Virtual Learning Worlds

I had the opportunity last year to talk with a potential student about the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. His father, a renowned researcher from Singapore, was visiting for the day and had his son in the states to look at universities. After talking about interests, he sheepishly asked

“Do you know if admissions offices look at social networking sites when making decisions?”

Good question. I told him that a university the size of Penn State probably does not, but I bet other, smaller schools do. Sure enough, some do to a small degree (one out of every 10 schools surveyed answered yes). I spend a good chunk of time in my IST 110 class talking about social networking, web 2.0 and identity. We’ve had several students NOT get internships, and in one case a job, due to Facebook or other pieces of content a student put online. I urge all IST students to carefully look at Facebook’s privacy features (must be logged in to Facebook), and use them accordingly. I actually looked up all 50 of my students on Facebook last semester, and nearly 75% had open profiles. I was tempted to put together a presentation using some of the more…colorful photos of my students, but decided against it at the last minute.

Of interest to me is what the admissions offices who answered “yes” reported:

• 25% reported finding positive information about the student applicant
• 38% reported finding negative information about the student applicant

Some of my students argue “this is OUR space, for me and my friends. You old folks need to get out!” Well my friend, welcome to reality. With the proliferation of net-capable cell phones with embedded cameras, it’s easy to upload that picture of Joe Smith passed out and duck-taped to a stop sign 5 seconds after it is taken. What’s even scarier is that Joe Smith did not upload the photo, one of his friends did and tagged him in it. If Joe is smart, he’ll login and remove the tag of himself in the photo, then promptly take his buddy’s phone and delete the picture (or drop the phone in the toilet, that works too).

It’s always interesting what you find when you Google yourself every few months, or search for yourself on different social networking sites.

Members of the Educational Gaming Commons team are gearing up for a couple trips to other universities and publishers around the country to start benchmarking and relationship building. I spent time looking over USC’s interactive media program as well as their gamepipe lab this afternoon. Although their program is very different from what we’re trying to do at PSU, it looks like lots of good stuff out on the left coast.

Have a look at the project gallery page. Lots of good games coming out of USC, including Fl0w and PMOG. If more hours existed in the day, I’d like to take a look at each of these projects. My guess is that I’d find a mountain of new ideas and applications in game technology.

And how much fun would this be? DemoDay looks similar to what the late R. Pausch did at CMU with fantastic results.

Maybe it’s time to put USC on the list of places to visit…for January or February.

Things are starting to heat up in the rhythm game genre again. Rock Band 2 is out, Guitar Hero World Tour to follow shortly. Also, Wii Music is making headlines and might be a good music game for kids interested in learning the basics of music education.

I’ve been playing Guitar Hero since GH2, and actually attended a midnight release for Rock Band that resulted in a World Tour running to the wee hours of the morning with some friends. Due to the massive amount of plastic instruments already strewn around my living room, I opted to pick up Rock Band 2 the day of release and will likely pass on Guitar Hero World Tour in October (it requires a new drum set).

But the major reason I opted for RB2? It’s all about the music, man. Not just the setlist for RB2, but the fact that I can import ALL of my downloaded songs from Rock Band 1 into Rock Band 2. Also, I was able to import nearly all the songs from the original Rock Band 1 CD into Rock Band 2 yesterday (see video below). It cost a measly 5 bucs due to licensing constraints, but most fans don’t mind. So my Rock Band library is now over 200 songs, something that is impossible with the current incarnations of Guitar Hero due to incompatibilities with downloaded content from one version to another. If I was a true Rock Band junky and downloaded ALL the content released, I would have OVER 500 songs to choose from. I’ve blogged in the past about wanting to play MY OWN music. We’re inching closer to that day, where I’ll be able to load up my favorite disco biscuits song and shred or drum to my heart’s content.

When your rock band library starts to look more like iTunes vs. the traditional setlist these games started with…that’s a good thing!

I picked up Spore the day it came out, but have only played intermittently the past week. I tried putting together a post last week, but it turned into a game review of the 5-phases of Spore…not exactly what I wanted to get at. Instead, some of the more interesting elements of the game:

Sporecasts - this is simply a way to subscribe to content in the Sporepedia, similar to how you would subscribe to an RSS feed using a reader. Anyone can create a Sporecast, and most have some sort of theme. I subscribed to a World of Warcraft sporecast and a Star Wars Sporecast straight away. Once I finished the cell stage and crawled on to land, one of the first tribes I exterminated (I took the Carnivore route) were full of Chewbacca look-alikes.

This is a good time to bring up the timeline feature in Spore. Each time you complete a stage, all your actions are captured on a timeline and accessible throughout the course of the game.

This is a glimpse of my timeline somewhere during the tribal stage. You can see my critter (left), the species I allied with (green chat bubbles and arrows), all the modifications I made to my critter (vertical stack of icons), when I died (crossbones), when my brain grew and all the species I drove to extinction (the images of critters with red crosshairs above them). Very interesting use of a timeline, and allows the player to reflect on decisions made throughout an entire stage of the game. Great implementation…could something similar be constructed for students throughout a semester for a course? Or for all courses combined? Could be interesting…

When I arrived at the civilization stage, I was taking over another tribe when I received a message that my base was being attacked. I quickly returned to my base to find it being destroyed by “Epic Magtheridon” (a raid boss in World of Warcraft).

