GameCity Squared 2009

I spent the last few days in Nottingham for the GameCity festival. I started off by attending the Interactive Technologies and Games conference and then spent the next couple of days checking out the exhibits in town and going to a couple of talks - all in all, it was a good couple of days, and a nice excuse to re-visit where I spent my undergrad years :-)

So, the focus of the conference was on the use of technologies and games for education, health and disability. There was a lot stuff on how the Wiimote and nunchuck in can be used to help those with physical and learning difficulties, such as Steven Battersby's talk about a series of projects exploring the different ways in which the controllers can be adapted and utilised e.g. as a WiiGlove. Other highlights include hearing about David Brown discuss European wide research on developing serious games for those with learning disabilities, where participants were also brought in to talk about their experiences with different games (participatory research - always good!) and Mark Griffiths discussing all the different ways in which games can be used as therapy. It was good to see Maria Saridaki again (who I met at ECGBL last year) and hear her discuss her work on the e-ISOTIS project - which highlighted the importance of considering both students and teachers as end users when it comes to design. I also caught up with Ulises Xolocotzin Elgio who I met at EARLI this year and thanks to Maria for getting us into the opening ceremony for GameCity festival (see the pic of us below sipping on champagne!).


But perhaps the thing that struck me the most about the conference was the focus on using technology to support the elderly. This came in the form of developing ways in which to make the Internet easier to use (Ernestina Etchemendy talking about the Butler system), using games as a way to motivate stroke patients to carry out their exercises (James Burke) and using games as a way to keep older people's brains active (Karel Van Isacker discussing the start of the OASIS project for older people). Given the fact our population is getting older as a whole, it's no surprise that there is an interest how we can assist the elderly and make their lives richer but I guess it's not something I've thought too much about before. Plus it also got me thinking about what things are going to be like when I get to that age!

As for the festival itself, I think the highlight for me where the talks I went to. Sure it was good to see cool things going on in town - the Indiecade (including the Path - though I did end up telling some kids who were getting bored with it that they really didn't need to listen to the game instructions and should be wondering off the path into the woods, lol), the EA exhibit (though all he games seemed to be out already), and Lego Rockband does look fun. Oh, and it was fun to watch loads of people playing the same game at once (see pic below).


But I also went to Lord Puttnam's opening speech - as well as having been a seriously impressive film producer, he is also Chancellor for the Open University - comparing the games and film industries. He was essentially pointing out the power that games could have and essentially pleading for games designers to start producing more mature games. the comparison between the two industries served to make the point that it takes time to understand the potential of a new medium - in the early days of cinema apparently, people would have been shocked by the idea that 90minute-2hour films would become the industry standard, for instance. Puttnam is also interested in climate change and reckons the solution to a lot of our problems is to develop a smarter, better informed society that is aware of the consequences of our actions - which is were games come in. It was quite an inspiring speech, but I think he was placing a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of games designers by essentially asking them to change the world...

David Surnam continued with the idea that games need to grow up a bit when he started the GameCityU day with a talk about what game design means. He went into a lot of different issues - the fact that there has been an explosion of game design courses, that games content should be improved, and that there is a lot of confusion about the roles and responsibilities of games designers and developers. I think he was keen to stress the creative (as well as technical side) of game design but more importantly, wanted to urge students and current designers to take ownership of the design process and their own idenity.

But perhaps the highlight for me was the GameCity U panel with Babsie Lippe (currently an artistic developer for the soon to be released indie MMO Papermint), Rex Crowle (illustrator for Media Molecule who worked on Little Big Planet) and Robin Hunicke (who has worked for EA on MySims and BoomBlox and now works for thatgamecompany) interviewed by David Surnam - see blurry pic below of the panel.


This was just a really cool opportunity to hear from some really creative people who've worked on some fantastic projects. They talked about their different gaming experiences - both as players and designers - gave advice to students in the room, and basically came across as people you'd seriously enjoy having a drink with. And two of them had PhD's, which made we wonder about where I'll end up in the next ten years! Though again, the emphasis was on creative side, so it would be quite surprising if I ever end up as a designer but what I did like how they encouraged students to immerse themselves in all sorts of things from books and music to being outside and trying something different because otherwise they will just end up making games that are self-referential and other little in terms of new experiences to the player.

