Theories of Games and Interaction for Design (12: 3 Responses)

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These are public postings of my writings for the first course of the Graduate Certificate Program in Serious Game Design and Research at Michigan State University.

Each week, we are required to post three responses/reactions to queries posted by other members of the class in the previous week. These are mine.

I have paraphrased the queries to preserve my classmates’ privacy.

Please note: these posts are not intended as any kind of commentary on or assessment of the course I’m taking, or its instructor, OR of Michigan State University or the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, or the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media. They are solely my thoughts and reactions that stem from the readings.

Feel free to comment, disagree, or what have you.

Week 12

These are the readings we had last week (Topics: Serious game implementation challenges):

  • Ritterfeld et al. (2009) Ch 14 Kafai, Y. B. (2009). Serious games for girls? Considering gender in learning with digital games. In U. Ritterfeld, M. Cody, & P. Vorderer (Eds.). (2009). Serious games: Mechanisms and effects (pp. 221-235). New York: Routledge.
  • Van Eck, R. (under review). Bringing ‘discipline’ to the study of games and learning. Research challenge. Information Design Journal.
    • Optional: Van Eck, R. (2006). Digital game-based learning: It’s not just the digital natives who are restless. EDUCAUSE Review, 41, 17-30.
    • Optional: Baranowski, T., Baranowski, J., Thompson, D. I., Buday, R., Jago, R., Griffith, M. J., et al. (2011). Video game play, child diet, and physical activity behavior change: A randomized clinical trial. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 40, 33-38.
    • Optional Baranowski, T., Baranowski, J., Thompson, D. I., & Buday, R. (2011). Behavioral science in video games for children’s diet and physical activity change: Key research needs. Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, 5, 229-233.

Response 1:[Week 12 KB dialog 1/3]  Is making a game a better learning experience than playing one?

What are your thoughts about the educational benefits of making games versus playing games? Could making a serious game about a subject be an even better educational activity than playing a serious game on that subject?

I don’t think it’s possible to answer this question definitively one way or the other. There are situations where playing a game would be a better way to learn and other situations where making a game would be a better way.

In general though, I’d say that if the thing you are trying to teach is very complex, then making a game is probably not the way to go. In order to make a game, you need to understand the thing you are trying to teach well, but that’s not enough. To make a game you also need to understand about game design – and if the subject or objective is a complex one (like, for example, ethical and moral issues surrounding gender reassignment), there is a tendency to get bogged down in the game design details and lose sight of the learning objectives. When working with complex subjects, I think the learners are likely to get more out of a well-designed game that sets up various scenarios and perspectives than they would from trying to design a game.

That having been said, I think there can be a lot of value in learning from building something. I think kids can learn lots from designing games to teach relatively straight-forward concepts (like basic geometry or nutrition), and they can certainly learn from designing games that deal with facts (like taxonomies, or states and capitals), but trying to design a game to deal with complex subjects adds another layer of complexity that is more likely to confuse the issue than to clarify it.

Response 2:[Week 12 KB dialog 2/3] What is it that we’re doing here?

Ok, now that we’re 11 weeks into our Serious Game Design certificate program, I thought it would be fun to ask what it is that we’re actually doing.  What would you call it?

I ask because Van Eck begins his article by stating his preference for “game-based learning” as the term for what we’re doing, as opposed to “serious games” or “edutainment” or “gamification”.  So now Van Eck and Bogost have both made strong cases for why these titles matter.

Which title do you prefer?  Both in your places of work/study, and in talking to your friends?

I usually use the term ‘serious games’ – and unless I already know the people I’m talking to know what that is, I usually follow that with a matter-of-fact definition (games and game technology designed for purposes other than, or in addition to entertainment).

That’s the definition that Ben Sawyer uses. It covers a bunch of things that I think are excluded if you use DGBL, because not all serious games are about learning – not really.

If you look at Ben’s taxonomy (http://www.ieducate.eu/admin/upload_data/Pages/Documents/serious-games-taxonomy-2008_web.pdf), education is only one row of the table. Advergames are serious games too. We made one for a local company earlier this year. They make and sell ice cream, so the game we made is called “War of the Swirls” (http://minkhollowmedia.ca/doku.php?id=swirls) and I’d hate to try and justify the “learning” that happens in a game like this one. Then there’s something like PSDoom (http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html). psDooM is a process monitor and manager for *nix systems. It could be considered a graphical interface to the ‘ps’, ‘renice’, and ‘kill’ commands. psDooM is based on XDoom, which is based on id Software’s ‘Doom’ (http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/) I would still call this a serious game, though it really isn’t about learning.

