Digital games and learning

Interactive punching bag

2012-01-12T13:56:00.000Z

Ok, so this isn't directly game related but it could be, depending on what you use the device for. This summer, six 18/19-year-olds built an interactive punching bag as a summer project at the Open University. Think of it as a game interface, with lights, sounds and sensors. If you like it, please feel free to do so on youtube and to share the video as it would be great to give their work some exposure.

Open University press release on my research

2011-12-20T13:41:00.006Z

Today's gaming ethusiast is older than you might think, finds OU research student.

My first press release on my PhD work, with a bit of a Christmas hook :-)

Being more open about my research

2011-12-04T18:26:00.000Z

As I mentioned in the last post, my recent part-time work where I've been looking at digital scholarship at the OU, has got me thinking about what it might mean to be a scholar in the digital age and how openness can be a part of that. I have touched upon aspects of my research in this blog, but mostly I tend to use it as a way to reflect about my own gaming experiences and as a way to keep track of my thoughts about different events I go to. As I was writing up the post about ECGBL 2011, I realised that I really did want to say more about what I had been doing and this might be quite a useful thing to do, especially as I'm currently writing up my PhD thesis.

So, in terms of what I have done my research, consists of three phases. Phase one included a conceptual overview of different frameworks of engagement and motivation and a set of interviews with a range of different games players (from casual to hardcore). This led to the development of a set of learning categories, which I presented at EARLI this year (extended abstract) where basically I found that people learn through games in three different ways: through play, through others and through external resources; and on three different levels: on a game level, skill level and personal level. The personal level refers to instances such as picking up general knowledge but also in terms of people mentioning things like developing perseverance and viewing game characters as role models - possibly an area that has received the least amount of attention in game studies though this is likely due to the difficulty of assessing it! I also developed a set of themes that relate to a concept Mia Consalvo calls gaming capital (in turn based upon Bourdieu's notions of capital), which players gain not just by being good at games but in terms of being knowledgeable about them. These themes were: competence, knowledge, community and identity. We published a journal article earlier this year, based on work I presented and GBL 2010, which introduces some of these concepts and outlines my position on engagement and motivation in terms of thinking about them as forms of involvement.

Phase two consisted of a set of case studies I carried out where I examined people playing games on a micro and macro level (i.e. analysing instances of play and wider involvement with players and resources). This consisted of eight case studies, again with a mix of players, some who identified as gamers and some who did not. At DiGRA, I presented the methods I adopted (which you can access here) while at ECGBL I focused on analysing game-play through analysing breakdowns and breakthroughs in terms of what they can tell us about learning and involvement in games (which you can find on ORO here). Whilst at ECGBL, I was asked about the use of AAA games within the case studies - I didn't choose to focus on these but the focus on consoles in the lab setup (see picture below) meant I was much less likely to look at more independent games like Braid or low budget games like Farmville. However, some of the observation sessions did involve more casual games like Big Brain Academy and some less familiar titles like Flower (which was produced by an indie developer) and Endless Ocean 2. Plus, I did try and tap into the different types of games people play by asking them to keep a diary of their experiences outside of the lab, though admittedly there is less detailed information about these in terms of considering breakdowns and breakthroughs. I was also asked about the types of players that took part but pointed out I was more interested in tapping into a range of experience by getting older/younger, male/female, casual players/gamers to take part in order to maximise the differences between cases, than in considering whether someone was an "explorer" or not. I probably should have been more explicit about how I was trying to contribute to a general theory of how involvement and learning relate to each other rather than trying to make statistical generalisations about how involvement and learning might differ with respect to player type/motivation and genre. That said, as I'm writing up, I will need to point out that in terms of the observation sessions at least, any claims I will make will relate to games where players control some sort of avatar and navigate through virtual environments (with Big Brain Academy as the only exception).

Another question I got asked at ECGBL was about how I actually identified breakdowns and breakthroughs with respect to action, understanding and involvement. In terms of action, this is pretty simple as strategies were either effective or not, while understanding was also relatively easy as this was something pretty clear from the post-play interviews (though occasionally breakthroughs would be more gradual). I also pointed out that I collected an awful lot of data so I was primarily focused on major issues, rather than a fine grained analysis of everything. However, involvement was definitely harder to identify, especially in terms of breakthroughs as it wasn't always clear exactly when these occurred and sometimes it may have been a much more gradual process. It seemed a lot easier to identify when flow breaks down for instance, than when it is actually happening. During the analysis, I ended up identifying involvement in affective terms i.e. with respect to evidence of negative emotion (where boredom or frustration would indicate a breakdown) and positive emotion (where enjoyment or satisfaction would indicate a breakthrough). On reflection though, I'm not sure the concept of breakthroughs could be applied as easily to involvement. This is something I discuss further in the thesis, while I also consider the relationship between the different types of breakdowns and breakthroughs. Note: I also collected a range of physiological data during the observation sessions - initially in the hopes it would help us identify different types of breaks but it turned out to be less useful than we hoped as it too difficult to interpret under these circumstances (i.e. because we didn't use a controlled experimental set up).

Finally, I was asked about how my work related to education - but since my focus is on learning that occurs when we are involved in games we play outside of formal educational contexts, I can't actually say an awful lot about that. However, I do think that building a better understanding what happens when we play the games that we do can help us design more involving educational games that are able to support effective learning e.g. by suggesting that it is important to avoid situations where progress can occur without being accompanied by understanding breakthroughs. So I think my work will have implications for education but the a more significant contribution will be to the area of informal learning.

One thing I didn't discuss at ECGBL that came out of the analysis of the diaries I asked players to keep (over a three week period), was that there wasn't really a lot of interaction with the wider gaming community. Sure, participants reported talking to other people about games and using various online resources to keep up to date with news and developments; while occasionally, they consulted guides or walkthroughs, but there really wasn't a whole lot going on in terms of people contributing to these sorts of things. Further, it seemed that the participants who identified as gamers were the ones who reported using resources more frequently than the non-gamers. As this was a small set of case studies, this led to us thinking about investigating this sort of thing on a wider scale through the use of a survey; in the final phase of my PhD.

It seemed important to consider this sort of macro level involvement in more detail, and how it might relate to identity and learning, as it links in to a lot of the stuff James Paul Gee discusses when he talks about games and learning; in particular with respect to semiotic domains and affinity groups/spaces. I'm not going to go into the results in detail (as that's a whole chapter's worth of discussion!) but it does seem that players who identify as hardcore are not only likely to interact with wider range of resources but that they also more likely to say they have learnt from their gaming experiences. This is significant, because while Gee talks about the importance of identity in learning, he discusses this is terms of a player reflecting on their personal identity in relationship to their avatar rather than in terms of how they identify as a gamer. We just got a short view points paper accepted by Learning, Media and Technology on the preliminary analysis of the questionnaire, so I'm quite looking forward to writing up the main analysis after I submit.

I'm not sure how coherant that all is and I still need to link everything so I can sum up how involvement and learning come together on a micro and macro level, but it's been interesting trying to sum up what I've been doing over the last few years! Now just need to get on with finishing off the thesis...

ECGBL 2011 - Athens

2011-10-26T13:52:00.000+01:00

After rearranging flights to avoid the air traffic control strike, I made it to Athens last week for the 5th European Conference of Game Based Learning. Not everyone was so lucky but I was pretty impressed with the conference organisers for managing to make sure the conference went ahead and that we all were looked after so well whilst we were there. It was a bit surreal having to avoid the crowds of protesters on the way to the conference venue and trying to make sure we didn't get caught up in any of the running battles with riot police on the way back... We did avoid the worst of it (which, on the first conference day involved ducking into a restaurant for a little while until the trouble outside died down!) with only piles of burnt rubbish around the city to remind of us of what was going on (see below).

Oh, and t-shirts like this :-)

In terms of the conference itself, I am very glad I managed to make it as it was a great opportunity to meet up with people I had met before, like Alex Moseley from Leicester and Jantina Huizenga from Amsterdam and to talk to new people about games and research like Magnus Johansson and Kimmo Oksanen. In terms of the talks, one of the highlights came from Carlo Fabricatore from the University of Worcester, UK and Ximena Lopez from Initium Studios, Italy introducing the area of sustainability games - something I also know my OU friend Stefan Kreitmayer who I went to the conference with was very interested in (since he is working on creating collaborative games that deal with climate change issues). The presenters provided a good rationale for how games are able to support problem solving and systems thinking, and a review of some of the existing games you can find online. The review revealed that there is definitely room for improvement as there aren't a lot of games out there that consider sustainability in terms of environmental, economic and social issues, or that actually allow for emergent complexity. Further, a lot of these games seem to be directed at children so there it would be interesting to see more of them aimed at adults. While it wasn't the focus of the presentation, it also made me wonder how you might be able to evaluate this sort of systems thinking within a formal educational context.

Another talk I enjoyed, came from Matthew Jewell, a game designer from Rosetta Stone which produces language learning tools. He presented a game called Prospero which includes speech recognition software so players can practice their grammar (see below). This was pretty interesting because the game is part of a portal of flash games that are directed at different levels of language learning and it made me think a lot about intrinsic/extrinsic motivation and integrating game mechanics with learning. Prospero is a neat little game that gives players points for pronouncing the correct sentences and utilising a treasure hunting mechanic to allow players to choose a task, which also provides further reward to the player. I think you can also compete with other players if you want. On the surface, this seems to go against a lot of what is discussed in the literature (the importance of intrinsic motivators etc) but in reality I can see how it's a really effective way to get players to practice what is a essentially a dull task (learning correct grammar) in order to become proficient at it. Further, the only way to progress in the game is to pronounce phrases accurately and I can see how variable reward (in the form of finding treasure) can provide help provide the sort of "stickiness" that Matthew was aiming to achieve. And at this level of learning at least, it does seem like it will help make the player more likely to practice. I'm not entirely sure how Rosetta Stone evaluate their products (or if they want to share that info!) while I'd be curious to see some of the other games in the portal and how they work, especially since the Rosetta blog suggests: "once you gain a little more confidence, you can progress to one of our conversational games, like Identi or Chatonium." I guess I'm curious about whether the gaming mechanisms evolve along with the learning complexity. In general, I really enjoyed talking with Matthew about games as he pointed out things like how casual games can be ignored by game-based learning research in favour of more complex solutions and he made me think about how maybe the lines between the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation are more blurred than we sometimes like to think!

My own session on breakdowns and breakthroughs experienced during game-play went ok too, and seemed to generate some interest. I'm actually going to do a seperate blog post on this as I'd like to introduce my research a bit more as I'm realising that it's not something I've been too explicit about on this blog. I've recently taken up some part time work on a project about digital scholarship which has made me think more about openess and what that might mean so I think it will be interesting to be actually put some of my work out there, especially in relation to what I have presented at recent conferences. In general though, the questions I got were interesting and gave me plenty to think about in terms of writing up my thesis.

There were a couple of other interesting talks, such as Lorenzo Romeo's talk on reflective flow, which got me thinking about whether games really do support experiential learning or whether we tend to use the term to describe active learning i.e. learning by doing - can learning in the context of game-play really be seen as a "direct encounter with the phenomenon being studied"? (this relates a little to conversations I've had with Rob Farrow about how embodiment relates to games); and Colin Lemmon giving a really interesting insight into all the problems designers face when trying to develop and get funding for serious game applications. The keynotes also provided food for thought with Nikolaos Avouris providing an useful introduction into the use of games in museum contexts (and how their is really a lot of improvement here in terms of the educational value they actually provide and tapping into more social and mobile experiences - e.g. contrast Play with the Frieze, where you have to match pairs of pictures of the frieze at the new Acropolis Museum; with Ghost of a Chance at the Smithsonian American Art Museum). Sara de Freitas also gave a talk on the Gamification of Life which provided an interesting overview into the work the Serious Games Insitute is doing and the challenges of doing work in this area. Unfortunately, the conference was a bit pressed for time at this point so it was a bit of whirlwind tour but I would have liked to have heard more about the evaluations carried out. Also, I'm a little confused about her use of the term gamification as it seemed to be used as way of referring to anything involving games (as opposed to the DiGRA gamification session definition of using game-elements in non-game contexts i.e. not whole games) so it would have been interesting to find out why she applied the term to the work that she discussed.

All in all, it was an interesting couple of days and I really benefitted from the chance to talk to other researchers about games and games research. I think I did see a bit more of the questioning I felt wasn't there at ECGBL 2008, though it was a shame there were quite a few people that couldn't make it so - depsite the fantastic efforts of the organisers, it wasn't quite the experience it could have been. I also think that the conference would benefit from tightening up the review process a little (perhaps by adding an additional reviewer?) as there were a couple of things that surprised me a little in the presentations e.g. the use of the somewhat outdated and unpopular term "edutainment" (though as in any international conference, translation might be an issue here). I'm also very glad I got to see Athens after the protests as the lively and historically amazing city that it is so will leave with a photo of the Acropolis from my hotel room :-)

DiGRA 2011: Hilversum (Part 2)

2011-09-21T20:59:00.005+01:00

The next day started just as well as the first with a keynote from Suzanne de Castell and Jen Jenson titled "Playing with fire: Libertarian ludolgies" (see below). They have done a lot of work over the years investigating technology and gender issues in terms of access, equity and design, with their latest research indicating that many of the "facts" we take for granted about gender e.g. girls dislike competitive play, are actually artefacts of novice play. In fact they were able to alter play styles by setting up conditions for girls to become experts and replicate these across different sites. Suzanne and Jen went on to highlight issues such as neoliberal tolerance for misogyny and violence (e.g. where expert female player try to hide their gender instead of having to deal with a barrage of abuse from other players - see Fat, Ugly or Slutty for examples and an attempt to deal with this sort of thing), the need for researchers to go beyond describing how things are and think about how to change them for the better and considering games within a wider media landscape. They suggested that we need better theories of ludic epistemology that recognise the intrinsic value of games and play; to develop innovative methods and interventions by also considering the role of the researcher plays in the process of investigation; to engage in more accountable design so we're not just producing better goods and reflecting society but using games to persuade and foster identity building; and finally they stressed the importance of critical intellectual discussion within the area. I think they said a lot of things that needed to be said, and I particularly liked the point made about shoddy research which claims to make predictions but really just describes the status quo, hence the need for critical debate and more rigorous research. Also, their perspective is hugely important in an area which often sees games and technology as "boys' toys" and I'm pretty sure their plea for researchers to think about change was at least one of the fires they wanted to set.

After that I went along to an interesting match on identity in massively multiplier games which reflected some of the issues mentioned in the earlier keynote. Arne Schröder talked about how game spaces tended to be predominantly white, straight and male, and while there was some experimentation with gender and sexuality it was more a kind of "identity tourism" than a genuine attempt at role-playing. He also gave examples of female and gay players who had left guilds due to sexist and homophobic remarks. Nick Taylor echoed some of this when he talked about "sex-swapping" as opposed to real attempts to "gender-swap" within games. He also made some interesting points about how identity shouldn't be seen as a singular construct with a one-to-one mapping between player and avatar, especially given the fact that players often have more than one avatar they use. Further, it seems that adopting different genders and/or sexualities tended not to be seen as transgressive play but as part of expert behaviour where the player was seeking to explore as much of the game as possible.

I also went to a match on values between Rilla Khaled and Jonathan Belman. Rilla talked about work carried out with Pippin Barr, where they examined the cultural values expressed in the Sims 3 and Fallout 3. They wanted to see whether these games embodied individualistic or collectivist value systems and found that while they expressed a mix of both, they tended to be more individualistic. I thought this might have something to do with the culture the designers came from, and would be quite interested to see how it would differ if looking at games directed and non-western audiences. Jonathan is doing his PhD on empathy in games and he spoke specifically about the http://www.valuesatplay.org/ project which developed a card system to guide the design process. Students were asked to pick different Grow-a-game cards (link also leads to free online version) consisting of a game verb (e.g. singing), a value (e.g. liberty), and a social issue (e.g. homelessness) and given the task of creating a game within these constraints. I hadn't realised it but one of the games to come from this project was Hush, where you play a Tutsi mother who must try and calm her baby during a Hutu raid. Apart from introducing an approach to value conscious design, the match also indicated how games are not value neutral, regardless of whether designers realise it or not.

During the day there was a also keynote from Antanas Mockus Šivickas, who is served as mayor of Bogota, Columbia. Now this seems pretty random, and it is because he's carried out all sorts of wacky and wonderful stunts whilst elected in order to promote change and improve the lives of day to day people. For instance, he hired hundreds of mimes in order to reduce traffic violations, dressed up as "Supercivico" to serve as a role model for civic behaviour and using a symbolic vaccine to reduce intra-familial violence. His talk highlighted the importance of considering legal, moral and social concerns when it comes to improving citizenship and harmonising the law (see below) and indicated how playful activities really can make a difference. All very inspiring!

After this I attended a roundtable on gamification, which was helpful in part as it provided an overview of the CHI gamification workshop. Despite the fact that many of the applications seemed directed at promoting "good" behaviours e.g. reducing environmental impact, gamification worries me because it reminds of badly designed edutainment - as it seems to involve slapping on a game-layer in order to get you to do something. Surely we've been trying to get away from this sort of extrinsic motivation? Also, as was raised during the session, some of these things might change behaviour in the short term but what about long term impact? The panel were pretty good and pointed out that there are HCI researchers who are interested in intrinsic motivation and a more phenomenological perspective. Plus, Dan Dixon suggested that we should move away from the term gamification (and its negative connotations) and use gameful design as an alternative (see pic below). It's clear this is a growing area of interest so it's something worth keeping an eye on, as I have a feeling we're going to have to sift through a lot of bad examples before finding out how to successfully use "game design elements in non-gaming contexts" in a way that doesn't feel like manipulation. Also, when it comes to things we have real trouble with, maybe we need all the help we can get, whatever form it's in.

My match was on learning was next, with Pilar Lacasa who was speaking about the use of machinima based on Spore that students produced in biology classrooms. It seems the curriculum is more flexible in Spain so teachers could focus on supporting the development of digital literacies rather than having to assess whether playing Spore and creating machinima led to a greater understanding of biology. It was interesting to see some how different students approached the project, especially when they blended game-play footage with that of the real world. My talk seemed to go ok, though I had an awful lot to explain in about 10 minutes. The paper I submitted was more concerned with introducing the method I developed for my main case study approach, rather than on presenting findings, so most of the questions were about the set-up. Though I did like the fact that when I mentioned Sharples work on breakdowns and breakthroughs a lot of people seemed to write it down! So what games did I use? (I allowed participants to choose during the first session, but then asked them to play something they usually didn't in the second). I seemed to adopt quite an experimental setup, didn't that conflict with trying to tap into the wider context of game-play? (While I did use a lab - because I couldn't sit around people's houses! - I did not carry out a controlled experiment and tried to make sure it was as comfortable as possible). Were there any differences between what I observed in the lab and what was recorded in the diaries? (The diary reports on game-play were much less detailed, and the lab sessions probably did "prompt" game-play). I also got asked about my research questions (which revolve around the role of breakdowns and breakthroughs and identifying learning beyond learning how to play) and about how I identified involvement and did I try to measure it? Short answer, no I didn't try and measure involvement. Though we did try and use physiological data in order to do identify it, this turned out to be much harder than we originally thought and not something that could be done during observation, as originally hoped. So most of the breaks were identified from the post-play interview transcript and now we're trying to figure out how to triangulate that with the physiological data.

After this there was a bit of rant from game scholars about various things - Mary Flanagan spoke about how few women there are in the games industry (see below); Frans Mäyrä complained about the media constantly asking about the detrimental effects of games (suggesting games are actually not dangerous enough!); Maggie Greene had a go at established academics for not using the power they have to improve the situation for grad students (e.g. by getting involved as public intellectuals to promote the area), especially in a climate of reduced employment funding; Espen Aarseth stressed the importance of rigorous reviews and constructive criticism; which was echoed by Suzanne de Castell who also ranted about the fact that we tend to think of gender as a binary construct and we should be careful to avoid "hostile research" which makes assumptions based on bad theory and backs them up with bad methods e.g. all RPG players are depressed and anti-social. Mary Flanagan then followed this up with a keynote on critical play and designing games from a social justice perspective (see below). She was PI of the Values@Play project so there was mention of using games to promote specific values and with respect the holy grail of educational research - transfer. I really liked that she mentioned that a lot of game design produces extrinsic motivation and referenced a study where children were found to spend less time drawing when they were given rewards for the activity. She also suggested systems thinking reveals that big shifts come from small incremental ones, and concluded with a quote from Jane Goodall: "The greatest danger to our future is apathy".

I think that just about covers it! I did also catch the last half of the session on Minecraft where some children were being interviewed on stage whilst they showed us round the game they had set up along with one of their parents (who I think also taught at the University). It was really interesting to hear them talk about the game and what they had built - an impressive replica of Helm's Deep. At one point they were asked whether they thought they could "win" the game, to which one of them responded that perhaps you could if you mined everything! Given all the talk about values of the conference I couldn't help but wonder what that meant about in terms of what they were taking from the game... There was also some talk about how they would often look at YouTube videos for inspiration about what to create in the game, but I think only one of the older ones posted videos himself. They definitely seemed to get a lot of of the experience and their own Minecraft community too.

So all in all it was quite an inspiring couple of days and I'm very glad I went. Thanks to the organisers for putting on a great conference and to everyone else who took part; including the students of the Utrecht School of Arts who had their exhibits on display during the event. Below is a photo of me and Jantina playing a student developed game called Fingle - if you have an iPad I recommend you check it out!

Oh and for further impressions of the conference, check out those videos:

DiGRA 2011: Hilversum (Part 1)

2011-09-21T01:00:00.005+01:00

I recently got back from the 5th DiGRA conference - it was held at the Utrecht School of Arts in Hilversum, and has seriously given me a lot to think about! So much so that I think I'm going to have to split the post into two parts.

The conference opened on the Wednesday night at club De Vorstin setting up a playful atmosphere with Chick n' Run races (where you have to rock back and forth on adult-sized play garden chickens against an opponent), B.U.T.T.O.N. (encouraging Brutally Unfair Tactics are Totally OK Now as you physically do all you can to win or stop your opponents from winning - one of many there from the Copehagen Game Collective), and a Do It Yourself DJ installation (with which you can mix audio samples using old school cassette tapes) to name just a few of the attractions on offer. Plus Kid Koala performed the opening "keynote" - gotta love a conference that's opened by a guy in a koala suit!

The next day, Eric Zimmerman's keynote gave the audience plenty of food for thought when he used quotes from Art in Theory and replacing the word art with games to show how there really are quite a few parallels between the two. Further, no one seems to feel the need to justify art or discusses how to make it "educational"! He stressed that games are an important cultural and aesthetic form in their own right and had a go at educators who see games as instruments for transmitting content efficiently (or not, as the case may be). He argued that though developing gaming literacies such as problem solving, systems thinking and community building we should be able to understand and fix the systemic problems that affect the world we live, in what he termed the "ludic century". This wasn't suggesting that we should gamify everything but that we should recognise the value games have in their own right, with game researchers leading the way!

All the presentation sessions took places in cabins outside (see below), where speakers were matched together on topics in order to promote discussion. This worked well when the topics were similar enough but sometimes it felt like a bit of a stretch, and though powerpoint was technically banned, it didn't stop most people from presenting slides in some form or another. Most of the presentations were short though, which did allow for more interaction, especially with plenty of time planned between matches.

