Virtual Learning Worlds

I’ll be attending the GDC next week, specifically the Serious Games portion of the conference (mon/tues). If anyone knows any ‘must see’ places in San Francisco that are under the tourist radar, that’d be awesome. I tend to avoid the touristy-stuff in big cities, opting for the local favorites that people point me towards.

Hope to see some familiar faces on the left coast!

…the technology gets in the way. After toying with Twitter for a few weeks, I was just starting to commit more of my time to the experience, when the technology decided it was going to do everything possible to stop me.

Last week: The twitter homepage was extremely slow. I went and downloaded Twidget, a Mac dashboard widget for Twitter. I don’t shut down my mac overnight, so it ends up going into power saver mode. Appparently Twidget doesn’t like this, because it crashes the widget, and forces me to do a total OS reboot to get it working properly again. Hrm, I’ll pass to something else.

This week: I went and snagged Twitterrific. Not a bad little app, looks clean, easy to use, easy to tweak settings, etc. I configure and use for a day, and it seems to work well. The next day, I’m flooded with error messages about session timeouts and XML parsing errors. Easy enough, turn off error messages. My updates aren’t being posted via Twitterriffic. D’oh! I’m not receiving updates from my friends, except once or twice a day when Twitterriffic makes the connection to the server (late in the evenings). Going to the www.twitter.com is a crapshoot…sometimes the page loads after several minutes of loading time, sometimes it crashes safari, sometimes it simply hangs and times out.

Conclusion: after somewhat ’seeing the light’, I’ll probably abandon this all together soon. I really hope they figure out their infrastructure problems soon (which is what I, and others, assume is going on).

Google recently acquired AdScape, one of the few companies focusing on advertising in virtual worlds. I’m not a big fan of ads in games. Many play games to escape from reality for a short time (or long time, depending on the game), and throwing in ads for Coke can totally throw off the immersion the game is trying to create. But at the same time, it can be done well, when the ads are somehow woven into the fabric or lore of the game. Let’s hope Gogle figures out a way to do this tasteful.

I’ve been asked to sit-in on some meetings regarding a possible initiative at Penn State revolving around Serious Games. I took some time today and brain-dumped a lot of information into a Word Document. One of the pieces of the document I uploaded here. This is a very short list of other universities who either have some sort of serious game initiative, game degree programs, or both.

I figured I’d post this here in case anyone finds this sort of thing interesting. Any additions or corrections welcome. I also posted this here so I didn’t have to email it to a bunch of people who may/may not read it…instead I can just drop the URL in the meeting today. Shameless Plug.

The Twitter experiment continues. I still don’t get it completely, but it’s making a little more sense. One thing I struggle with is what to blog vs. what to twitter? Obviously, I could do both, but that’s inefficient. Obviously, with its 140 character limit, twitter is meant for something very different. But…

I came across two wonderful links today (Will Wright interview about Spore and a great Did you know? video with startling statistics), both of which I dropped in twitter (they call this ‘tweeting’, which I swear is a knock-off on a phish or disco biscuits song, but I haven’t looked it up yet).

So here’s my problem: more and more I’ve been using my blog as a personal reference. A colleague asks me about some game-related story or video, and suddenly I recall writing about it over a year ago. I go to my blog, search, bingo, I’ve found the link again. I’ve found I do this a lot with Second Life, re-locating stories that I linked to that have specific SLURLs I can’t seem to locate within the virtual world. I’m also pulling up old entries when hanging out with friends, reminiscing about old videos on the web.

Will Twitter provide the same string of references? I’m not sure, but I’d assume no. I see an option to ‘view all’, but in a year from now, if people are using this several times a day…that list is going to be pretty long. It won’t be searchable either (at least not judging by the current UI). Interesting things to think about (at least for me) as we are flooded with all the 2.0 tools and applications.

Well, maybe not, but some of the things game designers have figured out are things instructional designers have struggled with for much longer, and still haven’t solved. Over the next week or two, I’ll be posting some thoughts relating to our group’s strategic meetings and some of my thinking on where we should be headed in terms of Instructional Design and Technology here at IST.

Our ID&D course model, from as far back as October of 1999, has remained fairly constant. We rely heavily on faculty input for our content outline, and then various faculty members to author our topics (equivalent to a chapter in a book). Unfortunately, this has led to some terrible content, a lot of missed milestones, and overall, a lot of hedache. The old adage that “content is king” was probably one of the drivers of our model. I’d argue that a different “C” word is now king: Community.

In my mind, we should be spending our time designing pedagogically-sound tools our faculty can use to build and/or modify materials for their online learning experiences. Can you build good instructional design into a toolset? I think so. By putting tools in the hands of our faculty with built-in instructional soundness, we take ourselves out of the dreaded content loop, which is like pulling teeth around here.