I have nothing against Rick Van Eck (I quite like him actually), but I have found that there is a tendency for people in Education to view their perspective as the only one there is in serious games. While I would say that all games are about learning to some extent, only some are about Education. Learning happens all the time – it’s one of our defining features as Homo sapiens. I view education as a proper subset of learning. Education is value laden and what counts as education is dependent on the society in which it takes place. Likewise, there is a tendency for Educators to see simulations as only those things with which they are familiar, namely simulations designed for education. It creates a distorted view of the field. It would be like assuming that you know all about canines because you know about poodles.

This perspective is a perfectly natural one, but it one I think we should be careful with. It’s as though each discipline is its own culture, and each one views the world its own way. It can be very fruitful to try looking at the world through other ‘cultures’:

  • for a computer scientist, everything is an algorithm.
  • to a musician, everything is a song.
  • to a writer, everything is a story.
  • to thespians, everything is a play.
  • to a film-maker, everything is a movie.
  • to a set designer, everything is a set.
  • to an educator, everything is a lesson.

Response 3: [Week 12 KB dialog 3/3] Model validation for DGBL

 

Does anyone understand the term model validation when used to understanding DGBL?

I can tell you what “model validation” means in the simulation community.

In simulation (and math), a model is a precise description of some system. In order to validate that model, we need to check our model against the original system to make sure the model matches the system. It’s almost a circular kind of process.

One of my hobbies is raising rabbits, and I have a particular interest in the genetics of coat colors. It is possible to describe coat color genetics using statistical models. I can write out a bunch of statistical equations that will describe (i.e. model) what happens when I breed to rabbits together, given I know something about how their phenotypes and genotypes relate to each other. Once I’ve done that, I can build a simulation of the model. A simulation is an implementation of the model I have made. In order to have some confidence that my model is correct, I need to run my simulation a whole bunch of times and check my results against what really happens in rabbits. The simulation has to agree with the real situation. This is how I validate my model. If it doesn’t, I have to back and find out what’s wrong with my model.

When creating DGBL models we try to describe how people learn from games, or how to design games the will help people learn. Doing this for any DGBL model is much harder than it is for coat color genetics because the original system is so complex that it’s impossible to include everything that’s important in your model. In other words, there is no way to make a model that is complete. If you can’t be sure your model is complete, it is that much harder to validate it. People try it anyways. I think it’s important to realize that ‘validation’ of a model like this is orders of magnitude less trustworthy than the validation of a scientific model.

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Theories of Games and Interaction for Design (11: 3 Queries)

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These are public postings of my writings for the first course of the Graduate Certificate Program in Serious Game Design and Research at Michigan State University.

Each week, we are also required to post three questions for the rest of the class. These are mine.

Please note: these posts are not intended as any kind of commentary on or assessment of the course I’m taking, or its instructor, OR of Michigan State University or the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, or the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media. They are solely my thoughts and reactions that stem from the readings.

Feel free to comment, disagree, or what have you.

Week 11

These are the readings for the week (Topics: Serious game implementation challenges):

  • Ritterfeld et al. (2009) Ch 14 Kafai, Y. B. (2009). Serious games for girls? Considering gender in learning with digital games. In U. Ritterfeld, M. Cody, & P. Vorderer (Eds.). (2009). Serious games: Mechanisms and effects (pp. 221-235). New York: Routledge.
  • Van Eck, R. (under review). Bringing ‘discipline’ to the study of games and learning. Research challenge. Information Design Journal.
    • Optional: Van Eck, R. (2006). Digital game-based learning: It’s not just the digital natives who are restless. EDUCAUSE Review, 41, 17-30.
    • Optional: Baranowski, T., Baranowski, J., Thompson, D. I., Buday, R., Jago, R., Griffith, M. J., et al. (2011). Video game play, child diet, and physical activity behavior change: A randomized clinical trial. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 40, 33-38.
    • Optional Baranowski, T., Baranowski, J., Thompson, D. I., & Buday, R. (2011). Behavioral science in video games for children’s diet and physical activity change: Key research needs. Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, 5, 229-233.

