play think learn

Just a quick post to highlight a new alternate reality game meta-site, looking at ARGs in institutions: museums, libraries, schools and beyond. This site contains a whole range of resources on ARGs in different fields, including research, articles, discussion and links to the games themselves. Well worth a peruse if you have a couple of spare hours.

I felt the need to have a little rant. Last night I watched Jo Frost’s Supernanny Extreme Parental Guidance (hoping to pick up some tips, clearly) and managed to get very, very annoyed at one of the features. This centred around whether violent computer games make kids lack empathy, and the experiment was so full of holes it was ridiculous.

To start they quoted some facts about the average child watching a screen for six hours a day, and immediately started talking about violent computer games. The inference is clear; they have just failed to mention that he average child watches television, and uses the computer in a whole range of other ways. Next, we have the controlled trial: 40 teenage boys split into two groups, one playing a violent game for 20 minutes, the other playing a football game. 40 subjects. 20 minutes. The boys’ heart rates were tested during the game play and the rate of those playing the violent game was found to be higher (although no mention of the word significant was made at any point).

At this point Jo Frost looks worried. So they’ve ‘proved’ that twenty boys on one occasion some had a higher average heart rate than another twenty. I can feel her constanation. Clearly we need no more evidence to see how computer games are rotting the minds of our youth. But there is more…

The next part of the experiment involved the researcher ‘randomly’ interviewing participants from each group (how many is not made clear - four? five? nineteen?), which the viewer sees through a hidden camera. During the interview, the researcher accidentally knocks over a jar of pens and in the majority of cases the boys who had played the football game helped pick them up while those that had played the violent game did not. What more proof do you need that violent computer games lead to lack of empathy? Except that the researcher had obviously decided that violent games were the work of Satan before the start of the experiment and had pre-judged the actions of the boys. When he dropped the pens during an interview with a football game player he stopped, looked at the pens and started to pick them up - the boy reluctantly helped; whereas with the violent game players he ignored the pens and so did the boys. They were simply mirroring him.

Now, I’m not going argue that violent games don’t make children lack empathy (to be honest, I don’t know enough about it), and I appreciate that there may be more to the experiments than could be typically shown in a short TV feature. However, I strongly feel that that faux-scientific experiments and Brass-Eye style media frenzy is not the way to take a rigourous and impartial look as something as serious as the potential effects of violent games.

Thanks to Fiona Littleton (who incidentally runs a excellent course in computer games for learning at Edinburgh University) who sent me the link to this article from Time magazine on the use of computer games to support awareness raising and activism.

A long time ago I worked for Oxfam and one of my tasks was to engage with groups on developmental issues as part of the education remit. I remember being asked to run a last minute session with a very well-to-do pensioners’ group in Edinburgh, and because I didn’t have anything prepared, I decided to run a development game with them. I think they were expecting a slide show of ‘poor children in Africa’ because the fact that they were going to do something interactive came as a bit of a shock (and initially met with a fair bit of resistance) but by the end of the session there was a high level of engagement and some of those present were starting to think differently about the reasons for poverty.

So games for activism aren’t something new, and in my experience they are certainly powerful, but I wonder whether the people who play these type of games aren’t already well informed and active. Without something to force the initial engagement are they simply preaching to the converted?

I thought I would round off the year (and the decade) with some thoughts about how gaming has changed in the past ten years, and how these advances in gaming could inform learning. So, I present my Top Five gaming innovations of the past ten years (in no particular order):

1. Interaction - the range of ways in which players can now interact with games using touch, voice, motion, balance boards, bongos, microphones, pens, steering wheels, musical instruments (to name but a few) is changing the ways in which games are designed and increasing the accessibility of games far beyond the traditional gamer market. While the majority of these methods are limited to consoles or dedicated handheld devices, it can’t be long before such peripherals are more widely and cheaply available, and we can start to think more widely about how different types of interactive technology could be used in learning.
2. Casual games - sites such as shockwave and bigfishgames have helped bring games to non-traditional gamers and make them more widely acceptable. Games that are easy to learn, split into bite-sized pieces, and simple to pick-up and put-down have made gaming something that can be fitted around other activities. Genres such as time management, matching games and hidden object are popular, and I think there are lessons to be learned here in terms of narrative design, sustained motivation and the chunking of activities to fit in with other real-world tasks.
3. Mobile, location-sensitive and augmented reality games - while the use of GPS and handheld technologies is already keenly discussed withing the educational technology community, I think this is an area of games that hasn’t yet been fully exploited. The potential for real-time multi-player gaming in ‘virtual’ spaces in the real world has yet to be really explored, along with the educational opportunities this affords. For example, I can image a ‘real-life’ crime scene investigation with multiple locations, characters, props and players working together to collect and analyse evidence and clues. Once the technology gets there (and I suspect that this is the case particularly as regards AR) these types of game will be limited only be the imaginations and organisational abilities of the designers and players.
4. Alternate reality games - I’ve already talked about these at length on this blog so I won’t go into too much detail here. I feel that the combination of gaming characteristics and lo-fi environment in ARGs are ideally suited to learning - if we can get over the hurdle of getting learners to be engaged enough to participate in the first place. While I believe that there is still a great deal of untapped potential in this gaming form, designers need to be pragmatic in terms of the educational context (e.g. being realistic about what will motivate students) and we still have a lot to learn before we get it right.
5. Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games - alright, I know that these aren’t technically an innovation of the last decade, but it is the appearance of games such as World of Warcraft that have brought this genre to prominence. The ability of games like this to support collaborative learning, mentoring and group working has been well established. The artifacts and communities that support the game in the wider online space offer insights into online social interaction and group dynamics. While I wouldn’t suggest that we start to teach in these massive gaming worlds, there is still a lot that we can learn from them in terms of designing group activities and interactions.

