play think learn

I’m currently in Amsterdam at the IADIS Gaming 2008 conference. It got off to a kicking start this morning with an opening keynote from Adriana Skarped, one of the main designers of the Swedish ARG The Truth about Marika. I was really amazed at the amount of planning (two years in this case) required for a project of this kind, the attention to detail that is required at all stages and they way that they mixed multiple media from subliminal clues in a television programme to bizarre events in a multi-user game world (with the complicity of the game company). Adriana actually played one of the characters in the game and it seemed to take over her entire life, to the extent where she couldn’t leave her house for ten days during a period when her character was abducted.

I realised this morning that I haven’t blogged for a while now, and there’s an awful lot of things sitting in my ‘must write about’ list, so I guess this post will be a bit of a brain-dump to clear the backlog.

Been out and about the last couple of weeks, attended an event on v-government at the Serious Games Institute, had a really interesting day, met some great people, and they gave us cocktails at the end. What’s not to like? Then to the JISC Innovation Forum, which I also found really useful (two engaging events in two weeks - that has to be some sort of record?). I gave a short talk on our project, as part of a symposium, which was quite bizarre as it was in a session on the student experience, but the audience were nice and didn’t ask too many scary questions.

In between sitting on trains, I’ve been playing with Google Lively (but so far can’t seem to get it to work properly - don’t really feel like I’m missing out), considered the benefits of reading the minds of insects (anything’s possible) and wishing I’d gone to the Hide and Seek festival. I have also finally succumbed to the call of Twitter, sigh.

Okay, this is going to be a bit of a rant. I suspect that it also might make me look a bit sad, playing computer games on a Saturday afternoon, but here goes…

In my spare time I’m currently playing one of the Nancy Drew adventure games, the Haunted Carousel. Now usually I like the games in this series as a bit of brain candy, they’re very traditional adventure games, not too hard, with a bit of a sense of humour. But I have (or rather Nancy has) just spent over an hour playing ‘barnacle blast’, a variant of Little Brick Out (incidentally the first computer game I ever played), so that the tokens gained can be used to win a harmonica. In an adventure game. Grrrrr.

There is no way to skip this embedded game or alternative way of getting the tokens. You just have to play it over and over again. And again. And again. Until eventually by luck (or I like to think, the magic of shouting at the computer) you manage to complete the game. I play adventure games because I like adventure games (and, admittedly, have practically no co-ordination whatsoever) and to have a ‘twitch’ game forced upon me half way through is surely just bad design?

Anyway, rant over. I feel better now. I wonder what I have to do with that harmonica?

I had a wonderful day out down in Birmingham on Saturday for the Grand Finale of Emergent Game, the brainchild of Nikki Pugh. The emergent game is kind of hard to explain… part online, part real-world, it involves selecting a cuddly toy avatar, undertaking a whole range of missions, and doing loads of creative things with technology.

I was really amazed at the way that this game became so engaging so quickly, how easy it was to slip into ‘avitari talk’ and how motivated I was to learn how to use lots of web applications simply to achive missions (and the kudos of my fellow ludens). When we finally met face-to-face over a cheeky beer it was like I had known these people for ages.

I think the emergent game structure has loads of potential in educational contexts. In particular:

• the way that it is designed with players (ludens) and people who watch (sapiens) so that watching is seen as a legitimate way to participate;
• the design of missions so that they are scored in five qualities - character, creativity, collaboration, community and cabaret - and so that working together is both essential and rewarded;
• the way that the missions list could be expanded and, in fact, there were missions that involved designing additional missions;
• the creative way in which the players embraced a whole range of web 2.0 technologies to achieve missions, and supported each other when technical difficulties arose;
• how much the game made me laugh out loud - it was just so silly. I suspect that sharing a sense of humour is very important to making something like this work.

Of course, I really should have spent more time at the beginning of the game when selecting my avatar, thinking through the consequences of choosing a beaver…

There’s a really interesting article on Gamasurta on the use of obstacles and barriers in games and the usability issues associated with them. I thought this was a clear analysis of some of the common usability problems in terms of visibility and affordance, with lots of examples too.

There’s some really interesting things happening at the moment with games and their potential to make us more active. I said a long while ago that the only way a running machine could be made even slightly palatable for me was if it was part of a 3D virtual world with stuff (e.g. robots, dinosaurs, zombies - all good) chasing you, and things to think about and interact with while you were running. Now it looks like we might be getting there…

This recent article from the BBC describes some of the new technologies available for ‘making fit fun’ and makes some interesting points, particularly hitting on what, I think, is a key advantage of games to encourage physical activity, pointing out that “it helps associate physical activity with feeling good, not feeling bad, and that’s a powerful, life-changing shift”.

(Another article, also from the BBC, goes further - there is some evidence that games don’t only have the power to make us fit, they can be used in pain control and treatment of psychological problems.)