Question1: [Week 11 KB Q 1/3] Does DGBL cover all serious games?

Rick Van Eck has put all serious games under the umbrella term ‘DGBL’, but I don’t think I agree. The terms he has used are:

Game Studies, Serious Games, Video Game Studies, Game-Based Learning. I’d be interested in hearing your definitions for these terms. I’ll add mine at the end of the week (as usual, I’m pretty opinionated on this).

Question2: [Week 11 KB Q 2/3] Is it appropriate to make educational games for girls?

I don’t like fighting. As a result, there are a whole pile of video games that I don’t really like playing. I’ve always thought of shooters and fighting games as the low-hanging fruit of game design. It’s fairly easy to do.

When I watched Avatar for the first time I thought the Navi’s connectedness with their planet had some really interesting possibilities for how to do a final conflict/challenge. When it became clear that the final challenge was simply going to be another epic war battle, I was sooo disappointed. It was all so utterly predictable. (I still like the film, it just could have been so much more).

I see videogames that require me to fight someone or something much the same way. Even Pokémon makes you battle, though for some reason the violence in Mario seems OK to me. I’ve never really known if I feel this way because I am a girl, or because I am German, or because I am a pacifist. Whatever the reason, I would be irritated if I had to play a game for school that required fighting. With the same token though, I’d be equally irritated if I had to play a game where I had to buy stuff, or dress up, or do anything I saw as particularly ‘girlish’.

There’s a part of me that thinks it is just as bad to make games for girls as it is to make games for boys – at least so long as the game is one that both (all?) genders will have to play, as happens in educational games. What about GLBT games? Can we do that? Should we? If we are going to make a game to be used in a formal educational setting, should we not be trying to figure out how to do that in a way that is gender-neutral?

Question3: [Week 11 KB Q 3/3] Is public interest in games the same as acceptance?

Rick Van Eck says we have largely overcome the stigma that games = play = frivolous. Have we though? Or have we just exchanged a general suspicion of anything “fun” for something more subtle but no less impervious?

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Theories of Games and Interaction for Design (11: 3 Responses)

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These are public postings of my writings for the first course of the Graduate Certificate Program in Serious Game Design and Research at Michigan State University.

Each week, we are required to post three responses/reactions to queries posted by other members of the class in the previous week. These are mine.

I have paraphrased the queries to preserve my classmates’ privacy.

Please note: these posts are not intended as any kind of commentary on or assessment of the course I’m taking, or its instructor, OR of Michigan State University or the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, or the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media. They are solely my thoughts and reactions that stem from the readings.

Feel free to comment, disagree, or what have you.

Week 11

These are the readings we had last week (Topics: Games for social change; Theories of persuasion; Culture):

  • Oinas-Kukkonen, H., & Harjumaa, M. (2008). A systematic framework for designing and evaluating persuasive systems. Paper presented at the The 3rd International Conference on Persuasive Technology (Persuasive ’08), Oulu, Finland.
  • Atkin, C.K. (1994). Designing persuasive health messages. In L. Sechrest, T.E. Backer, E.M. Rodgers, T.F. Campbell, & M.L. Grady (Eds.), Effective Dissemination of Clinical and Health Information. Rockville, MD: U. S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. (AHCPR Pub. No. 95-0015).
  • Abraham, C., & Michie, S. (2008). A taxonomy of behavior change techniques used in interventions. Health Psychology, 27, 379-387.
  • Bogost, I. (2011). Persuasive Games: Exploitationware. Gamasutra, May 3. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134735/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php
  • Optional: Khaled, R., Barr, R., Biddle, R., Fischer, R., & Noble, J. (2009). Game design strategies for collectivist persuasion. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games (Sandbox ’09), New Orleans, LA.
  • Game: Dr. Transplant www.doctortransplant.org
  • Game: Sweatshop www.playsweatshop.com
  • Game: Harpooned harpooned.org
  • Dr. Transplant www.doctortransplant.org Sweatshop http://www.playsweatshop.com

Response 1:[Week 11 KB dialog 1/3]  Other uses of “gamification”

 

In his 2011 Gamasutra article, Bogost rails against the term “gamification” and its common uses as “exploitationware” in commercial marketing. I wonder what he thinks of Lee Sheldon’s course-gamification approach, which incorporates more fundamental game mechanics (not just points & superficial rewards) ? Would he recommend that Sheldon use a different term, to avoid lending respectability to the more insidious forms of “gamification”? Can you think of a better term for Sheldon’s approach?

