games
Oh, man does this take me back! I spent hour after hour playing the original handheld LED football game - working on my offensive fake-out and hammering the arrow keys into dust.
Now, I can play the game on my iPod Touch. Sure hope I don’t put my finger through the touch screen…
Computer and video games are a cultural and economic force drawing increasing attention from educators, anthropologists, economists, media scholars, journalists, and art critics (King, 2002; Perron & Wolfe, 2003; Poole, 2000).
Computer games have grown in sophistication and brought innovative models of interactive storytelling that is entertaining and inspiring millions of people.
Games have grown not only into an important economic force (grossing roughly US$11 billion), but a cultural force -- a medium of choice for many members of the millennial generation that educators should understand.
While some educational critics have derided games as pointless, it is still important for educators to understand why games have such appeal and understand what design principles underlie them.
Dodlinger's (2007) academic literature review focuses on 35 publications addressing educational video game design spanning the last ten years in order to "identify elements of game design that promote learning as well as the learning theories that conceptualize how video games foster learning" (p. 21).
Dodlinger notes that "While there is widespread consensus that games motivate players to spend time on task mastering the skills a game imparts, some disagreement over the specific characteristics that provoke that motivation exists" (p. 28).
Elements of game design that promote learning
Moreover, Dodlinger's (2007) review identified six distinct design elements that could be deemed necessary to stimulate desired learning outcomes. These elements include:
- Narrative context -- for situating and contextualizing learning -- the storyline
- Goals and rules -- objectives and guidelines - short term, medium term, long term
- Rewards -- (associated w/motivation) -- signals achievement
- Interactivity and multisensory cues -- direct attention, introduce new sensory perspectives, provides feedback cues for error correction
Learning outcomes from educational video games
In terms of learning outcomes from educational video games, Dodlinger (2007) points to research that suggests that well-designed games support the development of 21st century learning skills (e.g., play, performance, navigation, resourcefulness, negotiation, synthesis, collaboration, team work, judgement, discernment) but also other higher order thinking skills such as deduction and hypothesis testing, complex concepts and abstract thinking, and visual and spatial processing.
While exploring the potential for games in educational contexts, there seem to be a handful of challenges to widespread adoption and game integration:
- Understanding the value of games
- Finding appropriately designed games
- Getting games into educators' hands
- Integrating games into curricula, i.e., getting them into kids' hands
- The ethical roles and responsibilities associated with gaming
- The lack of clear evaluation standards associated with work produced utilizing games
- How do we guarantee that the rich opportunities afforded by the expanding educational gaming landscape are available to all?
[I'm sure there are more, these are just a few that sprung to mind.]
Class activity:
Let's take a look at a couple of online educational games and see to what extent they incorporate the six design elements listed above.
Examples:
Tut pup -- basic math and spelling games -- http://tutpup.com
Getty Games -- basic puzzle games based on museum pieces in the Gettty collection -- http://www.getty.edu/gettygames/
Villany, Inc. -- Thwarting World Supremacy through Mathematics storytelling, problem-solving and mathematics -- http://villainyinc.thinkport.org/mission1/default.asp?autoload=1
Free Rice -- social action and educational game -- http://www.freerice.com/
ADDENDUM:
More Educational Games:
Games Multimedia Materials -- a wiki housing several good examples of educational games.
Game Research Site:
Game Research - The art, business, and science, of video games.
Major Reference:
Dondlinger, M. J. (2007). Educational video game design: A review of the literature. Journal of Applied Educational Technology, 4(1): 21-31. Retrieved 23 July 2008 from http://www.eduquery.com/jaet/JAET4-1_Dondlinger.pdf.
My del.icio.us "games" links
[Note: This post is a brief introduction to video and computer-based games in education. It is the basis for a lesson plan associated with EME2040 Introduction to Educational Technology Summer C 2008.]
Image from 1up.com.
“If you blog it, it is no dream.”
Last year at this time, while I was embedded deep in yet another bout of nostalgia, I posted about an old school video game called Killer Shark (1972). I had been lamenting the fact that this game was inaccessible to me now, and how much I loved the flailing shark as it moved back and forth across the screen. Well, yesterday I got a comment on that post alerting me to the fact that Loressa Clisby of Daemon Keep Games has developed a facsimile version of this arcade classic. She rules! You can download it here, just keep in mind that it only works with Windows (luckily I have one of those vestigial operating systems hanging around).
And to throw the gauntlet down, I have taken a minute and a half screencast of myself playing the game, and I have to say that despite the fact that I have only been playing for half an hour, I am the best already. I challenge any of you suckers!
