play think learn

I’ve been recently getting more and more interested with the potential of alternate reality games (ARGs) as a lo-fi solution to the problem of the expense of educational game development. Basically an ARG combines a story with a series of puzzles that need collaborative input to be solved. They generally make use of a whole range of web content as well as moving into the real world. This article in Wired magazine gives a really good overview of what ARGs are all about and for more detail, this white paper is excellent.

One of the most famous commercial ARGs is perplexcity, now sadly on hold. On a similar note, Notpron and Ouverture Facile provide the same sort of challenges without the narrative.

I’m currently in York at a two-day JISC meeting for the projects that have recently received funding under the Users and Innovation programme. Myself, Scot Wilson and Rosie Jones are here representing the ARGOSI project, which stands for Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction. This is our poster.

There are nineteen new projects that have been funded under this call.

My head hurts.

I spent a happy couple of hours this afternoon at two lectures, organised by the Computing & Mathematics department at MMU, on computer game design from the perspective of an industry professional, given by two speakers from Rare Games. First, Duncan Botwood talked about creativity and design, followed by Louise Ridgeway on characterisation in animation.

Although they were effectively recruitment talks, they were none the less interesting for that, and the turnout was impressive for optional lectures last thing in the afternoon. Duncan made some interesting points on the skills required to be a game designer (creativity, communication, passion, and methodical…ism…ness) and how to increase your creativity (test your comfort zone, read wisely, and exercise it - try writing ten game ideas in thirty minutes). He also plugged Warren Spector’s blog and, in particular, his ideas on reactive and blank slate creativity.

In all, I found both talks entertaining and enjoyable, but the particular nugget that stands out for me was Duncan’s advice (in relation to media engagement): “don’t be an arse in public”. One to take on board more generally, I think.

A big thank you to Scott Wilson for pointing this game out to me. It has truly risen to the challenge of making filing fun.

Perhaps sadder still is the fact that I’m in the pub feeling the need to play games about filing.

An area I’m particularly interested in is the potential of multi-player games as collaborative learning environments. Here are a couple of papers I’ve been looking at recently that explore some of the issues.

Constance Steinkuehler, a resercher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, carried out an auto ethnographic study to examine the naturally occuring learning behaviours in online games. In this paper she describes a range of apprenticeship activities that occur:

• modelling successful performance
• focussing attention on key material, social and contextual aspects of the situation
• entrusing more and more control to the apprentice
• allowing opportunities for practice and situated feedback
• proving information ‘just-in-time’ in the context of a goal-driven activity.

Steinkuehler, C. A. 2004. Learning in massively multiplayer online games. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Learning Sciences, Santa Monica, California.

Ducheneaut and Moore (2005) also carried out ethongraphic work to explore the potential of multi-user games for learning social skills. They present four modes of social learning about the game: in-game discussions; out-of-game discussion (e.g. web sites); observation of other players; and in-situ teaching. They concluded that these games could facilitate a range of social skills, including meeting people, team formation, leadership, empathy and testing interaction strategies, which can then be applied to the real work.

They describe three ways of encouraging social interaction in games: 1) actvivities that require multiple people interacting to achieve success; 2) creation in interdependencies between players (e.g. through professional roles); and 3) building periods of ‘downtime’ into the game play, for example, travel between cities where no fighting takes place. They also talk about the potential of non-combat games for learning and, I think particularly interestingly, suggest “… the expereince-points-based achievement systems in MMORPS could easily be transformed into educational-credits-based achievement systems in which students accumulate credits for accomplishing educational tasks.”

Ducheneaut, N. & Moore, R. J. 2005. More than just ‘XP’: learning social skills in massively multiplayer online games. Interactive Technology & Smart Education, 2, 89–100.

This game falls into the time-travelling cursor genre and is worth a diverting five minutes. Much easier to get my head around than the very confusing time bot (of course, that could just be my limited attention span talking).

I meant to post this link a while back. It’s not really games-related except in that it’s perhaps interesting that there’s nothing even remotely game-related in the top 100 (well, Flash, possibly, at a push).

Aside from that, there’s still some pretty cool stuff on the list…

The digiplay initiative site is one of those web sites that I keep returning to but never get the time to really explore in as much depth as I’d like. Among other things, it contains a really excellent research bibliography.

I’m hoping that by posting the link here it might actually remind me to spend more time looking at all that this site has to offer.

I recently listened to a really interesting Radio 4 program (Crossing Continents) on computer game playing in Korea, where gamers (or e-sportsmen) are considered cool and there is no concept of nerd. When can I go?

On the down side, the program also discusses the issue of gaming addiction, which is particularly real in Korea where competitive multi-player games are so embedded in the culture, and there are cases of players dying from game addiction, basically by forgetting to eat, drink, sleep, and not urinate on themselves (in Internet cafes, apparently) until their hearts pack up with stress.

The show ends with some doom-laden facts and figures about how gaming addiction may become more common in the west in years to come. While I don’t doubt that addiction is a real issue in any context, I do worry that the potential of games is sometimes negated by this issue. You don’t hear people saying that exercise is a bad thing because it’s possible to get addicted, but I have heard the same said about computer games.