I suspect that this is the term that’s going to stick, like it or not. The terminology battles will probably continue for many years to come. We still have debates that break out regularly on the serious games lists about whether or not Serious Games is the right term. Here too, like it or not, this is the term that the corporate world and those in performance improvement recognize and use. At some point it no longer matters whether or not you like the term, or even if you think the term is appropriate.

It was only a few years ago that engineering associations were suing computer science departments for their use of the term ‘Software Engineering’ (SENG). Engineers were of the opinion that they were the only ones who should be allowed to use the word ‘engineer’ and that anyone who was not a ring-bearing engineer should not be allowed to use the term (or teach it I suppose). For my part, I have very little respect for most of the people who call themselves software engineers (the academics anyways), and software engineering isn’t really about engineering OR software, for that matter. (Computer Science isn’t a science either, just in case you were wondering). However, at some point we should just acknowledge that this is what this thing is called.

I think many of the things we are now classifying as gamification aren’t really new at all. I got gold stars on my stuff in grade 1, and we had Bristol boards with all our names on it posted in the classroom where everyone could see who did stuff (and who didn’t). That’s the same as badges and leaderboards.

Depending on how you use them, points (by whatever name) can be the same as ‘regular’ grades. Unless you do more than exchange percent for points, you’re not doing anything except skinning. In a course I taught this summer you needed 200 points for a full score, but it was possible to earn over 400 because there were a bunch of different things they could do. Extra ‘spilled’ over in to the non-gamified parts of the course, so much like in a game, the more you did, the better your score.

 

Response 2:[Week 11 KB dialog 2/3] Is there a fundamental difference between digital games and other games?

I’ve heard something similar to this question come up in a few dialogues throughout the semester, and it has stuck in the back of my mind.  Now, coming off the NASAGA conference where people are using all sorts of games for serious purposes (digital, mobile, board, card, alternate reality, simulation, geo-caching), I come back to this question.

What is lost in turning a non-digital game into a digital one?  Is there a fundamental divide that cannot be crossed?

I think that there actually is a fundamental difference. I make a distinction though between computer-mediated games and ‘pure’ digital games. Computer mediated games are those that have previous real life (analog) versions – like solitaire or chess. Computerizing these games does not change them in any fundamental way. Computer Solitaire is still solitaire. It is, however, much harder to cheat in the digital version than in the analog version. There are other difference too, but they mostly have to do with housekeeping. I can play computer solitaire for hours, but I have no interest in playing with real cards. I am interested in the ‘essence’ of solitaire if you will, and have no interest in trying to keep piles tidy, or shuffling, or even keeping score.

When we look at ‘pure’ computer games, the difference is profound. These are games that have no analog counterpart, and it includes everything from games like Tetris to MMOs.  Many of these do have origins in analog games, but WoW is not just a digitized version of something like Warhammer. They are quite different.

This is from my book, and outlines some of the ways that things change when you go digital:

 

Table 3-1: Digital vs Non-Digital Simulations and Games
  Digital Analog
  Digital Simulations and Games (ALL) Board & Card Games Analog Simulation Games Analog Role-Playing Games Live Action Role-Play (including cosplay)
Model of Original System Painstakingly and precisely defined Many details taken for granted and never made explicit
Rule Enforcement hard-coded uses ‘honor system’ on the fly
Rule Structures Pre-determined Negotiable
Roles accurate placement into context Imagined, personally mediated Determined by game rules Imagined, personally mediated
Environment Dynamic – same for all players Static – unchanging Combined static physical artifacts (boards & pieces) AND imagined Imagined:
personalized
Environment Resolution dynamic static
physical		 relatively static relatively static Individually mediated
Game Objects can be autonomous either inert or mechanical imagined ( can include props)
Game Interaction (what people can do with / to the game) consistent across all instantiations of the game consistent only if the rules are followed each instantiation can be different
Participants there need only be one human participant All participants are human

 

Response 3: [Week 11 KB dialog 3/3] Repeats

Dr. Transplant reminds me of several games I have played. Particularly an iOS game called Restaurant Story. The premise is to make food, sell it to people and collect money. Then you can upgrade your restaurant so more people can eat at it, you can cook more food and serve different types. This style of game has been duplicated again and again. I wonder, and since we can not play it yet, does Dr. Transplant teach us anything or is it something to take our minds off whatever we do in live. The information on the website talks about finding your local organ donate registry and etc. but is any of the included or conveyed in game? Will playing puzzles and upgrading your hospital make you any more likely to achieve any serious games goals?