It was clear the presenters of the first session I went to afterwards were still thinking about the opening keynote. Marcelo de Vasconcellos started the match (each presenter was matched on topics for the conference sessions) with a discussion of how games might be used for promoting public health communication in Brazil, while Mary Flanagan and Jonathan Belman introduced their Save the People! Pox boardgame which was developed as part of the Science literacy curriculum in order to teach how immunisation and viruses work. The session also led to an interesting discussion on transfer and how you might test for it. I think there was a concern that this was the sort of thing Eric Zimmerman was attacking but I think that the problem lies with this idea of using games to deliver course content. If we do use art as a parallel, while you might not make art to be educational in the formal sense, there is often a desire to use it as a way to change thinking and broaden perspectives. Education should be more than about whether you can transmit information efficiently, but it doesn't mean you games can't be designed in order to foster understanding and the development of different skills. Going back to the talks though, it was interesting to hear that players of the iPad version of Pox tended to play the game a lot faster - it would seem that a physical board (or mat) and hand held game pieces encourage people to take their time, which seems like something worth investigating.

Speaking of board games, they aren't something I've ever really thought to much about before to be honest. But one of the keynotes was by Reiner Knizia a board game designer who is responsible for selling over 15 million games - I really had no idea how big the industry was! He spoke about the design of games in terms of how games relate to real life, considering intuitive input/outputs, creating an appealing game system, using highly visible hooks and engaging game communities. There was a panel afterwards (below) which also included Andrew Sheerin and James Wallis which discussed board games trends, academic perspectives, and subversion in games. Turns out James was at the Hide & Seek session I went to introducing the special edition of his "not-quite" role-play game The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but it was great to meet him at the conference and talk about games of all sorts. I also met Andrew after the panel, whose company Terror Bull games developed "War on Terror: The Boardgame". It's not a game I had heard of before but hearing about it, and the fact that it comes with a balaclava, made me think it's something I'm curious to try out. It was interesting to talk to him later on about the potential educational uses of such games, especially in terms of how they might act as catalysts for discussion.

Other highlights of the first day include Valentina Rao who discussed how we might be able to interpret games as a form of experiential discourse, and considering the design of serious games with specific communicative purposes. During this match on critical thinking Daniel Joseph spoke about ludotopian and ludocapitalist rhetoric surrounding games, in terms of how people see games in terms of "the sublime" e.g. recreating the Starship Enterprise in Minecraft and Jane McGonigal talking about how games can save the world, and in terms gamification and making money from it e.g. Gabe Zickermann. Dan suggested that the truth is probably somewhere in between and we won't really know it until games have become prosaic, commonplace and cheap i.e. until we don't notice them so much!

I also went to a match on engagement, where I met Gordon Calleja, who was talking about incorporation and the framework on player involvement I have been using within my research, and Henrik Schoenau-Fog who is looking at the continuation desires of players with respect to creating a player engagement framework. The fact that incorporation is not an experience that all games lead too was discussed, since it combines a feeling of intense involvement with a sense of inhabiting a virtual world. So you'd have to control an avatar, most likely in 3D space in order to achieve it. However, I do think Calleja's model and the frames within it can still be applied to most games, and that learning occurs when player's internalise each of the relevant frames. I did like the fact that Henrik distinguished between motivation (the carrot) and engagement (the hook) when he talked about continuation desires, as I don't think it's something that a lot of research considers. I was also intrigued by his introduction of First Person Victim (see below) in terms of thinking about how you can engage people to go through certain experiences which may not be that pleasant, in order to help them consider the plight of others and take part in discussion.

Earlier in the day, I went along to a live book review on Garry Crawford's book Video Gamers where Frans Mäyrä interviewed him about it on stage (below). Coming from a cultural sociological background, Garry was interested in how games fit into wider cultures and gamers lives. It's a book about players rather than games that aims to provide a fresh perspective to the area through including ideas about Bourdieu's notion of habitus, Goffman's frame analysis and through questioning concepts such as the magic circle. It was an interesting session and I think I'm going to have to get hold of the book to find out more. Specifically, I'd like to find out whether he makes any distinction between different types of gamers and players (or are just all people who play games gamers) and while I appreciate he was focusing on people rather than games, I'd like to know if there was a consideration of how different games might relate to different gaming cultures and practices.

Ok, I think that's enough for now - more later!

EARLI 2011: Exeter

2011-09-01T22:09:00.003+01:00

Hmm, can't believe it's been two years since the last EARLI! This time it was held at the University of Exeter, so a little easier to get to, but I only went for a couple of days as I have another two conferences lined up over the next couple of months and I really do have lots of PhD work to be getting on with if I'm going to finish it anytime soon... The conference is still running at the moment but I wanted to get my thoughts down while they are still fresh.

EARLI seemed bigger than ever this year with over 20 parallel sessions during each slot. But with so much of an emphasis on formal education and assessment there wasn't actually too much that I had to decide between. Obviously EARLI is an education conference so that's bound to be the focus and I suppose another reason why I didn't spend too long there was because I knew there wasn't a lot I would find especially relevant. I think there might have been even fewer presentations relating to games than last time but I am glad I got a chance to present at the main conference and that I had the opportunity to meet up with other people there. Plus I'm sure it's a good thing to be exposed to work in different areas and be reminded of what else is going on in the field of education.

So I found myself going along to presentations about multimedia learning, motivational, social and affective processes, and comprehension of texts and graphics. Highlights include Steffi Heidig presenting the Interact model (during her second presentation in the session, since her colleagues were stuck in the US because of hurricane Irene), which tries to consider both cognitive and emotional effects in relation to learning environments; contributing to a roundtable discussion about maths in relation to critical thinking skills and then CSCL environments (which I don't really know much about but quite enjoyed talking about anyway!); Daniela Raccanello discussing achievement emotions with respect to different subjects (also presenting the rather depressing finding that as class level increases, students experience less positive emotions and more negative ones); Lucia Lumbelli presenting work on self-explaining and the Simpsons; and Jan van der Meij discussing different learning diagram designs in relation to eye-tracking data.

The main session of interest to me though was one which included four game-related sessions. The first presentation was by John Quick, a PhD student from Arizona State University who is looking at how game design features relate to personality traits. He presented six design characteristics (fantasy, exploration, realism, challenge, companionship, and competition) and a number of player characteristics that relate to them in the form of player types e.g. imaginative realist explorer. I'm still not 100% sure how the "meeting new people" item ended up in the competition (rather than the companionship) category but I did like the idea of mapping design aspects to different personalities. I do reckon mood also has influence on the choices player's make (and external factors such as time available and social context) but it's hard not to agree that players still have underlying, longer-term preferences that affect the games they tend to play. I look forward to reading more about how the categories were developed and how they might be applied in terms of design.

Next there was P.G.Schrader talking about expert and novice behaviour in World of Warcraft, with a focus on examining spatial and social behaviour within immersive environment (they were more interested in the fact WoW is a virtual world than a game). I quite like the way this was set up and the use of observation protocols to track behaviours, though I should probably look into what the behavioural assessment matrix (BAM) actually is. However, given the small sample size and the increasing the p value (0.1 rather than the usual 0.05) I couldn't help but think they were over claiming a little. I know it's exploratory work, and they cited precedent for doing so, but I'd like to see further results especially in relation to the claim that novices require more than an hour before engaging in social interactions within immersive environments. Though the difference was quite large in this case, I think it reflects that (1) it's unlikely players have to engage with other people straight away in order progress with play (2) players probably don't want to join others and engage in collaborative activity before they have acquired a certain level of competence in the first place. Again, it'll be good to get hold of the longer paper as it'll be interesting to go through what they did in a bit more detail.

Then we had Vigdis Vangsnes talking about games as multi-modal performances and adopting a hermeneutic phenomenological model to consider quality in serious games. I quite like the idea of thinking of game-play as a performance but I have to confess that I wasn't quite sure how the framework was going to be applied in practice. It all seemed quite theoretical at this stage, as admittedly it's a work in progress, but a couple of examples might have been helpful to illustrate how this approach offers a unique insight into assessing game quality. The session then concluded with Sylke Vandercruysse presenting a review of different studies on game-based learning. Including papers about "(quasi-) experimental research that made use of a computer-based-game in an educational setting", they only found about 20 or so that fit their criteria. One of their aims was to investigate the claim that the increased motivation produced by games increases learning and it didn't look like they found strong evidence to support it. Again, it would be useful to get hold of the longer reference (I think there is an article in press) to see exactly all the criteria were but it did seem clear that the area would benefit from better designed studies and consistent definitions of learning, engagement and motivation.
The other game-related session I went to was roundtable discussion with Jantina Huizenga (who I met at JURE/EARLI last time). Jantina carried out a similar review (though this time finding 46 studies) - where we had a really interesting discussion about the different claims being made about games in education in terms of motivation (with learning content), engagement (with the game) and learning (in terms of factual knowledge, cognitive skills, and meta-cognitive skills). I think we concluded that the area would benefit from better designed studies that actually describe the games and interventions in more detail and make sure to back up their claims with empirical evidence. Oh and studies should actually define key words such as game, engagement and motivation. I know the field of game-based learning is relatively new but I'm really hoping the area will see an improvement in terms of quality soon as it's makes it harder for the field to be taken seriously.

My session wasn't till the next day, and while I would have preferred to have been included in the previous day's session with all the other games presentations, it did seem to go relatively well. (Note: if going to present on games at EARLI don't pick Multimedia and Hypermedia as a research strand, try Learning and Technology instead). I was presenting the learning categories I developed from my first email interview study - so not only qualitative research but focusing on informal learning, hopefully the audience appreciated a bit of break! I guess this is old news in terms of my PhD but the submission date was back in October so I didn't have much else to present at that point. It all seemed to go down ok with people quite interested in the quotes I was presenting to back up the creation of different categories. I did get a question about how you might test for learning beyond the game, which I kind of expected, though to be fair I don't think I was being asked why I hadn't included these tests in my own research. I also got quite an interesting question about when people look up information they encounter during play in terms of how do they know when references are factual or not. I'm not sure that's something I've thought about before but I guess you would have to at least some prior knowledge to be able to distinguish between the made up stuff and real world references. I'd like to think most people would be able to tell the difference, though perhaps there's a study in there where you could see whether the majority actually can.

Finally, I also have to say I really enjoyed Shaaron Ainsworth's keynote on "Understanding and transforming multi-representational learning" (which I think you will be able to watch later from here). Ok, so I'm slightly biased as I know Shaaron and because I actually got cited in the keynote (!) for a paper she presented at EARLI 2005 based on my undergraduate project but it was clear the rest of the audience felt the same way. Some of the content was familiar (due to studying at Nottingham but also with respect to Shaaron's work with Jake Habgood on the game Zombie Division) and some wasn't - in particular I was quite interested in the more recent focus on learning through drawing i.e. getting students to create representations. The gist of it was along the lines that learning is increasingly involve the use of multiple representations and we really should be thinking beyond general design principles about what actually works in practice and under what circumstances. And yes, that applies to games too!

All in all, I did appreciate going to EARLI. I'll admit I'm more excited about DiGRA in a couple of weeks since it's more games focused, but I did have the chance to present my work to a different audience, get more up to date about what's going on in educational research and I definitely enjoyed catching up with researchers I'd met before and meeting some new ones. Oh, and special thanks to my supervisor James Aczel and his family for putting me up in Exeter :-)

Mass Effect 2 (PS3)

2011-04-03T18:43:00.005+01:00

I want to talk about Mass Effect 2 because it's the first seriously long game in ages that I've been thoroughly engrossed in and wanted to play non-stop. Heavy Rain was probably the last title that had that effect on me, but it really didn't take too long to get through, and according to my save game files I've spent over 40 hours playing Mass Effect during the last three weeks... There's another post I'm thinking of writing about my gaming habits and how game-play fits into my life but first I want to reflect on why this game sucked me in as much as it did.

I was interested in the first Mass Effect when it came out but I didn't have an Xbox 360, and my laptop wouldn't have been able to cope with it. I'd also heard a lot about it from my friend Paul, who went on to enthuse about the second installment. So when I heard it was coming out on PS3, I was already excited. An action-RPG set in the future where I get to command a space ship and my choices affect the way the narrative progresses? I was definitely intrigued. I've not seriously played an RPG since Baldur's Gate years ago (and no, I don't think the tongue-in-cheek Deathspank really counts...), but I guess that was the last time I got this involved in a game story. Incidentally, Baldur's Gate was also created by Bioware. Mass Effect is the kind of game where narrative really does count, but I think it's the relationships you have with the rest of your team that make the narrative matter. I was utterly engrossed in Heavy Rain but it didn't take long to play through (plus there is some debate on whether it actually is a game or not). And while Deathspank was engaging in an amusing sort of way, I didn't really care about what was going on, not enough to try and finish it or even to spend that much time playing it on my own. But in Mass Effect 2, I had to make all sorts of choices along the way in terms of how I interact with people and what I do next which I knew would affect how the development of the plot.

So I finished it last weekend, and even now I'm still wondering whether I made the right decisions. Obligatory SPOILER ALERT as I'm going to go on discuss some of the plot and how it panned out. I think one of the moments that surprised me was how I ended up interacting with a character called Grunt (see below). Grunt is a member of the Krogan species who was genetically engineered in a vat by a scientist who was trying to create the "perfect" Krogran.

Soon after awaking/recruiting him, it's clear he's having some sort of difficulty dealing with his rage (hardly surprising since, despite being fully grown, he's only been out of the vat for a short while - experiencing the Krogan version of teenage angst perhaps?) so off we go to his homeworld to figure out if there is anything wrong with him and he ends up having to go on some sort of rite of passage. Now the Krogans are a pretty aggressive race (I guess sort of like Klingons but more animal like) and even though I've played most of the game so far by choosing the paragon (i.e. good guy) options, I start to play it differently now. Because Grunt is Krogan, and I want the others to respect him (and his choice to be part of my team) - in fact I want to encourage Grunt to be the best Krogan he could possibly be. It's odd, but he sort of felt like my adopted child and I wanted him to connect with his culture... I know the plot is a little bit ridiculous (but it did start with me being resurrected from being dead), and I know that is an odd feeling to have about a character I regularly took into battle but I'm really not sure how else to explain why I started acting all tough and aggressive all of a sudden. The only other thing I can say in my defence is that behaving how I did just sort of made sense, it just seemed like the best way to communicate with the Krogans. When in Rome...

So that's one team member. There are several others, and after a while you start to realise you like some of them more than others. I would find myself going to visit people, after missions just to hear what they had to say, some more than others. For instance, I enjoyed both serious and hilarious conversations with Mordin (the Salarian scientist who sings Gilbert and Sullivan). You can even have pursue a romantic relationships with one of them, though this part of the game impressed me less. Partly because while you are allowed to have inter-species relationships with alien team members, you can't pursue same sex relationships (except perhaps with the Asari who, though they look female, do not have a gender). If you choose to play a female Shepard, you can still flirt with human Yeoman Kelly Chambers (but there is definitely no man-on-man action), even have dinner with her (after which she will feed your fish and so stop them from dying when you are off ship, lol) but it's not considered pursuing a relationship - so it's all sort of implicit (until perhaps the end of the game, where it just gets weird). What I mean by it's not "considered a relationship" is that don't get the paramour achievement for pursuing this, but you will if you get together with one of your team mates. The problem I have with this side of the game, isn't that you can engage in this sort of things or even that it's reduced to an achievement (pretty much all of the game is tbh). It's that after a certain period of time, it's the only way for you to interact with your team mates. If you are female, the women just keep saying they are busy, and if you don't pursue the romantic options the men start to do the same. I guess the only way to continue to talk to someone is to become physically intimate with them.

The other aspect of the relationship system is that certain options are only available if you have received enough paragon or renegade points. You get these points based on how you act within the game, and on how you interact with people. This seems to presume we either want to be "good" or "bad" but sometimses situations are more complex than that and seem to call different kinds of behaviour, regardless of what you might actually believe. I know the game usually allows you to choose different responses but in order to unlock different options later on, it forces you to generally pick one mode over the other. At one stage, I sided with one character over another in an argument and I just didn't have enough points to resolve the issue. I kept trying to get more paragon points, just so I could try and sort things out, but that felt like a strange thing to be thinking during the game - I realised that I was considering my choices on the basis of whether it would give me enough points to convince Miranda to talk to me again. Perhaps the real problem here is that there were consequences to me not managing to get those points. You see, after the argument, Miranda was no longer loyal to the team, I guess she stopped trusting me. And so after the final mission, Miranda was the only person who didn't make it back alive... I really ended up feeling like I had failed her. Seriously, when did games start getting me to feel guilty about the choices I make within them?!

Even now I'm thinking about the decisions I made. Maybe I shouldn't have decided to kill the heretic Geth (an AI race, but some of members had sided with the bad guys in the first game). To me it seemed like the more ethical option - the other was to reprogram them i.e. brainwash them, but I figured they should be free to make a choice about what they believe, just as I made a choice about defending myself and the galaxy against their beliefs. The game didn't agree with my logic, so I got renegade points instead of paragon ones, and so I still couldn't resolve the argument. Maybe I should have taken Miranda with me on the final battle, at least that way I could have protected her, instead of her dying with the other team. Or maybe I should have sided with her in the first place, instead of Jack - who honestly started to irritate me after a while.

So that's one of things I was going over after I played it - the other was about the decision I made to pass on the Reaper technology to Cerberus. The Reapers are the big bad in the game - they are a threat to the entire galaxy and it is clear I will have to face them again in the third game (the decisions I have made will also influence the story of Mass Effect 3). Cerberus is the organisation I work for and who resurrected me, led by the Illusive Man (voiced by Martin Sheen) but it is clear they are a bit dodgy and perhaps worryingly pro-human. I decided to pass on the technology because I thought it would give me an advantage next time, but now I'm wondering whether I've really just given Cerberus the tools to make humans the dominant force in the galaxy... Lol, I'm still debating whether to play the final level again so I can save Miranda and destroy the technology!

There were other moments in the game that got me thinking about moral issues - the genophage the Salarians created in order to try and restrict the Krogan birth rate, the decision by a human scientist to use his autistic brother as a subject for an experiment etc - and I think this is the sort of thing that had me hooked. I wanted to get to the next cut scene and find out what was going to happen next, but I also had to seriously think about the issues the game raised and what sort of character I wanted the Shepard I was playing to be. I guess this was the first game in a while where I thought I might be doing some of that projective identity thinking that Gee talks about.

The actual combat was fine, not as hard as I thought it might be, and helped by the fact that I could essentially pause it whilst I picked my team's next attack/weapon. I actually started the game on the easiest option because I thought my lack of experience with shooters would stop me from progressing - but I changed this back to normal after the first couple of fights. Ultimately, it was the story and the choices I was presented with that I really cared about. And it is these things that will ensure I play the next installment. It wasn't all done perfectly, I actually kind of wish I hadn't chosen to go back to my ship and talk to people after the final mission. I was disappointed nobody had anything to say about Miranda's death (all there that happened was a little cut scene, showing a solitary coffin - her office being empty actually seemed more poignant). I also got annoyed with Grunt because he contradicted himself by telling me I shouldn't have given the tech to Cerberus, despite the fact that he encouraged me to take it at the time. Hmm, in fact they pretty much all seemed to think I had made the wrong decision, is that why I want to re-play it? And then there was Kelly. She was really visibly shaken after having been rescued from the Collector ship so her showing up in my cabin later in a revealing outfit to do a bit of "sexy" dance just seemed bizarre and out of character... Like a reward for horny teenage boys for having finished the game, rather than a genuine part of the story.

Despite a few small niggles, I seriously did enjoy playing Mass Effect 2. It was mostly very well put together, and there is something about knowing your actions will have meaningful consequences that makes makes the experiences all the more powerful. Will I replay it? Probably, but I haven't decided whether I'll redo the last level with my current character or try it again with a new one where I'll act completely different to how I did. I also have the option of playing it again with the same character but now I'm all levelled up. All I know for sure is that I'm looking forward to Mass Effect 3 :-)

GameCity 5 and Jonathan Blow's commentary on Braid

2010-11-01T18:21:00.000Z

So like I said I was in Nottingham last week for a couple of things, as well as the ITAG conference there was the GameCity 5. I went along last year too, so had a better idea what to expect this time. The festival had the usual marquee in Market Square though one half of the arena was devoted to EA and the Nottingham Primary Care Trust who partnered up to "bring you the Best Health club in the WORLD" (according to the GameCity website anyway). That was a bit weird to be honest - games promoting fitness... still not sure I've got my head around all that though that doesn't mean I think it's a bad thing, just different. The other side was much closer to home though, as it was full of couches and TVs so people could comfortably try out different games:

Like the new Lego Universe - a massively multiplayer experience that has just been launched. It looked cute and funny, though I got the impression it's being aimed at younger players.

And Confetti Carnival, developed by Spiky Snail which was a lot of fun. The designers were kind enough to answer my questions about the platform and release date - apparently while they would like it to be multi-platform, that really depends on what deal they get, and it should be ready for release by the second half of 2011.

The main highlight of the festival for me though was hearing Jonathan Blow do a sort of directors commentary on Braid:

It was seriously interesting, not just because it made me want to give Braid another go but because of what he said about game design. He first demoed the original prototype which he threw together in about 8 days to show his friends. The final game took about three years and looks a lot better, but it was quite interesting to see a lot of the main concepts (including the time reversal mechanic) in what was essentially a retro Marioesque platformer with crude graphics. Jonathan pretty much played through most of the game, explaining each world, though it was clear he wasn't going to say very much about the story. I think in some ways what the story means came across as something he didn't know how to verbalise, rather than something he was just refusing to talk about. And like most things, you can't control how people respond to what you've created.

But anyway, what really struck me about his talk was what he said about designing the puzzles and wanting to make them intrinsically motivating (a phrase he actually used, though he did admit only coming across it after the game was finished). The idea was to try and create an intriguing universe of simple rules that players could figure out one step and a time. He would often try and achieve this by giving the player the clues they needed within the single screen they were occupying. He even talked about trying to encourage "incubation" (though that's not what he called it - it's another psychological mechanism, which occurs when you get stuck on a problem and only seem to be able to solve it by leaving it alone for a while and doing something else). So he would try and get players to store a symbolic representation of the salient puzzle pieces, by keeping the levels as simple as possible. He also talked about wanting the game to be non-linear, I think in the sense that you were meant to come back to different puzzles, but after a play-test he ended up changing it so people could play it all the way through if they wanted (though he didn't seem sure that was the best decision). During the Q&A session, he also mentioned Skinner in the sense that variable rewards are always a better design mechanic than a consistent one. This linked to the pattern-breaking concept he'd mentioned too - while he made a lot about introducing the rules to the player of each world in a scaffolded way, he also pointed out that it was good to break those rules as it gives the game greater depth. As the game progresses, there are even more pattern breaking incidents, signaling to the player that the end is drawing near.

