Virtual Learning Worlds

The first line reads:

Ever since video games were invented, parents and teachers have been trying to make them boring.

in a Slate article about educational gaming. It’s a claim I’ve heard before, and similar to Prensky’s claim “instructional designers suck the fun out of games”. To a degree, I think they are both correct. Let’s examine some other standout lines from the article, shall we?

In taking the fun out of video games, companies like Persuasive make them less alluring to people who love games and more alluring to people who don’t.

I agree, but is this necessarily a bad thing? I think it depends on your target audience. If you’re trying to use small, flash-based games to train repetitive, monotonous tasks to the Net generation…you’re going to have some problems. I think part of the power of flash games is that they can reach anyone with an Internet connection and a Flash player (98%+ of Net users last I heard).
EDIT: Ian Bogost, who runs persuasive games, has a good post under the Slate article worth reading

Animating mindless, boring repetition doesn’t make the repetition any less mindless or boring.

Unfortunately this is the ‘low hanging fruit’ for a lot of decision makers, and they happen to be the easiest games to create. If I’m a 40-yr old executive, and the head of my training department comes to me with an idea to build a Grand Theft Auto-style corporate training environment for $800,000, I’m going to want a LOT of documented research with results that shows me this WILL work. Guess what? That type of research is slim, but growing steadily. Instead of making this $800,000 environment, why not spend $5,000 on a small, Flash-based game that teaches a basic entry-level task to new hires?

Now, I’m not saying this is the right approach, but this is the reality for a lot of people with big educational gaming ideas.

In his 2005 book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that games like The Sims and Grand Theft Auto make us smarter by training the mind in adaptive behavior and problem-solving. Most overtly educational software, though, ignores the complexities that make games riveting and enriching.

I believe part of the reason involves NON-GAMERS designing and developing these educational titles. That’s a recipe for failure. The Serious Games Initiative has been tirelessly forging relationships with the professional game design and development community, in hopes that some day we’ll have educational designers working on the same team as professional game designers and developers, to weave the educational content into the fabric of the game (exactly like Civilization, which the author mentions several times). There just isn’t enough profit to be made YET, compared to developing commercial titles.

I enjoyed the article quite a bit, and I think the author makes a few great points. I think the serious games community is trying to build the ideal state Justin alludes too…but it will take time.

I’ve had a browser window open for nearly a week now, with most of the items from a post by Tony. Some good stuff all around, although I had hoped for more data in the IBM PDFs. The claim? People learn about leaderhship in MMOs such as World of Warcraft. This claim has been made before (and I firmly believe it, being a GM and Officer in a couple end-game guilds over my WoW tenure), but this is the first real data I’ve seen supporting the claim.

Anyway, you can read all about that stuff in Tony’s post, I’d rather write about IBM’s management game, Innov8

The best part:

The game will be available free of charge to universities around the world. No price has been set yet for corporate customers because it will depend on how much IBM has to change the game to accommodate a particular business process a client might want to improve.

I’m already pestering some ex-IBMers here in my office to try and get us into the mix ASAP. I can’t judge much from the trailer, but here’s my initial take from a design standpoint:
- The player is actually running through an office. Personally, I think this is a great design move. Is it realistic? No. But do players want to move through the game environment at a snail’s pace? That’s an emphatic NO.
- Power-ups! There appear to be some sort note cards with information that the player runs across towards the end. The idea of power-ups is a time-tested design mechanism that’s been successful for a LONG time.
- The game looks to be based on exploration and information gathering by all the whiteboards, computers, and other objects the player is interacting with. Is there any ‘action’, or is this completely exploratory?

Designed to help tech managers better understand the roles of businesspeople, and vice versa, players go into a virtual business unit to test their hand at ventures such as redesigning a call center, opening a brokerage account, or processing an insurance claim.

That’s a great premise. I’ve never worked IN an IT shop, but I have had to work closely with IT shops to get projects off the ground. It’s a strange dynamic: trying to innovate in an IT-driven space vs. trying to support and maintain an IT infrastructure. Unfortunately, those two initiatives sometimes conflict with one another. If this game can address that issue and show personnel on each side of the equation how the other side works…that would be huge.

With the release of Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators I’ve had a few interesting conversations with a colleague about the relationship between the avatar and the person who plays it. The book has had several articles written about it, and if you’re into this sort of thing, they are worth a read.

After thinking about it for a while…I think some of my avatars represent pieces of my personality (just maybe…):

The top left avatar is what I normally use for all the forum communities I belong. I’m not sure this reflects anything about me at all, I just find the image hysterical. Maybe if I were a monkey, this is what I’d look like.

Next over is my first World of Warcraft character. I made this character as “over-the-top” as possible, with a mohawk, those funny black face lines, no real eyeballs, just eye sockets. I figure a warrior has to look as crazy as possible to scare your opponents.

