Virtual Learning Worlds

I wrote about the game Privates in May, hoping that Microsoft would pass it for XBLA.  No news from Microsoft about the game passing internal tests, but the game is available for free via Channel 4’s website.  After spending 30 minutes or so playing, I believe this game is a fantastic example of educational games done right.  Recently, I’ve been involved in a few discussions around the design philosophy of educational games.  In the context of these discussions, two somewhat conflicting viewpoints arise:

1. The instructional design paradigm.  The game needs to be instructionally valid and accurate above anything else.  Content is still king in this paradigm, and the content should be extremely accurate to convey the material effectively.
2. The game design paradigm.  The game needs to be…well, a game.  It needs to have game mechanics, that combine educational content with fun.  Content isn’t necessarily king, but still important.  The *design* is king, making the experience fun and engaging for the player.

The first paradigm seems to lead to more simulation-style games, where designers attempt to insert very accurate content into an interactive environment, allowing the player to experiment with variables that affect some sort of model the designer is trying to convey.  The second paradigm focuses more on blending the instructional content into a game experience.  Personally, I tend to fall in the game design paradigm, but understand the value of the instructional paradigm.  The biggest pitfall I see from folks in the instructional paradigm is the mindset that the game should be able to stand entirely on its own, as an instructional activity.

I think this is a mistake.  Think about how we learn for a moment. Think about how good teachers go about teaching their students.  It is almost NEVER a single method or a single instructional strategy.  It’s a combination of things, like lectures, assignments, powerpoint, etc.  A game is just another way to engage students, it doesn’t need to be 100% accurate, it simply needs to provide enough content to spark a student’s motivation, to drive them to other learning outlets like Wikipedia, friends, instructors and so on.

The designers for Privates sum this up nicely:

You know how you wouldn’t write a history essay based on your experiences playing a World War II shooter? Well, Privates is a bit like that - while the action takes place in and around peoples’ parts, the anatomy is in no way biologically accurate. We’ve had to make loads of concessions in order to make the game fun to play. There’s still loads of important stuff to take from Privates. Just be sensible about which bits, eh?

I urge everyone to give this game a try.  It certainly is NOT a standalone sex education game.  But I can already envision what would happen if my niece were to play this.  It offers enough content to be compelling, but also offers solid and fun gameplay to keep you interested.  Once the game is over, I’m sure my niece would have a lot on her mind to go and look up on the web, as well as ask some questions of her parents (that they may or may not be ready to answer!)

NASA announced a gaming initiative a couple years back, and it looks like we might have our first glimpse of the results with Moonbase Alpha. A recent article describes NASA’s goal with the game:

The game is a proof of concept to show how NASA content can be combined with a cutting-edge game engine to inspire, engage and educate students about agency technologies, job opportunities and the future of space exploration.

The game does look somewhat interesting, based on the short teaser video embedded below. My big question: but is it fun? The video makes the game look rather dry, aside from the part where you pilot a robotic rover across the surface of the moon. I understand that a big part of this is to educate, but part of the magic of games is the fun factor, which leads to a huge impact on engagement. We talk a lot at ’serious game’ conferences about the balance of fun vs. educational content. With the audience NASA is shooting for (K-12 I’d wager), this game has to be fun first, with the educational content built-in to the flow of the gameplay. If this was a captive audience, maybe you could get away with focusing on the content first and the fun second…but that is not the case here.

I was recently alerted that Virtual Learning Worlds was ranked in the top 50 educational blogs for 2010 by Sir Learnalot’s Knowledge Blog, which appears to be part of a site dealing with online college rankings.

I can’t say I’ve ever been to this site or heard of Sir Learnalot…but thanks all the same!

In other news, I’ve updated the Presentations page with recent talks from Educause last month, as well as a NATO talk I gave in late 2009 on virtual worlds and games with military applications. I also updated the About page with timely information on my current job and a few other musings.