All of what I've just said is about the puzzle solving elements of the game. Braid also has a narrative which is ostensibly about a boy called Tim who wants to find the Princess, but it seems to really be about being about relationships and making mistakes and whether you can ever take those back. Again, this is is a reference there to the early Mario platformers, except with Braid you actually start to consider why the hero is looking for the Princess in the first place. There is a lot of text in the game, but Jonathan made a choice to make it irrelevant to the game-play since you can go through the whole thing without paying attention to any of it. I'd argue that doing so means you would lose out on a richer game-play experience but I think the decision was based on an awareness that not all game-players like sitting through lots of text. I think the reason I enjoyed his talk so much was that he made me appreciate all the time, energy and love that was put into this game. I'm not a designer, and I've never really tried to make my own game, but hearing him made me think that this is what people who want to design educational games should listen too. There is a very particular kind of learning going on here - mostly in the form of cognitive problem solving - and I'm not sure how well that maps on to different curricula objectives but there is no way you could deny that players aren't learning as they progress through the game. Even Jonathan admitted that he found out new ways to solve certain puzzles, after he had finished it! Maybe the key is to think about how to create a universe who's rules you want the student to learn, rather than to consider how to lots of educational content into a game? The thing is, I also think you could get a lot of out studying how something like Braid was put together, not so much in terms of the coding underneath but mainly in terms of the ideas behind it and how they are reflected in the game-play mechanisms and design rhetoric. I think I'm starting to see a place for the study of games alongside the study of films or books - something that involves a lot more than chocolate covered broccoli and a bit more imagination than trying to simulate real world activity as closely as you possibly can. Something which Michael Abbott, is trying to do at Wabash College with Portal. Which reminds me, Portal actually has a developer's commentary you can access after you finish the game - it might be quite useful to see more of this sort of thing.

I'll admit though, when I first tried Braid, I didn't quite get the time mechanic and while I had been meaning to get back to it, it wasn't until after hearing Jonathan speak and seeing the game in action that I decided to give it another go. And if I'm really honest, though I did complete it, I did resort to using YouTube walkthroughs. As with playing Portal, sometimes it was more about confirming I had the right solution - and needing to know whether I should keep trying what I was doing until I got it right - than having absolutely no idea what to do. I had also real trouble with the shadow mechanic so needed to see it action. I know I get impatient sometimes, but I really do think it's better that I get a little help than get put off the game entirely and stop playing. So I still got to enjoy exploring and learning about the Braid universe, while figuring out (most of) the puzzles on my own. I'm not saying the game was perfect but it did a lot more right for me than it did wrong, though I know there are other opinions out there. Also, I have to admit that hearing Jonathan talk made me go back to it and appreciate the game differently - if I hadn't, I wonder whether I would have bothered?

ITAG conference

2010-11-01T17:51:00.001Z

I was in Nottingham last week for a couple of things, including the Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Game s conference. Unfortunately I ended up missing the first day due to a minor mishap, but was glad to make the second half of the conference. It took place in Nottingham Trent's new conference centre - which was a really cool venue, apart from trying to figure out the lifts, and the random (false) fire alarm that went off towards the end of lunch.

The day started with a keynote speech from Gerard Jones. He's a comic book author and write who wrote "Killing Monsters: Why Children need Fantasy, Super heroes, and Make-Believe Violence" which I read a while ago and would recommend to anyone worried about letting their kids play with toy guns and/or video games. His talk had very little to do with the book, in fact he wanted to talk about inclusion and how games are not isolating but are actually quite social. He then went on to talk about games can help people feel a sense of achievement through providing different ways of being good at something. He also pointed out that there is more of an emphasis now on games being designed for all, though the market itself seems to be a rapidly shifting one. I think his main message was that games are an arena with the potential for us all to move into from different angles, but by his own admission the talk was more a reflection on the sorts of things he'd been thinking about, as opposed to something more conclusive. I think at one point he also said something about how games can help people be good at something (like socialising) that they wouldn't be that good at in the real world - which really didn't sound that positive or inclusive since it sort of implies that games are for people with poor social skills...

The next talk was from Andrea Lewis, as Masters student at Nottingham Trent, who carried out a thematic analysis on the motivation behind female casual game-play. I would have liked a little more on methods but 20 minutes isn't exactly a generous slot when you've got a lot of material to get through! Two main things came out of this for me; one, it brought up the casual/hardcore thing again and made it clear it really isn't can't be just about the type of game or how long you play for and two, I wonder whether men and women's motivations for playing games is that different? I know there is a gender divide when it comes to the types of games men and women seem to prefer playing, but it's something I've not really made a point of addressing in my own research. I think that's because my main study involves the use of multiple case studies, I'm really not trying to make any gender based generalisations on a set of cases that should be able to stand on their own.

Other highlights of the day include Wee-Hoe Tan talking about how game designers and subject experts really should collaborate more (and mentioning that commercial game designers tend to look down on educational game designers for reducing the "essence" of games!); James Lewis talking about the Novint Falcon and how it can be used alongside games to promote stroke rehabilitation (though he also raised a valid point about whether you'd even want to replace a social situation within a stroke club that encourages movement e.g. chess, with a single player activity such as using the Novint Falcon); and Maria Saridaki talking about motivation in the context of people with intellectual difficulties in terms of how important it is to consider the educational environment itself and the motivation of the teachers themselves.

There was some accessibility issues raised, the most surprising of which to me concerned Facebook. Sarah Lewthwaite, a PhD student from the LSRI spoke about examining the social role Facebook plays in the life university students who identify as disabled. So while she discussed one student who suffered from depression and her use of a puppy application to connect with her friends from home, she also noted that for those with visual difficulties Facebook isn't exactly accessible, especially when it comes to it's third party applications. I guess what I hadn't considered before is that not being able to view these things as a new student can put you at a disadvantage from other students who can - to put it in Bourdieu's terms (which she did) it can lead to having less social capital, and generally feeling a bit left out. Another thing that surprised me, again because I've never really thought about it, came out of Sarah Pople's talk on how schools and universities can work together to develop games for students with disabilities. I remembered some of the games she mentioned from being at the conference last year and was pleased to see that again some of the students had come along to demo the games during the talk. But what I hadn't realised was that, due to the nature of their disabilities, only 16 out of 140 students were actually able to play these games. Apparently only 10% of students at the school can read and write while others need special controllers and switches to operate computers. It seems even more essential in this case that developers work with schools in order to find out how they can really make games accessible to all.

There were quite a few other interesting talks but I think that about covers my main highlights. ITAG isn't a very big conference but it is very friendly and it's always good to hear the different ways in which games and technology can make people's lives better. Thanks to David Brown and colleagues for putting it all together.

Jane McGonigal's sermon on Productivity

2010-10-26T13:10:00.004+01:00

On Sunday I went to a talk organised by the School of Life. They called it a sermon, it also took place in a what I think what used to be a church hall, and there were hymns. One of the hymns was Video killed the Radio Star, but we did actually have to stand up and sing along. It was all a bit random really in quite an enjoyable way and the reason I went was so I could hear Jane McGonigal talk about Productivity and games.

She started off by talking about how a lot of our ideas about what it means to be a productive member of society are based on a combination of protestant work ethic (God wants us to be busy) and the rise of apitalism. Which seems to ultilmately lead to a lot of guilt when we end up doing things that don't seem to produce anything. So in this light, playing games for hours on end is really just a colossal waste of time, right?

Well, maybe not. After getting to write down a to-do list and then make it into a paper plane to throw into the audience, she went on to talk about the research she's done and how four things seemed to keep coming up in relation to question what do games produce; whole hearted engagement, hope for success, opportunities to develop social bonds and a sense we can be part of something bigger than ourselves. But if that's not enough for you, her findings actual map on quite well to research being carried out that focuses on positive psychology - the sort of psychology that focuses on how we can be happy rather than on all the things that can go wrong. According to research that will be published next spring (in Dr.Seligman's new book Flourish) we need the following:

1) Positive emotion (Pe)

2) Relationships (R)

3) Meaning (M)

4) Achievement (A)

And just to make it easier for us to remember, Jane got some audiences members to spell out that acronym for us (thanks to GrahamBM for the Twitpic):

We all then engaged in a round of massively-multiplayer thumb wrestling to illustrate how playing games can achieve all four of those things. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of playing massively-multiplayer thumb wrestling, you're missing out ;-) Basically, though her argument is that by games can actually help solve wider social problems by increasing PeRMA. Through productive engagement in activities we find meaningful and that make us feel good, we can cement our social ties and feel part of something bigger. For those interested in these ideas more and about games how you could designe games that explictly address social issues keep an eye out for her book "Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World" which is out early next year.

There was a short Q&A session after the sermon, where one person asked how games were different to drugs. I thought this was a pretty good question as you do hear about how games are "addictive" and I guess, like drug taking, the activity is often be seen as completely unproductive. Jane responded by pointing out that drugs tend to be quick fixes, that take a toll on our bodies and end up leaving people feeling lower than before. In contrast, research has shown that the positive emotions received from playing games tend to spill over into other parts of our lives. Also, apparently there is some sort of gamer tipping point, where after 21 hours of play a week, most players realise that they aren't getting any more from the activity. (Note to self: I really should find what research she is referring to). Somebody also asked something about using games in education and Jane was keen to point out that she wasn't trying to gamify every activity but that even so, understanding how and why games appeal could influence certain underlying educational principles - which effectively sums up my own research. All in all it was a really enjoyable morning, and what better way to end than by drinking tea and eating space invader biscuits :-) (thanks to Katy Lindemann for the putting up the Flickr photo)

how much do I agree with all this? Well, quite a lot really but maybe not entirely. I really do think Jane McGonigal is doing an awesome job getting inspiring games out there and in talking positively about games. I think that games can definitely increase PeRMA and like that there is actual research backing this up. I'm not sure how much that will convince people who don't play games though, and I don't think it will convince them to play games. Especially, for those who start talking about how they heard about players in China or Korea who died because they didn't leave their computer for days, and about how it would still be much better for children to go outside and play. I'm not denying that for some people at least, games can become a problem, but like any activity you enjoy doing, surely there's nothing wrong with them being part of a balanced well-rounded life? I also think that for a lot of people who take games seriously, probably for a lot of people who call themselves gamers and see games as a social activity to share with friends, gaming is a major source of PeRMA and that's why they like it. I think what people don't realise is that even when you're playing something on your own, this can still feed into your social relationships if you have friends who are interested in what you're doing.

I suppose what I'm not sure about, is whether everyone who plays games gets the same benefits? So the aunt you get to play Wii Sports at Christmas, I can see how she would enjoy having a go, how it's a shared family experience and how the activity makes sense in that context even but will she really feel like she's achieving anything? Maybe that has more to say about how we much we value our experiences but when Jane said something along the lines that she has never met a pessimistic gamer, who didn't think they could succeed, I'm not sure I'd agree they don't exist. I mean maybe they would call themselves a gamer, but I've seen plenty of people put off from even trying something because they don't think they are good enough. And, I have given up on games myself when it's just gotten too hard... I definitely haven't finished all the games I have - what does that say about my ability to achieve things? Jane mentioned signature strenghts, but what if I'm noticing weaknesses instead?!

Maybe I'm taking it a bit too far, I do finish some games at least, I suppose the ones I get the most pleasure out of, so perhaps that's enough. But I am still curious about different types of players and how often people actually finish their games. The two main things I want to take with me from the sermon though, are to rethink my ideas about productivity and the fact that there is research out there about the positive effects of game-playing. Plus, I don't have to feel guilty about not writing my thesis yet, as there are plenty of activties I need to do first, including (though obviously not limited to) playing games, cos they increase my PeRMA quotient and make me flourish ;-)

Update: I forgot to add a link to the Gameful site - after thanking her for the talk and telling her a bit about my research, Jane suggested that I check it out once it launches. It seems to be a resource for anyone interested in making and using games that have a positive impact on people's live. You can find out a bit more about it on her blog here.

Eurogamer Expo 2010

2010-10-04T22:35:00.001+01:00

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Eurogamer Expo at Earl's Court in London. Here's a photo of me trying out Fallout: New Vegas.

As I just picked up from where someone else left off, I had no idea what I was doing so ended up shooting randomly at some people I think I was probably supposed to help. I didn't play for long as the people weren't very happy with me shooting at them and I died pretty soon after, so I'm not sure what to say about it. It felt a lot like the previous Fallout I guess, though the colours were less grey and more orange this time. Hmm, I'm thinking whatever happens after this PhD, I'm probably not going to get paid for writing game reviews... I know these events are supposed to give you a chance to try new releases, but I'm not sure how comfortable I feel playing in public. It seems a little too close to performing, even though I'm pretty sure no one is actually judging how well I'm doing. Plus, I think when it comes to new games, I prefer to try them out in my own time and space so I have a chance to get a feel for them - without the possibility of a queue forming. Though I was impressed with these guys trying out Dance Central on Kinnect.

So I saw Kinnect and the Playstation Move but didn't see any games for them that made me think I must try them. A lot of them seem to be party games - Wii Sports type spin-offs - which is fine, but I'm not sure that's going to convince me to shell out for either of them (especially when I already have a Wii). I'm sure there was an Xbox game that only literally involved you jumping, again, and again... Apparently, Heavy Rain has been modified so you can play it with the Move now, but I didn't have much luck finding it. I would have gone back after attending the last developer session to check again but the ensuing tube strike meant I wanted to leave a little earlier than I had originally planned.

If I'm really honest, a lot of the games at the exhibition came across as looking quite similar. Most of them involved running around with a weapon attacking monsters/aliens/humans in a post-apocalyptic/alien/war setting. Little Big Planet 2 was there, and looks as cute as the first, though apparently the level editors are easier to use. I also saw Rock Band 3 , which now has a keyboard accessory (even more plastic toys for my living room!). Nintendo was there too, but once I realised they weren't showing off a 3DS I moved on. Speaking of 3D, I did notice a lot of the games were being played with 3D glasses, and I think there were some 3D TVs. I probably would have been more impressed though, if the glasses NVidia gave out to watch their 3D demo had actually worked... I guess I'm just not convinced the technology is there yet, even if I could afford it! There was also an indie arcade, which perhaps I should have spent a bit more time at if I was looking for something different, but generally, I really can't say much really stood out. Maybe that says more about my reluctance to try lots of things though, than about what was on offer.

What I really did enjoy though was the developer sessions. First, I got to see Mike Simpson from Creative Assembly talk about Shogun 2 . I never played the original Total War game but what I saw and heard made me want to try out the second one. I think what I liked about it was how he talked about them using history - and not like it was a problem - in terms of it being the inspiration for the game and wanted to keep as close to it as possible. Someone asked whether the team had trouble deciding between whether to make it historical or fun, but his answer suggested that was actually quite a rare occurrence, with a lot of the fun stemming from the history itself. He also talked a lot about game strategy, perhaps with out meaning too, but it was pretty interesting to hear him talk during the demo about things like the best way to defeat archers (use a cavalry unit to sneak up behind them). I guess he (and experienced players) would take that sort of knowledge for granted but the rest of us have to pick it up as we play. It looks very pretty too, with a lot of work going into the details, like the Japanese trees. Apparently, it's been 10 years in the making (if you count the time if took to produce the original) - a lot of patience has gone into this game, and it shows.

The other session I went to was held by Tim Willits (id Software) about RAGE there latest shooter. For those of you who don't know (and to be honest, I didn't until my friend Ashley told me at the expo), Tim Willits was involved in Doom and Quake, and there were a lot of people in the audience who were very pleased to be able to see him. He spoke a bit about Id tech 5 - the companies latest game engine - which allows for much more graphical detail. There was someone else there who played through sections of the game, but you could see that Tim was keen to point out how the engine allowed them to give different areas of the game, and enemies, a unique feel. He made a point about player choice too - through the addition of engineering items you can create your own weapons, while there are different sub-missions you can take on that allow you to indulge in vehicular combat, for instance, if you want to. It looks great but it was kind of funny to sit through the demo though. I mean, it's not really the sort of game I go for and I couldn't help but think that the story and mechanics were feeling strangely familiar - post-apocalyptic world, mutants, doing side-missions etc - and for all the talk about choice, the choices are mostly about how you decide to kill the bad guys . It's not like I can choose to set up a business and make money or find a cure for the mutants or something. But the majority of the audience was there to see an extremely polished shooter with awesome graphics, and I'm positive that is what they will get when it comes out next year.

I feel like I'm being a bit negative about shooters. What's wrong with wanting to indulge in a bit of carnage? It's not fair really, and probably the reason I don't like them so much is I'm not very good at them (and can't be bothered to get good). And obviously, there's a serious market for these sorts of games but I guess I'm just personally, not that interested. I did notice though that both Mike Simpson and Tim Willets talked about expansion packs, downloadable content and modding communities. Before the games are even out, they are figuring out ways to make them last longer (and presumably ways in which to make more money out of them - but when games like this have taken years to develop, who can blame them?). There must be a way serious games could do the same? Plus, both studios have a history of supporting modding, so it was nice to see that they were keen to continue that. It made me think a little about gaming audiences, and how I don't really know anyone who creates mods. A friend of mine from uni used too, but that's about it. I wonder how many people out there do and what they think about games like Little Big Planet which attempt to make that sort of thing easier for players? Though I imagine, building a mod for Quake is very different to creating a level for LBP...

All in all, I enjoyed the expo. I'll have to see whether I'll go next year or not, but for now, here is a rather blurry photo of someone playing a driving game on Kinnect. I think it sums up well why I don't want to play a driving game on Kinnect.

Sam & Max and my research

2010-09-30T14:10:00.010+01:00

Again, it's been a while. I have the excuse of spending the last few months running my main data collection study, though I have also been playing games throughout. Maybe I've been quite busy, but maybe I also haven't felt like I've had a lot to say. Recently though, I've been thinking more and more about one particular series I've been playing and how I got back into it after being convinced to give it another go as a result of one of my data collection sessions.

Over the past few months, I've been asking participants to keep a set of gaming diaries and to come into the lab we've set up in the department to play games. They had to keep the diary for three weeks and come in on three seperate occassions so I could hook them up to various physiological equipment (to measure changes in muscle tension, galvanic skin response and heart rate) and observe them playing games. The sessions lasted about 2-3hours so all in all it was quite an investement from them. Even when all I could offer was a Amazon voucher just to say thanks, 9 people actually agreed to take part and for that I am very grateful :-)

Anyway, during the first two sessions I would ask people to bring in a game of their choice, preferably something they'd been playing. But for the final session I would pick a game for them. For my first participant - who is also a friend of mine but for the purposes of anonymity, let's call him Matt - I chose Sam and Max: Save the World . It's a point and click type adventure, with lots of puzzle solving where you play Sam and Max who Wikipedia describes as "self-styled vigilante private investigators, the former an anthropomorphic dog and the latter a 'hyperkinetic rabbity thing'" as they set about uncovering a hypnotism conspiracy.

I picked the game up ages ago for the Wii and though I played for a bit, I got stuck at one point early on and just never went back to it. I'm going to be honest here, while I wanted to choose something Matt hadn't played before (and that contrasted in pace to his own choices - survival horror/FPS), I also chose it because I thought he would find it boring. And I wanted to see whether all that physiological data I've been collecting would reflect that. I'm still working on the data so I'm going to have to save the in depth analyses for later on (and hopefully publication...) but he didn't find it boring. He liked it. That didn't mean he wasn't frustrated by some aspects of it, but he seemed to enjoy it. What really surprised me was that him liking it made me want to try it again. So I did, and I finished it this time. And then I bought the next series, Beyond Time and Space on Steam (because it wasn't on the Wii) and finished that. And then I played the latest series The Devil's Playhouse, and had to wait for Telltale to complete the last two episodes so I could finish that too.

So what happened? Why did I write the game off only so soon? What made me go back to it? How many other games do I have that I never really gave a fair shot? Looking back, I remember wanting to like Save the World but getting a little annoyed by all the dialogue and getting impatient with some of the puzzles. Even though I did think it was funny, I guess I didn't think it was funny enough to keep playing. So when I got stuck, maybe it didn't feel like there was enough incentive to go back. It was a good couple of years ago now when I got the game so I can't say for sure, but I also imagine that I got distracted by other games that I had at the time. So I forgot about it, until I started my study and had to come up with games for other people to play. That's already going to put it back on my radar, but then Matt seemed to enjoy it and we talked about it afterwards, and it made me want to give it another go. I think the fact that we are also friends who talk about games has something to do with it too. Though I don't think he's played the game since, him playing it in the session made me feel more like a shared experience, and when I refer to the series he knows what I'm talking about. Could that alone have increased my involvement with the game? I think it might have. And I'm glad it did.

I'm not saying it's a perfect series. Like most point and click adventures, the puzzles are less about creative problem solving and more about trying to figure out how the designer wants you to solve it. The dialogue is funny, but there is a lot of it and the story doesn't always really make a whole lot of sense... It was ok playing it with the Wii controls but the later games weren only out on Steam so I had to switch. I think the second game, Beyond Time and Space was the weakest of the three I played - it felt rushed, shorter than the others, with puzzles that made even less sense than normal. But the more I played, the better I got at it (and yes I did sometimes resort to walkthroughs or increased the in-game hint level, but I noticed as time went on this happened less too). Maybe I learnt how to think like the designers, but the puzzles didn't feel as frustrating. So even if the narrative was a little out there, I kept progressing, and I still wanted to know what was going to happen next. But I needed a reason to get past the initital hurdle I came across and that seemed to come from sharing the experience with someone else. Without them even being in the same room! And now it's got me wondering what other games I would have enjoyed? Also, I'm wondering what I would have given up on if I hadn't had others to share the experience with?!

All of this ties in with my reseach because I'm not just interested in what happens when we play but why we choose to play anything in the first place. Like I said, the analysis is at a pretty early stage but if I can uncover at least part of that, and explain how it all might relate to learning, then I might just have something decent to put in my thesis ;-) Plus, it's something I need to consider when I am doing my analysis - if my participants had an impact on my game-playing, then how did I impact theirs?

Tax breaks and the games industry

2010-06-23T15:52:00.005+01:00

The governement has decided not to go through with the pledge to provide tax relief to the games industry.

This worries me. In my last post on the Game-based learning conference I mentioned Richard Wilson from TIGA talking about how important it was for the industry to receive tax breaks to encourage business to grow and expand. The parties seemed to be behind it initially - so what's changed? I can see how removing tax incentives might save money in the short term but surely it makes more sense to encourage local talent and industry to grow to create more jobs and make more money in the long term?

Game Based Learning 2010

2010-03-31T20:02:00.006+01:00

On Monday and Tuesday I was Game-based learning 2010 at the Brewery in London. It was a really good couple of days - think I still need time to recover from it! Apart from the talks and meeting new people it was also good to catch up with fellow PhD student Wee-Hoe Tan from Warwick and to bump into Jeremiah Alexander from Ideonic again.

For a broad overview of the conference experience, Terry Freedman provides quite a good account of what the event was like. It's impossible to reccount everything here so I'm just going to talk about some of the highlights for me. The conference started with a couple of politicians who I don't remember having anything massively interesting to say (though I now know there is an All party video games group!) but I think I was reassured that whichever party wins the next election they'll be supportive of the video game industry. You see the recession did come up a bit but it looks like video games will save the day! Well maybe not single-handedly, but in addition to the politicians, Richard Wilson from TIGA highlighted how important industry is economically, educationally and culturally - and how the recent tax breaks will create more jobs and bring more money into the economy.