Third from the right is my mage. When I created this character, I was all about the Fire talent tree, hence the red facial hair and red eyes. Most gnomes have a very passive face in WoW, so I tried to blow that up by creating those nasty, mean eyes with raised eyebrows. For anyone who’s played a mage, you’re always on the brink of disaster. Push a little too far, you’re definitely going to get killed. I think my crazy gnome represents that well.

The final image on the top right is my current character, a paladin. This is the only female character I play, the main reason being the male blood elf animations make it look like the avatar is having a seizure or just came back from a 12-hour stint at the pub. I’m not so sure I see any reflections of my personality, or reflections of me at all, with this avatar.

The first image on the bottom left is my Second Life avatar. Most folks I’ve come across in Second Life create either a mirror-image avatar based on their real world appearance, or an idealized version of real life. Personally, I don’t like the idea of re-creating an avatar that looks like me. I actually prefer to create an avatar that doesn’t even look human, but I haven’t had the time to build one. So now I’m a short, red-skinned fellow. Why? Because it’s a virtual world, and I can!

And the final image on the bottom right should be fairly obvious. C’est moi.

Karl found an interesting website that contains data around big brands in Second Life. The first time I had a look, I was stunned.

What in the world is Big Pond? And what are they doing to attract almost 3x as many visitors as the next big brand on the chart? I did some digging, but unfortunately didn’t come up with a lot.

Apparently, Big Pond is an ISP from Australia. After perusing their website, they appear to be one of the top ISPs in the country. I see a lot of information about ‘metered’ downloads. Does Australia charge Internet users on actual bit-counts coming downstream? Sounds like they do. Now this makes less sense…Second Life is bandwidth intensive. How does Big Pond bring in so many visitors if most of the mates down under have to pay, bit-by-bit for the experience?

It appears as if Big Pond allows its subscribers to access SL ‘unmetered’, bypassing any fees attached to bandwidth usage. Clever. This whole Metaverse thing is jumping around in my head again…a country’s leading ISP partnering with Linden to offer a very intense SL experience? Hmmm.

I tried to find out how to get to the Pond space in SL, and had a terrible time finding any SLurls. I eventually stumbled upon the names of the sims in their FAQ completely by accident looking for more information about unmetered downloads. I realize this is designed for Big Pond customers, but seriously? No SLurls or sim names on the first tier of your Second Life pages?

After exploring the sims, they are fairly nice (although a bit too developed for my aging computer). They have games, promotions, fashion, and all sorts of other things to do on the space. From a design perspective, I like it.

One interesting observation…lately there seems to be a trend for people creating their own entry points into Second Life. The Big Pond has their own unique account creation and entry point into SL, Linden Labs uses Orientation Island, the NMC is working on their own entry point, same with IBM. Is it a good thing that all these entities will have their own unique portal into Second Life?

I’m trying to update my WordPress theme to K2, but the newest version was throwing an error during initialization. I stepped down to an older version of K2 (v.95) and still working out the kinks. Hopefully I can get some new headers created, along with some other sections of the blog I’ve been meaning to build-out for a while now. If something is broken, it should be fixed soon.

In my doctoral program we spend a LOT of time talking about career planning and mapping out your career path. I’ve always wanted to teach, not necassarily at a big R1 school where teaching is 4th or 5th on priority list, but somewhere teaching is valued as the number one priority of every faculty member.

I’m getting my first shot at this in the Fall when I get to teach 40 students, mostly freshman, in our IST introductory class, IST 110: Inforation, Technology, and People. As soon as I received the news, I’ve had a lot of fragmented ideas bouncing around in my brain (that I will probably write more about some other time, note the new ‘teaching’ category on the right). After talking with a few people about my ideas, someone suggested first coming up with my top 3 goals. Instead of creating content-related goals, I came up with three very broad teaching goals:

3. Learning
2. Fun
1. Engagement

A collegue has already questioned the ordering of these goals, and I can certainly understand why. But based on several years of reading about the Net Generation, Games, game-based learning, and Web 2.0…I have a strong feeling that if I succeed in both Goal 1 and 2, Goal 3 is gauranteed to happen. If the order of these goals were reversed, I’m not so sure I could say the same thing.

I’ve had some ideas kicking around that I wanted to blog about all week, but it’s been rather busy around here lately. I presented with a colleague of mine, Brett Bixler at the 10th Annual PSU Web Conference about Virtual Worlds. We spent most of our time focusing on Second Life, but did talk a little bit about other options out there, and Google’s speculated position in the whole Virtual World space.

Microsoft is partnering with Games for Change to hold a game competition around the theme of global warming. I won’t get into the details, but this is very exciting for those of us in the Serious Games space.