In my new position I’m working with a LOT of institutional data. The first of what might be many did you knows:

Did you know that, since 2000, females tend to graduate almost a semester quicker than their male counterparts at PSU?

I’ve leveraged wikis over the last 2 years for a wide variety of tasks, each time learning something new and valuable about how these platforms can be used. A few years ago, we used a wiki as a documentation repository for all the projects and tasks our unit was responsible. It helped a great deal if someone was sick for a workshop or had to deal with an emergency. Someone else on the team could quickly jump into the Wiki and help out. An unintentional finding during this experiment is that a wiki can help a great deal when it comes to turnover. A few people left the unit, and the new people got up to speed incredibly fast, being able to peruse the wiki and see all our projects mapped to personnel.

I’ve also used a wiki in one of my courses, where students were in teams tackling one of eleven different inter-related research topics. Phase one of the project was a basic literature review authored in the wiki. Phase 2 required each team to go out and read the other teams’ work, and create relationships between pages where the research topics intersected. The next time I teach an upper-level course, I will definitely use this assignment again.

I also use wikis for information retrieval, especially things like wikipedia and wowwiki.

So how does this play into games and learning? I first started using a wiki when I was in the Burning Crusade Beta test. If you’ve ever played WoW, often times you are toggling between the game and a web browser, checking wikis or item/quest databases to help guide your game experience. During a beta test, these databases are predominately empty because of how new the content is. With a wiki, we had thousands of people creating and editing pages as they were the first group of players to experience the new content. People were documenting quest storylines, monster types, new item drops…you name it, people were constantly in the wiki while they were playing, documenting everything. On one hand this is similar to the strategy guide scene in games, but the wiki method is MUCH faster and I would argue more accurate because many authors are contributing.

The same thing is taking place now with Dragon Age: Origins. This game came out just over a week ago, and similar to WoW I see thousands of people using this wiki to document the story arcs, races, classes, items and quests.

I refer to this type of activity as mutual knowledge construction, and I think it has huge potential value for education. But…

With games, those of us playing, and more importantly contributing to these wikis, are highly motivated. Whether intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, we are motivated to contribute to the massive collection of knowledge and information on these wikis. When I think of how to implement something like this in the classroom, this is where I struggle. In a graduate class I think this could work wonders, but in an undergraduate class, especially a general education class…I struggle to overcome the motivation barrier that I think is key to making something like this work. Hopefully this summer or fall 2010 I’ll have a chance to give this a go, asking students to collectively create a wiki over the course of the semester that both informs and motivates to dig deeper into a subject area. Once I have the assignment fleshed out, I’ll be sure to share.

After successfully defending my dissertation on May 5th, it is now official: I graduated on August 15th, 2009 with a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Workforce Education and Development from the College of Education, the Pennsylvania State University.

With the new degree in hand, I’m in the midst of a job search. I re-organized the site a bit, adding information to the Presentations page, creating a Publications page with a few articles and other materials I’ve authored, and finally a CV page that contains a link to my curriculum vitae. I have a couple more pages in mind that might show up soon, but this covers it for now. I’m applying for jobs all over the map, from industry jobs with Blizzard Entertainment, to administrator positions at universities and lastly tenure-track positions at teaching-oriented universities.

If anyone in the virtual world/game blogosphere is reading and has a vacancy, feel free to drop me a message so we can discuss further!
bartonpursel[at]gmail.com

After Google dumped Lively a while back, I was curious if they were going to dip their toe back in the MMO/Virtual world space. No concrete evidence has emerged yet, but some interesting posts are starting to pop up about Google’s O3D technology, their effort to put full 3D environments inside of Google’s browser, Chrome.

One writer believes that O3D + Google’s Wave technology could create a very interesting environment for browser-based MMO’s. I don’t know much about Wave yet, aside from Cole posting about it and showing a lot of excitement about its potential. Time to watch the Wave demo…

Note that this is nothing ground breaking. Mozilla is working on similar technology for Firefox and Unity3D is gaining momentum with its 3D plugin for browsers. I’m excited browsers can now handle large, interactive 3D spaces. This opens up HUGE doors for game designers and developers now that we don’t need to worry as much about custom installs and massive downloads. A prime example of where things are going is Quake Live. It frustrates me that this is browser based yet PC-only, but it’s a glimpse at where things are headed.

