Every Day the Same Dream by Paolo Pedercini

Every Day the Same Dream is a beautiful independent game from Paolo Pedercini as an entry to the Experimental Gameplay Project. Illustrating the tedium of routine office work, the game allows few interactions – for example exchanging brief words with your indifferent wife, a homeless man, the elevator operator. You can only ‘win’ the game by searching out the few ways to break the routine of everyday working life. It’s bleak and often tedious – and it’s one of the most consistent and affecting games I’ve played in a long time.

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Scribblenauts as classroom literacy aid

There’s an interview on Kotaku today with Scribblenauts creator Jeremiah Slaczka. The Nintendo DS title was released in September 2009 and, although controls and interface were often criticized, critics applauded the open-ended gameplay. Puzzles within the game can be solved by typing nouns on the onscreen keyboard – if the object is stored in the game’s 22,800-word database it will appear and may be used to solve the puzzle. As an example, pre-release hype centred around one player’s ability to solve a puzzle involving robot zombies by conjuring up a time machine, traveling back in time to collect a dinosaur and then riding atop the dinosaur to attack the zombies.

The Kotaku article relates Slaczka’s views about the application of the game as an educational tool:

One mother emailed the developer to tell how she bought the game for her son who was having difficulty in school learning to read and write. The woman gave the child a game along with a cheat sheet of ten words for him to try out in the game.

“He learned how to spell those words,” he said, “and now she said he’s up to two full pages of words that he can spell and understand which I thought was a really awesome story. “

While Slaczka acknowledges that the game can be used to enhance spelling and vocabulary, he’s hesitant to stress this potential:

“It has inherent educational potential, but it was never designed with an educational slant in mind,” he said. “It was a positive byproduct more than anything else. “

In appears that Slaczka is partly wary of labeling the game as an educational title because it may hurt sales, such is the stigma surrounding ‘edutainment’. However, Scribblenauts can certainly be added to the list of games (particularly Nintendo DS games) that can be used within the classroom to engage pupils in education.

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Audio-only action game simulates blindness

Over at Eurogamer there’s a report on Danish developer PortaPlay’s action-adventure that simulates blindness using audio and no graphics.

It’s set in a semi-factual WWII era where the player is an allied spy dropped behind enemy lines to gather intelligence on a secret German doomsday weapon. The player is blinded during the intro and the rest of the game takes place in complete darkness.

As well as simulating blindness for non-blind players, PortaPlay creative thinker Hans von Knut hopes that the realistic audio environments delivered through in-ear headphones will allow blind players to play the game successfully.

The game has combat, stealth, dialogue and puzzles, and will also feature multiplayer so blind people can play against each other in the same way non-visually-impaired gamers do.

The game is being funded by the film institute Danish Screen, but a release date has not yet been announced.

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Gamers to race against sporting pros

The BBC reports that Real Time Race is developing a system allowing television viewers to race against real F1 drivers. Racetracks would be mapped before the race using 360 degree cameras similar to those used by the Google Street View team, although this system would allow users to view the race from areas not actually visited by the camera-car itself. This data would then be controllable by the user – the accompanying video shows a user with an Xbox 360 gamepad – with a first-person racecar HUD overlaid onto the screen.

Real Time Race suggest that users would be able to race actual real-life competitors as the competition takes place. From the BBC’s report it appears that this would involve racing against accurate models of real-life competitor cars rather than actual video footage, however. While the aim is presumably to allow users to view the race from a novel perspective, the possible competitive element is intriguing – would the system be framed in gaming terms or simply as an enhanced viewing experience?

Real Time Race hope that their system will be available to the public in 2010 and expect it to be eventually integrated into other sports such as skiing, cycling and sailing.

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Handheld species identification with WildKey

WildKnowlege produce a range of software tools allowing learners to create and share images, forms and databases on mobile devices such as PC, iPhone and Nintendo DS. The suite of tools include WildKey, an ambitious branching database tool that provides pupils with simple prompts allowing them to categorise flora and fauna ‘in the field’. The suite also contains WildForm and WildImage as well as WildMap, which allows pupils to create their own trails – and all of the user-created content can be shared with other learners.