Back to day one and the games though. I really enjoyed Alice Taylor's talk about what she is commissioning for Channel 4 to support young people's informal learning. These ranged from the recent Smokescreen (which aimed to helped people learn about privacy online) to the soon to be released Ada (which aims to inspire girls interest in science) but what I really noticed was how a lot of the entertainment she was discussing was multi-platform and seemed a ARG inspired. I'm also really impressed by the work being carried out by Derek Robertson in colleagues up in Scotland. Their work within the Consolarium has meant that games are essentially becoming a normal part of classroom activity, and it's a shame the rest of the UK seems a long way off from that. I like the emphasis they place on the teacher but also on sharing what teachers are doing - it's not about games replacing classrooms but understanding that they are another useful learning tool that can be used. It was nice to see this backed up with examples from headteacher Gillian Penny in a later talk.

Moving on to the subject of piracy, one of my favourite talks was Matt Mason who I knew absolutely nothing about till he got up on stage. He provided a very interesting case for pirates - in the sense that they can often push the boundaries of what is possible (as opposed to those who just nick stuff) and actually came up with ways of dealing with the issue that made more sense than "punish them!" - which is something I think rushing in the new Digital Economy bill focuses on a bit too much. Anyway, I'm gonna have to get his book.

ARGs came up, in a more academic context, with Alex Mosely and Simon Brookes talking about how they used them on their HE courses. I liked the mention of communities of practice here as it's something I'm going to be looking at though I think I will need to go back and have a look at Schaffer's concept of epistemic frames again. Communities of practice also came up again at the later MirandaMod meet (which was an interesting if slightly confusing experience as I wasn't sure what a MirandaMod was!) which will hopefully be up soon. It's just good to know that people are realising that games aren't played in a vacuum and it's good to see that other things are now being taken into account.

On day two I got to start of the research strand with my presentation "Press Start: Motivation, Engagement and Informal Learning through Video Games" (see pic below). It think it went pretty well, though I probably did run through quite a lot of information in the 15 minute slot. Derek Robertson was kind enough to mention me and my blog link on his twitter feed as did a couple of others (and that's where I got the pic from - btw, is being tweeted a measure of success?!). I'm glad I got a couple of other theories out there - Calleja's Digital Game Experience Model especially - but hope I also got people thinking about why it's important we understand the bigger picture when it comes to studying games. The thing I like about the DGEM is that it gives me a way of discussing different game play experiences (on both a micro and macro scale). And if there is an existing framework out there I don't need to produce one of my own, but I think it can help in what I am trying to do - which is explore the relationship between motivation, engagement and informal learning through games. Anyways, all in all it was a good opportunity to meet other people and ultimately reflect on my work.

I enjoyed the rest of the research strand too, especially Karl Royle and David Squire's talk on their DoomEd mod and sharing what they learnt from the experience, and also Paul Hollins talk (prepared with Nicola Whitton) about 10 things educators could learn from the games industry (though a few more Do's thrown in with the Dont's might have been good too). I thought he raised an interesting point how educators should think more about entertainment rather than simulation because I couldn't help but notice that some of software on show (and discussed) are really simulations rather than games. I think are some important differences here in terms of learning (or maybe even just with respect to how people approach them). I mean simulations - and a lot of serious games - try to be as real as possible, so it's easier to apply what is learnt in the real world but games shouldn't be real because realism can be boring, and though we learn in games, we also know what behaviour is appropriate in the real world and what isn't. Hmm, maybe one day I'll be able to verbalise this better and have some evidence to back up what I'm trying to say.

In the final part of the conference I got to see Tom Chatfield (who wrote Fun Inc.) talk about the role of failure in learning and games - "What is learning? Failing better" and Margaret Robertson discuss what educators can learn from casual games. Sean Brennan from Bethesda games seemed to make the audience squirm a little (and get the Twitter feed buzzing) by essentially reading out his powerpoint slides and telling most of us what we already knew about games and learning. Maybe it was his struggle to come up with a reason that the commercial games industry should get involved in games (he ummed for a bit and then suggested PR maybe?) or maybe it was that he thought education should be doing more to make sure he got the skilled games designers he needed but I'm not sure his talk went down well.... Though conference organiser Graham Brown-Martin did assure us afterwards that beneath the "ballsy arrogance" Sean was a good guy really! And I suppose he did donate some games for the prize draw at the end too... including Bethesda's Fallout3 - which I didn't get :-(

The conference closed with Jesse Schell speaking to us via a live video link and I think gave everyone something to think about by arguing that education should be like the rest of our future - beautiful, customisable, shareable and real. I think my favourite part of this talk was at the end when someone asked how we might be able to benchmark collaborative work and he just said "Screw all that" as school should be preparing people for the real world and not trying to figure out ways to standardise and measure everyone. Definitely need to check out his DICE talk too.

So I left with the feeling that the future is going to be a very exciting place to be. And it would be very cool to be a part of making it that way.

Heavy Rain (PS3)

2010-03-13T16:54:00.007Z

It's been longer than I thought since I last wrote but since then I bought myself a PS3 and have been playing lots of games :-) One of which is Heavy Rain.

I really enjoyed this game. Actually, enjoyed might be the wrong word, as I'm not sure I've played anything that's made me feel the way Heavy Rain has, especially in terms of experiencing guilt. I should probably post the obligatory SPOILER ALERT here as I will be discussing what happened when I played the game, though I won't reveal the identity of the Origami Killer. I don't want to spend half this post telling you about the game itself though, as this is less of a review and more a way to document my own response to it. For those who know little about the game though and don't plan on playing it go here for a synopsis.

So first off, it's probably worth knowing that I didn't play the game on my own. My friend Paul came round and we took turns playing (on three seperate session). I'm not sure how I would of felt playing it on my own, but we both came away from it feeling like Heavy Rain could be the start of something very exciting, with Paul suggesting it might even be the start of a new genre. From the start, when we were given instructions on how to make an origami figure from the paper that came with box, we knew it was going to be an immersive experience. Yes it did feel a lot like a movie, in fact it felt like one of those books from when we were kids that asked you to make a decision and then turn to the appropriate page once you had - just a lot more effective! And ok, there is definitely room for improvement - the controls could get annoying, there were some plot holes, a pretty gratuitous sex scene (and a little unconvincing given how beat up Ethan was, and how little time him and Madison had spent together) while I think we were mostly deliberately lead astray about the identity of the origami killer - but overall, I would thoroughly recommend playing it.

The reason I do is because of how I felt when I played it. I felt helpless when Jason (Ethan's oldest) died as there was little I could do. I felt pleased with myself as Agent Jayden when I managed to calm a suspect down and get him to lower his weapon only to feel incredibly guilty when the suspect spun round during his arrest and I shot him, only realising too late he was holding a crucifix and not another weapon... I liked playing the hard-drinking private investigator who also seemed soft-hearted because though you fought people, you also had to change a baby's diaper and rock it to sleep after rescuing it's mother from a suicide attempt. I felt relief when I was Madison and I went to visit a creepy doctor to get some more clues and then left before he came back in the room (after having found the clue I needed and refusing to drink the drink he gave me - I'm not sure what would have happened if I did but I know it wouldn't have been good!).

But the guilt came back when I was playing the investigator again and I ended up in a car at the bottom of the river with Lauren, a prostitute whoose son had been murdered by the Origami Killer and was helping me with my investigation. A lot of the tension in the game involves having to react to quick time events, and this was a particularly tense situation as I had no idea how much time I had. Though I managed to cut my own ropes and free myself, in my panic to escape the car I ended up kicking my way out without rescuing Lauren... I felt terrible, and the only thing I could think to say to Paul afterwards was that we really need to save Shaun now! As if somehow it would makes Lauren's death worthwhile...

I think the fact that we played the game together made it even more interesting though. Depending on what we were doing and how connected we felt to the character we were playing at the time, we would refer to the character by name, as "I" or even "we". The Origami Killer sends Ethan a series of tasks to complete (each more dangerous than the last) and in one of them you are supposed to go to someone's house and kill them. After going to the house, there is a struggle and you end up pointing a gun at the guy in his daughter's room. Paul just turned round to me and said, I don't want to do it. So I said ok, even though we had failed the previous task (and so were now going to miss out on two clues), because that's not who we wanted Ethan to be. After almost every scene we would discuss what had just happened, reflecting and wanting to make sure we had done the right thing. Interestingly there were also a couple of moments where we didn't actually want the responsibility of having the controller - knowing that our decisions and ability to react could influence the outcome, meant there an awful lot of pressure on who was playing not to mess up. And that was the feeling I had during the final task Ethan had to carry out, which asked him to drink a poison that would give him enough time to rescue his son, but would then kill him. I actually paused the game at this point so we could discuss what we should do (and I think it was the only time that we stopped mid-gameplay to do so). After a lengthy discussion we decided that we weren't going to do it, because it would really suck if after everything that happened, Shuan survives to lose his Dad as well.

You can replay bits of the game but we wanted to play it all the way through first. After we finished, we did go back and try different things out to see what would happen - turns out the poison dilemma wasn't as serious as we thought, and that Madison being able to get to Ethan before the end is what you'd really want to not mess up. I'd like to see some of the different endings but I'm not sure I really want to replay the whole game from start to finish again. While it's an interesting "what if" exercise, I think it could become a little tedious, and won't ever compare to playing it first time around.

There is probably loads more I could say about how this game affected me but this has already turned into an essay. I think I just want to say that though Heavy Rain didn't do everything perfectly I was fascinated by the ethical discussions we had about it, and thoroughly engrossed while both playing and watching it. Maybe the game gave us the illusion that we had more control than we did (despite a large number of possible endings there is still a limited number) but maybe that illusion is more important than actually having a completely open ended experience. Maybe it is more like a movie than a game, but so what? It still felt more engrossing than watching a film about the Origami Killer would. And maybe I would have felt less positive about the game if we hadn't saved Shaun and got one of the "better" endings but I still think I would have enjoyed the process.

I think this is the first time I've been able to experience the way games can provide us with such powerful emotional experiences and it's something I'd like to see a lot more of, both in commercial games as well as educational. This is something that games can do in a way other media can't and I for one would really like to see how these sorts of games develop.

Trine, Borderlands and Assasin's Creed II (PS3)

2009-11-27T21:10:00.008Z

First off, I need to say thanks to my mate Paul for sharing his PS3 with me over the last couple of weeks - I promise I will get one myself but it's going to have to wait till after Christmas...

So first, we played Trine (from Finnish developers Frozenbyte and you can also get it on PC) And it was good. A physics based action/platformer/puzzle game? That you can play with up to two other players?! Awesome!!! It looked pretty too (see video above). I have to admit not really caring about the storyline so much, but I did love the gameplay. Especially when we had to stop and think about what we needed to do next. I seemed to gravitate towards the thief most - I liked the fact she used arrows (so I didn't have to get too close to enemies) and I guess I just like jumping! I kind of left the wizardy stuff to the more experienced player as he seemed to have a good handle on when to do what but we would sometimes switch depending on what was going on. All in all, Trine did a brilliant jump of encouraging enjoyable coop play and I think it gave plenty of examples of problem solving and collaboration in action. My only issues with it were the occasional glitches that occurred when one of the characters goes off screen (similar to LBP) and the end. The last level really wasn't very difficult (in comparison to earlier ones!) and the n the game just ended - not really satisfying at all, but please don't let that put you off trying a pretty innovative game.

Then, there was Borderlands (see pic above). It's a first-person shooter (FPS) with role-playing game elements (RPG) set in a post-apocalyptic world full of bandits, guns, leftover cash in boxes and scary looking dog like creatures called skags. Paul likes it a lot but I'm not sure it's really my thing... This game made me realise I have a tendency to panic when something unexpected happens that threatens my character. It happened in Trine too - I ran away from a big scary skeleton when it first appeared, even though I was the warrior with the big sword! But when I panic in an FPS this means I lose all sense of spatial awareness (which isn't great to begin with) and start shooting all over the place. And then I die. So that's not much fun. Plus, I don't really care about guns and I don't like the feeling that I'm not very good at something. I also think my lack of progress levelling up and getting enough money to buy better (i.e. more powerful) weapons also added to my disatisfaction with the game. And god that robot guide at the start is annoying! My feelings are a little mixed on the game as a whole though because I did enjoy some of it. Like when I could see I was getting a little better - my aim did improve while I have to admit there was something really satisfying about nailing those head shots and also when I did eventually level up. I could even see myself picking up simple strategies like remembering to crouch down behind something when reloading and running backwards while shooting. Plus, playing with a more experienced FPS player made it a lot easier because it meant I also had someone to tell me what to do. Then there was the really hilarious moment when we heard growling, got scared and both ended up hiding in the same shed waiting for the skag to come to us! Though you may have had to have been there for that one... So yeah, mixed feelings about Borderlands.

Finally there is Assassin's Creed II from Ubisoft. I really liked this - a lot more than Borderlands. Probably because the third person action-adventure genre is one I'm more comfortable with and maybe because I get to a lot more jumping in the form of free running around beautiful recreations of 15th Italy. While the avatar facial expressions are a little disconcerting (e.g. a lot of them seem kinda cross-eyed), the rest of the game is seriously stunning (see pic above). I found the storyline intriguing too, especially at the start where I ended up getting quite into the whole revenge plot. Though I have to say this doesn't seem to have sustained itself, as now I feel more impatient to just get on with the missions. And sometimes it wasn't clear how to get from a to b (or maybe we just haven't figured out the maps properly yet?). I did like the fighting here more too, though I have a feeling I prefer punching (i.e. hitting buttons repeatedly) and assassinating (killing someone without getting in a fight) than sword fighting (which seems to involve a mixture of timing and skill that I'm still getting the hang of). I have also learnt how to spell assassin properly ;) All in all though, it is a game I would actually like to spend some time playing on my own to how much I get into it, even though it was still fun to take turns at it.

So, that's a few more games than usual, and a lot more killing than I have done in a while! I don't think I've ever had much of a problem with violence in games - I know it's not real and of course I know it's not an appropriate to behave outside of the game - but I guess it is strange to realise I actually enjoy a lot of it. At least, when I do it well... So maybe, as Przylbylski et al. suggest (see here for a good summary), it's more about competence than violence? I think lack of competence may be why I don't like FPS games that much - I feel I have too much to get a handle on in terms of learning the controls, orienting myself spatially, comparing weapons I really don't know much about etc. Maybe I'd enjoy them more if I spend a little time practising but when there are so many other games I enjoy playing (and get to grips with quicker),I think something else will probably get priority. Until the next time a friend wants me to play an FPS anyway. I also liked the way that these recent experiences have all been quite social. When it wasn't a coop game, we took turns, and when we played Trine there were other mates around who were happy to watch us. Sharing does seem to make things more fun, or at least make things fun in a different way. And I think working together can also be quite satisfying though I imagine this might also depend on who you're playing with!

It's been good but I really am going to have to get my own "serious" console soon...

Reference:
Przylbylski, A. K., Ryan, R. M. & Rigby, C. S. (2009). The motivating role of violence in video games. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 243-259.

Machinarium (PC)

2009-11-13T17:26:00.007Z

Go and play Machinarium.

It not only looks good - it's set in a sort of rusty cute looking robot world - but manages to engage without a single word of dialogue being spoken (at least not as far I've played it). It's an independent point-and-click puzzle solving adventure without the tedious dialogue. Don't get me wrong, I love the narrative and humour of the Monkey Island games and I've even been playing the new episodic ones but it's the pretty much the same formula,though it is done well. But you can also get that wrong - like with A Vampyre Story. Czech designers Amanita Design have done something different here and have managed to communicate a storyline through the use of thought bubbles and (pretty cool) drawings alone.

Not only that but they've included a really clever little mechanism for getting help within the game. I think I've mentioned this before, but I do use walkthroughs when I get stuck. There are just points where I don't have the patience to keep trying something, and if the information is out there I don't see it being massively different to asking a friend for some help. But, in order to access these walkthroughs (or tips or whatever) I have to leave the game and go online to find out what I need. And once I've caved and started looking at the walkthrough I then run the risk of ruining the gameplay by reading ahead so I don't have to come back for the next puzzle... However, in Machinarium, I have two other options. The first is to click on the light bulb on the far right to give you a hint for how to solve the puzzle. If that's not enough then you click on what looks like a locked journal of some kind. Now this will give the solution but (and here's the bit I really like) you have to play a somewhat boring mini-game to get to that solution. The reason I love this so much is because it means it stops me from ruining the game by easily accessing the walkthrough whenever I want - I have to decide whether it's worth playing the game first. So while the mini-game isn't very interesting (or very long for that matter) it makes me think twice about looking up the solution. But if I really am stuck, then I have a way to fix it without ever having to leave the game! Genius :-)

So I finally posted something about a games again (and not conference related!). I've been playing a few different things lately so I'm hoping there will be more to follow soon.

GameCity Squared 2009

2009-10-31T15:17:00.011Z

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 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 free 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 were 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 the games seemed to be out already), and Lego Rockband does look like a laugh. 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

2009-09-21T17:00:00.005+01:00

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

2009-09-08T11:59:00.003+01:00

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

2009-09-07T14:08:00.007+01:00

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

2009-07-30T22:00:00.003+01:00

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

2009-06-23T18:41:00.006+01:00

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

2009-06-17T22:47:00.003+01:00

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!

CALRG conference

2009-05-27T17:40:00.008+01:00

Last week, CALRG (Computer and learning research group) had it's annual conference in the Jennie Lee building on campus. Unfortunately, I had to miss 30th anniversary celebrations on the Monday as I was coming back from Cyprus but Dave Perry was kind enough to photoshop me into the photo below so in a few years time, I'll probably think I was there! (It's a scanned copy of the photo so it's not too clear but I'm at the end of the top row next to Josie. If you look closely though, you might notice one or two others who have been added...).

From the sounds of it, I missed a good day. For a breakdown of the talks given, Doug Clow seems to have live blogged the entire event, separating the day into sessions 1, 2, and 3. You can also access the twitter archive and cloudspace for the event here, where each talk given has a cloud (thanks to Patrick McAndrew for putting up summaries of these). I did have a poster up based on my MRes work for last, and apparently, Tim O'Shea reckons I had the best research questions - though also the most difficult to answer... So that was pretty cool. Oh, and just for reference purposes, the questions I posed were:

How can we identify the learning processes that occur during play?
How can we describe the involvement that players experience during play?
Is there an identifiable relationship between the learning that occurs and this experience of involvement?

I did attend the conference sessions on the 19th and 20th though, and even presented myself. I have to say, it was a very supportive environment for my first PhD related talk (I think I even enjoyed it a little!). I was basically presenting a summary of my work in progress - which was pretty much based around my probation report. I think the slides are going to go up on the knowledge network at some point but if anyone is interested, I'd be happy to pass them along. I got a fair amount of feedback in terms of suggested reading that might be useful including looking at the sociological literature for research on learning through play, looking at accessibility literature for research on what different physiological signals might represent, and some suggestions for looking at work on presence and motivation. All interesting stuff for to search for and read so I can add to what feels like a never-ending literature review!

While it was great for me to feel that my ideas and questions came across as valid and interesting, the conference was also a really good opportunity for me to see what other people in my research group are up to. Again, Patrick has done a good job of summarising the gist of the talks here, but in terms of my own response, I guess the most obvious thing for me was the emphasis was mainly on formal learning and assessment. The theme of the first day was argumentation, where the focus was essentially on exploring way to teach students how to argue effectively with the aid of various types of software e.g. Talk Factory, InterLoc, Second Life. The discussant for the day (and my old boss) Richard Joiner, summed it up quite well, when he suggested that there seems to be a fine line between learning how to argue, and using argument to learn. There was also a presentation on tools to might help annotate and map arguments online, and another on reading group discourse that looked at naturally occurring talk and how you might analyse argumentation and collaboration through corpus-based analysis. The latter talk was especially interesting for me, partly because it focused on informal learning but also because it used a case-study approach (where they attempted to study a wide a range of groups as possible) and gave me some ideas about how of the tools available to analyse the data in terms of trying to find patterns across these groups.

On day two, the themes were far more wide ranging, so I'm not going to try and review everything. It was good to find out a bit more about OpenLearn though and the English in Action project in Bangladesh. I think it's sometimes very easy to nod and smile when people are mention their research, but going to something like this makes it a lot clearer. So now I have a firmer grasp, for instance, on what my fellow PhD students Pauline and Eunice are doing! I'm not sure how relevant a lot of the talks were in terms of my own research, but going to the conference has also got me thinking about the conferences I'll be going to in August/September. I'm going to EARLI in Amsterdam (presenting a roundtable discussion at the JURE pre-conference) which is very much education focused, and then HCI in Cambridge (presenting my very first paper!) which is much more technology focused. I'm already beginning to think I have a bias towards the latter as though I'm interested in how technologies can be used for learning, I'm just not sure how inspired I am by education - as it seems to revolve around learning outcomes and assessments. Hopefully, going along to these events will give me a better feel for both these areas (whatever my preconceptions might be) and will also help me in terms of thinking about what direction I want to go in as a researcher...

H809: Block three update

2009-05-25T21:04:00.005+01:00

First off, apologies to H809ers for my absence over the last couple of weeks. I'm afraid that submitting my probation report, going back home for a family wedding and presenting at my research group conference (CALRG; a post on the conference to follow soon) has meant that H809 has had to take a bit of a back seat.

So I haven't been doing the reading for Block 3 but for excellent summaries and commentary on the last few weeks, please have a look at Juliette Culver's blog. In week 11, she raises some wothwhile points about how candid (or not) people are when filling in surveys while also discussing the notions of validity and reliability (where she notes "reliability is about whether you can consistently achieve the same results using methods, validity is about whether your methods tell you what you claim they do"). I think she also raises some interesting issues surrounding the concept of ethnographic research in weeks 13&14, especially in relation to virtual ethnography and the divide between the virtual and the real. I think the blurring of this divide is something we are seeing more of these days, and in terms of my area of research at least, we do need to be aware that this is not necessarily a binary distinction (if you want tto read more about this see Gordon Calleja's paper called the Binary Myth, 2008). There is also research going on within online gaming communities - virtual ethnographies within virtual worlds I guess - where an ethnographic approach has been adopted. For instance, Bonnie Nardi and colleagues has done some work looking at learning conversations in World of Warcraft. Though not really related to ethnographic study, I did consider some of the ethical issues of purposefully blurring these sorts of distinctions in my entry on alternate reality games.

Jansh has also been updating her blog regularly, reflecting on the week 11 podcasts, and has produced a really interesting post on the Browne (2003) "Conversations in cyberspace" reading, where she relates it to her own experience as an AL with the OU. She also discusses her ideas for her final H809 project, looking at how the teacher's wiki she has set up is being used. Her and James have also engaged in a discussion about wiki etiquette and how to encourage collaborative learning. As the reading and activity portion of the course comes to an end and the focus turns to your own research projects, I would just like to say that this doesn't mean that you can't blog about your own ideas. I'd be happy to try and give you my own take on your proposals, though it's probably best to think of me as another student commenting, rather than as a tutor since I won't be marking any of them! So even if you haven't been blogging throughout the course, now might be a good time to get some of those ideas out there for others to see.