Well, that’s my take on the last ten years. I’d be very interested to know if you agree, disagree, or think that I’ve left out something important?

That just leaves me to say Happy New Year and wish everyone the very best for 2010!

I was recently watching one of James May’s excellent television programmes about childhood toys. in which he reminisces and/or uses them to build something incredible and very cool, when he said something that got me thinking. I can’t remember his exact words but it was something along the lines of modern computer games being boring because they leave nothing to the imagination.

I’ve been thinking recently about the importance of graphical quality in games, and this struck a chord with some of my own ideas about the increasing fidelity of high-end gaming. As the gaming experience becomes ever more realistic it becomes ever more immersive… or does it? I remember being immersed in games of far lesser graphical wonder, such as The Hobbit with its shaky line drawings, and the brilliant Secret of Monkey Island with its 2d pixelmen. Or even a good book.

I think that May has got it right. By striving for increasing accuracy and definition in games we may be losing some of the essential ‘gameness’ of them - the mystery, storytelling, creativity and imagination that goes on in our own heads as we play.

Thanks to Katie Piatt for a recent inspiring blog post on  play in relation to student’s learning. She considers how Eberle’s process of play (described by Johan Brand) could be applied to the design of student learning experiences.

The process of play model contains six cyclical steps, roughly sequential:

1. anticipation;
2. surprise;
3. pleasure;
4. understanding;
5. strength;
6. poise.

What also interested me in Johan Brand’s post was the idea of enablers of playful behaviour, which can be harnessed to support the design of playful experiences. These enablers are described as: ownership; sharing; personalisation; creation; participation; socialising; and competing.

One project that I’ve been watching with interest over the past year is the ARGuing project, which used an alternate reality game for language learning in secondary schools across Europe.

A key feature of this project was that it made use of a network of teachers to support the delivery of the game, and the involvement of this resource is key to the methodology developed by the project. I had an interesting chat with Joel Josephson, one of the project partners, recently (who incidentally runs a children’s educational gaming site that is well worth a look) about the appropriateness of this model in Higher Education and the difficulties of getting staff engaged and able to devote time and energy to the extent seen in the ARGuing project.

One of the key issues of ARGs in education is engaging players, and the time required to provide the ongoing interaction that supports this (particularly in the early stages of the game) was one of the difficulties encountered in the ARGOSI project, and I think that looking at solutions employed in other education sectors could provide some valuable ideas here.

The Increasing Mainstreaming of Games in Learning Policies (IMAGINE?) project aims to draw together and examine the results of previous games-based learning projects and initiatives. The recently-published final report (pdf) provides lots of examples of projects in the area, usefully categorised by target audience, technology used, and project outputs.

It’s been a bit of a hectic month. On 2nd October my husband and I became first time parents, to a happy and healthy baby girl, and since then it’s been an endless cycle of eat, poo, cry, sleep, sick, etc… thus there hasn’t been much time for blogging. However, one advantage of my recent erratic sleeping habits is that I’ve discovered some late night telly that wouldn’t normally make it on to the radar.

A real treat was Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe (which is unfortunately no longer available on iPlayer but can be viewed in installments). This is a caustic analysis of the world of computer games (in usual Brooker style) including some interesting comments on the influence of violence in games. This managed to make a very long night very much easier to cope with.

I had a very exciting moment at the end of last week when I received this package of books from my publisher. Learning with Digital Games is my first book and is based on practical lessons learned from the research carried out during my PhD.

It is designed as an introduction to the use of games-based learning in universities for lecturers, learning technologies, researchers and anyone else who is interested really.

There is also a web site to support the book, and any feedback or comments will be very gratefully received.