WildKnowledge began as a collaborative project between Oxford Brookes University and software company Adit Limited. It appears that WildKnowledge have considered some of the extended applications of their software – their brochure makes brief mention of the possibility of user-created treasure hunts and GPS-enabled role-playing games. Perhaps some teachers may soon introduce educational geocaching hunts into the school day?

Via Flux.

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Digital residents and digital visitors

Over at TALL blog (part of the University of Oxford’s Department of Continuing Education) there’s a great article discussing different categorisations of online users. In recent years, online users have been typified as Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, to distinguish those who grew up using online systems and latecomers more used to traditional systems. The TALL blog article argues that their students can be more usefully broadly categorised as Digital Visitors and Digital Residents, relating to the extent of the user’s profile and social life that is conducted online:

In effect the Resident has a presence online which they are constantly developing while the Visitor logs on, performs a specific task and then logs off.

The article goes on to suggest how this categorization can inform online learning tools:

This Visitor, Resident distinction is useful when considering which technologies to provide for online learners. For example if your learners are mainly Visitors they are unlikely to take advantage of any feed based system for aggregated information you may put in place. They are also unlikely to blog or comment as part of a course. The Resident will expect to have the opportunity to offer opinions on topics and to socialise around a programme of study. In fact they are likely to find ways of doing this even if they are not ‘officially’ provided.

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Dress code for online avatars

Company policy on social networking sites such as Facebook is one thing, but now consultancy firm Gartner predicts that by 2013, 70% of companies will have introduced codes of conduct policies for online avatars. Gartner suggests that this will extend to dress code policies for avatars representing businesses.

Via Virtual Worlds News.

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Online list of theses related to serious games

Serious Games Pathfinder features a growing list of Master’s and Doctoral theses related to serious games. Currently, most of the theses are Canadian but the site welcomes submissions from other countries to add to the list. While not all of the theses are available online, it’s worth browsing the list to see the changing interests of the academic community.

Here’s a selection of some of the more arresting titles:

• Informatization of a nation: a case study of South Korea’s computer gaming and PC-Bang culture
• Infinite regress : the blurring of an architectural game-space
• Gamers as learners: Emergent culture, enculturation, and informal learning in massively multiplayer online games

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Will Wright and E O Wilson on educational games

Take a look over at NPR for a summary of an open mic session between game designer Will Wright (with credits including SimCity, The Sims and Spore) and biologist E. O. Wilson.

Wright asked Wilson if he saw a role for games in education:

“I’ll go to an even more radical position,” Wilson said. “I think games are the future in education. We’re going through a rapid transition now. We’re about to leave print and textbooks behind.”

Wilson imagines students taking visits through the virtual world to different ecosystems. “That could be a rain forest,” he said, “a tundra — or a Jurassic forest.”

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Videogames improve working memory

Following on from last week’s claim that Tetris increases brain efficiency, BBC News reports that war-simulation videogames can improve players’ ‘working memory’ – i.e. the ability to remember information and to use it. Dr Tracy Alloway, from the University of Stirling, suggests that studies have shown that videogames such as the Total War series enhance this element of intelligence, and similar effects are produced by completing Sudoku puzzles and, oddly, spending time on Facebook. Examples of activities likely to weaken working memory are text messaging, posting on Twitter and watching Youtube videos.

Gamers won’t be too surprised by the claim that playing the challenging Total War series can boost intelligence. Given that many videogames require resource-balancing and forward-planning, I wonder how less overtly strategic videogames would fare in Dr Alloway’s intelligence trials.

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Video Game Name Generator

A bit of slightly off-topic fun for a Tuesday morning… Take a look at the Video Game Name Generator for an endless list of scarily plausible videogame titles. My favourites so far include Legendary Kitchen Deathmatch, Tactical Llama Revisited and the peerless WWII Hillbilly II.

