Teaching in Minecraft

Take a look over at Ars Technica for an account of one computer teacher at Manhattan’s Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School who is making interesting use of the much-loved world-creating game tool, Minecraft. Joel Levin creates custom-built worlds and makes players invulnerable so that they can work together to experiment building structures. Completed tasks have involved building structures using limited resources and entering a pyramid without disturbing its treasures.

Joel Levin blogs about his experiences at The Minecraft Teacher.

Player agency in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Over on my other blog, Cosy Catastrophes, you’ll find a review of Ubisoft’s 2010 videogame, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I won’t post the full article here as it’s not directly related to serious games – but there’s a paragraph at the end of the review which refers to a particular scene in which the player’s ability to affect the game is limited, in order to deliver the scene in a specific manner.

Not only is the content of the scene surprising (note:  if you haven’t yet played the game, beware! The review contains spoilers about one quest), but I’m really interested in the approach in terms of its mechanics. The scene joins the Tibetan village section of Uncharted 2, the No Russian level in Modern Warfare 2 and chunks of Heavy Rain as examples of developers testing their ability to deliver mature stories by dictating the limits of player agency. By removing the ability for players to ‘ruin’ a scene by shooting, jumping or punching their way through supposedly emotional moments, perhaps videogames may be able to transcend their (usually) pulp fiction influences.

For the record, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood contains another example of the same technique towards the end of the main storyline, but this time it results in scenes that are frustrating and nonsensical. So there’s work still to be done.

Designing games for children

There’s a thought-provoking article on Eurogamer today about the principles behind designing games for kids. Jonathan Smith, head of production at Traveller’s Tales and director of LEGO Star Wars, says:

Play is closely related to learning. When we have fun, we’re experimenting, discovering and developing our own abilities. This is especially true for children, who have the most at stake in situations of play and learning – the most to gain. That’s why play is more important to children. That’s why they’re the best at it.

George Andreas of Rare notes that younger players tend to be more preoccupied with short-term goals rather than thinking in the long-term – and that boys are particularly stimulated by games that allow them to conquer or control territory. Given that the pool of ‘games for chidren’ overlaps substantially with the pool for ‘games for education’, it’s odd that I can’t think of any recent examples of educational games involving these kind of (as Andreas puts it) bragging rights.

GameAccessibility site launches

The AbleGamers Foundation, a West Virginia charity dedicated to information and lobbying related to disabled gamers, has launched a new site called GameAccessibility. It’s a portal for developers and researchers to share thoughts about making all games more accessible, with news updates, and is well worth a look or even signing up to get involved.

The Winter House: an interactive short story

As part of their Story campaign, Booktrust have commissioned The Winter House by Naomi Alderman. It’s a spooky interactive short story set at the turn of the last century, and it includes game mechanics in order to progress the story. The text elements fade and bounce, mirroring the actions described, and hyperlinks and point-and-click hotspots move readers to the next scene. Definitely worth a look, and full of jumping-off points for learning opportunities.

Futurelab article on Child Education PLUS

There’s a new article by Futurelab on the Child Education PLUS website, discussing the use of computer games in the classroom. (This is unashamed self-promotion, as I’ve just started my new role at Scholastic as editor of Child Education PLUS.)

Heavy Rain and unpredictable actions

Heavy Rain is the PS3’s much-anticipated new title from director David Cage. It’s a dark serial-killer thriller with adult themes and content – and Cage claims that with this title he’s produced a new genre apart from videogames – ‘Interactive Drama’.

I haven’t yet played the full game, but I have sampled the demo on PSN. I’ve been as hyped as anyone about the potential of this game, and, as is usual, actually playing it feels like rather an anticlimax. There are obvious areas of weakness – the voice acting is standard fare and the script seems unlikely to rise above a generic level; HBO this is not.

But more worrying is the frustration of a central game mechanism: actually controlling the characters. Movement is controlled by facing in a particular direction and pressing the right trigger to walk in that direction. It sounds reasonable in theory but due to changing camera angles it can result in your character swinging around in circles.

But a bigger concern are the context-sensitive controls. During development, critics fretted whether the game would be one long QTE (quick-time-event), requiring you to push buttons with split-second timing in order to progress the story. Cage has avoided some of the pitfalls of QTEs: rather than being required, timed events can be triggered or ignored, and in theory the outcome of the scene will be affected correspondingly. In practice it seems that many scenes play out in very similar fashion either way – but failing to press the buttons doesn’t require a restart, at least (there are no restarts in Heavy Rain – characters can even die unceremoniously, and the dynamic plot continues with the remaining characters).

So the issue isn’t that button presses are QTEs. The single biggest issue is that, when a button prompt appears, you’re often unsure what will be the consequences of pressing that button. As an example, as character Shelby I spent time in the demo questioning a woman about her link to a killer. I was able to take different lines of questioning, and then made my excuses to leave. On exiting, a button prompt appeared showing a curved arrow. The possible significances of completing that button press are many: would Shelby turn around and question the woman again? Would he threaten her? Bribe her? As it turns out, the button press made Shelby reach for his wallet and produce a business card – certainly not something that would have occured to me – in my capacity of Shelby’s puppetmaster – to do.

So, this is a long-winded way of raising the issue about control schemes in interactive fiction that necessarily allows only particular input actions. While Cage has grappled impressively with the difficulties of translating gamepad actions to a simulated reality, it seems likely that in 3, 5, 10 years we’ll look back fondly at these clumsy first steps into interactivity. Perhaps Natal and PS Move, Microsoft’s and Sony’s motion-control technology, will herald a wave of interactive fictions with more literal gesture controls? Even then, developers will need to create a shorthand language to signal to the user what Shelby can take out of his back pocket, before he does it.

Futurelab podcast – technology in primary education

I’m a little late with this one, but the current Futurelab podcast is really worth a listen. Sue Cranmer speaks to John Potter of the London Knowledge Lab, University of London, about technology in primary classrooms. John speaks compellingly about the need to recognise learning needs and then to produce appropriate technology, rather than simply trying to convince teachers that they have a need for any available new technology. He argues for low-tech usage of high-tech products, such as an interactive whiteboard used as a table surface allowing simple manipulation of objects for Nursery and Early Years pupils.

Click here to download the podcast.

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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