5 Lessons Professors Can Learn From Video Games -

Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Nice article.

via 5 Lessons Professors Can Learn From Video Games – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The author suggests we might be in the “third level” of video games inside the ivory tower, one where people are

recognizing that games are often not the best tools in an educational setting, but when they are, they should carefully balance substance and sport.

At that level, it’s possible to deconstruct video games, looking for takeaways that professors can try in their own teaching, whether or not they ever pick up a joystick or click “play.”

I have some comment son each of those parts:

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http://www.globalgamejam.org/

Live video can be found at http://www.globalgamejam.be/livewall/

The local Calgary site begins at about 4 PM today; others have started, of course, as the various time zones join up.

When I was writing my thesis I looked for examples of dissertations to get some ideas about how to formulate my own – you know general style, chapter organization, etc. It was suggested that I go to my school’s library and look at the theses that had been completed there in the last several years. It was a good idea. I did that. It didn’t help me even a little.

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Now, I’m a big fan of Serious Games, but I’m also quite sure that this is one of those cases where more is not necessarily better. What is important is balance. I suppose it may be difficult to make sure students have exposure to natural things too, given that they are in Manhattan (http://q2l.org/), but I am quite convinced that ultimately, a lack of connection with nature and living things will have far more negative consequences than spending too much time online.

I’m talking negative on an epic scale.

Here is the article:

New York Launches Public School Curriculum Based on Playing Games

Here’s a well-written explanation for why most of the media-effects studies really don’t tell us anything:

WHY VIDEO GAME RESEARCH IS FLAWED

By CHRIS LAVIGNE

Studies that spread the idea that video games are harmful to children are conducted by researchers whose knowledge about video games is embarrassingly poor.

May 25, 2009

Read the whole article here

SHEESH!

I get a lot of papers to review in Game Studies; Serious Games; Educational Games., etc.

I used to learn a lot from reading these papers.

Not anymore.

Not only is much of what I read “old news” (i.e. it’s been done or discussed and mostly published before), but FAR too many of the papers I read now don’t even cite the other works. What’s going on?

I am finding more and more submissions (journals, conferences, etc.) from authors who have not done a thorough lit review. Many papers I’ve read appear to come from authors who are relatively new to the field, did a quicky lit. search (1st 2 screens in google scholar, or for many of the Education papers I see, it looks as though they simply went to 2 or 3 education websites (AERA, AACE, AECT) and searched a subset of the journals there. This leaves people with a fairly restricted view of what’s been done and what is known.

What’s the problem? Do people not know how to perform a lit. review anymore? Do they not care? Are they naive enough to believe they’re the first ones who thought of this?

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There’s a big todo about EA’s DRM – and rightly so. It’s  no wonder Spore is being pirated at amazing rates. You know – many people would be willing to pay for it (and NOT try to steal it) if EA would only permit you to actually own what you bought.

The Penny Arcade provides a lovely analogy:

“Imagine, though, an unsuspecting bibliophile returning home with their copy of The True-Born Englishman
only to discover that once they’ve read it, the pages turn to ash. Or maybe they can read it and let a couple of friends borrow it, but that’s it. No more reads, thank you very much. What if they find that there is someone lurking outside their library window, watching them, making sure no one else catches a glance of page 32? Or, god forbid, they try to go and sell the book back?”

Be reasonable and you’ll find thefts go down.

Really, Will, I know you’re a reasonable man, can’t you do anything about this?

I’ve actually been pondering this since it first came out. I’m getting pretty tired of the “Games are bad for society” rhetoric. Why can’t people get past hating things and look at something that can actually make a difference, like *how*  are they useful; what are they good for; is there something we can do better with games than with other media?…  I’ve decided that rather than try and draft a careful response to this article, I’ll just give a somewhat emotional one. I’ve taken the liberty of re-printing large parts of the article; the link to the original is just below:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-565207/

Modern-technology-changing-way-brains-work-says-neuroscientist.html#StartComments

The original text is in green and my responses are in black italics just so there is no confusion about who said what.

The REAL brain drain: Modern technology – including violent video games – is changing the way our brains work, says neuroscientist

By SUSAN GREENFIELD – Last updated at 22:17pm on 9th May 2008

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Some years ago I was at a conference where Dmitri Williams was talking about the social history of videogames. He made reference to this song as a way of illustrating how the societal reaction to videogames isn’t really new. Since then I’ve thought about re-working (OK maybe perverting a little) the lyrics to match the current denunciation of our newest medium (with apologies and all due respect for the original composer Meredith Willson (1902-1984). For a dictionary of the original terminology, see: http://www.sewickley.org/~kcerny/LowerSchool/divisionmusical/TheMusicManDictionary.htm

Ya Got Trouble (original lyrics found here)

Read on to see my updated lyrics….

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does NOT necessarily cause violence, according to a new study: Grand Theft Childhood, by Lawrence Kutner & Cheryl B. Olson (more here: http://www.gamecouch.com/2008/02/interview-dr-cheryl-olson-co-author-of-grand-theft-childhood/)

In 2007, results from a breakthrough Harvard video game study found that children used video games to manage their feelings, the stereotype of the socially stunted gamer was a myth, and there was no obvious connection between violent games and youth crime.

Well, cool.

It’s so nice to see real evidence for something many of us who are researching games already thought was true.