I think you’ve hit on an important point. This basic scenario also sounds like Diner Dash and a host of other simplistic resource management games. I wonder why people make these kinds of games. Is it because they are easy to design, or do they really not understand what it is about a game that makes it a valuable learning experience? Is it games they don’t understand, or instructional design? Both?

There are still a lot of classroom teachers who think ‘Jeopardy’ qualifies as a game in the same way as Black and White or Rollercoaster Typhoon. Jeopardy may be a fun way to skin a drill exercise, but I would not call it a game in the same sense as the other two. I think Jeopardy has a place, as do Bingo games and others. Some things need to be memorized, and if wrapping them in a game makes them a little more fun, then that might not be a bad thing.

However, the idea that you can create 3 or 4 templates (like make stuff, sell it to customers, collect money, and buy more supplies to make more stuff) passes for actual game design is misguided. Personally, I’d like to see these kinds of games placed in their own category. If the content in the game can easily be converted to a worksheet, then I’d say it is not a game in the same way as a game where the learning goals are actually integral to the game itself. These are much harder to make, but I think they have the potential to deliver a much more powerful message.

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Here’s a Devastating Account of the Crap Women in the Games Business Have to Deal With. In 2012.

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Here’s a Devastating Account of the Crap Women in the Games Business Have to Deal With. In 2012..

http://alivetinyworld.com/2012/11/27/too-many-reasons-why/

There’s a certain amount of this that happens in science too, though we should really note the point made by one of the commenters:

To be fair, it goes both ways. I have a male friend who is a nurse and he deals with some shit from the women he works with that you wouldn’t believe. And then the guys give him shit for it, too. In high school I worked two jobs, one with dogs, one with children. I had some of the worst gay bashing slurs hurled my way, even by people who knew I worked there with my girlfriend. And you’d better believe that any time anything over 10 lbs needed to be lifted, I was expected to just do it without being asked. But god forbid I didn’t hold the door for one of them.

Maybe we can generalize this a bit. I’d LOVE for the conversation to come around to how far (FAR) too many people are just downright ignorant, rude, and juvenile. This includes men, women, and everyone else.

 

Yes, there are particular indignities that women routinely have to put up with, but there’s a little voice in my head that always pipes up at times like these. It reminds me that almost every last one of those a@$holes HAD A MOM. What was she doing when this kid was growing up? If she let her sons get away with being jerks, and told her daughters not to stand up for themselves, then maybe, just maybe, SHE should shoulder some of the responsibility in this.

p.s. There is NO SUCH THING as “boys will be boys”. This is simply an excuse for letting kids be jerks. In the same way, “well, you know how catty girls can be” is also an excuse for letting girls get away with being mean. Neither should be acceptable. Ever.

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CS2013 Ironman Draft Available « Computing Education Blog

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The Ironman Draft of the next ACM/IEEE CS Curricula is out.

CS2013 Ironman Draft Available « Computing Education Blog.

We are happy to announce the availability of the ACM/IEEE-CS Computer Science Curricula 2013 – Ironman v0.8 draft. The draft is available at the CS2013 website (http://cs2013.org) or directly at:
http://cs2013.org/ironman-draft/cs2013-ironman-v0.8.pdf

The Ironman v0.8 draft contains the complete CS2013 Body of Knowledge, fully revised based on comments from the previously released CS2013 Strawman draft. We are now calling on the computing community to submit exemplars of courses and curricula to better connect the CS2013 Body of Knowledge to real, existing approaches representing diverse and innovative ways to teach computer science.

CALL FOR EXEMPLARS
The CS2013 Curriculum Steering Committee is seeking exemplars of courses and curricula from the broader community. This open process will better connect the CS2013 Body of Knowledge to real, existing approaches representing diverse and innovative ways to teach computer science. In computer-science terms, the topics and learning outcomes in the Body of Knowledge represent a “specification”, whereas a curriculum is an “implementation” and a course is part of a curriculum. The CS2013 Ironman v1.0 draft (the penultimate CS2013 draft) will be released in early 2013, containing an initial set of such course/curriculum exemplars.

