Posted: May 27th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Education, Games for Good, State of the Art, game-based learning | Tags: Education, game design, game-based learning, Games for Change, video games | No Comments »
Katherine Isbister – NYU Poly
Games are customiable, provide rich data, and are popular with kids so should be good for learning
Unfortunately, it’s incredibly easy to make terrible games
So, G4L! is trying to develop useful theories for making good learning gmaes
Trying to get best practices from commercial developers – interviewed 41 professional game developers and reserach-practitioners mostly at professional events
Focus on design tactics
Donald Schon’s “The Reflective Practitioner”
Found recurrent recommendations, and now has a massive archive of these interviews
Key concepts include:
Fun – hate the term engaging, and think most learning games are crap
Polish – most learning games not polished enough
Mechanics aren’t ‘bolted on’ – learning games fail to integrate learning and mechanics
Inviting commercial developers to critique learning games
Katie Culp – CCT
Looking at building research into the front end of game design–designing based on who the audience is
Looking at building inquiry skills in middle school students
Too many games make assumptions about student/player thinking skills without considering where kids are developmentally
Kids at this stage have trouble recognizing what they don’t know/what they need to learn
In order to understand this, formative research–a type of research pioneered by Sesame Workshop is useful.
The methodology is very early in the design process use activities and content that’s central to the game concept and bring it to kids to play with
This does not create broad understanding, is not like a RCT, but does allow particular insights into specific audiences’ specific thinking
Researcher may already have an understanding based on the literature about kid misconceptions, but formative research brings forth the specific language and cognitive associations and ways of thinking.
Greg Chung UCLA/CRESST/CATS
How can meaningful information be extracted from a high volumen low quality data set? (I’m paraphrasing, may be off)
Developing math game focusing on fractions and addition of fractions
Worked with USC to develop game ideas and what gameplay info will show player understanding of fractions
Sorry…Zoned out here
Jan Plass NYU/G4LI
Looking at design patterns for good learning
Building Augmented Reality games for science learning, Adventure games for science learning, math games,
Looking for general solutions to commonly occuring problems in learning game design
–Strong narratives provide sufficient incentive to solve hard puzzles
–One challenge is we don’t know how to measure engagement well–behavioral, cognitive, social, and emotional
Individual engagement–self report, survey, interview, biomentirs, video observation, user logs
group engagement–video observation, classroom observation, user logs
One challenge is that studies on a certain scale it becomes impossible to always observe
Requires Theoretical model of Interactivity – some paper with plass, schwartz, and another guy
Using a lot of bio data to measure enegagment
Important: triangulation–each measurement only measures a certain kind of engagement in a certain context, and a theorietical framework is needed to tie it all together–but it’s still setting, task, genre, and platform specific
Posted: May 26th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Education, Games for Good, State of the Art, game-based learning | Tags: Education, game design, game-based learning, Games for Change, Iraq, video games, videogame violence | No Comments »
OK, so for this panel we have two hipster/nerd white guys and a woman in army fatigues. Interesting.
Kurt Squire
There’s a gap between the legacy institution of schools and modern technology. Handheld devices will radically change schools. The Generation Mobile study is significant in terms of explaining how pervasive mobile device use is among kids. Kids today almost all have mobile devices and access the internet via them, and multitask on them to cram more media activity into less time.
Right now, schools ban mobile media (which is an unsustainable decision) and the solution is instead to encourage media multitasking and different educational tasks for different students.
Squire and his team worked in an alternative school with 12-18 students, but with that caveat, the experiment was very successful,they saw very pro-social behavior, the devices amplified learning.
Devices amplify subject interest, self, social network and learning.
With mobile devices students are multitasking in interesting ways and combining the affordances of different apps in creative ways.
Students talked about using Facebook to escape from school clicks. Kids use mobile device to take advantage of teachable moments and participate in the adult world in new ways (give directions to mom using gps when she’s lost).
Games!
Neighborhood game design project–integrated course in a design studio context
Started with place based inquiry, game design, and collaboratively building an ARG. Used the context of working with city planner, learned about the challenges of this field, and then went to game design studio–learning game design process, then applying it to their city. Kids decided to make a game about a bike path behind their school being paved. Interesting process was that while they disliked the change before starting the process, by the end they understand why the government did what they did.
Devices can leverage learnign not anywhere anytime, but rather specific places.
Arisgames.org–platofrm for developing iphone arg games.