This whole thing led me to search out some information about the place where I played the original Killer Shark arcade game for years: Nunley's Amusement Park in beautiful Baldwin, Long Island. It was a suburban family amusement park (the last of its kind) that had all the amenities of a large amusement park, in the classic style of Coney Island mind you, only in miniature. There was a miniature roller coaster, cups and saucers, ferris wheel, hand carts, miniature golf, and the famously opulent carousel that was designed in 1912 by Stein & Goldstein of Brooklyn and is one of the few that have been preserved and recognized as a landmark.
I think I can say with some certainty that it was a special place for just about every kid who grew up on the South Shore of Long Island (and far beyond I’m sure) for over half a century. That’ where I played Killer Shark as a kid, but it is also where my friends and I whiled away many a Summer’s day playing video games, skeeball, getting our fortune’s told by a gypsy automata, and beating each other up over a soft ice cream or a slice of pizza, which were served by “the Greeks” who wore white and red vertically striped shirts (all of whom must have worked there their entire lives, for over the twenty year span I frewuented Nunely’s, there was never a new face behind the counter). It was were I took my first date in 5th grade, and where I got broken up with more times than I care to remember. I loved Nunley’s, it is a painful reminder of the fact that even the suburbs had some style and dignity at one time. It was closed at the end of the Summer in 1995, never to re-open.
On that day the South Shore of Long Island got that much more barren and desolate. The land was sold off to some speculator that brought in a chain auto parts store (what vision and imagination!). I actually think about Nunley’s on a regular basis these days while I struggle to entertain two young kids with things to do. I think about how much I would appreciate a place like Nunely’s which has some old school class, wasn’t in some fucking mall or surrounded by box stores, easily accessible by public transportation, and would be just as much fun for me as would be for my kids. All we got is Chuck E. Cheese’s and the rest of that corporate junk, it’s really disheartening how much we have gutted ourselves of any kind of unique and wonder-filled experiences. Everything remains the same, predictable, and utterly sterile. I want a time machine.
Actually, wait…I kind of found one! It’s called YouTube, and it has a great video discussing the history of Nunley’s, its fabled carousel, along with its (at the time) imminent demise. If you watch the video, you can see how the whole place was set up, and the video games actually were placed on the perimeter of the walls around the carousel, you can also see the skeeball if you look hard. Wow, how cool is that! YouTube, I love you!
Image of Nunley’s Ferris Wheel from Cabin333’s Flickr account.
Just in case Matt Barton is too shy to mention it himself, his recent book Dungeons and Desktops has been slashdotted.
I’ve been following Spore since I saw the first demo at TED. I remember playing SimCity back in the day (on my Amiga 1000!), and SimEarth, and the other variants, and have really been looking forward to Spore.
It’s really a universe simulator, where players interact at various scales separated by orders of magnitude. The full game starts at the single cell stage, evolving up through multicellular life, eventually up to group and society, and finally planetary and galactic scales. What a great way to show interconnections between the various disciplines? Biochemistry through cellular biology through zoology through ecology through sociology through planetary biology and astrophysics. In a format that can be jumped into by anyone, including kids. Especially kids. What would happen if kids are able to develop a sense of these interactions and interdependencies at various scales?
I downloaded (and purchased) the full Spore Creature Creator - it’s the demo app to showcase some of the technology that will be in the final game. It lets you create creatures using a set of biological widgets, and the behaviour and charactistics of the creature are developed based on the properties of the components selected.
I put together a quick creature to see what the full demo would do, and it’s really pretty cool just how detailed the creature is. Based on the limbs and body size, the thing as a believable gate and stance. Based on the head, jaw, and body shape, it has a realistic voice - able to call and roar.
I’m REALLY looking forward to the full game.
I always *felt* like I should be a gamer. After all, I built educational games for a good portion of my career — first for children (reading readiness software), then for Columbia University and Cable & Wireless, where the name of the game was social simulations — choose-your-own-adventure style scenarios where you interacted with professional environments — and if you made the wrong decision you could bring your team/company/state/country down with you.
So I tried to play recreational computer games. I really tried. Since I like to solve puzzles I kept buying PC based “adventure” games. And since I’m not a violent sort I steered away from the gore.
But every game I played seemed like the same game. And that game was “Try to figure out what the game designer thought an appropriate action would be in this context.”
I’m sure you know this game. It starts with you watching a film intro, and then some objective is voiced. Maybe you have to get to Room 306 or something. Maybe you have to find the crystal ionizer.