Including exemplars as part of the CS2013 effort is a new idea not present in previous versions of the ACM/IEEE-CS Computer Science Curriculum guidelines. The steering committee believes they will provide greater value than stylized model courses that do not directly describe actual experience. Submitting an exemplar is your opportunity to present a successful approach to teaching computer science in a way that will prove useful to educators working to adopt the CS2013 guidelines.

Information on how to contribute course/curriculum exemplars is available at the CS2013 website (http://cs2013.org) or directly at:
http://cs2013.org/exemplars.html

 

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Where I’ve Been Online (to Nov. 17)

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  • U.S. Doctorates in the 20th Century (pdf) NSF June 2006

    The availability of new types of data on doctorates, the significant changes in doctoral education known to have occurred in the past 25 years, and the close of the 20th century make this a good time to reexamine the long-term trends in U.S. doctoral education. NSF’s Division of Science Resources Statistics commissioned this report to explore these trends and to make the results available to the public. Cosponsors of the report are the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

    tags: nsf pdf doctorates phd 20th-century

  • What is Game Balance Concepts? « Game Balance Concepts

    What is Game Balance Concepts? What is this blog? This is the second summer I’ve decided to run a free online course on the topic of game design. Last summer was a general course that covered all areas on a very general level; you can find it at http://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com This summer, I’m diving deeper into the narrower topic of game balance. The topic was covered in a single lesson last year, but I think it deserves better treatment, so this year I’m looking at balance in depth. You can view a free intro video here that covers the course topics in more detail. (Update: due to technical difficulties with the courseware site, this was not viewable for a brief period. The issues have been resolved and everyone should now be able to create an account, view the video and download the syllabus. Thanks to everyone for reporting it and for being patient while I worked with supercoolschool.com to resolve this!)

    tags: game balance concepts ian-schreiber

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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The Gamification of Everything

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I really hate that term. My fear is that it will stick though.

Don’t get me wrong – there are some very useful things that are being called gamification. Many of them aren’t new though. There’s also a lot of crap that’s being labelled as gamification. I’m worried that most stuff will end up being part of the second group.

I’m staring to wonder just how much of the world is already gamified? Maybe it’s always been this way.

Example 1: Badges

There’s a local organization I’ve been trying to talk to since July. I keep sending mail to the President, and so far the best I’ve gotten is an apology for ‘losing my email’. Curiously, there are other people copied on the email – they don’t respond either. I of course can’t tell you if it is the case here but I suspect there are some people who seek various positions just so they can add to their ‘portfolio’. You know, like badges….. Member of …., President of…., yadda yadda.

Example 2: Leaderboards

For I while this summer, I made an effort to get an adjunct appointment. (For those of you from away – an Adjunct in Canada is a completely resource-neutral appointment.  See the end of this post for an explanation.) I tried three different universities – one of them was the institution where I’d actually HAD an adjunct appointment. For the most part, they don’t even acknowledge my emails. That’s used to be considered rude. I still consider it unprofessional at the very least. My credentials are pretty good, so the university really has nothing to lose by adding my annual accomplishments as part of any unit’s “output”, unless… My list of publications would end up pretty close to the top of the publication counter leaderboard, so maybe they’d rather not have me. I recall reading somewhere that people don’t like people who raise the bar. Now, again, I have no way of telling what the real story is – they won’t tell me (I kind of doubt they’d tell me the truth anyways).

I resent the fact that most of what I’ve published in the last few years is associated with a university that won’t even answer my emails.

Example 3: Points

One of the latest gamification deals has been rolled out by LinkedIn. I can’t say for sure when they started it, but in the last month or two they have added a new “feature”: their “Skills & Expertise” endorsement game.  Now, you can collect endorsements. Just you wait, it won’t be long before these endorsements start to look just like leaderboards, and you will be able to earn Endorsement badges, both for endorsing lots and lots of people, and for getting endorsed.

How many people have you endorsed? Did you REALLY know whether or not they had the expertise you said they did? Did you do it to make them feel good? Make them notice you? Maybe earn some cache in case you need a favour sometime in the future?

What about the people who don’t get endorsements? Does it actually mean they don’t have those skills?

Do people really believe this crap?

It’s a very small set of steps from “Networking” to “GroupThink” to “Mobbing”…..

