play think learn

Operation: sleeper cell launched this week and is a large-scale ARG, designed by volunteers, aiming to raise money for Cancer Research. Brilliant.

There’s a detailed description over on ARGnet.

I have just got back from a conference at the European University Miguel de Cervantes, where I was doing a talk on Games and Simulations for Learning (just for a change). I was looked after amazingly well and was treated to a long and sumptuous lunch before my talk (with wine - I’m not entirely sure this is a good idea). If your Spanish is up to it, there’s a description of the day, with a charming photo of me.

I was also given a tour of the university and was very impressed with the facilities (although I was a little bemused at why I was being shown a ‘television set’ until I realised that it was a fully kitted out recording studio and set). What also impressed me very much is that the university management offices are on the same corridor as classrooms, accessible to students, and welcoming. Definitely something to learn there.

Unfortunately I was double-booked for Dave White’s talk at ALT-C, but I did manage to grab him for 15 minutes to get up to speed with the cool games stuff he’s been doing.The OpenHabitat project has carried out two pilot studies in Second Life, in the areas of Art & Design and philosophy, and Dave’s talk centred around what we can learn from game design (specifically MMORPGs) when designing learning activities in multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs).

His premise is that the two key ways in which we can learn from MMORPGs is the way in which people learn how to use the environments implicitly (without recourse to a manual) and the sophisticated collaboration that takes place. I was particularly taken with Dave’s analogy that “a MMORPG is a novel whereas a MUVE is a notebook”.

He described three elements of MMORPGs that he says should be considered when designing learning activities in MUVEs:

• Questing - relevant situated tasks that support learning how to use the environment (e.g. collaboratively building a bridge or playing hide-and-seek in Second Life).
• Role-playing and identity - being able to take on a role in MOORPGs with a fictional backstory as part of a larger narrative structure. In Second Life the rules of engagement are not so clear, there is no ’stepping into a role’ so it is higher risk and the cultural norms are not so clear.
• Emotional state - in MUVEs it is more important that people understand the emotional state of the person behind the avatar, and that using avatars as a representation of emotional state is dangerous. He says “emoticons are more effective at communicating emotional state than your avatar in Second Life - unless your emotional state is ‘I wanna dance’”.

I had another good day yesterday at ALT-C 2008, and was very pleased to finally meet Juliette Culver, Alex Moseley and Daniel Livingstone - all doing excellent work in games and education.The talk here has been very much centered on the potential of ARGs in teaching and learning and it’s great to talk to other people without having to explain the concepts from first principles. Looks like ARGs might be the next big thing?Alex did an fantastic talk on the educational lessons that can be learned from ARGs, which struck a lot of chords with some of our recent ARGOSI findings. In his sample of ARG players he found that the three reasons that people took part were: a) to solve puzzles, b) to uncover the story, and c) to be part of a community. He also presented seven key features of ARGs for education:

1. Problem solving at varying levels (graded challenge)
2. Progress and rewards (leaderboard, grand prize)
3. Narrative devices (characters, plot, story)
4. Influence on outcomes
5. Regular delivery of new problems/events
6. Potential for large, active community
7. Based on simple, existing technologies/media

I’ve just arrived at ALT-C in Leeds after attending a 24-hour meeting run by Lawrie Phipps. Usually I feel very flat after this sort of event, but just now I am buzzing with excitement and ideas.

This was essentially an unstructured event in which like-minded people were given the space to chat about their thoughts and share ideas. And it really did involve being given space - there was no agenda, no plan, we didn’t have to feed back to other groups, people could dip in and out when they wanted and we could talk as long as we liked. So myself, Dave White, Andrew Middleton, Simon Ball, and a few others who popped in and out, spent a whole day kicking round ideas around game-inspired learning environments, the integration of virtual, real and alternate worlds, and the potential of mobile technologies.

In all, an excellent, truly participant-centered event. Watch this space for the paper… 

I’m currently at my first British Educational Research Association (BERA) conference and feeling a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of people, conceptual difficulty of some of the papers, and unpleasantness of Heriot Watt food.

Been to a couple of papers on games this morning.

Graham  Downes and Susan Haywood from Bath Spa University presented first with a talk entitled Gaming and Learning: Computer Games and Education. They presented a model of computer games as ‘ludic texts’ with both narrative and ludic elements, and a continuum from stories (picture books) to talking stories (with hotspots, music, narration, embedded games) to games.

Their research has been carried out in the context of children’s computer gaming, and they put forward the following characteristics of children playing computer games: a) compulsive problem-solving; b) simultaneous objectives; c) multimediation (simultaneous activity); d) flow. They suggest that there is an issue of home-school dissonance and that the integrity of games are lost when they are moved into a classroom context.

Secondly, Harry O’Neil from UCLA/CRESST presented a talk called Instructional Interventions to Make Computer Games a Learning Environment. His background is with adults in a training environment and was interested in whether games increase players’ problem solving and whether there are instructional strategies that can be added to commercial off-the-shelf games to make them more effective.

He first presented a model of learning with five outcomes: 1) content understanding; 2) problem-solving; 3) self regulation (metacognition and motivation); 4) communication; and 5) collaboration, and argued that whether a game is to be used in-class or out-of-class is critical to the choice of game, as the two learning environments are so fundamentally different. He presented empirical work on the effectiveness of different supplementary activities  to increase problem-solving knowledge from off-the-shelf games, concluding that worked examples offer the best opportunity.

While this was an interesting talk, I fundamentally disagree with Harry on two points, first, his assertion that you have to use off-the-shelf games for the game to have appropriate production values, and secondly, that games that use “inductive instructional strategies” (discovery learning) are not appropriate for learning.

(Also known as the Emergent Game part 2.)

Niki Pugh has just blogged about Call and Return, a multi-cultural mission-based urban game running from 19 September and currently recruiting players worldwide. She says “as well as negotiating their immediate surrounding, players must also negotiate interactions with other people across different geographies, languages and time zones”. Time to dust off my beaver then…

I’d also recommend a visit to the Ludogeographic Society.