So you walk around a room, and the first steps come easy. Wow, there’s a note there! What does it say?
But then you try to exit the room for 30 minutes without success. Why won’t that door open? Am I at the wrong door?
And then the answer, stupid me, would be that the card under the coffee cup was actually a key card for the door. It goes (don’t you know) in the slot you saw on the floor on the other side of the room.
That’s thirty minutes of my life I’m not going to get back. And it’s thirty minutes of trying to guess what an “appropriate” solution is.
Worse, it’s thirty minutes of trying to figure out what an “appropriately creative” solution is. And that’s just maddening.
So I gave up on games for a while. Until one week I decided to borrow my brother’s XBox and see what the hullaballoo about Halo 3 was. And from the moment I started playing it, I realized I had it backwards on games.
Whatever your feeling about the subject matter, the battle games are the educational games. Why? Because as you run through scenarios dying repeatedly, you are forced to look at the thing, not from the perspective of WWGDD (What would game designers do?) but from the perspective of systems analysis. Have you chosen the correct weapons to make it through the hall? Would a short range weapon with a bigger kick be more appropriate? Are you dying because you are trying to take out too many of the enemy before proceeding — or do maybe you need to dash through *more* quickly? Is the risk of making the dash to the weapons cabinet worth the pay off here? What’s the optimum route through the level?
You have resources and potential paths. You can combine them in ways the game designer might not expect. There are multiple working paths to any achievement. You play co-op mode with others, and you develop team strategies (”You go this way with the gravity hammer and I’ll snipe with the 50 cal…”). And every time you die (which if you are me, is a *lot*), you evaluate that crucial question Seth Godin refers to as the question of “The Dip”: Is my set of tactics sound, but requiring more polish in execution? Or is my approach fundamentally flawed?
And, again, you do this all by studying the way the system operates instead of playing a senseless game of WWGDD.
You may find the content disturbing. Personally, as silly as it may sound, I can’t play games where I’m shooting realistic humans in a current war. I have to shoot aliens, or people so far back in history that I’m removed from the geopolitical implications.
But strip that away and the process of playing Halo or Gears of War is more educational, and will teach you more about analyzing problems than any “intellectual” game on the market. There’s an honesty to these games, and within tight constraints, an emergent element. No, it’s not spore, or Civilization IV. And you can’t build your own weapons or design your own level. You can’t mashup elements from other games into Halo.
But you can study a system that operates in a discoverable way, and develop an approach that makes the best use of tools and available cover. You can develop a strategy that it’s just possible no one has discovered before. That beats trying to figure out what cleverly hidden object you need to open a door any day of the week.
(There’s probably a clever coda here to be written about whether your use of classroom technology looks more like Syberia or Halo, but I’ll leave that for someone else to write…)
I think I'm going to be able to attend this interactive fiction event at the Unversity of Maryland:
As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds (http://www.ndiipp.uiuc.edu/pca/), MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University. We will read through the complete text of the game, and also (geeks that we are) have a look at its FORTRAN source code.
Imagine that -- unfolding in real time -- you find a perfect real-world example that, with eerie clarity, embodies almost all the concepts you've devoted yourself to teaching and studying in the past ten or so years.
I'm not sure if many people here are aware of this, so I thought I'd go ahead and post it at the risk of looking like a shameless self-publicist: Dungeons and Desktops is now available from Amazon (and directly from AK Peters). This is my first single-authored book, and hopefully it won't be my last. :)
Here's the blurb from the publisher:
Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) are a special genre of computer games that bring the tabletop role-playing experience of games such as Dungeons & Dragons to the computer screen. This genre includes classics such as Ultima and The Bard's Tale as well as more modern games such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars.
Written in an engaging style for both the computer game enthusiast and the more casual computer game player, this book explores the history of the genre by telling the stories of the developers, games, and gamers who created it.
This collection of articles, published as Threshold Magazine - New Directions Spring 2008 by Cable in the Classroom and the KnowledgeWorks Foundation is one of the finest “think bombs” related to education and coming changes that I’ve seen printed on paper. I received a copy by accident, as my predecessor was on just the right mailing list.
There’s a great think piece on open textbooks, and Stephen Downes has a piece in the issue, too, on educational choices and virtual options. Also included is a handy copy of the Future Forces Affecting Education map by KnowledgeWorks. Might be worth getting some extra hard copies to share with your favorite administrator, teacher, school board member, etc. (Here’s the reprint inquiry info. I’ll be calling on Monday.)