Made a game about Lake Wingra, and tried to build in some transgression, but in fact none of the kids wanted to transgress (destroy the lake) only wanted to save it.
Kids in 5th grade made a game about a destroyed neightborhood and then drafted and got passed a city resolution
Interested in helping kids learn to be community organizers
Ken Perlin
“We have an entire society dedicated to putting people into pigeonholes” “You’re an artist, scientist, engineer, designer”
We establish dialectics between exploration and implementation, analytic and asesthetic, when in fact all people have these abilities within them.
Maybe in the future we’ll all be more in virtual reality.
Just called an iPad a book. We’re seeing the proliferatino of digital books, which eventually will all have cameras so that they can facial recognition.
Technology always ends up converging with magic. devices shouldn’t take over our lives. Future shouldn’t be about the machine, but about how we can connect.
People who ask the right questions get to the future first.
Shit yeah! talking about Diamond Age. In the primer, the book only works because there’s a person behind it–not AI. Kids love toys and games but will always respond best to mentors and humans.
Humans are wired in some way to diferentiate between human and not human but acts human–we have limited/no empathy towards artificial intelligence.
As long as you create a compelling charachter, media will converge around it.
All tech has an exponential phase, but eventaully levels off. Whatever is exponential now wil llelvel off and what’s interesting is the things just starting.
“In the future we will still play with plastic dinosaurs, but my hope is we’ll get to keep doing it all our lives.”
Army Brigadere General Lorree K. Sutton
I’m having a hard time. We’re getting some “next greatest generation” stuff here about the nobility of service in the military.
“Perhaps the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.” Sebastian Jung. “If that’s true, perhaps the ultimate war game is the one that compels us to return to the scene of the battle,” and acknowledge that wound and move towards healing. “Being together virtually is far more real than being together face to face.” Really?
This lady is hoo rah! all the way. And yet, believes that mental health for soldiers requires moving from “suck it up” to treatment and ommuninty involvement, and reaching out for help is an act of strength.
Sesame Workshop working with the military to help families grieving or adjusting to suffering.
“Theater of War” bringing Greek warrior ideals to life in a way to help soldiers.
Honestly, I have no idea what the hell is being talked about here. We’ve heard the phrase “down range” about a dozen times, which seems to indicate a place where armed conflict takes place. I understand that there are games trying to help soldiers deal with mental health issues, but I know that going in to the talk and I’ve heard virtually nothing of any substance about these.
Sutton has been following war games over the years (down on one knee speaking into the mic like Elvis on stage). Is scared by the latest generation of war games. Brainstorming with Alan Gerschenfeld about how to make war wounded characters from these games and bring them to a space where they can learn about psychological health. Say what?
I got nothing against individual soldiers, but let’s be clear here: These wars we are engaged in (which are not even official wars declared thourough Congress as is mandated in the Constitution!) are tragedies justified by lies. They are destroying millions of lives, they are economically damaging our country, they are perpetuating a culture of fear and justifying the loss of our civil liberties.
Posted: May 2nd, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: State of the Art | Tags: art games, game design, jason Rohrer, video games | No Comments »
I’ve been playing around a little bit with Sleep is Death, Jason Rohrer’s new “game” and I really want to write a review of it here, but I have a minor problem. I can’t figure out how to use it. The game is a two player story telling experience where one player becomes a kind of dungeon master and the other player explores the story world created around him. The first time I tried it with a friend we couldn’t figure out how to make our routers play talk to each other and after 45 minutes of futzing around I got bored and started shopping for a rice cooker.
The next day, my friend came over so we could play over the wi fi and skip all the network connectivitiy issues. This time I spent 45 minutes trying to instantiate puppies into a cabin and wondering why my timer was showing -237 seconds. Eventually, we got bored and distracted and ended up discussing, I don’t know, lint or something. I’m not sure if Rohrer’s complete obtuse game design is some kind of high level commentary on the nature of personal narrative and representation of self in a world where sign and signified have been riven, or if I’m just too dense to decipher rules so obvious they need no explanation, like the man/woman bathroom symbols or something.
Anyway, I haven’t given up hope, and will read the message boards (there seems to be a massive fan community already) and try again next week. In the meantime, I am amusing myself with the brilliant, intuitive and addictive Mario Crossover. It’s Super Mario Brothers, but you can play as Mega Man, Samus, Link, and other NES heroes complete with proper music and unique character abilities. It may not be art, but it’s awesome.