Quest to Learn: NYC’s game-based school

New York City’s Quest to Learn, created in collaboration with New Visions for Public Schools, is a proposed 6-12th grade school based on game-inspired teaching.

Mission critical at Quest to Learn is a translation of the underlying form of games into a powerful pedagogical model for its 6-12th graders. Games work as rule-based learning systems, creating worlds in which players actively participate, use strategic thinking to make choices, solve complex problems, seek content knowledge, receive constant feedback, and consider the point of view of others. As is the case with many of the games played by young people today, Quest is designed to enable students to “take on” the identities and behaviors of explorers, mathematicians, historians, writers, and evolutionary biologists as they work through a dynamic, challenge-based curriculum with content-rich questing to learn at its core.

Rather than playing commercially-available videogames, the school aims to utilise ‘game-like learning experiences’ via partnerships with third-party development studios.

Via Flux.

Tetris increases brain efficiency

More fuel for the games-are-good-for-you argument:

Albuquerque, N.M.-based Mind Research Network said over the course of three months, it tracked adolescent girls who practiced playing Tetris. Compared to control subjects, these girls exhibited greater brain efficiency and a thicker cortex, as evidenced by brain scans.

Areas of the brain that showed thicker cortex were sections believed to play a role in “planning of complex, coordinated movements,” researchers said, and areas responsible for “coordination of visual, tactile, auditory, and internal physiological information.”

Other parts of the brain, which are associated with “critical thinking, reasoning, and language and processing,” also showed greater efficiency after practicing Tetris.

Via Serious Games Source. Photo by Hybridrain.

Information design in Casablanca and videogames

In his column in the new edition of Edge magazine, Randy Smith discusses similarities between movies and videogames. He comments that he tends to dislike old movies because of poor information design and offers the opening sequence of Casablanca as an example, where he argues that the importance of the transit papers is not made clear to the viewer. He suggests that modern movies often achieve a higher level of information design, such as the Keyser Soze reveal at the end of The Usual Suspects, which, while surprising to many viewers, is telegraphed so that few viewers will misunderstand the new information they are receiving. Smith argues that The Usual Suspects may provide a better template for good videogame narrative, simply because it ensures that all viewers come away from the experience with the same level of information.

I’ve been chewing over these comments all morning. To be fair, a large part of my disgruntlement is the suggestion that The Usual Suspects is ‘better’ than Casablanca, although I’ll try to suppress my film snobbery here. But I think this information design approach to both movies and games might be rewarding, and Randy Smith’s conclusions bother me.  (Click to read more)

CANVAS: a virtual world for pupil artwork

Learning and Teaching Scotland’s educational games initiative Consolarium has announced CANVAS, a virtual world allowing local authorities to display pupils’ art. Based on the OpenSim application and created by Aberdeen-based company Second Places, CANVAS (Children’s Art at the National Virtual Arena of Scotland) has the appearance of Second Life while being hosted on LTS servers, so affording them far stricter controls than standard Second Life islands. Each local authority in Scotland will have the opportunity to curate one of 32 separate galleries held on the server.

While I understand the use of OpenSim as suitable for adapting virtual worlds to specific uses, I’m still unsure whether pupils (and indeed, local authority staff) will adapt well to the less than user-friendly camera system within Second Life-style virtual worlds. Is a fully 3D virtual world perhaps unnecessary for the purpose of displaying 2D artworks? I can imagine an application more in common visually with the 2D Club Penguin that would allow users to view artworks without the extra complication of navigating a 3D space.

Silent Conversation – text platformer

Gregory Weir of Ludus Novus has released a game called Silent Conversation on Armor Games. The game involves guiding a letter ‘I’ avatar to move over the words in extracts from poetry and prose, including William Carlos Williams and H P Lovecraft. The typography (Silent Conversation is as much a lovingly typeset treatment of fiction as it is a videogame) is is often arranged in Mario-esque platforms and the challenge is to hit as many words as possible whilst avoiding words highlighted in red.