What’s consumed me lately is one of the many books I recently received from Amazon: Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.

I was in the midst of dissertation land when this book first came out, so it fell off the radar for a while. I’m only about 75 pages in, but I already have so many dog-eared pages my book looks like it’s been read five times already. Johnson uses his unique background of systems analysis, neuroscience, culture, games, and software development to spin an interesting argument about the impact of different media (I’ve only hit the parts about games and television so far) on today’s youth (and in some cases, adults).

My favorite piece so far deals with the decline of casual reading Johnson mentions, and goes on to quote some studies and opinions dealing with this decline. People who read a lot are more inclined to do volunteer work, participate in community events…all those interesting quotes we’ve seen published in the NY Times and other places that proclaim the youth of today need to get back to reading more books because all these video games are rotting their brain.

Johnson suggest a mental exercise at this point: What if video games were created FIRST, before books? He goes on to craft a fantastic 2-page narrative along this theme.

“Reading books chronically understimulates the senses.”

“Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.”

“Books are tragically isolating.”

“These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading acrivities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.”

“But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path…For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing.”

“This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.”

Johnson immediately disagrees with this fictitious passage, but it provides the reader with a lot to think about. You can actually read the entire passage via Amazon’s preview feature, pages 19-20.

I’m somewhat embarrassed I hadn’t figured this out already, especially since it directly relates to my first design entry: I can FLY.

Design Lesson 5: Phantom Walls
Second Life has a feature you can toggle for every prim that allows avatars to pass right through them, as if the object wasn’t even there. I’m starting to think I should make my avatar look like Superman. This has some interesting design implications. I really don’t like the idea of re-creating real-world structures within Second Life, like some universities are creating campuses, but at least the idea of having phantom walls allows the user to move in, around, and out of buildings that are re-created to look like real-world replicas much easier. Going back to my Ohio University example:

If they had used phantom walls, I would not have got stuck within this building. I could have walked through the walls and flown out of the structure. THAT would have been much less frustrating.

So how will we use these phantom walls? Our buildings are textured in a black, partly transparent, design. I think we’ll standardize phantom walls as a certain texture, so users know what they can or can’t fly through. Initially, I think these phantom walls will be used for prims around doorways to give extra room to enter/exit structures, as well as for building roofs (or at least part of the roof). These are the initial thoughts, I’m sure we’ll come up with some better uses for phantom objects down the line.

In terms of design, I finally got to visit Microsoft’s new space, and really enjoyed the design of this building:

which seems to be the hub of their land. It’s a very spacious, open design that gives you plenty of movement freedom, and you can actually navigate through the entire structure without putting your feet on a surface.

This is one of my favorite aspects of games: the UI. I tend to borrow a lot of game UI elements for some of our elearning modules, mostly due to our 18-22 year old audience. I also happen to think game folks design some of the best UI’s out there. One of the best decisions Blizzard made when releasing World of Warcraft is opening their interface API so the community could create useful addons, or interface modifications (mods). Many of the early mods actually drove Blizzard to create similar features in the standard UI, but also forced Blizzard to put extra code restrictions on their API to prohibit mods from automating certain key functions of the game. I’ve experimented with MANY mods over my WoW career, but recently I’ve been struck by UI trends in Warcraft post-2.1 patch (this patch introduced A LOT of changes, some UI related).

In the early days of raiding (a raid is when you get 10, 15, 20, 25 people together to combat a computer-driven creature or character), interfaces were very busy. Buttons all over the screen, information everywhere, extremely hard to keep track of, etc. This UI isn’t *that* bad, but I think you can get the idea of how busy a WoW interface can get.

I’ve recently been trying to configure my UI to make it much cleaner. Mine looked a lot like the above image, which made my job in large raids (healing) much more difficult than need be. I’m shooting for something like:

You might be bored of all this WoW stuff by now, but here’s where I make the jump.

Can’t we, as designers of learning environments, figure out a better way to leverage UI customization for our users? Think elearning modding. Can we build some sort of frameworks or APIs into our content that can be not only customized on a CSS/basic level, but even tapped into and re-organized by users? Amazon web services is another great example. Facebook’s new MarketPlace, where people can build modules that tap into Facebook.

Elearning open APIs…I don’t think we are there yet, but I think it’s getting closer.

EDIT: some of the formatting around the second screen shot blows up on some browsers…a fix is in the works.

I posted about Newsbreaker in the past, and just found another great clip of the game. This is something that…is flat out amazing. Not from a technological viewpoint, but more from an engagement viewpoint. It looks like the whole theater is playing along, collaborating, and having a great time.

Imagine being able to build other small flash games that utilize motion sensors, and match the game with the general demographic of a specific movie audience. A children’s game for shrek, an adult game for Mr. Brooks, etc.

…and then you could work on sneaking a little educational content in.