 

Adjunct:

The title Adjunct Professor may be bestowed upon a person who is not a full-time member of the faculty. The granting of the title reflects some mutually beneficial scholarly association between the University and the candidate.

The title Adjunct Professor may be granted for any of the following purposes:
(1) To supervise or co-supervise graduate or undergraduate students
(2) To contribute to other scholarly pursuits of the department
(3) To facilitate the pursuit of independent research.

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Theories of Games and Interaction for Design (10: 3 Responses)

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These are public postings of my writings for the first course of the Graduate Certificate Program in Serious Game Design and Research at Michigan State University.

Each week, we are required to post three responses/reactions to queries posted by other members of the class in the previous week. These are mine.

I have paraphrased the queries to preserve my classmates’ privacy.

Please note: these posts are not intended as any kind of commentary on or assessment of the course I’m taking, or its instructor, OR of Michigan State University or the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, or the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media. They are solely my thoughts and reactions that stem from the readings.

Feel free to comment, disagree, or what have you.

Week 10

These are the readings we had last week (Topics: Topics: Evaluation plan (feasibility, acceptability, usability, effectiveness; IRB and logistics):

  • Pinelle, D., Wong, N., & Stach, T. (2008). Heuristic evaluation for games: Usability principle for video game design. Paper presented at the The 26th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’06).
  • Baranowski, T., Baranowski, J., Thompson, D. I., Buday, R., Jago, R., Griffith, M. J., et al. (2011). Video game play, child diet, and physical activity behavior change: A randomized clinical trial. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 40, 33-38.
  • Baranowski, T., Baranowski, J., Thompson, D. I., & Buday, R. (2011). Behavioral science in video games for children’s diet and physical activity change: Key research needs. Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, 5, 229-233.
  • Optional: Isbister, K., Flanagan, M., & Hash, C. (2010). Designing games for learning: Insights from conversations with designers. Paper presented at the 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’10)

Response 1:? [Week 10 KB dialog 1/3] Is educational research on gaming hard to find or being ignored?

I could not help but wonder as I was reading the study by Pinelle and colleagues this week that there are several resources available that game designers appear to have ignored.  I conjure up memories of playing Darfur is Dying and I wonder how the gamers couldn’t have done a quick Google search to come up with some better tips to improve usability.  I understand that no research is perfect, but even studying the number of works we have thus far in the class, we can detect a number of patterns and, at the very least, create a checklist of things to consider in our designs.

Is educational research on serious games that hard to find or are industry innovators in this space more prone to winging it?  Or is the educational research not convincing enough that it is being ignored?

I think the problem goes both ways. They tend to ignore each other. Industry has a general mistrust of academia as not having anything practical to contribute, and academia tends to dismiss industry as not having the formal research to back up what it’s doing. There is a grain of truth to both of course, though neither is completely right.

This kind of parochialism also happens within academia where each discipline has a tendency to insulate itself from the others (think ‘silos’). Each discipline considers its own sources superior to those of other disciplines, but there are a few fields where this seems to be pathological: Education, and Information Technology. Both seem quite confident that no-one else has anything useful to contribute to their body of knowledge, so they don’t even look. I’ve always found this odd because I think they are among the MOST applied disciplines there are: the whole point of education is to teach something, and tech is really only interesting for what you can do with it.

The disrespect that ‘outside’ faculty have for Education is well known within Education, but those same people who complain about how their own discipline doesn’t get the respect it deserves do exactly the same thing to Informatics by depreciating the body of knowledge that underlies the technology they use. I’m sure this is a factor in why industry tends to ignore them.

Response 2:? [Week 10 KB dialog 2/3] Who do we need to know in the gaming industry?

In a follow-up post to last week’s inquiry on serious game conferences, I thought it would also be useful to come up with a Who’s Who in the gaming industry list.  Please submit your votes on who should be added to the list of gaming superstars we should know about.

Perhaps we can have also this list in a central place and make it available to future students.