Where does game design come in? Let’s look at Spore, Will Wright’s newest project. Game designers, similarly to IDs collaborating with SMEs, spend insane amounts of time on content generation and manipulation. Will Wright and his team have found an ingenous way to alleviate much of this burden. By giving the users powerful content creation tools, gamers who play spore are able to build their own:
- characters
- landscapes
- buildings
- vehicles
- planets
- galaxies

They do this through a watered-down implementation of Pixar’s 3D toolset. So the players are creating their own content. Nothing new here. But…what Spore does is connect to OTHER GAMERS machines, and based on what you’ve created, downloads content from other gamers onto your computer to populate the rest of you game world. Then a rating system kicks in, where you can rate this content, so now the game is going out and grabbing content similar to what you like. If this all works out as Will describes it, this will be one huge breakthrough for the game industry with regards to content creation.

There has to be a way to do something similar with content for elearning courses. We’re trying something similar with the utilization of Wikis. I’m not sure the Wiki is the answer, but there must be a better way…

UPDATE: A recent interview with Will Wright on Spore

Came across this article today, which provides some insight into Sun’s thoughts on Second Life, gaming technology, and their role in the big picture.

And how does one go about obtaining a job like Chris Melissinos? He’s listed as Chief Gaming Officer for Sun. I’ve read about other companies having similar positions, but I’m not entirely sure what they do.

Via TerraNova, Sony recently released its Station Exchange data. For those in the dark, Station Exchange is a service for SOE games such as Everquest where people can pay real money for virtual goods. Something the MMO publishers have frowned up on the past. Follow the TerraNova link for the press release, as well as commentary from big names in the MMO market.

So I’ve been following Cole’s twitter adventures and commentary, and I must say…I still don’t get it. I guess I kind of understand his perspective from his recent post, but it still doesn’t make much sense for me. I just created an account, but honestly, I don’t plan on using it much unless some compelling reason jumps out at me. My twitter would probably look something like:
- At work, reading emails/correspondence
- At work, learning about Second Life
- At work, meeting about X, Y, or Z
- Finally home, logging into Warcraft
- Dinner
- Spending time with Emily
- Zzzzzz

Most of my close friends and the people I care about know this pattern all to well. Sure, I could fill these out to be more specific, but why is that interesting? When I do come across interesting aspects relating to any of the above items, I usually post them here in the blog, or some other digital space appropriate to the specific task I am engaged in. I dunno…privacy bells ring in my head the way I see Twitter, but not in the traditional sense of Internet privacy (if that makes any sense?).

Now, what I DO see interesting about twitter is the possibilities for research, probably in the qualitative arena. This system appears to be extremely accessible (from various devices/outlets), and would allow people, both researchers and research subjects, a 24/7/365 avenue to track their experiments, and even a data collection method. What would be really interesting, informative, and somewhat comical, would be to get 5-10 people to abandon meat-space (a new word I re-discovered today via. Ludlow’s SL interview by Henry Jenkins) for a week, and spend all their waking moments living digitally, in Second Life, There, Warcraft…whatever MMO they choose. Then utilize something like Twitter to collect data not only on what they are DOING in the digital realm all week, but what they are FEELING. Lonely? Bored? More fun than first-life? Less social interaction? More?

EDIT: After lunch with Cole and some of the ETS crew, I think I’ll give it a shot. I think I have a better idea of the potential draw of twitter…

I always get a chuckle (although I should take it more seriously) when raging debates occur on what to name this emerging, game-based learning field. Ben Sawyer and the Sloan foundation use the term “Serious Games” to define their conferences and the space we are in. I’ve been to several Serious Game Summits (and will be returning to San Francisco for these year’s GDC Summit) where we’ve spent over an hour ‘debating’ this moniker for our field.

Don’t we have anything better to do?

I see why it’s important, but is it really THAT important? Well, the elearning guild thinks it is, because they’ve added their own term to the acronym soup, “Immersive Learning Simulations” or ILS. Based on their surveys, they found that elearning professionals, or more importantly, their bosses and executives, find the term ‘game’ hard to swallow for serious education and training. In my eyes, a simulation is an accurate re-creation of some real world phenomena, procedure, or process. A game, on the other hand, takes a very subjective view of reality, and designers frequently remove real-world accuracies in favor of other engagement (IE: Fun) strategies for keeping the user immersed within the environment. Simulations, in their truest form, contain NO competition. Games, on the other hand, always maintain some form of competition, such as vs. other players, vs. the AI, vs. the clock, vs. some sort of score, etc.

My bottom line: Don’t try and change a moniker that already has some momentum behind it, because ‘old skool’ executives and managers can’t get their minds wrapped around the idea of a game being good for things other than entertainment. Ten years from now, when these folks have retired and the designers and developers have moved up to managers, we’ll all be wondering “why in the world are we calling these things simulations? This doesn’t make any sense”.

The educational MMO space is facing the same acronym soup dilemma. I’ve always referred to educational MMOs as Virtual Learning Worlds (VLWs), Chris Dede and his early educational MMO projects he called “Multi-User Virtual Environments” (MUVEs), and now Dr. Kapp proposes Massively Multi-learner Online Learning Environment (MMOLE). I know more names exist that I can’t recall at the moment.