Unfortunately, I have to echo some of Sonja's concerns about the lack of communication within the forums on H809, since discussions seems to have become less and less frequent as time has gone on. As such, there isn't a lot to report in terms of what's been happening on the forums, though there have been some interesting discussion about the difference between reviewing vs. consuming (in relation to the notion of peer review), the issue of trust and ethics when using CMC (in relation to the Bos. et al., 2002) and - from the sounds of it - some very legitimate concerns being raised about the research carried out by Davies and Graf (2005) on student grades and participation within an e-learning community. The latter discussions will be especially relevant for those finishing off their final TMA.

Right, I think I would like to end this post by urging students to respond to each others concerns (whether within forums or through blogs) as you are all part of a diverse community that can support each other through the trials and tribulations of online learning. Contributions don't always have to be profound - sometimes it's nice just to know someone else is out there going through what you are - but without any communication the whole experience can be quite frustrating and really wouldn't be taking advantage of all the potentially useful resources that are available. So please do get involved and I promise I'll be around till the end of the course to try and provide another perspective - if you want it!

Low budget games

2009-05-09T19:38:00.004+01:00

This is going to be a quick post, so I can bring your attention to the Professional Gamer's (or Costas from LostInGames) post on some smaller budget games he has been playing. I can thoroughly recommend "Today I die" which is free and essentially some form of interactive poetry, while Braid has been on my list of games to play for quite a while now and I'm almost embarrassed by how long it's taking me to get round to play it.

I do want to add a game to the list though - The Path from Tale of Tales. It's a horror game inspired by Little Red Riding Hood but instead of following the path to Grandma's house as instructed, you're encouraged to wander off into the woods - where all the interesting stuff is... It only costs $9.99 and can be downloaded from here. It's already reviews e.g. Leigh Alexander's review on Kotaku and for a much better description of it than I could give check out Fullbirght's take on it here. I think the main reason the game appeals to me because it's making people think about what games are and what they could be. Yes it challenges our normal game play assumptions but you can also see how something it could be used to prompt discussions about all sorts of issues, such as is it warning young girls to stay away from dangerous situations? Or do we all have our own "wolfs"? And even to what extent does it echo traditional fairy tales, including of course, Little Red Riding Hood? I also like the way the designers have worked around the game so you can find out a bit more about the girls as individuals e.g. Carmen has a blog here, while the rest can be found from the Path's own blog.

ThePath------StoryTrailer from Tale of Tales on Vimeo.

That said, and as much as I appreciate the different approach to designing a game-play experience, I haven't actually finished the game yet. Ok, so yes I'm a little busy at the moment, but when I have played it, I often get a little frustrated by how long it takes me to explore the woods. There is no map I can call up to see where I've been and where I haven't, expect for this weird unreliable dotted path that occasionally flashes up on the screen but disappears before I can get my bearings. There are some cryptic clues for your location in terms of finding the "wolf" but these aren't very helpful when I only want to do that after I've explored everything else. I know the game is supposed to be accessible to non-games players but how about people with poor spatial awareness?! I think I am just a little bit impatient when it comes to games, even when I know I should be appreciating the fact that I do actually feel lost in the woods when I play, and all the stunning graphics and music that make up the Path. But I have certain expectations of games and I guess I get frustrated when I'm not sure how to get from A to B, and at the thought that I could be missing out on something by not exploring everything. Is that enough to questions The Path's status as a game. I'm going to go with Leigh Alexander and Fullbright on this one - did I play it? Yes. Then it's a game. Just maybe not the sort I'm used to....

H809: End of block 2

2009-04-28T18:30:00.001+01:00

Well, everyone seems to have been busy with their second assignment so there's not been a massive amount of activity online for H809 the last couple of weeks. I did finally get around to reading the last few papers but have been pretty busy myself as I've been preparing for my upcoming probation report. And I'm probably going to be quite busy with this for a while, as it's essentially a test of whether I sound like I have a good enough grasp on what I want to do, why it's worth doing and how I'm going to do it, so I can prove I'm ready for my second year of PhD study. If it sounds straight forward, it's not as these are surprisingly difficult questions to answer but I'm sure that the whole process means I'm at least going to come up with a plan! But yes, I'm probably going to be a bit quiet over the next couple of weeks (at least until my report is due in on May 18th) though I will be keeping an eye on what's happening on the blogs at least.

Back to H809 though. In terms of the readings, Juliette has posted summaries and her own reflections for Weeks 8 and 9.Week 8 involved reading the Tolmie (2001) and Crook & Dymott (2005) papers to introduce students to different socio-cultural perspectives, while Week 9 looked at Activity theory (cultural-historical activity theory to be precise) and how it might be useful in practice via the Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy (1999) paper. As part of the activities for week 8, students were asked to consider tools for social bookmarking. Some of the suggestions include:

Diigo (used to be Furl) which allows you to highlight web pages and use post-its
Delicious as it helps store relevant site links, including YouTube clips, and it allows you to tag and see other tags of urls into bundles. At the time of writing, there seems to be 90 delicious tags for H809...
Citeulike which comes across as more academic, though apparently didn't seem particulalry intuitive
Zotz for the Zotero plugin on Firefox, though the problem here is not knowing enough people who use it

With respect to the readings for Week 8, the issues that came up where the fact that maybe learning theories don't need to be mutually exclusive, that the word "context" doesn't always mean the same thing (does gender really count as context? c.f. Tolmie paper) and how the theory adopted by the researchers informs how the goals of the research are assessed. A link was posted to a paper available on ACM by Rousou and colleagues (1999) - you will need to be logged in to access it though - to illustrate how theoretically driven approaches have been used to analyse learning.

For Week 9, one of the key things identified concerning Activity Theory (AT) was how it emphasises that all meaningful activity is related to the environment in which it occurs. This entails the study of activity in authentic situations, rather than within a lab for example. However, this means there will probably be factors that will not be taken into account during the research process, as it is impossible to control for everything, so researchers need to be aware of this when interpreting the findings. Juliette also pointed out that while the approach outlined by Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy to using AT to guide the design of learning environments might be quite useful, there might be problems applying to certain cases e.g. pure mathematics. Oh, and I really liked the findings the sentence that described AT as a "primarily descriptive tool rather than a prescriptive theory" (p. 68) because I think I said something along these lines in response to Juliette's posts and now I can back it up with a quote!

In terms of my own research, I can't say I found the last couple of weeks activities have been particularly inspiring. The main point I've taken from the readings and thinking about socio-cultural theories is the importance of context, and how you define it. The more I think about it, the stranger it seems to try and look at learning in isolation - so with respect to my own work, if I can't get access to "natural" settings where game play occurs, I would try and replicate those sort of conditions within a lab as much as possible. Plus, if I'm going to look at more than one player, it would be better to get them to play with (or against) friends or family members i.e. the people they would normally play with. Otherwise, I'm probably not going to be able to observe the sort of informal learning and engagement they would normally experience. I think the activity theory triangles help to visualise how the relationship between the subject and object is mediated by the tool(s) - and how one can affect the other and vice-versa. It's also useful for considering what constitutes context in terms of division of labour, community and rules. So, it might be helpful for thinking about what aspects to pay attention too. I'm not sure at this point if I'm going to be using AT for my own analysis but it's definitely helped me to consider the broader picture.

Tangential Learning

2009-04-14T16:22:00.006+01:00

You can also find the article the video blog is based on here.

"Tangential learning is not what you learn by being taught rather it's what you learn by being exposed to things in a context with which you're already engaged in". This seems to fit in with something I've been thinking about for a while, namely that games seem to engage people who like games, and if that's the case then we do need more ways to get people 'tangentially' involved in other things. I guess what I'd like to know is, what is it that motivates that 0.1% of Final Fantasy fans to look up what a sephiroth is? Are they just more motivated than the rest of the players? Why? And doesn't this seem a little, well, shallow, in terms of learning? I mean I've played a lot of Civilization in my time but unless I really get stuck, I tend to ignore the Civilopedia and when I have looked at it, I usually just feel like I'm just skimming the articles as quickly as possible so I can get back to playing. Much in the same way I skim wikipedia articles I look up after being curious about references in films or even songs. Yes, I'm motivated by curiosity to look things up but I'm just not sure how much of it sticks....

So there are two things I want to take from this. The first is to do with the fact there seems little distinction between 'surface' and 'deep' learning when it comes to learning from games (to borrow terms from research on approaches to study). And the second is that there appears to be two sides to motivation: getting people interested in the first place and then keeping them interested. Again, I'm not sure that's something much of the literature of gaming has taken into account, and it's looking increasingly likely that I'm going to make a point of this in my own work.

H809: Week 7 roundup

2009-04-08T21:26:00.004+01:00

Ok, I think I've always been about a week behind with the posts but it also looks like people on the course are trying to play catch up too, and I've been pretty busy with PhD work, so I am probably a bit more behind than usual. And yeah, I haven't caught up on the reading for weeks 8 and 9 either...

But anyway. Week 7 has been interesting, but before I go on to that I wanted to post a couple of interesting links that have popped up on the forums since last week. The first is to a blog post called "How Online Communities and Flawed Reasoning Sound a Death Knell for Qualitative Methods". The second is related to last weeks discussions on audiences, and is a link to a New Scientist article on how the media can distort research findings. There was a little more talk about audiences and ethics as well, with it being pointed out that often a researchers write for themselves in order to clarify and work through ideas (i.e. you are your own audience) and that the notion of "informed consent" can be a tricky one when dealing with minors and those whose first language isn't English.

As for week 7 though, the main theme (and for the rest of this block) is learning theories. The discussions in the forums and on the blogs definitely suggest there is a fair amount of confusion going on here in terms of just what constitutes of learning theory and which ones go under what headings. One of the tutors posted a link to a summary of learning theories by Helen Beetham that fits in closest to my own thinking, which I hope helps clarify some of the confusion.

As for the readings, there were two papers this week. The first was by Conole et al. (2004) called ‘Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design’. The paper attempted to provide e-learning practitioners with a framework to relate learning theory to practice. At least some of the debate in the forums related to how the criteria used to classify different learning theories (individual - social, reflection - non-reflection, information - experience) could be applied differently, and so perhaps the framework proposed would be better for enabling practitioners to see how their perceptions of different learning activities vary from each other. For a brief summary and interesting reflection on the paper see Juliette's post on Learning Theories (Part 2), where she also raises the question of just what is a learning theory exactly. Part of the weeks activities included trying to put the previous blocks (weeks 1 to 5) readings into the summary headings provided by Conole and colleagues such as behaviourism, constructivist. systems theory etc. Sonja had a go on her blog at Mapping papers onto theories. She also considered her own teaching in terms of learning theories.

The second paper by Jones and Preece (2006) is called ‘Online communities for teachers and lifelong learners: a framework for comparing similarities and identifying differences in communities of practice and communities of interest’. I think one of the most interesting points made in connection to this paper within the forums was about how the researchers developed a framework based on theory to inform their research but it still isn't clear from the paper alone how they came up with the factors included in the model. In relation to using theory to inform practice, I'd like to think these factors have come up as significant in previous research., especially as a lot of them (e.g. common ground, trust) are familiar from when I studied Human Computer Interaction at Bath. However, without having a copy of the previous publications referred to in front of me, it's difficult to know for sure. For an example of how the framework Jones and Preece present could prove useful for other research purposes, check out JM's post here. Juliette has also posted her reflections on the paper in Learning Theories (Part 3), including a consideration of the difference between theories and frameworks, echoing some of the discussions occurring in the forums.

Finally, all this talk about learning theories has gotten me thinking about how they relate to game-based learning. If I am going to use the categories used by Helen Beetham above, then I need to start with behaviourism. At the most basic level, I reckon that you could safely use a behaviourist perspective to discuss how players learn game controls - it's a simple case of pairing the right buttons (stimulus) with the right actions occurring in the game (response). As you move further into the game though, the constructivist learning principles start to come through - you are an active participant in this process, you have to try things out and regulate your performance while the game attempts to scaffold your activities by starting the game out easy and then making it progressively more difficult. If you are playing with other people, co-located or otherwise, social constructivism kicks in as your peers help you out, and/or you start engaging in collaborative activities. Finally, maybe you now start to see yourself as a "gamer", so apart from playing the game, you start to engage in other activities around it - talking about it with friends and online, reading magazines/blogs, contributing to walkthroughs etc essentially participating in a community of practice - or what James Paul Gee is talking about when he talks about "semiotic domains" and "affinity groups" of players.

For a really interesting take on how video games embody different learning theories see Ian Bogost's "Persuasive games" chapter 8. He mentions the three perspectives I used in the previous paragraph but what I find most interesting is how he explains the media effects argument as a behaviourist perspective. The idea is that violence in game-play will be reinforced and thus more likely to occur in real life, implying a direct transfer between the two environments. I doubt that the real story is as simplistic as this - otherwise I really would have beaten up an awful lot of people up by now, and probably stolen a couple of cars - but I guess you could argue that this is essentially what simulations are trying to achieve: a realistic a mapping as possible between the virtual and the real so that behaviour learnt within the simulation will directly transfer to real world situations. And I could see how that could be useful for certain kinds of training, but I always thought this was a situated learning approach, where you are essentially simulating how you would behave in a community of practice. Now I'm thinking,that you would still be doing that but through a process of reinforcement... But if I don't agree with the media effect argument, how can I defend using this same approach for educational purposes? And is this really how we learn from video games? I do know I am interested in games based learning, not simulation based learning or even serious games (which often seem quite similar to simulations), as I think they can provide with a very different sort of learning experience but I need to do a bit more reading and thinking before I can verbalise that.... Hmm, now I'm confused. But it's late and I think that's enough for today so maybe I'll come back to it later.

H809: Week 6 update

2009-03-30T16:46:00.004+01:00

I had thought about combining this post with a week 7 entry, as it is a little overdue, but the forums have been a bit quiet so I thought I'd focus on week 6 and wait a little longer to give people a chance to discuss the relevant activities.

The theme of week 6 was audiences and ethics, and while there was no set reading to discuss, students were asked to listen to a podcast - which anyone can listen to from here (thanks to Juliette for posting the link). The podcast was discussion between James Aczel, Eileen Scanlon, Cindy Kerawalla, and Chris Jones about the impact of different audiences on the process of research and how it is reported. Discussions in the forums highlighted the importance of pitching proposals to funders in such a way as to justify the research planned (including a consideration of any ethical issues), the need to be cautious of distorting the findings by oversimplifying the message (e.g. when reporting to a non-technical audience), and how there can often be a tension between what the funders and the researchers want. The latter point is especially true of dissemination activities, as funders will often want publicity straight away, while researchers will tend to want to mull things over a bit and consider the implications. If anyone is interested, this link was posted in the forum cafe to a Guardian discussing the government's interest in "evidence based research". Another point that came up, was how it is common to disseminate the same research findings to different audiences. This reminded of conversations I had when working as a research assistant on the Racing Academy project, where we talked about dissemination in terms of both academic audiences and practitioners, because we also wanted the findings to be useful to teachers who wanted to use game-based learning in practice. In general, the discussions within H809 seemed to suggest that thinking about your target audience should happen quite early on in the research process, because it helps you address the issue who is likely to benefit from your research. This doesn't mean that you should tell funders or other audiences what they expect, but by considering what they might find most useful from the start, you won't have carried out a piece of research that no one wants to hear about! Meanwhile, Juliette and Sonja have both used their blogs to consider how the issues of audiences affect their own research.

In terms of ethics, a lot of the forum discussions focused on the ethics of carrying out research online. Part of this was about the "racial ravine" e.g. only 5% of Internet users are African-American and so a researcher has a duty to note that results may be influenced by inequalities in power relations (be they due to race, class, gender, sexuality etc) or cultural issues. Other issues raised were how to go about getting informed consent from participants (see Juliette's post on ethics for some examples of consent forms and information sheets) and how you can know whether someone online is who they say they are. Linked to the latter point was a suggestion that the Exploring online research methods website might be a little out of date, as there is little consideration of Web 2.0 technologies in terms of ethics. An article was also linked to about the failure of Captcha systems (which I seem to have to deal with everytime I buy gig tickets or post a blog comment) to distinguish between computers and humans. Students have also begun to think about how to address ethics in their own research by posting case studies to the wiki (which you can access here if you are logged into the course website) including JM who has posted her case study online. Finally, there was also some talk about the difficulty of maintaining the anonymity of participants. Changing someone's name is not always enough, as they can be identified by other information. For example, it was pointed out in the forums that while Hiltz and Meinke (1989) did not refer to participants by their real names, they did make a potential breach of privacy by informing us that not only did the Upsala college's ice hockey team take part in the project but also hat some of them failed to show up on-line on a regular basis. It is worth noting however, that even if care is taken to anonymise identifiable information about participants, they may still find it somewhat uncomfortable to read about how their behaviour is interpreted by the researcher(s). One way to avoid this is to make sure your participants get to read your interpretations before you publish them, but this also runs the risk of them withdrawing their consent during the final stages of your research...

As usual, I've been trying to think about my own take on the topics being addressed in H809. In terms of audiences, I think I'm probably focusing on an academic audience at the moment as I'm not looking at anything that directly relates to educational practice just yet. However, studying games and learning means there are a variety of academic audiences I can address as I seem to be some sort of psychology, computer science, education type crossroads which I can also talk about in terms of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) user experience evaluation. I think this will be especially obvious when it comes to writing up my findings, and is something I have already become aware by submitting papers to different types of conferences. In terms of ethics, I don't think I'm going to have any major problems as it looks like I'm going to be using adults (keep in mind that when children are being used in research projects, there will be even more ethical issues to consider and processes to complete such as a Criminal Records Bureau check), and won't be asking them to do anything that could cause them serious harm. That said, if I do end up using these gaming vests, there may be some potential for physical injury that I will need to take into account and justify my reasons for wanting to look into. I should also say that even though I didn't need to get ethical approval for the studies I carried out last year during my masters, filling in the OU ethics proforma was still quite a useful exercise as if helped set out what I intended to and made me think about all sorts of issues that need to be considered if you want to carry out an ethically sound piece of research that your particpants won't regret taking part in.

H809: End of block 1

2009-03-16T22:27:00.002Z

This is just a quick post to wrap up the last of block 1 so we can all start afresh for the next part of the course.

I can imagine that everyone has been very busy getting the first assignment in (due today) so things have been a little quieter. In week four, there was some discussion about referencing tools and bibliographic software. It's something I have to keep reminding myself to do - keep track of what I'm reading and where to find it - but I have to admit I don't always stay on top of. But, once you get to grips with the tool you are using, it's one of those things that will actually save you time in the long run and well worth it. The main tools that have come up in the discussions include Refworks, Endnote and Zotero (which is the one I actually use). I did have a go at Endnote but Zotero just seems easier - I love the fact I can add references just straight from my browser, though you do need to be using Firefox to do so). Plus, if you use it in combination with something like Dropbox (suggested in one of the forums) you don't have to worry about only having access to it on one PC. Oh, and Zotero is also free, unlike the other two. In general, while using any of this kind of software does have a bit of a learning curve, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages since they allow you to keep a record of what you've been reading, attach notes about this, create bibliographies in specific styles and avoid having to repeatedly search for the same document. Another link posted on the forum is to a review paper on blended learning, which shows how powerful things like using the keyword function can be (see appendix 1).

The last paper to be read in Block one was "Learning by Collaborating: Convergent Conceptual Change" by Jeremy Roschelle (1992). Unfortunately there wasn't a whole lot of discussion going on about this one, but it is rather heavy going and in combination with the upcoming TMA1, I suspect people had less time to get into it. Mike Protts did post his own reflections on the paper though, and relates them to "extreme programming". One of my supervisors gave me the paper to read last year, and I remember thinking at the time that it was an incredibly detailed account of a single case. While this obviously imposes limit on the generalisabilty of the claims made, the claims are often supported by referencing other studies, and the paper does provide a really interesting account of the processes that occur when trying to come to a shared understanding about scientific concepts - which are notoriously difficult to get right (see this link from the forums about how it can all go very wrong). I liked how the author discussed the findings in terms of theories of learning including constructivism and situated action. If pairs are learning through convergent conceptual change then it illustrates that collaborative learning can occur without the need for asymmetrical pairs (Vygotsky) and/or without cognitive conflict (Piaget) in order for the participants to achieve mutual understanding. By referring to situated action as well, there is a further emphasis on the context within which the interactions take place, because the environment is seen as an integral part of our cognitive processes. The reference also reminded of when I did my Human Communication and Computing MSc at the University of Bath, where we did an awful lot of talking about how technology can be used to support the process of achieving common ground during collaborative activities.

How does this relate to my current research? I'm not really sure it does to be honest, as even though I may be using a case-study approach I'm not sure I want one this detailed! While learning through collaborating is something I definitely want to keep in mind, I'm not focusing on formal learning of scientific concepts and I'm not sure I'd be comfortable enough to use a discourse analytic approach (in the form of conversational analysis) to analyse co-located game play interactions. But I guess it's an option! At the very least, it's given me something to think about in terms of methods and theories that concern collaborative learning.

So that's it for block one. I hope everyone got their TMAs in ok and that you're all looking forward to block two. It starts this week with a focus on audiences (something Sonja Tack has already been thinking about) and ethics.

User-generated content

2009-03-09T20:26:00.000Z

So, what is user generated content then? I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a while now I think I first mentioned it when I was writing about Spore. In relation to games, it means you not only get to play them but you get to have some input into the game, by designing your own levels, for instance. This is beyond being able to customise your avatar in an RPG, as it influences the gameplay itself. The concept is quite similar to modding, which has been around for ages, with whole communities built around it e.g. for Counter-Strike (which is itself a mod of Half -Life). But though modding tools are sometimes made available for certain games, the process was usually quite technical. There has been a more recent move though, towards encouraging this sort of user-generated content by making it easier to do, with games like Little Big Planet (LBP) allowing players to design, build and share their own levels. The video below is an example of a player created LBP level, based on Takeshi's Castle:

The reason I'm interested in all this, is because I think it says a lot about different player motivations. There seems to be a certain type of player who is not content with the experience of playing but wants to create as well. Things is, I'm just not sure I'm one of them. And as much as stuff like Sporn and my mate creating a phallic shaped rocket ship in Little Big Planet can amuse me, it's just not what I want to be spending my time doing. Don't get me wrong, I know people can come up with some pretty impressive creations (as the video above illustrates) and I actually really enjoy games like SimCity where you get to build your own city. I'm just not that fussed about being able to design the landscape I'm going to build the city on. In Spore, I felt like I had to push myself through the creature design stages in order to get to the good bit (and I was so relieved when I realised I could just use the games own designs and other peoples for stuff like planes and buildings in the later stages). In Little Big Planet, I watched my sister sit through boring tutorials to get to grips with the level editor controls so she could start producing her own - as an artist I think this really appealed to her, though I have a suspicion she was more interested in creating a novel visual experience, rather than in thinking about it in terms of 'good' game design. It's all really fascinating from a research perspective - I can ask what drives these players to create, something Bartle's 4 types of gamer categories do not account for (I guess it would need some sort of creator/designer category), or I could ask what sort of other skills they develop while they are creating whatever they are creating. But on a personal level, I think just want to play already!