In his own words:

This game grew out of an idea that I had in childhood. I was a voracious reader, and occasionally, late at night, I would see the structure of the words on the page as something physical: the end of a paragraph was a fissure in a cliff edge, and each indentation was a handhold. I could visualize a little person running along the lines, exploring every crevice of the story. This is an attempt to realize that concept.

In terms of scoring and the function of the game, there’s no explicit need to read the extracts, but progress through the levels inevitably means that the player reads and absorbs the text. Could this game-led approach be used to encourage unenthusiastic readers, or could elements that require the player to read the text be added to a similar text-platforming game?

Do serious games developers ignore mainstream videogames?

Those interested in serious games have long been preoccupied with defining serious games themselves, and the outcomes are rarely illuminating. On his member blog at Gamasutra, Raymond Ortgiesen criticizes the term ‘serious games’ but also goes on to bemoan serious games developers’ tendencies to ignore the progress made in traditional videogames in terms of immersion and player engagement.

Didn’t Far Cry 2 touch on the poverty and power struggles in  Africa? Didn’t Bioshock try to challenge our notions of freedom (“A man chooses, a slave obeys”)? And how many countless games have been satirical but serious critiques of western society (Fallout, Grand Theft Auto)? Now, those games aren’t perfect. They haven’t all even accomplished what they set out to do, necessarily. But they try and they becoming more potent with each iteration. Why aren’t they called serious games?

Ortgiesen argues that serious games developers should take the current crop of videogames as their starting point, rather than reinventing the wheel – and he also notes that ‘It’s not as if the “serious games” crowd has a large repertoire of successes to claim either’. While I agree with this in principle, the fact that publishers see little demand for big-budget educational games means that serious games developers have far more limited resources. And while Far Cry 2 and Bioshock lay a strong claim to provoke intellectual discussion, I’d say that the concepts presented in these games are more a narrative framework rather than a thesis or a selection of facts and skills for the player to absorb.

Similarly, an analogy to film and literature isn’t ideal – whereas Schindler’s List could be described as a more serious or more educational film than Die Hard, is it really a more comprehensive visual treatment of its subject matter than a BBC documentary about WWII? However, I sympathise with Ortgiesen’s argument that the ‘serious game’ term ‘does nothing except erect a big wall between developers who are trying to accomplish the same goal’, and perhaps the best way for a developer to create a mainstream educational game is to not label it as such.

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Driving and texting – a game to gauge distraction

The New York Times, with help from psychology professors David Strayer and David E. Meyer, has created a game to simulate the effects of texting whilst driving a car. The interface works because it’s so awkward – you’re expected to steer the car into traffic lanes using number keys whilst simultaneously typing text message responses using the mouse. The volume of crash barriers may not be realistic, but the game succeeds neatly in demonstrating that using a mobile phone while driving decreases your ability to react quickly.

Via VG Researcher – Psychology.

Playstation Home boasts 7 million users

The PS3’s Home virtual world service is now 7 months old. Peter Edward, director of the PlayStation Home platform group, reported at Brighton’s Develop conference that there are now 7 million Home users – and that a typical European visitor spends 56 minutes in Home per session. The service also generated $1 million in micro-transactions in its first month, a statistic that will presumably excite potential advertisers and content providers.

However, many internet forum commenters note that the service still has a bare-bones feel – especially the European service where new content is often delayed due to localisation issues – and many areas feel like little more than advertising for full-price retail games. However, nDreams’ complex alternate reality game Xi managed to establish a small enthusiastic community and clearly there are exciting possibilities for a virtual world with an inbuilt userbase. Only time will tell if Sony are able to capitalise on Home’s full potential.

Via Edge online.

Kodu game creator on Xbox Live

Microsoft Research’s Kodu on Xbox 360 allows users to create their own games using a visual programming interface. Through a series of ‘if…then’ commands it’s possible to create complex interactions such as ‘if player presses R trigger then unicycle jumps and changes to random colour’.