OpenEducation.net did an in depth review of the topic of violent video games that included an interview with one of the authors of the book. They broke the topic out into three posts:

1. http://www.openeducation.net/2008/03/16/shoot-em-up-video-games-the-cause-of-greater-anti-social-behaviors-in-teens/
2. http://www.openeducation.net/2008/03/17/author-reveals-the-surprising-truth-about-violent-video-games/
3. http://www.openeducation.net/2008/03/18/experts-state-do-not-banish-instead-manage-violent-video-game-play/

What is a Game?

Games are classified in many different ways and even after going round and round repeatedly, we still can’t seem to agree on what a game actually is.

Here are a few examples:

Some examples of casual (or mini) games: (posted by Clark Aldrich on seriousgames May 20, 2007

> Tips on Tap: http://www.webcourseworks.com/tipsontap/
> Binary numbers: http://forums.cisco.com/CertCom/game/binary_game.swf
> Other Cisco games: http://www.medcalf.com/games/cisco_games/

“Tips on Tap” isn’t so much a game as a contest – here the object is to see how quickly you can click the right things in the right order. The addition of scores and time constraints seems to make this into a game. I tried it – un-doing an action is difficult and frustrating.

The “Binary Game” isn’t really a game at all, in my opinion. It is an exercise – in fact, it is a worksheet. True, there is a score, and the challenge is to see how fast you can solve the problems. It appears that the introduction of scores and time keeping allows this electronic worksheet to be viewed as a game.

The “Cisco Games”, while posing more complex (and possibly interesting) problems suffer from functional complexity as well. I did not find the gameplay intuitive. Of the three groups, I’d consider these the most game-like, although I am currently at a loss to explain exactly why. If we remove the time pressure what do we have left? In many cases, what we have left is a puzzle. If we remove the score-keeping, it appears to stop being a game.

Among the points highlighted in Clark’s recent article trashing serious games are that “…the research shows no instructional advantages of games over the other instructional approaches (such as lectures)…” and that “only poorly designed studies find learning benefits from games“.

And yet, we all know that listening to lectures is quite passive while doing something with what you are learning is much more active and leads to better retention. Learning by doing beats learning by listening. This came across slashdot yesterday: “‘Like humans, monkeys benefit enormously from being actively involved in learning instead of having information presented to them passively,’ said Nate Kornell, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in psychology and lead author of the study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Psychological Science. ‘The advantage of active learning appears to be a fundamental property of memory in humans and nonhumans alike.’” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070801161511.htm

I also found this bit interesting: “The findings were somewhat unintuitive, because passively using the hint appeared to enhance performance during the study phase of the experiment but had a deleterious effect on long-term learning,” Kornell said. Read the rest of this entry »

Clark, R. E. (2007). Learning from Serious Games? Arguments, Evidence, and Research Suggestions. EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, May-June 2007, 56-59.

Richard E. Clark says, “My goal in this column is to offer a brief view of the current state of the evidence for the educational benefit of games, discuss a few problems with existing studies, make some suggestions for the design of game studies, and suggest a possible application of games in order to invite a discussion about the design of future serious game research, evaluation, and implementation.”

For those who aren’t familiar with this person, R.E.Clark is the “nay” side of the famous Clark-Kozma debate. So, no surprize that this author would claim that games don’t make any difference. It is simply the same argument moved to a new medium. I wonder if Dr. Clark plays any games himself, or if he is forming his opinion based on, as Harlan Ellison would say, “idiot hearsay”.

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On Game Length

[started Dec. 4 2006] http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20061201/qotw_01.shtml Talks about the length of games.

This is of value to me because [I say] long games are ill-suited to school environments.
School learning comes in bite-sized chunks, single lessons; units that last a few weeks. Unless we begin to require dozens of hours in homework, there is no way for games to fit into formal school environments. It may be part of the reason why puzzle games predominate when it comes to school games. Their length is better suited to the environment than a game like Oblivion.

I think that many modern games are *not* suited for use in schools because of the time commitment required to play them vs. what we can get out of them in terms of meeting outcomes. That also means that the model provided by such games may not be especially useful for ed-games. A game that takes 100 hours to complete is just not going to work in school, whereas a 10-hour game might. Even if the 100-hour game were to match perfectly with a whole pile of general outcomes, it is still a huge time commitment. The amount of flexibility around the time commitment for any game is going to depend (at least in part) on what level of organization the ’schedule’ is set at. In other words, if the province sets the amount of time available for something we have almost no hope of affecting that; if it is done at the board level the chances are better but the case still has to be made that this change will be good for all schools in the district. However, if the decision is school-based we have the greatest chance of influence.

A typical encounter at a yet-to-be built massively multiplayer online school:

Suddenly, Amy realized that unless they all worked together, they wouldn’t get out alive. She wiggles the fuzzy slippers dangling from her swinging feet and glances out the window as if looking for an answer.

She had miscalculated, and now they didn’t have enough fuel left to make it to the landing strip. After several abbreviated (cryptic) messages back and forth, all five members of the crew agreed that this would be as good a time as any to test whether or not the wing modifications they introduced yesterday would have the desired effect. Penny was in charge of gathering weather data – they needed to plot a new flight path that would take advantage of the winds and updrafts in light of their wing mods to save fuel. Kevin’s job was to locate alternate landing sites – they had to coordinate closely to make sure they found a place that would not only allow them to touch down without too much damage to the landing gear, but also take advantage of the winds currents. Each time they found another possible site, Mick and Krista would run several simulated landings to see what their chances for success were. Amy asks her mom if lunch will be ready soon – all this excitement is making her hungry.

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