There were a few other things I would have liked to have seen - like Night Blooms: Flower in the Exchange Arcade and hear Masaya Matsura's closing keynote (the designer responsible for PaRappa the Rapper and VibRibbon) but I'm not sure I could have justified spending much more time away from work (or gotten hold of tickets...). The whole thing was definitely worth going to and I'm glad I was left feeling that while the games industry seems to be at a crossroads, there seems to be a real desire from games developers to make games that matter. And I for one am looking forward to seeing where it's all going to go next.

School of gaming starts in New York

This Guardian article on a school founded on the principles of game-based learning claims this is also "proof that games are educational". I think it's going to take more than just the school opening to support this claim though.

They are starting with just the sixth grade right now but you can check out the school website to find out more.

I'm intrigued but not sure I'm a fan of the school being called "Quest to learn" - too many images of warriors, Elves and magic coming to mind...

HCI 2009

Ok, so the second conference post.

The 23rd BCS (British Computing Society) HCI (Human Computer Interaction) conference was held in Cambridge last week. Anthony Dunne from the Royal College of Art began the opening keynote by asking whether we wanted to "Do you want to replace the existing normal?". Usability news has a nice summary of the talk but the gist of it seemed to be about thinking about design in terms of what could be, and how we can fit into the world, rather than in terms of what is, and how we change the world to fit us. He also presented a lot of his own and students work including ideas such as teddy bear shaped blood bags, the sentinel (below) which requires you to stare into it for a very long time in order to access your data and the cloudworks student project, which explored the idea of using nanotechnology to make clouds "rain" ice cream. It was a fascinating keynote but I can see how some people came away with the idea that this was more about producing art (and getting people to think) than about producing "good" design. I think it's definitely a good thing to encourage people to think outside the box, but I'm not sure you can ignore the fact that mostly what people want (and what makes money) is products that they can easily use, that do what they are supposed to do and that look good.

This was followed by Steve Benford talking about how to design for interaction for people's trajectories through different user experiences. He used a couple of examples from Blast Theory project like Desert Rain and Uncle Roy All Around You to discuss how these "extended hybrid structures" (involving different technological interfaces and narratives within the real and virtual world) can be unified by the realisation that they are taking the user on an extended and coherent journey which will involve transitions, negotiations and interleaving the trajectories of different participants. One of the questions afterwards noted how the approach could be applied to game design where you often have a number of potential trajectories in terms of narrative and timing, but where you also might have to consider how to interleave these when there is more than one player involved.

Other highlights include William Hudson talking about Baron-Cohen's empathising-systematising scale (though I don't think he reported anything that new in his findings since essentially it seemed that those who were in more tech related jobs were found to score more highly on the systematic scale) and Simon Robinson's presentation on the use of haptic feedback while walking (which users appreciated more than visual feedback since they could walk without having to stop and look) and Jenn Sheridan's talk on taking a DIY approach to building interactive surfaces. There was also an Open House Festival showcasing all sorts of gadgets and technology that have been developed recently including the OU's work from the e-Sense project where a blindfolded player is strapped into a vibrating "corset" which lets them know which direction the ball is coming from (see below) showcased by Jon Bird and Paul Marshall from the Computing dept.

In terms of games related stuff, the only things that came up (apart from my own talk) were during the encounter sessions. In these sessions the presenters had five minutes to introduce their subject and then we went off into different 20 minute discussion groups with two of presenters. The first session I attended included Rui Pedro Goncalves Pereira's presenting his TüISt multi-instrument interface and Gijsbert dos Santos presenting some work on using augmented reality as a conceptual design tool. The discussion group I joined after the presentations consisted of Eduardo H. Calvillo Gámez - who presented a model of the gaming experience from his PhD thesis (that I need to look at further, though he has focused on single rather than mutliplayer experiences) - and Russell Beale who talked about using a grounded theory approach to analyse video game reviews (as did Eduardo) in order to categorise what makes a good game. I think the main thing to come out of this for me was the idea of using game reviews as a source of data - while there's been some talk with my supervisors about interviewing game designers, this is something I hadn't considered before.