This also relates to how games can be used within education. Teachers can get their students to play games (be they designed to be explicitly educational or not) and try an integrate this into some part of the curriculum or they could get them to build their own games. This isn't that new an approach, Llyod Rieber and colleagues carried out Project KidDesigner back in the late 90s, and you can probably trace it's constructivist roots back to Seymour Papert and LOGO in the 70s. The basic idea is that kids will learn more effectively and acquire a wider range of skills if they are actively constructing something. And with the development of free software tools such as GameMaker, that make designing your own game a relatively simple matter, its become a lot more common than it used to be. If anyone is interested in this sort of thing, Jake Habgood carried out some relatively recent research that looked at the kinds of games children made in after school clubs, while his website contains a whole host of information about the resources out there that teachers and children can use.

I'm doubt a specific approach is better than another, as usual it will depend on the context and how well integrated the approach and context are (if anyone from H809 is reading this post, what I just said definitely relates to the Laurillard (1994) paper from Week 3!). I do find it interesting though that in terms of learning theories you can label this approach as constructivist, while you could talk about massively multi-player online games tends under some sort of communities of practice heading. Plus, it's made me think about what I want from my gaming experiences - and it seems that I don't want to actively engage in an online community, I just want to get on with some actual game play when the mood strikes. But is something I want because it requires less effort? What does that mean for the learning that results from the experience? Is it somehow shallower or less likely to transfer? Maybe I'm just impatient, but I have to admit I don't want to design parts of a game myself as it feels like a lot of work (and even though I am studying games, I still see playing them as a break from 'proper' work). And also, if I've just spent x amount of money on a game, I definitely want to be rewarded by an experience that has been designed for me to play. But that's just me, and I'm beginning to realise that there is a whole range of reasons why people play, and create, games. If we're ever going to be able to truly tap into the educational potential, of using games, I think we're going to have to recognise that and understand these motivations a whole lot better than we do now.

H809: Week Three reflections

2009-03-07T16:28:00.005Z

I had been meaning to get this post out earlier but have been busy this week trying to submit a conference paper. But it's all in now, so will have to wait and see how it goes.

Students were asked to use academic search engines such as Google Scholar and ISI Web of Science (which you need to access through the OU library page, under databases but remember to sign in first) to find papers and evaluate their impact by checking how many times the papers had been cited. It seems that while this turned out to be a rather time consuming task and that not everyone got the same results, most people concluded that the last two readings didn't seem to have a huge impact and some students started to question whether number of citations was the only way to measure impact - surely having to read them for the course means they have an impact, despite not adding to how many times they have been cited?

There were two readings for this week; the first of which was "How can learning technologies improve learning?" (Laurillard, 1994). The main point that came out of the discussions about this was how important it was to consider the relationship between the context in which learning takes place and the outcomes which result from this learning. It isn't enough to simply ask whether technology x improves learning, but under what conditions does technology x improve learning, something H809 tutor Rhona highlights in her post and links to how to approach TMA1. JM has also posted on how the paper relates to the use of wikis. Another issue that came out of the forums is that technology can sometimes be an obstacle to learning, as students could end up spending too much time getting to grips with the software and not enough on the content they are supposed to be learning. This is actually quite relevant to my topic of research, because there does seem to be a distinction between learning how to play a game i.e. in terms of controls, and other skills that develop as a result of continued play e.g. problem solving, decisions making etc. Another interesting point raised about the paper was how the arguments within it are still valid today with respect to newer technologies (e.g. Web 2.0, virtual worlds), with a link being posted to a New Scientist article about the impact of podcast lectures.

Less was said about the second paper "Knowledge, society and perspectives on learning technology" by Oliver and colleagues (2007). I suspect part of the reason for this is that it continued the epistemological debate over positivism and other social perspectives, and also because we are getting closer to the first assignment deadline. Juliette Culver has posted quite a nice summary of both the papers, and her thoughts on them - from this and the forums it seems students appreciated how the paper outlined different perspectives and gave actual examples of how these would influence research in practice. There was also the suggestion that while quantitative approaches might be good for examining whether an effect takes place, qualitative approaches are probably more useful for explaining why the effect occurs (or not). The discussions on frameworks also link to the final activities for this week concerning the podcast about the impact of ICTs in education (you will need to be signed in to access this link). The podcast seemed to get people thinking about how important it is to consider philosophical perspectives, in addition to the other questions suggested in Week 1, when reading about research, as the approach adopted is quite likely to affect the methods and conclusions of the paper.

I think that covers the main events of the last week or so. If anyone has anything to add though, do please let me know. I'd also be happy to receive any feedback about how useful (or not!) these posts are, what I should be including in them, and about the timing of them.

H809: Thoughts on week two

2009-02-25T17:40:00.006Z

Technically, I guess H809 is in week three, but it seems to make sense to post about the previous works activities (some of which are carrying on) rather than on trying to provide some sort of 'this just happened' account. I thought it would also be worth sharing some wikipedia links that came up in the forums for anyone who was having trouble with the stats reported in last weeks paper - the first concerns F-ratios, and the second ANOVAs. It might also be useful to look at the course wiki (sign in required) to see how some of the students have used it to integrate their different accounts of how technology has been used in education over the years. This activity will help prove useful further on in the course as we start to consider how to contextualise educational research. A link that might be useful for finding relevant articles was also posted in the cafe for Journals in the field of technology enhanced learning.

Week two's reading was ‘Using computer-based text analysis to integrate qualitative and quantitative methods in research on collaborative learning’ (Wegerif & Mercer, 1997). Juliette has a nice summary and some reflections on it here. Some interesting things that have come out of the forum discussions so far include the distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods in terms of their level of abstraction, the strengths and weaknesses of different methods of both collection and analyses e.g. the fact that textual analysis of speech will miss out on non-verbal communication and about how adequate a control group comparison was (not very, it would seem in this case). On a personal level, I think I enjoyed reading this paper more than last week's one, and I especially liked the introduction section for providing a kind of pros and cons to quantitative and qualitative research. The promised solution to the divide between the two sounded promising but as the students discussions have indicated there are some issues about the control group used (where they subject to the same analyses or not) and about whether the computer-based textual analyses carried out really does address all the issues it set out to do.

I think the most interesting aspect of this paper is that it has got everyone talking about quantitative and qualitative methods, with students considering issues such as how different is positivism to evidence-based practice? The debate over quantitative vs. qualitative is a long one and unfortunately not an easy one to jump into. When I was doing the MRes last year, I found it helpful to think about how these approaches differ on an epistemological basis. Essentially, positivists view research as a way to uncover what is already there while constructivists argue that reality is socially constructed, and so "research findings are created rather than discovered" (Badley, 2002). One of this weeks references, Richard Pring's article "The false dualism of educational research" (the link is accessible only if you're signed into OU StudentHome), provides another interesting insight into the debate. The paper provides a really useful outline of the quantitative and qualitative approaches, especially in terms of their philosophical basis, but ultimately argues that this does not have to be an either/or issue. Instead, the author concludes that "the qualitative investigation can clear the ground for the quantitative--and the quantitative be suggestive of differences to be explored in a more interpretive mode" (p. 259; Pring, 2000). This doesn't mean that a researcher should always use both, but that she or he needs to consider methods in terms of what is most appropriate to address the research questions. There is a lot to get your head around in Pring paper, but it is well worth a read as it provides a really interesting account of the debate, and an alternative option. In addition, it was suggested in the forums that next weeks reading by Oliver et al. (2007) also helps to clarify some of these perspectives (specifically positivism and constructivism), though I haven't read this yet.

The reason all this is important from a research perspective is that no matter what area it is you are focusing on, once you've figured out a research question/problem, you're going to have to think about methods. And when you think about methods, you have to be able to defend the choices you make and this means being able to talk about what you rejected and why as well. At the moment it looks like I'm going to be adopting a case-study based approach because I'm not looking to prove a hypothesis, but to explore certain processes, and because I want an in depth account of these process. So I have to sacrifice breadth for depth in terms of my results. It looks then like I will be taking a more qualitative approach since I will be using observation and interviews. However, I have also been thinking about getting some more "objective" data, such as physiological measures e.g. galvanic skin responses. The idea here is to gather a variety of measures to explore an phenomenon in depth, which may eventually lead to a framework of some sort, which could then be tested for it's generalisability. As for whether I think reality is socially constructed or not? I think I've tried to avoid answering that in the past but I guess I do agree, up to a point. I'm going to go with Pring on this one, and say I think I agree that our interpretations of reality are constrained by it's own features, so we can still say that some constructions are more likely than others. Otherwise, a lot of research might seem somewhat futile and I'd be out of a job!

H809: Week one roundup and reading reflections

2009-02-16T16:08:00.007Z

Well it's been just over a week and things have definitely got going with H809. Students have been busy introducing themselves, and it seems there is quite a range of people on the course, with a variety of backgrounds and expertise (as was last year's group). There's also been a certain amount of becoming familiar with the VLE, I know I'm still getting used to the forums but I am starting to feel less confused about where everything is, and less overwhelmed by the number of posts! There are even a few blogs popping up - I've listed the public ones under H809 on the left hand side of this page, though there are also a couple that are just open to OU users. Not much is happening on these just yet but there have been a few posts e.g. Juliette Culver introducing her research background and her thoughts on educational research, and Mike Protts reflecting on the first course reading. Hopefully, we'll see a few more starting up and some further discussion as the course progresses. It does seem that some people are further ahead than others in their work, such as H809-jm thinking about a for technologies in education, but it is worth pointing out that one of the advantages of doing an online course is that you can go through the materials at your own pace so it's best not to use other people's progress as a marker for your own. Btw, in case anyone missed it, a glossary for key terms has been set up within the course wiki (if you are signed into the OU website, you can access this here).

In terms of the first paper,"Teaching sociology in a virtual classroom" (Hiltz & Meinke, 1989), most of the tutor groups have been getting on with the activities and sharing their thoughts and opinions about it. I think one of the first things that people noticed about the paper was the date that it was written - I mean we're talking pre-internet (something I have real trouble imagining as I've never had to do any academic work without it) so it's important to try and put this in context as there wouldn't have been much CMC related literature around at the time. However, the novelty value of the Virtual Classroom (VC) didn't really seem to be something the researchers considered but it is something I really should think about in relation to my own research, especially when dealing with novel game-play interaction techniques.

Some of the other things that seemed to come up in forum conversations more than once were the fact the study tried to cover an awful lot of ground, the colleges that took part in the study were very different (as were the modes of delivery) and that the institutions attitude towards having to use the virtual classroom was not always favourable. The latter point was quite interesting to me, as it reminded me of my work at the University of Bath where I was a research assistant on the Racing Academy project and one of the things we had to evaluate was the organisational impact of implementing the use of the game within different HE and FE institutions. We ended up using Activity Theory (I think this is coming up later on in H809 anyway) as a way of describing all the factors that seemed to have an impact, and I'm sure we would have missed some of the most interesting findings if we hadn't tried to take organisational issues into account. In the forum discussions, it was pointed out that while Hiltz & Meinke (1989) mention the fact that there was resistance to the use of the Virtual Classroom, we have no idea how the students were affected by this, or even why it occurred in the first place. I guess that to me at least, these seem like questions worth asking. It was also good to see how everyone is starting to consider the methods being used, and coming to terms with the distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods, something that I think the next reading will place more emphasis on.

My own research is beginning to take shape at the moment, and there are certain key words circling round my head as I try and formulate my research question. One of these terms is engagement, and I couldn't help pay attention when Hiltz and Meinke began to talk about interest and involvement. You see one of the key reasons for the academic interest in digital games is that they are seen to be engaging so researchers want to know how we can harness this motivational power (p. 4; Kirremuir & McFarlane, 2004). As such, I was especially interested in Hypothesis 2.4 which suggested the VC would be superior to traditional teaching in terms of "Increased level of interest in the subject matter, which may continue beyond the course" (p. 436; Hiltz & Menke, 1989). How were they going to evaluate this? Turns out through self-report questionnaires, and I'm not sure they even did ask about "beyond the course". So, the measure of interest was actually how interested the students thought they were, with no recognition of the possibility that the novelty of the VC might be a contributing factor. I guess I was hoping for something a bit more objective, though I'm not sure what exactly. In terms of methods, I know I won't be using some sort of pre-post test experimental design either as I will be focusing on much more informal learning. Still need to think about how I'm going to assess this though...

Going back to the paper, I think (and this is something else that kind of came up in the forums) the references to procrastination and self-discipline are a little bit worrying as they seemed to come across like students were being blamed for not being interested enough in the first place. If the VC is supposed to raise interest in the course, but not all students feel the same way, then surely it's not doing it's job (in this respect at least)? Big surprise, but the students who participated the most in the VC were the ones with the highest levels of reported interested i.e. the students who described the experience as "fun" (p. 440) were probably already highly motivated to begin with. The authors even go on to conclude that students who have problems with motivation, verbal skills, and/or access to computers are more likely to drop out of an online course - which suggests to me that the VC really doesn't increase "level of interest in the subject matter". I have a suspicion as well that when it comes to games, a similar thing is going on. I mean, it seems likely that the people who would get the most out of game-based learning are the ones who are already motivated to play games which seems quite obvious now that I've written it down...

Hiltz and Meinke also tie motivation to the concept of cognitive maturity - the authors claim that students who have attained a specific "level of cognitive maturity or writing skill" are actually predisposed "to active and highly readable engagement with ideas and new skills" (p. 434). I guess this is an attempt to explain why the VC does not appeal to everyone, which is fine, except that there is no consideration for how the situation might be improved, apart from cutting out the VC entirely from the academically weakest course. The notion of cognitive maturity reminded me a little of some reading I did last year on approaches to learning (see here for brief introduction) where much research has focused on how to promote deeper approaches to learning within education. So maybe that's why I was expecting something about how to improve the situation, rather than the conclusion that the VC is just not suitable for less academically able students. As for my own project (and for where I'm going with the link to games-playing) I think this has reinforced my thinking in terms of how important it is to take student characteristics (or game player expectations and long term motivations) into account if we are ever going to come up with a clear understanding of how motivation, involvement and learning interrelate.

Social gaming

2009-02-09T17:58:00.017Z

I had a couple of friends come round last weekend so we could have a go on a some games I'd been wanting to try out. The first one was World of Goo, which I already knew I was going to love as I'd already played the PC demo. At first we were looking for some sort of multi-player mode, but then realised that all you had to do was point another wiimote at the screen to join in the puzzle solving. World of Goo is seriously easy to pick up, and we enjoyed it pretty much from the start. It follows the usual approach of starting you off with relatively easy tasks which get grow more and more difficult the further you progress - achieving a nice balance between your developing skills and the challenges you have to face. I also really like how you gradually start to become more and more curious about the goo and what exactly is going on in the game world. Who is the mysterious Sign Painter who leaves cryptic clues around the place? What are goo balls used for? What's with the random giant frogs? And so on. While I quite like this sort of randomness, one of my friends did point out the self-referential humour employed by the game might get annoying after a while. It was quite interesting to try and solve each puzzle with someone else though, especially since the experience seemed to have much to do with who you are playing with! While it made sense to cooperate and establish some sort of strategy together i.e. "you do the bridge and I'll do the balloons" (see image below), there was also the occasional competitive moment of "stop stealing my goo balls!". We didn't try it with three wiimotes but I have a suspicion it would have been quite hard to break down the puzzles into different tasks and it would have just turned into who can solve the puzzle fastest!

In contrast, de Blob supports multi-player play with a party gaming mode. The game is essentially a single-player adventure where you have to bring colour back to Chroma City by acquiring paint and bumping into things. It's amusing enough but not very engaging in the long term to be honest - I think I'm more intrigued by World of Goo's Sign Painter than the de Blob story. I had hoped the party mode would be a bit more interesting, but it essentially consists of three mini-games (which you have to unlock by playing the story mode) where you can compete against another player (actually up to 4, but while I do have 4 wiimotes, I've only got two nunchucks). The image below shows the split screen for two-player mode. We played it for a bit and it was entertaining but to be honest there wasn't much there to keep us going for long. The party mode just ended up feeling like a bit of a simplistic add on thrown in to try and tap into the Wii's success as a party console. Which is fine, if you don't want to invest much effort into it, or if you're playing with people who don't have much gaming experience.

If you want something a bit meatier though, there is Little Big Planet on the PS3, which I would seriously encourage anyone to have a go on. I'm going to ignore the user-generated content side of things for the moment as I think I want to do a separate post on this later on, and focus on the going through the levels, which you have to do anyway to unlock materials to design your own levels. I have played it on my own, and while it's incredibly cute and you could spend ages customising your little sack person, I found it a lot more fun to play it with someone. I first tried it back home at Christmas with my sister, and it brought back memories of how it used to feel playing together on my Mega-drive as kids - a sort of nostalgic bonding experience! The game encourages you to play with someone else by providing challenges you can only solve with the help of another player. I didn't realise until I was helping out at the Digilab stall in the Learn About Fair on campus a couple of weeks ago that you can play with up to four players. This was quite cool in terms of getting as many people to try it as possible but did get a little complicated trying to keep multiple sack boys and girls on screen at once (if your character disappears off to one side for too long you end up losing a life).

So, I think two-player mode works best, but while the game starts out easy enough some of the later levels can be quite difficult! Or at least they require a level of coordination and timing from both players that isn't always easy to achieve. The fact that there are frequent save points throughout each level means reduces the consequences of falling off a cliff or into crocodile jaws, being burnt to death etc but you essentially get four chances at making it to the next checkpoint, and that's between the number of people playing. So if there are two of you, and one of you has died twice, and the other once, the pressure is on for the second player to make it to the next check point in one piece, otherwise you have to go back to the start of the level It's an interesting mechanic, but it can get a little frustrating when things don't go very well. Plus, I tend to want to rush into everything when presented with a new level (I'm going to blame this on growing up playing Sonic...) when perhaps a bit of patience would work better. I also think that while de Blob and possibly World of Goo could quickly be picked up by any player, and played quite happily by a single player, Little Big Planet requires a bit more investment from two people to really reach it's potential as an engaging platformer. At the end of the day, I guess what you choose what you want to play based on the energy you want to put in and the experience you want to have.

Blogging

2009-01-30T15:12:00.007Z

As a kind of introductory H809 post (though most of this will probably apply to anyone who is thinking about setting up there own blog), I wanted to talk about some of the blogging tools that are out there for people to use and what sort of questions you need to ask yourself when deciding what to use. I figured the easiest way to go about this was to try and compare some of the tools available so I'm going to talk about the OU blogging tool (available as part of the VLE), Blogger and Wordpress. Note: there is also wordpress.org, where you can download a bit of blogging software and need your own domain name to host your blog, but I'm going to be discussing Wordpress.com where they host your blog for you.

Obviously, I am most familiar with blogger, but I did have a play with the OU tool and a chat with another student at in IET, Anesa Hosein, about her experience with Wordpress.com. With respect to the OU blogging tool (you can find this via the StudentHome website, under the tools section) it is convenient and easy to access in terms of the course. The other main advantage with this tool is that you are able to choose whether to keep your blog completely private, only available to OU users, or completely public. On the downside though, it seems some people have experienced spamming problems, and there is a distinct lack of features available. Of course you can post entries, edit them, add tags, access the html editor, even embed photos and videos (though I didn't have much luck trying to post a youtube video when I was playing around with it). There is also an option to post links on the side and subscribe to RSS feeds, but in comparison to what's available with other tools, the choices seem a bit limited. Also, as far as I am aware, there is no search function for looking through your own blog.

In contrast, Blogger and Wordpress offer a range of widgets that you can add, plus a large number of templates for you to customise the look and feel of your blog. So you can add things like I've got on the sidebar - blogs I'm following, an archive of posts - and anything else from a Wikipedia search bar to a dodgeball game! One of the things I like about Blogger is how I am able to access it from my google account, and also how it automatically adds the blogs I'm following to google reader. However, if you want to keep track of how many people visit your blog and various other stats, you will need to use something like Google Analytics or StatCounter and insert a piece of code to keep track of this for you. In contrast, Wordpress keeps a record of a lot of the same information for you. Additionally, it also allows you to decide which of your posts are public or private, which turned out to be a deciding factor for Anesa. Oh, and I just found out that there is a Wordpress plugin for Zotero (thanks Katherine!) if you're thinking about how to integrate referencing tools to your blog.

At the end of the day, there is no one tool that is going to work for everyone. It's going to depend on what you want to use your blog for and what features you think are best going to support this use. If anyone has any comments about their own experiences or advice for others, I'd be interested to hear them.

BETT exhibition, SGI workshop and my own research

2009-01-22T11:40:00.009Z

There were a couple of things I went to last week that I thought were worth mentioning. One of them was BETT, which I went to with my supervisor James Aczel who has already blogged about it here. The picture on the right is me playing with Microsoft's surface, which was definitely pretty cool. So we saw a lot of cool bits of technology, but I think what I'd like to add to James' commentary was that we saw very little in terms of innovative gaming approaches.

There were a fair few simulations on offer, and a lot of interactive software but in very little in terms of actual games. There was a stall for Serious Games Interactive, who were promoting their Global conflict series where students take on the role of reporter in either Palestine or Latin America. I'd already heard about the company at ECGBL, when Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen did his keynote so it was nice to see they had a presence at the exhibition, albeit in a little stall in an upstairs corner. ConnectED had a stand with PSPs on it, but these mostly seemed to be used as portable recording devices more than anything else. We found out later though, that they are also being used as augmented reality viewers and while it will be interesting to see how this might be used in education, it's not exactly using the PSP as a gaming device either. Then we came across the Cyber Coach - Dance mat system. As far as I could figure out, this is essentially allows you to connect multiple dance mats to a single system, gives you access to virtual (i.e. taped) instructors and has thrown in a few extra games to get the kids moving. All for about £6000... I was told that most schools didn't buy dance mats for all the children, but that's ok because the ones who don't have them tend to try and copy the steps anyway, and also some places are making extra money by charging adults to use the system in the evening. Is it me or does this all seem a bit, well, gimmicky? I mean, apart from being able to connect several mats to one system (which the students don't seem to need anyway)... you seem to be paying for a set of really expensive aerobics videos. Perhaps I'm simplifying things a bit - there are several different types of classes you can access (Tai-Chi, Royal Marines training, Salsa to name a few), you can customise these clips, and if you buy more software you can create your own videos/classes etc. Who knows, maybe I would have liked P.E. more at school if we'd had a Cyber Coach. I mean it's got to beat running around a track right? And while I don't think it's particularly innovative, it's not like I have a better idea for how to use games to promote physical fitness. Still, I'm just not convinced this would be the best use of a school's budget.

I also went along to the Serious Games Institute (SGI) in Coventry for their Second Wednesday workshops, this one focusing on Education. Highlights include hearing about the Winning Game project in Scotland from Matt Seeney of Team Play Learning Dynamics, Martyn Ware from the Human League and Heaven 17, talk about Illustrious and their unique 3D Audioscape surround sound system, meeting people like Sara de Freitas, who is the Director of research at the SGI. It was quite an interesting experience and got me thinking. It seemed a lot of the people there were from industry, so had actually produced something (or were in the process of doing so), and wanted to know how to get funding, publicity etc. So there was less of an academic focus, and less on an interes in how this was all being evaluated. The emphasis was on getting these games, or supporting hardware, out there and in use. Which is great and entirely necessary in order to educate people about serious games and how they can be used but I guess that's not what I'm doing, and that's what it got me thinking about.

