Virtual Learning Worlds

I’ve been following a couple blogs lately regarding the role of instructional designers, more specifically, how individuals come to call themselves instructional designers. It all started with Cammy’s post, “Who Gets to Be Called an Instructional Designer?”. I then followed some jumps to Karl’s response and Clark’s response, which stressed the importance of formal degrees and/or a wide range of background knowledge necessary to successfully practice instructional design. While I agree with both posts…there’s still elements of instructional design I find lacking (and this is coming from someone with a Master’s degree in the field).

After practicing ID for nearly 10 years now after my degree, I rarely call myself an instructional designer, but simply a “designer”. Why? I think part of it was my Masters experience at Bloomsburg, which was coupled with a lot of elearning design, which continues here at Penn State. Instructional design provides a great viewpoint into certain aspects of learning, but seems to lack emphasis on things like:

• HCI and user interfaces - create the best learning experience, but put a poor interface on top of it, and you lose the majority of your audience.
• Motivation - some models take this into account, but it’s almost never emphasized enough. Both from the standpoint of what the learner’s initial motivations might be, plus how I can build on these motivations or create new motivations.
• Engagement - instructional design seems to place little emphasis on how to actually engage the learner with the materials at hand. Objectives, examples, scaffolding, and other elements that often guide the design process do a very poor job of creating an engaging learning experience.
• Cognitive psychology - as Clark points out, a the foundations of ID are partially built on early psychology work related to learning. A colleague of mine with a PhD in learning sciences points this out as THE pitfall of most ID programs. We do a poor job of understanding the psychology of learning, particularly the context of the learning environment.

I still believe ID is extremely valuable on any project related to learning. But I’ve dealt with instructional designers who have Masters or PhDs and want to follow some ID model to a “T” for every project, and if we don’t follow the models to a “T”, it’s not good instructional design. I think this is at the heart of the point Cammy wanted to make: we need a much better balance between theory and practice in the field.

I could bend this into a game-related post, but that would take up another 5 paragraphs. Marc Prensky often muses that “game designers make better instructional designers than someone with an instructional design degree”. I don’t agree with Marc, but on some fronts, I find this very true.

Being sick most of this week and trying to catch up after a vacation down south, I nearly forgot that the GDC is in full swing. I opted to pass on the serious games summit this year but am still trying to keep track of blog feeds from the Moscone Center.

Today was Microsoft’s big show, where they highlighted Fable 2, the new Unreal engine on Xbox 360, and announced Gears of War 2. But the big news (and what they actually covered FIRST during the show)?

“Xbox Live Community Games”

Taken from Joystiq’s report:

Xbox Live Community Games’ will give creators a huge audience to share their creativity with. Game distribution will be democritized, allowing the community to control the content. Create, Submit, Peer Review, Play are the four key steps.

On the surface this sounds great, and with the traction MS has with Xbox Live, I think they can make it work. I’m curious what the system will look like, both in terms of flow and UI. I’m also curious if this could lead to a direct distribution channel for folks who want to design and develop serious games for a wide ranging audience. What other opportunities does something like this present?

When we were designing online courses here at SI, we used a CMS that captured not only the content, but all the design decisions and storyboards that went along with each specific chunk of content. When we published the courses, we only pushed the content, leaving the meta-data and design dialog in the CMS. We toyed around with the idea of publishing the design notes as well, giving the students a glimpse into the decision making process our team went through at a specific point in a course. We assumed then, and even more so now, that students simply would not care. But what if you did this as part of an activity, say for an instructional design/instructional systems graduate program?

Coming from an ID background, I have a sense of what represents a good learning experience vs. a bad learning experience in specific contexts. What if you could somehow capture design decisions from the team that produced the learning experience, and allow ID students to get an inside glimpse into the reality of designing a standout piece of instruction?

Enter Half-Life 2’s ‘commentary’ mode. I’m playing through HL2 Episode One right now, which features a mode where I can access commentary directly from the designers of the game. It looks something like this:

How valuable could something like this be for design education? Choose some of the top elearning providers, and somehow capture this type of information regarding the design decisions the team makes and provide access to the commentary sporadically throughout the learning module. As an ID graduate student, I learned all about design models and philosophies, but I rarely had the opportunity to see inside a designer’s mind, to get the contextual side of design along with the content.

I’d like to think of myself as an educational game designer, especially when that’s part of my signature file in my work emails and what I do with 25% of my time. I have had someone at the GDC tell me “You’re in academia? You guys always make up titles for yourselves that don’t make any sense”. If he saw “game designer” in my sig file, he’d probably laugh at me and tell me I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Which might be true in one sense, but entirely false in another.

On one hand, we have a LOT of people in academia trying to make games with no formal (or even informal) background in game design. Myself included. I’ve read my share of books, read the monthly Game Developer Magazine, and belong to several professional organizations, but do I actually have real-world experience? Not particularly. But due to my background as a gamer, in addition to all the other aspects of the design field I DO have a formal background in, I’d like to think I could successfully design a small game.

On the other hand, even within development studios, the term “game designer” has a plethora of descriptions. Each studio seems to have a unique perspective on the role of a game designer. Some studios have many different types of game designers, such as mob design, zone design, mission design, and system design. From an article in Game Developer, Jack Emmert, lead designer of City of Heroes, put together an interesting piece about how his studio, Cryptic, interviews for game designers. A few of their test questions:

City of Heroes is built upon the premise that three ‘minions’ are a challenge to a single hero and that combat is fast and furious. First, every entity has six attributes: endurance, hit points, damage, regeneration rate, recovery rate, and base percentage to hit. Second, every ability has a recharge time in seconds before it can be used again.

The question goes on to ask the applicant to actually assign mathematical values to attributes and time (seconds) to abilities, then illustrate how the created system would work if a hero had to fight 3 villains simultaneously. The applicant is expected to “show all your work”, as if taking a calculus test.

Emmert goes on to indicate that some of the most seasoned designers fail this test (or others found on the first phase of the application). But Cryptic has somewhat standardized on the qualifications of a game designer for their studio…which could be both good and bad.