Though not completely game related the second encounter sessions included some work carried out by Anne Adams, also from IET - who presented some work on attention and affective issues in Second Life and Runescape - and Shazia Afzal - who introduced the notion of intentional affect when dealing with considering machine that interpret the users affective state. The discussion we had was really interesting and got me thinking not only about how you define attention (and immersion!) and affect, but also about how you can try and measure them. We also got on to talking about whether you actually really want a machine to know how you are feeling all the time, when you may not even be sure yourself! Which I guess is part of the reason for thinking about intentional affect...

Then there was my own presentation: "Exploring the link between player involvement and learning within digital games" - my first proper conference paper! (where I'm first author anyway). You can find the paper itself here, and the slides here. There was a bit of a delayed start, so I think I might have rushed the beginning a little but I soon got into it. I got a bit of a tricky question about what I meant by learning which I think threw me a bit as I've gotten to the point where I don't even question that games involve learning but I guess it depends on how you define it as a concept and what you're expectations are around it. The question did make me realise I'm going to have to be very explicit about how I do define it, especially when I am presenting outside game related circles. And that I may have to consider my titles more carefully in future, as I think a lot of people thought I was going to talk about educational games. While I think I did alright at addressing her concerns, I'm going to have to get better at justifying my interest in informal learning. Having a further discussion after the talk also made me realise that I may have to talk about learning on different levels i.e. with learning how to press the buttons at the bottom, which brings me back to the point I made in the last post about finding out a way to analyse the complexity of learning (and play) that occurs within games.

And finally, the conference ended with Bill Buxton's keynote. This was seriously good, he really did keep everyone engaged and got us to think as well. Essentially, he was arguing for the importance of being aware of our own historical socio-cultural context of technology. For instance, did you know that the first smart phone to have a single button and touch screen to be introduced was the IBM Simon? In 1994. 13 years before the iPhone. And how many people working in HCI are actually aware of this?!? The point he was making wasn't about somebody else inventing it first but that innovations can usually be traced back at least 20 years - "The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed" (Gibson) - so the next big thing is probably already around. Obviously, the Simon didn't do well, so it's not just about the technology but about how you present the whole package. But maybe by seeing the world through different eyes, knowing enough history to build upon it and adding your own twist who knows what'll happen next?

It was a good ending to a good few days and now I have a whole long list of things I need to read up on...

JURE and EARLI 2009

I was going to write a single blog post titled "Conference season" since that is what the last two weeks have felt like, but I think it might get a stupidly long so I've decided to do two separate ones. I know I've been slack with the posting, especially about the games I've been playing, but now that I'm actually going to be in one place for more than a few days at a time I should be getting back into more regular posts.

So, first off, was EARLI (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction) in Amsterdam where I presented a roundtable discussion at the JURE (Junior researchers of EARLI) preconference. I'm glad the other presenter at the session was doing games related research (Jantina Huizenga who is working on the Game Atelier project) and though it may not have been the main area of everyone who attended, it was useful to get some different perspectives on my work. I also somehow managed to win an award for "Best roundtable" (thanks to the Groningen votes!) so that was pretty cool :) The main things the discussion got me thinking about was in terms of how to keep interactions as natural as possible during observation sessions and also about whether there is any way I can somehow analyse the complexity of the games being played in order to distinguish between them? I think I have this theory that games like Mario Kart or Wii Fit are somehow simpler than something like Fable II or Spore but I don't really have any real way of distinguishing between them... as yet.

Now EARLI is a massive conference and there were loads of talks to do with areas of education I really don't know much about (e.g. reading and writing). There was some games related stuff, and a lot of talk about motivation, but pretty much all of it was to do with formal education. Though there was a poster by Bjorn Sjoblom on co-located gaming about studying the discourses of players playing a MMOG within an Internet cafe. I liked the fact he was focusing on the co-located aspects of play and that he was using an observational approach.

There wasn't a whole lot of talk about informal learning either and when there was, it seemed to be more about trying to bridge the informal learning experiences at museum or science centres with what goes on at schools. At JURE though, I did come across a poster presented by Marjolein van Herten about informal learning within book discussion groups and had a bit of chat with the author about how difficult it actually is to identify informal learning... I also went to a JURE talk on the computer-based educational games by Claudia Schrader who compared a high-immersive game and a low-immersive application (control) to find that the control group did a lot better on subsequent cognitive tests. Without seeing the game and application used, it's difficult to make any judgements here, but I have a suspicion that learning gains from games take longer to show up (or at least require more than a single session) and may also be retained for longer (which would need a delayed post-test). It's also possible that we are back to considering whether there is a divide between being motivated to play the game, and being motivated to learn the content.