Overall the Sporecast idea is fantastic, but it does not seem to be implemented to perfection. Once subscribed, I receive a message “creatures of this Sporecast are more likely to appear in your game world than other creatures”. Hmm. Why can’t I get ONLY critters from the Sporecasts I subscribe?

I finally hit the Space stage of the game this weekend (final stage). The first four stages were Ok, but they were nothing more than re-creations of other game genres within the Spore framework. But the Space stage feels different. It’s very open-ended (think emergent, sandbox gameplay) and almost feels like a single player RPG. I can go to different planets and negotiate with them for economic gains, try and sway them with religious tactics, or simply overtake them with brute force. I can also ally with other empires, accepting quests to do their bidding for a short while. Other options include terra-forming planets that are inhospitable in order to colonize or playing the market, buying trade goods cheap in one solar system and re-selling them in a different solar system for triple the cost. I’m only an hour into the Space stage, but THIS is what Spore is all about.

We have a few faculty that want to explore using Spore to supplement a course. Looking forward to some very interesting brainstorming sessions in the future…

I’ve had several browser windows open with content I wanted to blog about, but this PhD thing is prohibiting a post per item. So a quick roundup of content over the last couple weeks:

50 Virtual Worlds in 7 minutes - Nice video with a few virtual worlds I had never seen. Moves rapidly towards the end, but worth the 7 minutes.

Thanks to Tony O for the initial find.

IBM’s Environmental Game - this has been in production for a few years now, but it appears IBM has finally released the MMO-style game related to environmental education.

Thanks to Karl for the pointer to the video

Finally, I came across a great post over at O’Reilly Radar concerning Apple’s application store. Two items worth noting:

• Games are BY FAR the biggest category of applications. Utilities is second, but the game category is over twice as large as the utility category
• Educational applications have tripled over the last three weeks, making it the fastest growing category of applications in the store

Lots of great things going on in the serious games and virtual learning worlds space!

The game has gone gold and should arrive on store shelves this Sunday. But the hype that has surrounded this game for over 3 years has…well, died down the closer we get to release. Are people sick of hearing about it? Bored with the Creature Creator? Or is the game not that good? Joystiq recently posted a meta-review of the game with scores of 80, 88, and 91 of 100 by different review outlets. Not even close to the reviews of something like GTA IV.

In addition to pondering why the hype has decreased, I wonder what my play habits will be with this game.

A few of us have been discussing a game-related blog for the past 6 months. We have a team of three, and each of us have a different perspective on games. In addition to different perspectives, we all have different game-playing habits. Personally, I’d call myself “casual hardcore”: I play several games, but rarely to completion (GTA IV, Gears of War, Mass Effect, etc). I play a lot of Xbox Live Arcade games and other browser-based casual games (Castle Crashers, Geometry Wars, Boom Boom Rocket, Desktop Tower Defense…). I play a lot of social games (Guitar Hero, Boom Blox, Wii Sports, Rock Band). I WILL go hardcore MMO from time to time (Ultima Online, World of Warcraft). In addition to playing these games, I read Game Developer each month and follow several gaming news sites and industry sites.

I guess you could call this my gaming profile (much better than my Xbox Live card to the right). So the big question: will Spore fit MY game play habits? My guess is that the traditional hardcore crowd will not spend a lot of time with Spore (hence the somewhat low reviews), but the hardcore casual crowd may spend months with this game.

Could this be the first of many examples of games that bridge the gap between the casual game market and the traditional, hardcore market?

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Cole and his group, Education Technology Services, for one week each month over the last year. In addition to being a great experience, the sporadic residencies give me an interesting perspective on the evolution of the work spaces Cole and Co. are designing. ETS opened the ETS Cafe a couple months back.

It’s a nice space. In addition to the four chars, TV and table you see in the picture, there is a raised seating area akin to a bar in the back of the room (where I was standing while taking the pic). A few observations:

• Few spaces exist like this on campus that I am aware of. Some buildings have traditional ‘lounge’ spaces in large, open areas, but I have not come across rooms like the Cafe ETS on campus. When space is always at a premium (labs, offices, centers, etc), it’s refreshing to see a space like this emerge.
• When passing the cafe, I usually see no one in the room or four people in the room. Rarely, if ever, do I see only 1 or 2 individuals. Not really sure why that is…
• It is usually the males in this space. For some reason I rarely see the females of the office in this space

The other recent addition to the ETS space is a massive whiteboard that resides in the central hallway leading to the ETS offices. Cole told me the story last night when the whiteboard first arrived, no one was sure what to do with it. Finally, one of the employees wrote on the whiteboard “what are the policies of use for this whiteboard?”. Hah! Now, the whiteboard has a mix of collaborative opportunities, with people posting ideas and signing up for ETS events.

The whiteboard also contains a large series of ‘voting’ boxes, from everything to a lobster tank in the office to the presidential race. I’m curious if one type of content will overtake the other, or if some other use will emerge that may dominate the whiteboard.

If you read Cole’s blog, you’re aware of the importance he places on community and collaboration. Personally, I’m enjoying this once-a-month glimpse into the evolution of these community spaces at ETS and looking forward to watching the experiment continue to unfold.