While the resultant games are likely to be small in scale, the developers rightly claim that the fun is as much in the creation as in the finished product. Many LittleBigPlanet uers found that the level designer mode derailed ideas with fiddly placement of onscreen elements, whereas Kodu’s emphasis on logical AI behavior may mean that developing interactions and behaviours becomes a satisfying puzzle in itself. Perhaps most importantly, Kodu seems a great way to introduce young people to the basics of computer programming and abstract logical thinking.

Kodu is available now on the Xbox Live Community Games channel for just 400 Microsoft Points (£3.40).

Nintendo DS Classroom unveiled for Japan

Today Nintendo and Sharp System Products unveiled DS Classroom, allowing DS consoles to be linked to a central computer and used with specialised educational software.

Known as “Nintendo DS Kyoushitsu” in its native Japanese, the new system pairs up the DS with a PC. Teachers make use of software on the PC to interact via Wi-Fi with students through their individual DS, DS Lite or DSi units that have been equipped with a Nintendo DS Classroom cartridge. The system allows a single PC to interact with up to 50 DS units. Everything is handled locally, so no internet connection is required.

Examples of classroom uses are multiple choice tests and quizzes requiring free response questions to be answered using the DS stylus, with student responses reflected in real time on the teacher’s PC.

The system will be available in Japan from February 2010.

Saving journalism with online games

Youth marketing website Ypulse hosts an article about using online games in place of journalism to engage young people. Anastasia argues that while teenagers may choose Halo over a serious game such as MTV’s ‘Darfur is Dying’, when presented with a classroom choice between listening to a teacher lecturing about Darfur or playing the game, pupils would undoubtedly pick the game.

Building relationships with Microsoft’s Milo

During Microsoft’s E3 keynote presentation last night Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux demonstrated Milo, a virtual 10-year-old boy. Users interact with Milo via full-body motion tracking (courtesy of Project Natal, Microsoft’s new camera tracking accessory) and voice commands. In the demo Milo demonstrates impressive AI, tracking the demonstrators’ movement, and answering her questions, also making observations about the user’s clothes and expression. While Milo is a tech demo, and presumably the demonstration is scripted to play to the AI’s strengths, it’s an impressive performance.

While Project Natal has Wii-like possibilities for full-body videogaming, Milo seems a more curious prospect. Much of the internet reaction has focused on the fact that interacting with Milo doesn’t appear very gamelike, and the odd mother-son relationship between Milo and Claire, the demonstrator, backs up this viewpoint. At first glance, the Milo application appears to be less a game and more a simulator along the lines of Nintendogs, but far more lifelike and personal.

I’ll be interested to see whether Milo’s subsequent outings tend towards game features (e.g. Animal Crossing), purer simulation (e.g. Nintendogs), or – admittedly less likely given that this is Xbox rather than Wii – possible educational applications.

Click here to see a video demonstration of Milo, and here for a Youtube video shocasing Project Natal.

Serious Games Jam

The Serious Games Jam beta website forums are now live.

The Serious Games Online Jam will provide an online collaborative space for those interested in Serious Games to discuss, debate and vote on different topics of Serious Games. Participants will have the opportunity to post discussions, contribute to discussions, learn about the current movements and growth areas, and make connections with other participants.

As well as forums and a shoutbox, the website incorporates a karma system instead of a normal grading for user comments. Registering also automatically enters you in a draw to win a Nintendo DS.

PSP Go to result in cheaper PSPs for schools?

Rumours of Sony’s PSP Go console appear to have been confirmed. The hardware features slide-out controls and digital-only distribution (i.e. no UMD slot) and is apparently far lighter than previous PSP iterations.

Unlike Nintendo’s new DSi console, there appear to be no new features that would benefit classroom use directly. However, the rumoured Autumn release of the PSP Go may mean that there is surplus stock of the perfectly serviceable PSP-3000 hardware available for schools at bargain-bucket prices…