Which brings me on to Shaaron Ainsworth's talk on intrinsic integration within serious games. She presented some work carried out by one of previous PhD students Jake Habgood about how to integrate learning material within the game being designed. The approach adopted was an experimental one where manipulations of the same game (Zombie Division see below) indicated that it is not the notion of intrinsic fantasy that is important but how you integrate the learning within the game's core mechanics. I take this to mean that there shouldn't really be a divide between learning how to play and learning what you want players to learn.



Though I know Shaaron from when I was an undergraduate at Nottingham and it's work I've come across before, it was good to be reminded of it and it made me think about what it I want to get out of my own research. I've chosen not to focus on educational games, but on commercial ones, because I don't think we have a good enough understanding of why people play them, and how this links to the amount of effort they are willing to put in to learn (and master) the game. The discussant at the session also raised some interesting point about how it's time to think about specifying what kinds of gameplay work with what kinds of learning, which seems pretty close to what I want to do. What I really want is to come up with a way to compare and contrast different games in terms of motivation, engagement and informal learning. This will hopefully have implications for how to use and design games within education, or even just mean we are able to assess the informal learning potential of different games.

Even attending talks that weren't directly related to my research area got me thinking about different things. For one, expectancy-value models of motivation kept coming up at different presentations, so I need to look more into that. Errors were also mentioned as a potential source of learning which I think could be relevant to learning during game-play. There was also some discussion of deep and surface approaches to learning, which made we whether you could classify learning within games in the same way - maybe players engaged in shallow learning with Mario Kart and deep learning with Spore? How could I assess this?

One presentation I did find particularly useful (especially because we got to talk about it afterwards) was by Ulises Xolocotzin-Eligio, a PhD student at the LSRI in Nottingham, who is examining the role of perceived emotions within computer supported collaborative learning. He has also used games (e.g. Astroversity) to explore these concepts during co-located play and has kindly forwarded me some of his work to look at in more detail. Looking over my notes for the session, I have written down "think I need to observe people more than once..." as the talk made me realise I probably do want to do more than a one-shot observation session in order to see how the processes of learning and engagement change over time.

Hmm, can see how things are starting to get more complicated in terms of what I want to do, while I haven't even begun to reflect on the HCI conference... But right now I think I need to go away and write up some sort of reading list based on the conference, before I forget it all!

Women and games

I've been a bit quiet lately because it's the summer and I've not really been in one place for long but I do promise to post something about my recent gaming experiences soon. In the meantime, please watch this very cool animated short from Daniel Floyd and Leigh Alexander:



Diversity it seems, is key. Though marketing may have their own ideas...

Critical thinking and The Sims 3

Thanks to Costas again for sending me a link to a fascinating blog that is looking at what happens when you decide to play a homeless family in The Sims 3 (see pic below of Kev and his daughter Alice, created by Robin Burkinsaw).

While it's pretty interesting in itself, it reminded me of some of Gonzalo Frasca's work which discusses Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed in relation to video game design and how this could be used to encourage critical thinking. In an article on the same topic (based on this thesis) he discusses a hypothetical, open source version of the original Sims that would allow players to have much more control over character creation (which seems to have be part of the latest one). He argues that this control would allow players to create characters with the traits they want and gives an example of someone playing this version of the game and comparing the effects of these different traits. His main argument seems to be that by reducing immersion (in this case, the term seems to refer to attention and the suspension of disbelief, as opposed to the feeling of inhabiting a virtual environment) through allowing players more control, you will encourage critical thinking and reflection. I'm not sure whether providing more control , on its own, automatically leads to a more reflective stance about the game, but Robin Burkinshaw's blog does suggest how this might manifest.

And the link made me think that I should probably get a copy of the game myself...

H809: a couple of links

Just a very short post to point to a couple of things that might be useful for the final assignment:

1) A research proposal outline - posted by Sonja
2) Assignment guide for H809 - James suggests reading from page 7 onwards
3) A link to some videos on educational theories - posted in the blogs
4) Oh, and please don't forget to fill in the course survey here.

Good luck with finishing your ECAs!