So what am I doing? Good question, and I'm not sure I have a suitable answer yet. I know that I want to look at commercial games, specifically the latest generation of console games as the initial question was to assess whether they can offer anything different in educational terms. I attempted to explore the link between engagement and learning during specific instances of play (through observation and interview) as part of my Master's and I think want to continue along similar lines. But I am looking at informal learning - i.e. what goes on as the player learns to progress through the game - not at what happens with games in formal educational environments. I have a feeling that the link between engagement and learning in games is taken for granted could do with further explanation. Maybe I'm not convinced a lot of serious games are as engaging as commercial games (even Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen seemed to recognise this at ECGBL) but is that because of how they are designed, or because of the context they are being used in? Perhaps just saying this game will help you learn reduces your desire to play it? Some games are obviously more engaging than others but how can you compare them, especially when it seems to depend on who's playing them and why? How can you even measure something like engagement anyway? After coming across Regan Mandryk's research, we've been considering using some sort of bio-sensors to measure stuff like heart rate and galvanic skin response to answer the last question but it might be quite a complex thing to do. So there is lot to be reading and thinking about, but at least it looks like I've got something to discuss at my next supervisor meeting!

Practice based research in educational technology (H809)

2009-01-19T19:05:00.009Z

In good news, I have managed to get myself some part-time work! I'm quite excited about it not just because it's a chance to gain some useful experience and earn some extra cash but I think the post is going to be a bit of an experiment in and of itself. I'm going to be helping out on a 20 week OU course called "Practice based research in educational technology" (H809), which ran for the first time last year. The course aims to help students locate, understand and evaluate empirical research within the area of technology enhanced learning in order to answer questions such as "How strong is the evidence for claims made about the use of ICT in edcuation?", and "How can we use theory to improve things?". It can be taken as part of a masters program or seen as a stepping stone to further study (e.g. PhD) and is aimed at teachers, lecturers, and education professional who have an interest how ICT is being used and evaluated within education. You can find out the details and register here, though be quick as there are only a couple of weeks before registration for 2009 ends.

What is it I'll be doing exactly? Well, I'm going to be a course blogger. Uh huh, I hear you say, and that means...? The H809 blog has a pretty good description of my main tasks and responsibilites, but the gist of it is that I will be keeping an eye on students' blogs (and elsewhere on the web), leaving comments and encouraging participation in order to coordinate the discussions and keep track of the main points that come up during the course. I'm also going to be thinking about how the course readings relate to my own research so I expect you will be seeing something about that here, as I will probably end up using my own blog to do so. The post is really quite an innovative idea which fits in very nicely with the course itself, so I think it's going to be really interesting to see how it develops. We're not sure exactly what to expect, but at the very least we might get some ideas about how to do it in future! If anyone has come across anything similar, I'd love to hear about it.

Spore (PC)

2009-01-07T13:44:00.008Z

It's time to talk about Spore. Designed by Will Wright (who gave us Sim City and The Sims) and produced by Maxis there has been a lot of hype surrounding this game, partly because it took so long to develop. In Spore, the player gets to follow and make choices about the evolution of their species through a series of phases: Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization and Space. Now I got the game back when it was released in September and got through the first four stages relatively quickly, but then I hit Space. I'm not even sure you can compare the Space phase to the previous ones because it is ridiculously huge. In the earlier phases, it is fun to watch your creation evolve, but it also feels like there is a lot of repetition going on e.g. in terms of how you interact with other creatures, plus I don't get why things like the camera controls seem to differ at each stage. But anyway, once you get through all that and unify your civilization, you discover space travel and the game is suddenly huge. Honestly, I've only had time to seriously play it over the holidays but it's only since reaching space that I really began to enjoy it. Maybe I'm just not that excited by creature creation (see pic below), or designing my own buildings and vehicles, and perhaps I just prefer being able to explore space and communicate with other races. But I think I can also blame the massive scope of the game for how long it's taken me to get into it - there is so much to learn and get a handle on, especially within the Space stage, I guess I felt like I didn't have the time to give it the attention it seemed to require.

The experience has also made me wonder about what my longer term motivators are for playing too. I mean, the game obviously requires quite an investment from players in terms of both time and energy, which doesn't pay off straight away, so why did I bother? It's reminding me a little of why I kept up with Portal - I think part of it in my case was because the hype, and later conversations with friends, made me want to know what all the fuss was about. I guess knowing about the various stages in advance also meant I kept wondering what would be next. I think the Space stage might be the game I wanted to play all along - but I do think it really is quite overwhelming when you're not convinced you have enough time to get the hang of it.

As much as I've enjoyed playing the Space stage though, I've not been entirely satisfied with my experience of playing Spore. There were a few little things - like having trouble keeping track of missions that were in different parts of the galaxy, getting confused by the wormhole numbers and having no way of noting within the game which wormhole would take me where etc. But what really annoyed were the Grox. SPOILERS AHEAD! (in case you wanted a warning...). After a playing while you encounter the alien race known as the Grox. As far as I can figure out, they're just not very nice. They attack your planets randomly for no apparent reason, and they have colonised hundreds if not thousands of planets in a belt around the seemingly mysterious centre of the universe (see pic below), so their space ships just shoot at you when you try and get through. I assume they've done this just to be annoying and to stop you from getting to centre. I realised pretty quick it would take forever to try and defeat the entire Grox race, and since my Dodos are quite a peaceful race anyway, war didn't seem like the best idea. But they are also ridiculously hard to make friends with and anytime you enter their space to even have a conversation they just don't stop shooting at you!! Frustrated, I turned to Spore Wiki for some advice. I decide I would just make a break for it - stock up with loads of energy and health packs and keep going till I reached the centre. Which I did, and it didn't take that long (though your ship moves a lot slower the closer it gets to the galactic core).

And what happened next? A strange yet amusing encounter with someone called Steve, 42 (in a nod to Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's guide), enlightenment (nothing specific, you are just told you have achieved this) and a gift - the Staff of Life. The staff sounded kinda cool but I didn't know what it was supposed to do, so I went back the wiki and was told it could terraform a planet to level 3 in just one go - but only up to 42 times (and so now I'm annoyed by the limitations imposed by the Hitchiker's refernce) . Meanwhile, I'm in the centre of the galaxy and the goddamn Grox are still shooting at me! So I used my get home in one jump ticket and quit the game. The way I see it, reaching the galactic core wasn't enough and there are now only two ways I feel I can achieve a sense of completition with this game - ally with the Grox (at the expense of making every other race hate me) or wipe the Grox out (which is going to take forever). So paradoxically, wanting to make friends with aliens everywhere has led me to think that I'm going have to resort to ethnic cleansing...

But my holidays are pretty much over, and it's back to the UK tomorrow so I'm just not sure I'm going to have the time and energy to keep playing. I'm just not sure the feeling I get from eradicting the galaxy of the Grox is going to be worth it. I'm not sure I ever expected an "ending", I knew Spore wasn't that kind of game, but I think I wanted something more like Civilization where you get a score or something. I mean, have I done well or not? I'm trying to remember if I felt a similar way when I used to play Sim City games? Have I just got less patient with games that demand more from me? And does it matter when I have deBlob, Sam and Max: Episode 1,World of Goo and Braid to play? I'm either more easily distracted these days or just have too many other games to play...

Overdue games update

2008-12-23T15:59:00.005Z

I'm on a break for the holidays so thought it was about time I wrote something about what I've been playing over the last couple of months. I've left Spore off this list as I've only recently gotten in to playing it again and want to post about it in more depth later on.

Since September, I've managed to complete two games. The first is episode two of the Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (PC version) developed by Hothead Games. You join Gabe and Tycho again on their quest to find the giant robot destroying New Arcadia (and which destroyed your house in the first episode). Basically, it was more of the same as the first episode but I'm not convinced it was quite as fun. At least in terms of the turn-based combat, I got more out of the mimed attacks and colourful clown blood spatter, than I did of beating up rich snobs and mental patients (cue ethical discussion here...). I did enjoy it though, because of the humour that comes with it and I think I quite like the episodic format - it doesn't take more than a few hours to complete. I also think I'm driven more to complete games like this by a desire to get to the end of the story than by a sense of challenge, as I'm not sure I want to go back and do it all over again in "insane mode". I mean, you'd have to promise something a lot more than the same thing again but a hell of a lot harder.

The second game I completed was Lost Winds, developed by Frontier Developments for the Wii. Available on WiiWare (as opposed to in shops) where you play Toku, a young boy who has to save his homeland from the elemental spirit Balasaar with the help of the Wind spirit Enril. You control his movements with the nun-chuck but also use the Wiimote to control the wind in order to help Toku jump higher and further. Apparently a second player can use an additional Wiimote to help Toku jump further but not higher (similar to the co-op mode in Super Mario Galaxy) but I haven't tried it. I really enjoyed Lost Winds, again because I could complete it in a few hours (as opposed to weeks) and also because it is one of the few games I've come across that actually integrates how you use the Wiimote into the story and gameplay. It's also easy to pick up and very pretty. It might be a little too short (I think it might be best to think of it as an episodic game, as a sequel seems to be in the works) and it could definitely have benefited from a map, or some sort of spatial representation of where you were and where you could go, since I seemed to spend a fair bit of time retracing my steps. If you have a Wii though, I would definitely recommend downloading it and it is only 1000 points (only £7).

I've also been playing a point-and-click adventure game called A Vampyre Story about an opera singing vampire named Mona who was kidnapped and turned into a vampire by the rather pathetic Shrowdy von Kieffer and is now trying to escape back to Paris. Developed by Crimson Cow I had high hopes for this as I'm a big fan of the genre and while it looks pretty, I'm finding the characters a little annoying, especially Mona's sidekick Froderick the bat, and the dialogue you have to sit through can be a little tedious (and just isn't that funny). I'm not sure the interface works that well either and in general I'm just not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I think it might go on the back burner for a bit while I play Spore...

Lastly, there is World of Goo developed by independent games studio 2D-Boy. I played the PC demo a while back but have been waiting for it to be released on WiiWare in Europe - which should be soon - to see what it's like on the Wii. I absolutely loved this game. Described as a puzzle/construction game by it's developers, the player controls balls of goo which you can attach in different ways to form bridges and structures so the remaining goo can exit the pipe (a bit like Lemmings). It's not only easy to learn, but also clever and engaging. But if I have to wait too much longer I think I'll end up with the PC version.

Ok, think that's it for now at least!

Physics games

2008-12-11T17:02:00.004Z

Ok, so this isn't the 'games I've been playing' roundup I've been meaning to do but I've got a rotten cold at the moment and so that's going to wait until my head is a little less foggy.

But a friend of mine did send me a link today for a pretty cool game that I thought was worth sharing:

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo

In addition to Echochrome and World of Goo there does seem to be a fair few simple yet elegant physics types games out there at the moment. They seem to engage people very much in a problem solving way i.e. on a tactical and spatial level and with less emphasis on have to hit the right buttons at precisely the right time. I guess, along with my masters project and the reading I've been doing, I've been thinking a lot about the different ways in which games engage and how these can be related to learning. The question "how can digital games support learning?" now seems ridiculously vague. It would be better to consider how specific types of games (and the way they involve players) result in specific forms of learning before even beginning to consider how best to use digital games within formal educational environments.

My thoughts on alternate reality gaming

2008-11-17T15:43:00.011Z

Lately, I've been doing a bit of thinking about Alternate Reality games. I was introduced to them last year but in the last few months I've heard about them at a conference (see previous entry for thoughts on ECGBL), watched two very different ones unfold, and been along to the Sandpit during the London Games festival. I've also been lucky enough to have had conversations about them with Justin Pickard and Juliette Culver, who have been involved with Superstruct and Operation Sleeper Cell respectively.

Now Superstruct is similar to World Without Oil (and both are projects that Jane McGonigal has been helped create and run) in that it involves imagining yourself in an alternate reality crises - in this case it is 2019 and the combination of five different superthreats mean the end of the world as we know it by 2042. Players are encouraged to write their own stories about their experiences in this possible future, and to discuss possible superstruct solutions with each other in order to extend the human races survival horizon. Operation Sleeper Cell is a bit different, as it is a spy-themed game that requires players to solve a series of puzzles with the ultimate aim of helping to raise money for Cancer Research UK (click here to donate money or sponsor a player). Meanwhile, the Sandpit describes itself as "pervasive gaming night" since you actually need to show up and play in the same physical location as other people, while the games themselves ranged from competitive storytelling in the Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen to chasing "Mr. Smith" around the streets of Soho.

I'm going to talk a bit about my reactions to these different types of games but first I want to point out that the common theme running through seems to be that they attempt to blur the lines between reality and fiction. Now this sounds kind of cool, but I think it also raises some interesting ethical points. First off, there is the issue of turning a crises into a game - maybe it's only fun if you haven't lived through something similar - which came up at ECGBL. Then there is the "this is not a game" tag, which can lead to feeling "A bit thick". Michael Abbott thought he was helping out a legtimate games blogger, but turns out she's a character from an ARG. I've been talking to Justin about this, and we seemed to agree that just because pixelvixen707 turned out to be a fictional character doesn't mean the exchanges that occurred were any less valuable. I mean, I doubt whatever she said in terms of games criticism is any more or less valid than anything else on the web, assuming the writers have done their homework. But what we didn't agree on was whether we would feel betrayed if we had been on the receiving end of such a stunt. Justin reckons that what he would have gained from the interaction would end up counterbalancing any sense of betrayal he might feel, but I'm not so sure. I mean, I see how ARGs want you to question the divide fiction and reality, and how in order to do so they need to "plant" characters in real world forums but would it have been so hard to let Abbott in on the secret first? Would that mean having to let everyone in on it? How much do people gain from this sort of "fake authenticity" (thanks to Justin for coining the phrase) in terms of player experience and how much do they have to lose from it in terms of real world experience? Unfortunately, while it might make the game more intriguing, I have a feeling that Abbott is going to be a little more cautious the next time he is approached by a blogger who is just starting out and may be less likely to give them the time and energy he would have done othwerwise.

So what about the ARGs I've been paying a bit more attention too? Well while the games I outlined earlier are all rather different but they all contain an element of blurring the line between reality and fiction. In Superstruct's case, by using the internet as a platform, player's create their own narratives to fit in with the scenario of the game. Now while I am capable of stringing sentences together, I haven't attempted any form of creative writing since I was in school so I'm not sure this appeals to me that much. I know it's about envisaging my own future but I'm not very good at that either, despite repeated attempts from my supervisor to get me to do so. I find it difficult to picture where I'll be in 10 years time, let alone to imagine the skills and knowledge I may have acquired by then, so it's no surprise that I've avoided completing my SEHI profile. Instead, I've been checking the updates, having a look at some of the discussions people have been having and thinking that it would actually feel a lot like work and less like fun for me to take part in Superstruct on a more active basis. And I guess I can't help thinking about whether any of these debates and ideas will make a serious difference in the real world.

I've been a bit rubbish with Operation Sleeper Cell as well. I've signed up and had a look round, even solved a couple of puzzles but I haven't really got going with it. I guess I prefer the way the game is puzzle based, but when I don't know how to solve one I tend to give up. It's not clear where I can go for help even though there are forums you can look at and ask questions on (whereas I guess I want a "hint" type button that I can go for right there and then). I suspect it would be a bit more fun to play the game in a group with some friends, and that would also help with the trickier puzzles too. What I'm less keen on are the missions where you have to reconstruct a bond theme/dress as a spy/make a cake and take photos to send to the Agency. I'm guessing this is where we get the blurring of reality and fiction? Maybe I'm just not all that creative, but again this seems like an awful lot of (not always relevant) work for someone who's favourite video game genre is the point and click adventure!

The Sandpit is quite different to these other two games in that it is really several games occuring in one evening, and does not require the internet as a platform. What is interesting in this case, is the way the games occur in public spaces with only the players knowing what is going on. I had a lot of fun here, it reminded me of what it felt like to play games as a kid playing in the neighbourhood (though Soho is a very different neighbourhood to the one I grew up in...). But it was obvious that other people were a bit confused about what a bunch of adults were doing running after a man in a mask and guarding vats of goo from people in different coloured bowler hats. One woman asked whether we had just been watching a fight as a group of players ran off down the street, while all of us would go quiet when the police walked by. So now we're back to the ethics of carrying out an activity that not everybody knows about.

I guess ARGs are still a developing medium and perhaps it's not always the correct term to apply, but there are some interesting issues emerging from these forms of gaming. In terms of education, it is clear there are ethical issues that need to be considered if you were going to try and adopt this sort of approach. I think it's also fair to say that this form of gaming does not necassarily appeal to everyone's tastes, so while it may be engaging and active, and get people to collaborate (or at least play together), some thought needs to be put into who would get the most of learning in this way. It would seem, as with digital games, there is a lot of potential here but a fair amount of work still needs to be done before the educational applications are clear. Despite being interested in them though, I don't think that ARGs are going to be the main focus on my PhD so the next post will see a return to a focus on video games and what I've been playing.

European Conference of Game Based Learning

2008-10-27T14:50:00.009Z

I was in Barcelona last week for ECGBL. This was my first proper conference and though I wasn't presenting it was pretty cool to be able to get a feel for what other people are doing in the area. In general, I enjoyed the whole thing as I got to hear from different perspectives and meet some interesting people along the way. But it was almost as people were a little too nice - there was little picking apart of ideas or applications, and I didn't hear any particularly difficult questions at the talks I went to. I'm not an advocate of being difficult just for the sake of it, but in line with Ben Sawyer's keynote where he talked about the need for constructive criticism and how the discipline needs to move on from arguments about fun and learning, it was like people were a bit too eager to pat each other on the back. I think I was expecting a little more debate but perhaps I wouldn't feel the same if I had been one of the ones presenting.

That doesn't mean there wasn't loads of interesting stuff that's given me plenty to think about. I was really pleased I got to hear Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen speak - he gave a really good overview of the research area and gave an example of one the serious games he's worked on as part of the Serious Games Interactive (Global Conflict: Latin America). One of the points he brought up was the fact that increasing the learning focus in serious games seems to decrease the motivational aspects. The other thing he made me think about was how the term "serious game" seems to be used as a synonym for "simulation". For instance, he said something along the lines of games being the "future for training" since they provide "immersive, realistic and meaningful environments". It's just that there seems to be a difference between playing a game where you are essentially training as a journalist and one where you are taking on the role of a criminal in Liberty City. I'm just not sure how to verbalise that difference or how important a distinction it is to make with respect to education. But I have a feeling the more realistic something is, the closer it is to a real life job, the less engaging it's going to be when presented as a game.

Other highlights include a review of theoretical models of player enjoyment by Liz Boyle (including arousal theory and Apter's theory of reversal which I need to look into) which made me think about the difference between sustaining motivation in the long and short term; Nathalie Charlier and Maria Saridaki talking about how teachers can be taught to use a digital-game based learning apporach; Andy Smith's presentation of how we might be able to develop the notion of a "respectful mind" through something like cultural exchange programs in foreign MMPORGs with host families; Gearoid O Suilleabhain talking about how we should consider that there are different types of transfer and we can improve on the ways of testing for it; Nicola Whitton discussing the ARGOSI project to develop an alternative form of induction through ARGs; and Jen Jensen making a distinction between imitation and simulation as a result of the different gaming experiences that new game controllers (e.g. guitar shaped peripherals) seem to provide.

But perhaps the talk that I remember the most in terms of making me think about things differently was by Natasha Boskic, a Serbian now working at the University of British Columbia in Canada. She was working with a team on examining World Without Oil (WWO; an ARG that ran for 32 days in 2007 which encouraged players to consider how they would deal with a future oil crises) to uncover noteworthy themes and issues from the artefacts produced by the players. However, once she began, people's comments and accounts from the game began to remind her of what she went through whilst living in war-torn Serbia in the early 1990s. In the conference paper, she describes dealing with the game as "unbearably traumatic" since "to me, WWO was neither a game or an alternate reality. It was my reality" (pg. 46; Boskic et al., 2008). The tag line "Play it before you live it" didn't exactly help matters and nor did the comments from players about how much "fun" they had playing it. Her experience raised some interesting questions about whether you can teach empathy and understanding about real world crises through play and whether it's even ethical to try and create games out of other peoples' disasters in the first place? Not that the presenter didn't recognise that there weren't good things about WWO (see Rusnak et. al., 2008; from the same conference) but the point was that designers and educators who want to use a game-based learning approach need to be mindful when doing so and sensitive to their potential audience.

So yes, plenty of things to think about while trying to figure out what I want to focus on in terms of my own research.

Portal (PS3)

2008-08-31T12:54:00.013+01:00

I finally finished Portal. It's a first person action/puzzle game, where an AI called GLaDOS challenges you to get through each of the test chambers through the use of a portal gun (which allows you to create a connection between two different locations in 3D space). Oh, and you are promised cake when you complete all the trials. I borrowed it ages ago from the library, and meant to complete a lot sooner but kept getting annoyed with certain puzzles and taking weeks off before trying them again. Now I’m well aware that a lot of people out there thought Portal was a piece of cake (pardon the pun…) and it only took them a day or something to get through the game. If anything, that’s an important part of why I just didn't give up on it entirely after the first time I got stuck – I wasn’t going to let this “easy” game beat me. But you see the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t solve the puzzles, it was that I had trouble putting my solutions in practice. I’ve never really played first-person shooters, I tend to panic when being shot at and I find them disorientating – like I never quite know where my feet are. So even though the game wasn’t about shooting, it was still about aiming and it turns out my aim sucks. And that’s a bit of a problem when you have to shoot holes in the ground while hurtling through the air and make sure you land in them. The result was that I had to keep trying what felt like the same thing again and again, till I eventually got it right. I went from getting so frustrated I gave up on the game for weeks to consulting walkthroughs to make sure I wasn’t wasting my time trying the wrong thing.

The whole experience reminded me of a quote I came across ages ago which defined madness as “doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results” (possibly by Albert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin). Games seem to stop being fun when they make you question your own sanity. And who wants to play something that makes you feel inept? This seems to fit in with Michael Abbott’s reasons for not being overly enthusiastic about Braid – frustration can really ruin whatever experience the designer intended you to have.