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For those of you that play World of Warcraft, this probably won’t be very interesting.  For those that do not play WoW, hopefully this illustrates some of the complexities and intricacies of the game.

I’m still working on several projects centered around YouTube.  I intend to make YouTube *THE* instructional platform for my Fall 2009 course (more on that later) and I’ve also been using YouTube to hopefully increase the rate of progression for my Warcraft Guild.  To help put this into context, we are a raiding guild.  We spend a couple nights a week in either 10-person or 25-man person groups, tackling very complex AI-driven encounters with dragons, demons and other evil pixel creations terrorizing Azeroth.  Let me stress the word COMPLEX, because many of these encounters take a very patient, scientific approach to defeat.

Our 10-person crew recently defeated one of the more difficult encounters Blizzard added to the game a little over a month ago.  Our guild is rather large and we have guildmates that will get to the same encounter soon.  Instead of having them struggle like we did to defeat this complex encounter, I used Fraps to record the encounter, documenting our strategy for success.

In addition to the video feed (which alone does not provide a great deal of insight), I also added annotation using the YouTube annotation features, to provide time-sensitive information about the encounter as people watched it.  These encounters in Warcraft can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes, from a single phase to multiple phases, which EVERYONE needs to understand because these game mechanics and how players react to them dictate sucess or failure.  Often times when someone ‘teaches’ the rest of the raid about the encounter, it is done using Ventrilo (a VoIP service) and takes 5 to 10 minutes.  Sounds a lot like a lecture, right?  For the very detailed encounters, this is information overload to the extreme!  My hope is that videos like the one below will help the rest of my guild successfully defeat the more complex encounters, by providing annotated videos including the ventrilo talk on strategy.

This semester was my first experience teaching 100+ students in a large lecture hall. The course, IST 110, is a basic introduction to the College of Information Sciences and Technology at PSU. Overall I’ve learned a LOT regarding how to transition my old version of IST 110 to a much larger course setting. I used a lot of different technology tools, broke the class down a few weeks to run workshops and ended up asking them to do quite a few things online, including podcasts, video, eportfolio creation, blogging and evaluating social networking services.

Marc Prensky was an early influence to the direction I’ve taken my instructional design philosophies, both around gaming and around generational differences (the digital natives vs. digital immigrants). Marc doesn’t necessarily write about social networking (it was a bit too early for that when he wrote his paper almost 10 years ago), but MANY people have picked up the torch and claim that this concept also holds true for social networking, and in many cases, technology in general.

After this semester, I don’t buy the hype.

Most students don’t know how to make a website. The idea of creating a web page or a site is very foreign to them (even though they do this everyday via Facebook or MySpace). Podcasts? Yeah right, just give me more music please. Creating video? A SMALL fraction of students do this, which in turn means only a small fraction of students can even get footage off a digital camera to a computer. Twitter? Delicious? Brite Kite? I get very confused looks when I bring these things up with students.

…and I’m teaching a course with TECHNOLOGY in the title, so normally students have some sort of interest to enroll in this class (it is a general education course so many students take it outside the major).

The few students that use twitter use it to follow celebrities, TV shows or athletes. I’ve found a total of ONE student (out of 210 this semester) that is using Twitter as a means of collaboration and community support around his professional life (and the student is non-traditional).

Now they do use MySpace and Facebook, but they use it very differently than we do (and many times they want us to stay out of this space). We often use these sites for professional reasons (build our networks, share our ideas and so on) while they use it almost exclusively to virtually hang out with friends.

