play think learn

Games get a hard enough time being taken seriously without rubbish like this being produced. It’s a ‘virtual fashion game’ aimed at 9-14 year old girls in which the aim is to “become the hottest, coolest most famous bimbo ever”. An ambition indeed. This is what The Guardian has to say about it.

Apparently this game is meant to be satirical, but I’m not sure how sophisticated my appreciation of postmodern irony was at nine years old. Aside from the fact that this game promotes negative female stereotypes and provides an endorsement of a superficial, image-obsessed, celebrity-is-paramount culture, surely it should be possible to develop a game for girls that isn’t about shopping, cooking, dressing up, dolls or ponies? And isn’t pink.

I wonder how many women were actually involved in developing this game?

Thanks to Katie for sending me these links.

I have just got back from a hectic start-up meeting for the ARGOSI project. I’ve really enjoyed two days out of the office working with such a creative and enthusiastic group of people.

In the team photo (from left to right) are Dave White (digital narrative guru), Scott Wilson (code guru), Katie Piatt (who has developed and used ARGs at the University of Brighton for the last two years - on her own - scary and very impressive), me, Rosie Jones (library induction guru), and Peter Whitton (graphic designer extraordinaire).

Thanks also to Lawrie Phipps, from the JISC, who joined us on the second day and helped to ensure that the project has at least some tentative grounding in reality.

I wish all of my work was this much fun.

I was down in London last week, with my colleague Cathy Lewin, to present the interim findings of another project I’m involved in. The Models of Innovation in Learning Online (MILO) project is looking at the different ways in which online learning is being used in schools and colleges (Key Stage 3 and 14-19). Grainne Conole wrote a nice blog post about the event.

Here’s another game by the people responsible for the brilliant Samorost 1, Samorost 2 and Quest for the Rest. This one’s actually designed as an educational game, and I can forgive the rather crude embedding of content because of the humour, quirkiness and beautiful graphics.

I was rather proud with how well I was doing until I realised that this game is aimed at 7-11 year olds.

The deadline for abstracts for the second European Conference on Game-Based Learning is 27 March. ECGBL 2008 will take place in Barcelona from 16-17 October, and if last year’s event is anything to go by, will be lively, stimulating and fun.

Here’s the call for papers.

It’s good to see some really innovative gaming research, such as this small-scale study to look at the potential impact of using Nintendo DS consoles in primary schools to teach maths.

When I was at a talk about this project last year, one of the key outcomes of using this technology (not mentioned in this article) was that it kept the children quiet for twenty minutes every day. A considerable benefit for the teacher I would think, but perhaps less media-friendly.

I would be keen to see research on the novelty effect associated with such interventions.

For the past four days I’ve been on an NLP diploma course. As I blogged a while back, this is a recent area of interest for me, and one that I approach with a healthy scepticism.

The low point of the course, for me, was round about lunchtime on the third day, when I’d had just about enough of enforced socialisation and talking about ‘feelings’ with strangers. It was only the thought of my shiny diploma that stopped me from walking out (oh, how sad to be motivated by a bit of paper). The turning point came later that afternoon when I finally realised that a) much of NLP is pretty much common sense, and b) not all of it works for everyone. By viewing npl as a set of interrelated theories to explain what many people do naturally, some useful, some questionable, I can see its applicability (I’m not sure that NLP practitioners would agree with this view, but it works for me).

The particular areas of nlp that we covered in the course that most strike a chord (oooh, auditory) with me are:

• the concept of building rapport, matching and mirroring body position, pacing and leading - I’d like to try this in interviewing but suspect I would just end up looking like a mad copying lady;
• the idea of thoughts being coded in different representational systems (visual, auditory and kinesthetic) and that the language we use and our eye movements can indicate the system we are using;
• the model of developing well-formed outcomes, which are positive, specific, achievable (sounds a bit like SMART so far…) but where ecology issues (how this will effect yourself and others) and sensory evidence of achievement are also considered;
• the idea of association and disassociation (whether memories are viewed in first or third person) - I wonder if this could be related to first person/third person game preferences?
• the notion that people view time in different ways and can be ‘in time’ or ‘through time’ (at least I now partially understand why my parents get so cross when I’m late for stuff).

While I feel that areas of NLP have lots offer in terms of how we understand and deal with the world, there are a couple of things that really trouble me: 1) the lack of robust evidence that it works (sorry but ‘it worked for me’ just doesn’t cut it) and the apparent unwillingness of the NLP community to engage in empirical research; 2) the lack of recognition that the suppositions of NLP are simply one ontological approach and that others exist.

The NLPU site was recommended as a good resource by our instructor (if you can cope with the seriously bad web design).

The deadline for submissions for the IADIS International Conference, Gaming 2008: Design for engaging experience and social interaction has been extended until 31 March.

The conference will be held in Amsterdam from 25-27 July and the range of submission types and topic areas can be found on the web site.

I’ve been (slowly) catching up with my reading on MMORPGS. Here are summaries of another couple of papers I’ve read recently.

Dickey (2006) describes the elements of MMORPGs that he hypothesises foster intrinsic motivation, in particular the character design and narrative environment. He describes how the small quest structure, common in MMORPGs, provides a model for designing learning by: a) ensuring players have been exposed to resources; b) providing experience at increasing difficulties; c) fostering teamwork and collaboration, and d) providing a sense of ongoing achievement.

Interestingly, Dickey also relates available quest types to learning different types of knowledge. He describes four areas with examples of types of quests: declarative (e.g. identifying, labeling or defining something); procedural (e.g. delivering a message in a certain way); strategic (e.g. defeating a particular character); and metacognitive (e.g. goodwill quests that involve reflecting on past experience while helping lower-level players).

Dickey, M. D. (2006). Game design and learning: a conjectural analysis of how massively multiple online role-playing games (MMORPGs) foster intrinsic motivation. Educational Technology Research and Development, 55, 253-273.

Charlton and Danforth (2007) examined the differences between high engagement and addiction in players of MMORPGs. They say that in the case of high engagement ‘the individual is not compelled to perform the behavior towards the end of symptom alleviation, but rather engages in the behavior in pursuit of enjoyment’ (p 1533) but that addiction causes features such as withdrawal symptoms and guilt when the activity is not performed.

They argue that MMORPGs might be addictive because ‘they are particularly good as inducing operant conditioning via variable-ratio reinforcement schedules’ (p 1534) and because other players provide social reinforcement. They used six criteria on which to assess levels of engagement or addiction:

1. salience - the activity dominates the player’s life;
2. euphoria - the player experiences a ‘buzz’;
3. tolerance - increasing exposure to the game is required to experience the same levels of euphoria;
4. withdrawal symptoms;
5. conflict - with others or the self;
6. relapse and reinstatement - attempts to give up the activity are followed by restarting.

The paper argues that high score in the first three criteria indicate high engagement, while the second three are related to addiction. It also provides some evidence that there is a developmental sequence from engagement to addiction.

Charlton, J. P. & Danforth, I. D. W. (2007). Distinguishing addiction and high engagement in the context of online game playing. Computers in Human Behaviour, 23, 1531-1548.

Mark Wagner has recently posted six articles to his blog on MMORPGs in education, based on the feedback from an expert panel as part of his doctoral work. These articles look at the areas of: motivation and engagement, context-embedded learning, social learning, 21st century skills, reflection, and infrastructure and logistics.

Each theme is presented as a summary of areas of consensus within the expert group and a summary of points of dissent.