But why did I keep playing Portal? I think a major part of it is because I’d heard so much about the game and from friends who’d found it relatively easy and fun. Don’t get me wrong, I do think it’s a pretty clever game – I liked how it took a novel approach to the first person genre and the dark sense of humour that came with it. So maybe these things helped me to come back but I really think the main reason I persisted is that I wanted to be able to talk to people about the game without feeling like a failure for not having completed it. Tell you what though, when I finally got to the end, it felt pretty damn good. In that embarrassing punch the air with your fist and shout “Yes!!!” sort of way…

It’s been ages since my last entry because I’ve been pretty busy with my master’s dissertation (which isn’t quite finished yet). In my thesis, I’ve been using Gordon Calleja’s Digital Game Experience Model to talk about instances of play and learning, and I can’t help consider my whole experience with Portal in relation to it. The framework describes involvement along six different frames (affective, narrative, spatial, tactical, performative and shared) that the player engages in on both short and long term levels. Basically, during certain instances of game-play, I was having a lot of trouble actualising my strategies (tactical) which seriously reduced my sense of agency within the performative frame and subsequently decreased my affective involvement (in terms of enjoyment). When this happened I would give up but in the longer term I was motivated to come back by my desire to prove my competence to other players (shared) and, to a lesser extent, to get to the end of the game story (narrative). By looking at walkthroughs I was also engaging in the tactical and shared frames outside of the moment of game-play since I was checking my strategies and using an online resource created by the game playing community – as opposed to cheating ;)

Now these frames can be experienced at the same time, and to a greater or lesser extent at different points within the same game but when they have been internalised to the point where the player no longer has to pay conscious attention to them, it can result in an experience Calleja calls “incorporation”. This is defined as: “the subjective experience of inhabiting a virtual environment facilitated by the potential to act meaningfully within it while being present to others” (p. 219; Calleja, 2007). And that is what I experienced during the final level. After my initial rushed attempts, I was finally familiar enough with the spatial (the setting), tactical (I knew what I had to do) and performative (I could actually carry out what I wanted to do) frames while I was getting the affective (in terms of graphics and sound), narrative (in terms of the story progressing) and shared (in terms of GLaDOS’ reactions) feedback I needed to experience that deep sense of involvement that seems unique to video games. As Calleja rightfully points out, this is more than just feeling like physically “immersed” within the environment, it is also about feeling like your actions have meaningful consequences within an environment that responds to you. It’s a pretty powerful feeling, and that’s my excuse for punching the air and shouting “yes!!!” when it all worked out in the end.

Cyprus and violent video games

2008-07-02T17:33:00.005+01:00

Having grown up in Cyprus I wasn't too surprised to hear that there are no actual laws in place that regulate the selling of video games. So I did think it is a good thing when I read in the Cyprus mail that the government is planning on introducing some legislation to address this issue. However, when I read the sorts of things Tasos Mitsopoulos and Athena Kyriakidou were quoted as saying about games I couldn't help get that familiar sinking feeling I get when most politicians talk about video games. Because what they are talking about is the need to ban games like GTA, which apparently teach children how to steal cars (like it teaches you to hot wire them or something). They also refer to the sorts of games that they seem to think have been "scientifically proven" to link to the teenage rampages in America, such as at Virginia Tech. However, as GamePolitics.com rightly points out, this is not really the best example to use since the shooter, Seung Hui Cho, was 23 years old - so hardly an impressionable child who tried to "copy" what he saw in video games. GamePolitics.com also draws our attention to the fact that Cho did not even play violent video games.

Look, I don't deny that games have an affect on people. I wouldn't be interested their potential for education if I didn't think they could teach you something. But I don't agree that the link between video games and violence has been scientifically proven and I do think that most people know that how they behave in a game is not how they should behave when they put the controller down. The debate about this has been going on for years, and I have no intention of trying to resolve it here. If you want to know more I suggest you try and look at both sides of the argument - for an 'anti' stance check out C.A. Anderson's site; for a more balanced view try something like "Grand Theft Childhood" or even the UK government funded Byron Review. All I can ask is that if Cyprus is one of the few countries that has no restrictions on games and there is a definite causal link between the playing violent games and violence in the real world, then why are my memories of having a safe childhood and adolescence with lots of freedom not marred by any evidence of this? Could it be possible, even if there is some sort of link, that it might just be a tiny part of a much larger and complex set of problems? And maybe playing violent games is a symptom of these problems rather than a cause? Let's face it, most of the people who play the types of games that politicians seem worried about do not go on to commit violent acts, so something else must be going on with the people that do.

At the end of the day I do agree that games like Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto 4 are not for children so I have no problem with the idea that Cyprus should have some sort of legislation in place that prevents the selling of such titles to minors. But I am getting really fed up of politicians who talk about banning video games they haven't even played and talking about a subject they know little about. Further, while we're starting to see articles about the positive effects of gaming, something tells me it's going to be a while before I see anything like this coming from back home.

Writing in Games

2008-06-20T16:10:00.008+01:00

I was in London last week for NMK's Writing for Games Event and while the event was interesting in and of itself, it's also got me thinking about the relationship between narrative and game play. The panel was pretty cool, consisting of Katie Ellwood, (who worked on Getaway franchise), Steve Ince (who worked on the BAFTA nominated Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon), Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman (who were both involved in Perplex City, an ARG, with Adrian as designer and producer and Naomi as a writer) and it was fascinating to hear about their different experiences. It did seem like the event was aimed more at people who were looking to break into the games industry as writers, such as Justin who I sat next too and had quite an interesting chat with afterwards. While becoming a games writer is not something I've ever really considered, I do feel I came away with a better idea about the part writing plays in the game design process.

There were a couple of things that struck me. One, was that most of the panel seemed to fall into the roles they had as a result of meeting the right person at the right time. It seems there is no direct or obvious career path, which is possibly why many writers have a background in fiction writing or TV and film. Two, was that the design process seems to very much depend on the team you find yourself in and that there can be a fair bit of tension between game designers and game writers. It was suggested that if you can get the design team and writing team to agree you're probably on to a very good thing but it also sounded like this could be quite hard to do in practice... Especially when the writing is usually seen as secondary to the game.

This seems kind of similar to the idea that narrative can get in the way of the game play. I've been playing GTA4 a bit recently, which I think I enjoy less than I should because I get bored at all the driving around you have to do (and I guess because I'm just not very good good at all that driving). But as usual, I tended to skip over the bits of the story. Maybe I'm just impatient, but I wanted to do something, not have to listen to Roman complain about his debts or go on about his girlfriend Mallorie. What's good is that you can skip these bits, and still know what you're supposed to be doing. However, it just might be possible that I'm just not taking them seriously enough. I mean I wanted to see what the game was like, but it's huge and I don't want to get sucked into playing it so maybe I avoid the story to avoid any further involvement? There are still plenty of games though were you feel like the story is getting in the way of your game play e.g. Trauma Centre: Second Opinion's endless storyboarding and the rather long intro scenes of Prince of Persia: Rival Swords for instance.

Ideally, there should be no conflict between the game story and the game play. One should inform the other, and any cut scenes you have to watch should be integral to the game itself, and to be fair, I think most games do aim for this. Arguably, the writing gives the game a context that makes playing it a richer experience. But games aren't movies intended for a passive audience - they are supposed to be interactive and maybe that's why gamers seem to resent extended cut scenes. There have been rumours that the latest Metal Gear Solid has 90 minute cut scenes in it, and while this is an exaggeration, without the passion for and knowledge of the series that some players have, I find it hard to imagine I could interpret this sort of thing as anything other than an incredibly lenghty intrusion into my game playing.

Maybe it's because writers in the games industry are using ideas from areas such as film and theatre and these just don't work as well when the goal is an interactive experience. I would think that this could be where a lot of educational games fail - I mean it would seem that the most likely place to introduce learning content would be the include it in the narrative, but if gamers skip over these bits, it's unlikely to be a very effective strategy. I doubt games will ever be able to deliver much content but they have other strengths. After reading books by people like James Paul Gee and Ian Bogost, I'm starting to think that what games do well is to provide you with a set of experiences, and if these are meaningful experiences, then maybe that's where the potential for learning through games lies. I guess the next thing to ask is what exactly is a meaningful experience and how can (or do) digital games provide them?

A bit of a rant about controllers and peripherals

2008-06-06T13:56:00.010+01:00

Chris Plante posted an article called "Problematic Peripherals" about all the extra kit that seems to come along with games these days. He's got a point - where exactly are you supposed to find space to put it all? And what sort of place are you supposed to be living in to have space to play things like Wii Fit or god forbid, Rock Band?

For the Wii alone I seem to have collected two wimmotes and nunchucks, at least one plastic guitar (two if you count the one I've borrowed from the department), a Mario Kart steering wheel and four GameCube controllers (that I seem to have acquired on long term loan). The funny thing about Mario Kart is that I found the the steering wheel to be the most difficult choice of controller. Playing it with a group of friends the other week, it seemed like the more traditional GameCube controllers were easiest, though one us seemed quite happy using the Wiimote and nunchuck combination. Maybe it's because the older controllers are just the ones I've had more experience with, but it still seems a little odd that the option that appeared to be the most intuitive, wasn't in practice. I just don't get what the advantage was supposed to be, and considering it's essentially a bit of plastic you just stick the Wiimote in, I'm not going to be buying any extra ones for my friends.

You see, besides the issue of where you are supposed to store all this equipment, it's also worth asking how you are supposed to pay for all of it? Nintendo are really pushing their periperals - for the Wii, you can get a Sharp shooter, a Light Sword and tennis rackets to name but a few. With things like the Zapper that comes with Link's Crossbow training, it's not even clear whether you'll be able to use the peripheral for anything else. Further, it's a little confusing which controllers you can use with what games as there is also the Classic Controller and the option to download retro games through the Virtual Console.

As consumers, are we really expected to buy every add on we can get? I think what really annoys me about the whole thing is how much emphasis companies like Nintendo have placed recently on the social side of gaming but at the same time they only provide one set of controllers. Plus, it's not exactly cheap get the set of four (don't forget you need a Wiimote and a Nunchuck) that would allow you to take full advantage of multi-player gaming. I'm pretty sure the same is true of the PS3 and Xbox 360 as well. Anybody else remember the days when you could buy a Sega MegaDrive with two control pads?

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One (PC)

2008-05-26T14:26:00.011+01:00

Ok so I'm not sure if this counts as a seventh generation game as such, but it has only just been released and I did really enjoy playing it so I'm going to write about it.

Created by Mike 'Gabe' Krahulik and Jerry 'Tycho' Holkins from Penny Arcade, in conjunction with Hothead Games, On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness allows you to enter the 1920s world of New Arcadia. After a bit of a random intro sequence where your house is crushed by a giant robot, you get to join Tycho and Gabe as part of their Startling Detective agency in order to figure out just what is going on. Then you're off of on an adventure involving Tycho's niece Anne Claire (who has been recast from the comics as some sort of scientific/engineering genius), battling various hobos, robotic 'Fruit Fuckers', clowns, mime's and barber shop quartets with your trusty rake, exploring Desperation St, Hobo Alley and Pelican Bay on a quest that will ultimately involve destroying a god.

It's all a bit random and thoroughly enjoyable because of it. It reminded me of when I used to play Lucas Arts games like the Monkey Island series, and Grim Fandango, which is not surprising given Ron Gilbert's involvement in the project (he helped create the first two Monkey Island games). Partly this was due to the look and feel of it, but also because the game has a sense of humour. It's funny in that 'it makes you smile' kind of way because it treats you as someone who gets the joke. Maybe it helps to be familiar with the characters from the web-comic, or the tongue in cheek humour of Monkey Island but I'd like to think most people would appreciate this is not a serious adventure game. It seems that some of this will depend on whether you do get the in-jokes or not, which in turn depends on what knowledge you bring into the game in the first place. I wonder whether the role of humour has been examined with respect to games and learning? Is it really just another way of making things fun or does it have a more fundamental role to play?

Another familiar aspect of the game was it's player friendly design. It's very hard to die, but if you do the consequences are pretty much negligible. Plus, you can save whenever you like. The combat scenes may seem a little confusing at first, especially getting the hang of each character's special moves, but you quickly get used to the turn based combat and rolling of the 12 sided dice, and start to enjoy the amusing fight sequences that often ensue. Oh, and you can pick up various exploding items, power ups and downs during your travels that can aid you during a fight. Then there is the Detective Agency screen where you can examine case logs, check your inventory and look at the files which contain info on pretty much everyone in the game.

The language in the game - fighting Fruit Fucker robots and looking for somewhere to live in the Shithole - and it's M rating makes it clear has not been aimed at a young audience. There are also pools of blood in certain areas, and a subplot involving the selling of hobo meat to a charity worker (which sounds a lot darker than it is and the hobos attacked us first - honest!). However, it's not supposed to be a disturbing game, so you also get mime's fight moves like 'pretending to throw a grenade' and clown's blood that looks like paint, which means you get fight scenes that end up looking like an over enthusiastic round of paintball. The humour might be a little dark in places, but I guess I quite like that.

Most of the time you do feel like you are running around inside a 1920s comic book world of robots, the occult, while meeting some very odd individuals in the process. The look and feel of the Penny Arcade comics are especially preserved by the polished cut scenes. But there were a few glitches that need addressing. There were silly things, like the fact one of my eyebrows always appeared in front of my hair in the cut scenes. There were also more annoying things like needing to click on an object three times before my character would actually go to it. Then there was the most annoying thing ever - during the final battle, if you called the cat (T. Kemper from the comic) to perform a supporting character attack, the game crashes and you have to start the battle again. So I hope they figure this sort of stuff out by the next installment.

See the other thing about the On the Rain Slick, is that it is an episodic game. That means it's short. Short enough, and entertaining enough, for me to finish within a few days. There is something about this that appeals to me as it means the game is broken down into distinct yet manageable chunks which I stand a chance of completing. However, it will probably end up costing me more as I will have to buy and download the rest of the episodes from Greenhouse Studios. Worst of all though, I now have to wait four months for episode two.

Endless Ocean (Wii)

2008-04-29T18:33:00.012+01:00

I've recently had a look at Endless Ocean on the Wii, and it's proved to be an interesting change. First off, it manages to put you into some sort of trance like state by making you feel like you could actually be underwater (whilst somehow managing to keep dry). The graphics are obviously key to this experience (and perhaps playing it on a 32inch TV) but I think the music is quite important too. Tycho from Penny Arcade puts it well when he writes: "The rhythm of the scuba gear itself is sufficiently hypnotic, but they offer up musical selections in parallel: there is a warbling sea witch in this game whose voice can drown men. When we dive, I believe we dive in search of her." As you progress in the game, you can unlock further similar tracks but you can also play music of your own from an SD card you can plug into the Wii. It is probably best to find something more chilled out to swim around too though as the game is so relaxed it might be a bit disconcerting to have Arctic Monkeys or something in the background.

It's also different because I'm not sure what the goal is. You seem to get to dive and swim around and poke fish, a lot. I've also managed to become a freelance photographer, get hold of an underwater pen, and make a dolphin my diving partner, who I have (very originally) called Ecco. This might sound busy, but it's not really. It's all the less stressful because there is no competition, no an enemy to fight, no point system as such or and there's not even a time limit. Of course there is a story line - I've been hired as some sort of researcher/diving guide to work on a boat with this lady called Catherine who can't swim and seems to have some sort of issue with her father (I caught her making apologies to him while staring out to sea), but it doesn't seem very important. At the end of the day I can choose whether to take people on tours or not and I seem to be able to decide where I want to go, with a few hints from Catherine about where might be interesting. There are also hints of legends about caves and the like but at the end of the day I can just sit on the deck and watch the sea.

Admittedly all this relaxing gets a little boring so it is quite nice to go on dives. You can catalog all the sea creatures you find by following them aroun and you seem to be able to find stuff out quicker if you feed, poke or stroke them. That's one of the ways you seem to progress in the game, by discovering new species. The other indicators are: adding more information to existing species, exploring new areas on the map, and feedback concerning you guided dives. For my last diving tour I got an A, I think because I actually managed to find the fish the client wanted to see. But it's still all very relaxed. There is the occasional moment of frustration though when waving the Wiimote doesn't quite get your avatar to do what you were expecting it to do. Plus, I'm not sure whether I've forgotten the controls for looking more closely at something and picking up objects, or if there are just some things I have to wait to be unlocked before I can do so.

You'd think I might have learnt a bit more about different kinds of life underwater but I'm not sure I have. I don't really read the information I gather, and very little of it seems to stick. That said, I never knew there was such a thing as a False Killer Whale but apparently there is. In fact, the information you get is rather like skimming through an article in wikipedia and then forgetting all about it. I'm not sure about this poking and stroking fish thing either. I mean, is that really the best strategy to use when faced with a species you've never encountered before? Especially when it looks like something that might want to bite or poison you. It seems impossible to die in this game as you don't even seem to be able to run out of oxygen. Not that I want to die, but it seems odd there is no element of risk at all. Maybe it's just a result of playing other games, but I can't help expecting something bad to happen at some point.

I find it interesting that I care about things like the feedback I got from a dive, and how many creatures I've found, but that I don't really care about what I've actually found out about them. I also don't care about Catherine's relationship with her father (for all I know she blames him for never teaching her to swim). I do think the game engages me emotionally, but only when I'm actually diving. So when I'm swimming underwater, the music is playing and there are pretty fish and coral to look, it feels good. It's a nice change from trying to kill all the baddies and trying to improve your performance all the time. Though you can get a bit of a shock bumping into a particularly ugly fish, or something large like a manatee. I don't think that feeling of being immersed under water is the same as experiencing of flow though, mainly because the game seems to lack any real sense of challenge. So, I doubt I'm going to be playing much more of it as I'm just not sure what I'm getting out of it, and trying to discover every single species doesn't seem enough to keep me playing on the off chance that something else will happen.

An awful lot of gameplay and a few thoughts

2008-03-24T18:32:00.012Z

I've been playing quite of different games lately and have been struck by a couple of things. The first concerns the fact that I haven't actually gotten round to finishing any of them. Which links in quite nicely with Leigh Alexander's article on "Completion Anxiety Disoder" where she considers the reasons why people don't seem to end up completing many of the games they actually have. She covers lots of practical reasons like not having enough time, and games being too difficult/easy or not interesting enough and then ends up suggesting a further reason; that players sometimes just don't want the game to end. Now it's a pretty interesting article in itself, but when you think about it in terms of how this relates to the educational potential of games it raises a couple of interesting issues. I mean lets assume we're talking about good games here, the ones that do get the challenges right and manage to maintain our interest, she's still basically saying that even when the motivation to play is there, people don't actually want to finish what they started. This would mean an end to the game-play experience and so instead it appears better to just avoid playing. So, if we're thinking about games as learning environments, then doesn't that mean that those playing won't get the 'complete' learning experience? Maybe this is only an issue if you think about learning in terms of delivering content and achieving outcomes? Or maybe it's just an odd claim to make, especially when you think about comparing it to not finishing a book or a film. In those cases, the only times I don't are when I'm not enjoying the experience - if I really enjoy it then I usually end up reading/watching it again, rather than trying to avoid the ending all together.

The other thing I've been thinking about has to do with playing Guitar Hero III and how frustrated I got with it when trying to beat Slash in a guitar battle and I couldn't. It really pissed me off. Which didn't exaclty help me when trying to concentrate on getting the notes right, so after suppressing the somewhat rock star urge to smash the tv with the Les Paul controller, I turned if off. Don't get me wrong, I really did enjoy playing and still do - I think it's been a while since I've really felt that sort pure sensation of 'flow' - but only when I'm good at it. It made me think though about all the things I've been reading about learning and fun. I kind of realised that I'd forgotten that just because you enjoy learning something doesn't mean that it's easy. I suppose the point of the story is that I did go back and beat Slash, which felt good, and so I'm still playing it. But if I want to be really good at Guitar Hero, it looks like I might actually need to take the practice mode seriously (where you can practice the songs you unlock outside of career mode). I just can't help feeling that if I'm going to do that, then maybe I'd be better off picking up the rather dusty bass guitar I got a couple of years ago and practice on that instead so I can learn to actually play along to the all songs I've been enjoying in the game.

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Wii)

2008-03-10T14:08:00.012Z

I borrowed Lego Star Wars from Lovefilm a little while ago and have been really getting into it. I did have a slightly rocky start as it took me a little while to realise that the cantina I started in wasn't a proper level even though you could explore it and start fights with people. I eventually found the set of doors where you get to pick which part of the saga (i.e. episodes 1-6) you want to play. While not having a manual probably contributed to my initial confusion, it wasn't a problem in terms of the controls as I found it was very easy to pick up them up. One of my favourite discoveries was being able to use the z button to build stuff out of seemingly random bits of Lego, and finding out I could "use the force" on objects and characters with a blue glow around them. Plus, if your character has a sword you can swing the Wiimote to use it.

The initial appeal of the game I think for me was how it manages to combine two very familiar things in an entertaining way. Lego Star Wars looks good. I was walking past the Lego store in town the other day and I actually thougth about buying something. Plus, I know these films, especially the ones I watched as a kid, so I don't need to hear the dialogue to know what's going on in the story. It's far more enjoyable to see the Lego characters mumble and shrug while they act out classic scenes. Even better, you seem to get to be able to play all the characters at some point, unlocking more as you go on. While you can swap between a certain set in each level e.g. Obi Wan, Luke, C3PO and R2D2 in some of the earlier ones, once you've completed the challenges you can go back with any unlocked character and do the level again in free play mode. In fact, if you want to unlock hidden areas and collect everything it looks like you have to go through them all again. I wonder if this is enough incentive to do so?

That is one of the things that struck me about the game - it really feels like it's about collecting stuff. I mean of course there is the Star Wars plot and the associated challenges (rescue the girl, kill the baddies, save the world etc) but the game is really arranged around how much of what you collect and whether you have achieved "True Jedi" status on every level. I mean it was obvious from the start that you should collecting the large numbers of gold, silver and occasionaly blue studs - which are either lying around or you get from building/destroying/using the force on object. What is more interesting though is that I wanted to collect them, and collect them all if I could. I mean there are hundreds of these things, and when you destroy somethinng they fly out at you and you don't always have enough time to collect them all (which is a little annoying especially when they also spill over a ledge you can't jump down). At first I thought you needed them to buy things at the cantina. Then when I started episode one I noticed the bar at the top which started to fill up the more studs I collected. If you get enough you achieve "True Jedi" status. I still don't quite know what that means but you get a little tick at the end of the chapter if you achieve it. Td how many of the golden bricks, and mini-kits you have found and how many are left for you to discover. And I want them all, even though I'm not sure what happens if and when I manage to do so. Part of the incentive is that further aspects of the game will be unlocked in the process but I doubt that if I did manage to collect everything the outcome would be as exciting as I feel it should be. The main point though, is that the way the game has been designed means it's not just about getting to the end of each level, but it's also about exploring the entire game to unlock each section.

It's a little similar to playing Super Mario Galaxy and having the desire to collect all the star bits. I was talking to Will the other day and we agreed that we hate it when we're watching someone else play and they don't collect really obvious ones. I can't help thinking that this collecting aspect means Lego Star Wars comes across as more of platform game than an action adventure one. For example, in Zelda you do collect gems but the purpose of them is so you can buy other things that are useful to your adventures like better armour and weapons, or oil for your lantern. In contrast, in the Sonic and Mario games you collect gold (rings and coins respectively) but just to see how many you can get. Things like star bits, studs or gold coins aren't even power ups as such, at least not until you collect enough of them and get an extra life or something. Is that enough of an incentive to explain the drive to pick them all up? Something else seems to be going on here but I'm not sure what.

Why people play games

2008-01-31T14:33:00.003Z

I found this a little while ago:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6932785.stm

It struck me as interesting because it suggests that what is we find 'fun' about games is the learning process we engage in when we play them and the opportunities they give us to see the results of our efforts. The article implies that people actually enjoy learning; something that seems similar to what Papert is referring to in his introduction to Mindstorms when he talks about falling in love with gears. So, instead of thinking about games in terms of how we can 'make learning fun' by 'harnessing their motivational power' (c.f. Futurelab review), maybe we should be thinking about them as successful learning environments which can be compared to areas of education that aren't.