*And here’s a link to an interview with Crossover’s creator Jay Pavlina. He’s a film maker and this is first game and used this game to teach himself programming! Judging from this quote, he is clearly a natural game designer:
Originally, the game was going to have a story where Mario got captured, so Luigi recruited his friends from other videogame worlds to help get Mario back. But I decided not to worry about the story and just focus on making the gameplay awesome.
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: State of the Art | Tags: art games, game design, media use, video games, Visual Art, youtube | No Comments »
Without a doubt the two best pieces of literature I read this year were comics. David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp and David B.’s Epileptic are simply brilliant pieces of storytelling that use the form of the graphic novel more skillfully than anything I’ve ever experienced before. I recently read (almost all of) David Shields’s book Reality Hunger, and while I don’t share his complete disdain for the traditional novel, I do find it’s rare that I find a current work of fiction very engaging. Experimental writing, bouncing from perspective to perspective, manipulating timescapes, or whatever, often feels contrived and frivolous rather than meaningful.
B. and Mazzucchelli, however, take advantage of the affordances of their medium in ways that genuinely enrich the story and deepen the reader’s connection to character, setting, and plot. In Epileptic, B. portrays his childhood, or something like it, focusing on his brother’s severe epilepsy and how it damaged the family. Through his illustrations, B. effectively conveys the confusion, insight, whimsy, cruelty, and caring that comprises childhood. His illustrations personify the epilepsy and also illuminate his own fantastical coping strategies. The book is tragic/beautiful and beautifully tragic and by the end I was almost crying (something no movie or book has come close to doing in over a decade).
B.’s vivid imagery is often so dense it can take half an hour to work through a page or two, carefully exploring all the tiny chaotic epic battlegrounds that made up his childhood. It is the labored pace Epileptic demands that makes it so exceptional. By spending time with the imagery I found myself reflecting on the text, meditating on B.’s experience, considering experiences from my own childhood, and wondering how I would have acted in his place. It was in this forced lingering that I became empathetic to B. in a way that I don’t think a movie with its predetermined camera cuts or a book with its pure literary presentation could equal. B. creates something with a comic that could only be done with a comic.
Asterios Polyp is a very different story with a very different presentation, but like B., Mazzucchelli uses the comic form to its full potential. Every character is drawn in a unique art style and voiced with a unique font that expresses aspects of his or her personality. Throughout the story form, color, and dialogue interrelate to communicate. There is one section, however, that affected me more than any other. For a series of pages, the main character Asterios reminisces about his ex-wife. There are almost no words, but on those pages Mazzucchelli creates an experience that has more verisimilitude to the actual lived experience of wistful remembering than any film montage or book passage I’ve ever seen.
Viewing the comic, I was able to experience all the images at once, feeling them all lose detail but gain mass, and then sometimes linger on one image or another. The ex-wife is depicted in any number of mundane moments from sneezing to smiling to lying sick in bed. It is exactly this diverse collection of significant and insignificant memories that constitutes intimacy with someone, and when that person is gone, the experience of reminiscence is one of drifting through snapshots of beautiful banality interspersed with precious perfect moments. The remembering is bittersweet, virtually effortless, and irregular in its movements from memory to memory. Viewing these pages from Asterios Polyp was so similar to the actual experience of reminiscing that I had a feeling of mild claustrophobia. Too much, too close, Mazzucchelli penned Life but with darker outlines and more saturation, accomplishing the hyper-realism that only great art does.
Thinking about what these two comics accomplish makes me wonder how close video game are to this high standard. I think Heavy Rain, which I had the chance to play yesterday, is one of gaming’s most artful attempts. I have pretty mixed feelings about it, but fundamentally I congratulate the developers on trying to do something new with the medium of video games. Just as B. and Mazzucchelli took long looks at the comic and drew upon what it could do that no other medium could, I think the developers at Quantic Dream made a sincere attempt to tell a tragic narrative in a way that only a video game could.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: March 29th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: State of the Art | Tags: art games, game design, Molleindustria, video games, Visual Art | No Comments »
With a keen eye for elegant, efficient ludic communication, Molleindustria has done it again. What is, on a the surface simply a deeply blasphemous mini-game by Paolo Pedercini is, in fact, well, not a nuanced meditation, but at least a thoughtful little statement.