I came across this this morning:

http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2012/11/the-18-greatest-gaming-scholars-all-time/

I would agree that all of these people belong on a list of influential game scholars. Not sure I agree with the order necessarily, and it is rather US-centric. All but three are in the U.S.: Sara (UK), Pamela (Currently Netherlands, but US educated), and Espen (Denmark). Also, all but Marc are academics. That having been said, most of the ones below are also currently in the US. At the end I’ve listed some additional names of people that were influential to me when I first started looking at games)

Here are a few additional ones that have been influential for me:

  • Clark Aldrich (http://www.clarkaldrichdesigns.com/)Lead the international team that created SimuLearn’s Virtual Leader; Aldrich speaks, writes, and does consulting work on e-learning issues. Published numerous books on simulations and games.
  • Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen (http://egenfeldt.eu/blog/ ) Has written articles on computer games, children, education, and learning since 1997. He is the author of two Danish books on computer games, and an English one (in its second edition) and regularly gives talk on the subject both nationally and internationally. Board member of Digital Game Research Association, co-founder of Game-Research.com, editor of Ivory tower column, and a founding member of Center for Computer Games Research Copenhagen. Co-creator of Global Conflicts
  • David Gibson, oversees all phases and aspects of the simSchool project: professional development, planning and implementation, educational research and evaluation, application development and deployment, budgeting, staff-performance and project-performance monitoring, communications, dissemination, and sustainability. At the Vermont Institutes, Gibson is director of research and development, concentrating on partnership development and new programs, systems analysis, evaluation, higher-education reform, and statewide professional-development planning
  • Carrie Heeter (http://gel.msu.edu/carrie/)Founding Director of the Communication Technology Laboratory and Creative Director for Michigan State University’s Virtual University Design and Technology group. Professor of Digital Media Arts in the Department of Telecommunication where she teaches online design and design research courses. Lives in San Francisco, using communication technologies to “telerelate” with colleagues, students, and friends in Michigan and elsewhere.
  • Ben Sawyer (http://www.dmill.com/) Serious Games Initiative The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy.
  • Ernest W. Adams Author, Consultant, Games Designer http://www.designersnotebook.com/

Also: Amy Bruckman, David Buckingham, Gonzalo Frasca, Yasmin Kafai, John Kirriemuir, Angela McFarlane, Seymour Papert, Andy Phelps, Clark Quinn, Mitch Resnick, Lloyd P. Rieber, Suzanne Seggerman, Richard N. Van Eck, Chris Crawford, Frans Ilkka Mäyrä, Peter Molyneux, Miguel Sicart, T.LTaylor, Will Wright

Response 3:? [Week 10 KB dialog 3/3]  Where is the line between good instructions and hand-holding?

Problem category 9 in the Pinelle reading touched on a particularly important and controversial area (although, I may be biased, having worked as a technical writer). It’s clear that some form of user assistance is necessary for a good gaming experience, whether it be instructions, in-game tutorials, or a help system. The current trend seems to be to integrate help and tutorial information into gameplay as much as possible. I’m wondering if there is a way to tell how much tutorial is too much; at what point does a design start to keep a player from feeling autonomous because it’s too helpful?

I think the answer to this is going to be different for entertainment games than for serious games, and there is probably variation even within serious games. Games that try to change your attitude, for example, will likely need to be much more cautious about forcing people to spend time in a tutorial than a game trying to teach math. It also depends a great deal on the complexity of the game as well as the complexity of the subject matter.

Personally, I think people should have access to tutorials and other help but there is very little they should be forced to do.

A game like Machinarium has a very short intro tutorial that gets you started. I think it is very well designed. Its “help” pages are incredibly cryptic, on purpose, in keeping with the whole spirit of the game. You even have to do a mini-challenge before you can even look at the help pages.

Earlier this year, we were asked to design a game to teach concepts in machine learning to middle schoolers. This one presented a huge challenge – there is nothing insightful about watching a machine while it’s learning – without an idea of how it’s doing what it’s doing, you really can’t get any idea of what this is all about – all you see is that the machine (or program) just gets better at what it does. Also, machine learning is not part of any normal middle school curriculum. It’s a fairly advanced topic and assumes a fair bit of background in probability, statistics, and CS. We ended up making a game where the player is the one who is asked to learn the way a machine does. The player is to create a program for a probe to be launched to Europa. It was not designed to be easy, but the intent was to give kids a feel for how machine learning works, without all the math and CS. The publisher kept asking us to make it easier. They wanted us to add all kinds of hints and pop-ups telling players what to do next. We got into a lot of trouble for resisting. In the end we created a fairly substantial ‘manual’ that players could access whenever they wanted. We had offered to do far more (video tutorials, lesson plans, etc.) but the publisher didn’t want to pay for them.

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