This Saturday was the TLT Symposium here on campus, and I was able to get away from the EGC Demonstration Room to listen to dana boyd talk about her field work on social media with teens. I was ecstatic to hear her echo these thoughts, and even stress the fact that she finds this assumption (”digital natives just know how to use all this stuff, ya know?”) extremely frustrating.

On one hand I still see value in looking at these tools and illustrating how they can be used professionally or to improve organizational productivity, but the whole idea of “I need to integrate these into the flow of my course because students use this stuff and understand it” is something we all need to question.

I posted about some of the research going on regarding scientific discourse and virtual worlds in the past, and an interview with a top raiding guild, Vodka, provided another great example. When asked how they approach a new raid encounter within the game:

When we first approach a new encounter, we typically just throw ourselves at the boss a few times without any real plan just to see what is going on, which may sound silly, but during each of these attempts we are observing as much as we possibly can and recording as much data as possible so that we can begin analyzing it more thoroughly in order to develop a strategy. Once we have collected some information about the encounter, we can then determine what type of damage output we will be dealing with, which will then answer the question of what type of healing we need to counter it, and then we can move on to things such as positioning, what the best type of DPS is going to be, and what tanks will give us the best results. Once we have all of that figured out, we can begin testing different iterations of our strategy to see where the flaws are and then work on resolving them. Eventually we will have a strategy that will work long enough for us to see if there are different phases to the encounter, and determine whether or not there are any types of enrage timers or anything. Once we have that information, we go back to our original strategy and figure out how to adjust it so that we can deal with anything new that is introduced to the encounter in the later phases. Eventually we end up with a well rounded strategy that we are confident will work for us and then we begin doing reps over and over until the boss is dead.

If you simply read the snippets in bold, this could just as easily be someone talking about a design challenge, a production challenge, a supply chain challenge, a management challenge…you name it. This is the scientific method, a systematic approach to problem solving, that apparently our schools are doing a TERRIBLE job teaching these days (Miller 2004; Chinn and Malhotra 2002; National Research Council 2005; too many to list…) This also exemplifies problem-based learning, something the College of Information Sciences and Technology prides itself on. I’m simultaneously embarrassed and excited that our educational system is doing so poorly with this form of discourse, yet games are doing it so well.

Cripes, this PhD stuff must be getting to me if I’m citing academic articles in a blog entry. Apologies!

I had a chance to sit down and talk with colleague Will McGill yesterday regarding a Second Life project for industry dealing with deception. We got talking virtual worlds, and he pointed me to a fantastic chart:

*click thumbnail to go to original, hosted by K Zero

A picture is worth a thousand words, eh? I have another post on that topic alone, but I’ll save it. A few things to point out in this chart:

• The numbers are extremely bloated. Several colleagues were shocked that “Habbo Hotel has 100 million users!?!?!” Not really. Simply by visiting the Habbo Hotel website, you’ll see they have just under 6 million active users in the last month. This is still an astounding number, but pales in comparison to the listed 100 million mark. Seems the people behind the graph decided to publish TOTAL accounts created for the virtual worlds vs. active user base (usually tracked similar to website stats: unique visitors per month).
• Trends with the blue and red dots (worlds in development and current worlds on the market). Particularly, look at the upcoming saturation of worlds aimed at 5-to-11 year olds. Insane. Then there’s a gap with only a few worlds on the market and NO new worlds in development for 11-to-15 year olds. Then you see another spike from about 15-to21 year olds. Then again a dry area from 21 all the way to 30+ years of age.

What does it all mean? Time will tell, but I get the sense that the market for virtual worlds aimed at “tweens” will become saturated quickly, just like what we see now in the MMORPG space. The market can only support a certain number of these worlds, and many are bound to fail. Second, just by looking at the right side of the graph, you can make the assumption that many, MANY kids that are moving into High School and, in a few years, college, will be EXTREMELY versed in these worlds.

The gaming and virtual trends are glaringly obvious, but why then is it so difficult to create educational gaming and virtual world software that students find engaging? I have some of my own reasons, but would like to hear some of yours.