In Run Jesus Run, you play as Jesus trying to save humanity in ten seconds. The concept of Jesus working against a time limit is actually quite accurate, and I think it humanizes Jesus to imagine that while he was wandering and teaching he sometimes felt the weight of the shot clock and wished for a little more time. In the game, the only two controls you have are run with the arrow keys and “do Jesus things” with the space bar. Walk on water with the space bar, multiply loaves and fishes with the space bar, fight the devil with the space bar. The simple controls fit with the game’s simple aesthetic, but there’s something more significant going on too. For Jesus, the son of God (or God himself, this relationship has never been really clear to me) every great crowd-awing miracle would be as simple as a keystroke. And one of his messages (if memory serves me right) was that such great feats as walking on water were within reach of his disciples too, if they could just take the simple action of believing.
Finally, after a brief sprint for salvation, the player wins and ends up on the cross, flanked by the two thieves. If you lose the game, running out of time, or falling into a pit at one point, the end screen shows the two crucified criminals with “Game Over” in place of Jesus. To win is to be crucified, to lose is to miss your brutal destiny. It’s an inevitable, but highly interesting end to the game. The player runs to his death, eagerly completing each little task for the privilege of being crucified.
This is not the first religious game that Pedercini has made, but it may be his best. Faith Fighter is amusing, but it’s point is obvious, and the fighting is clunky. Faith Fighter 2 is just an animated insult to everyone offended by Faith FIghter, but is not without it’s charms. Operation Pedopriest was briefly banned by the Italian government. It’s not a brilliant game, but it’s so shocking the first time you see it I think it’s an incredible statement. Run Jesus Run, though, feels like art. It’s not didactic, it’s subtle, and it gets better if you spend more time with it. Well done Paolo.
Posted: March 25th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: State of the Art, game-based learning | Tags: Education, game design, game-based learning, video games, Visual Art | No Comments »
This is obviously not how the designers intend their game to be played.
Kotaku has posted a
brief article considering subversion and gameplay. It doesn’t get very deep (and certainly doesn’t wax philosophical for days like
my own discussion of this topic) but it’s closing ideas are of interest. The author describes a forthcoming game in which the protagonist is different in the Japanese and American versions. The game designers intended for the player to assume the role of a brother rescuing his sister, but in the American version the player is a father rescuing his daughter. This is not an example of player subversion, but still raises questions about significance of the intention of the designers. How much does it matter what a designer intended her game to express? This, of course is a question common in the arts and interestingly, I’ve recently been experiencing a synchronicity relating to this.
A Summary:
I’m currently reading David Shield’s Reality Hunger, which is almost a book without an author, comprised entirely from snippets of writing by other writers.
The New York Times recently ran and article entitled Text without Context that considers (among other things) mash-up culture and how it robs from original artists while creating very little newness in the world.
Last month, Kotaku posted an article on the search for the video game auteur (a notion seemingly undercut by today’s subversion post.)
And, perhaps most significantly, last night’s South Park episode reflected on poststructuralism and the foolishness that can come from over analyzing a created work to perceive meaning which is simply absent. It was a somber, nuanced and subtle meditation, of course. There was lots of vomit.
Anyway, as I’ve said before, I believe wholeheartedly in subversion. Rules are meant to be broken and the magic circle is durable enough to withstand enthusiastic probing of its limits. As a game designer, the first thing I learned is that the first time you playtest a game it will always be played “wrong” and that’s the fun. It is a high achievement to invent a game where players can invent new strategies, discover unique methods, and find their own style. From a game based learning perspective, it is very challenging to develop a system that both provides space for innovation and consistently guides the player towards sound instructional activities, but if I didn’t like challenge I wouldn’t work in education.
Posted: March 25th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: State of the Art | Tags: game design, video games, Visual Art | No Comments »
As someone currently working on a literacy video game, I have some issues with this article, and I’m not sure how scientific all the claims are, but I like the idea of working with affordances. Certainly, there are many ways to tell a story, and I’m all for game designers doing more with imagery and less with dialogue. That said, a good game writer can add a lot to a game and word play is a deep human practice. I definitely don’t agree that there’s something purer about visual communication as opposed to literary communication and i think Boyer’s “Joyful Reunion” example falls flat. But, overall, it’s a good piece to read and mull over.
Less Talk, More Rock
The native language of video gamesis neither spoken nor written
Posted: March 8th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: State of the Art | Tags: art games, documentary video games, game design, jason Rohrer, Video game | No Comments »
If you haven’t played Passage yet, go play it. Then sit quietly for a few minutes and play it again. Rohrer did something special there, and it looks like Sleep is Death will be even more impressive. I’ll be pre-ordering my copy soon.
