Games are complex beasts. Not only do you need to understand and master the interface and inputs, but in order to succeed you need to put your patience to the test. Games are meant to be challenging, but until dynamic difficulty systems are commonplace, what do you do when you hit a brick wall in terms of progression within a game?
Some people continue to run into the wall, testing different strategies, collecting feedback, then re-strategize until they succeed. I find this very interesting in terms of the learning process and applying the scientific method in an entertainment context, but that’s not the point of this post…
The point of this post is what I do when I hit the wall in a game. I look for cheats. Unlimited ammo? Instant health packs? Armor? Something to help me break through the wall so i can continue with the game.
Why look for a cheat? In my case, two reasons:
- Time. I simply do not have time to try and overcome the same obstacle over and over if I ever want to see the end of a game. Between work, PhD studies and other obligations, time always seems to be short.
- Story. I WANT to see the game to the end. I’m a firm believer that games are an art form, and to enjoy the art to its fullest you need to experience the entire artistic expression, from start to finish.
So back to accessibility. Would games be a more accessible medium if designers provided the end user with a variety of tools to ease the difficulty of the game? Cheats are available for most games, but the user needs to go out and actively seek them out. What if the game was smart enough to say “hey, I see this alien has destroyed you and your base 12 times in a row. Want some free weapon upgrades this go around for a better shot at progressing?”
Or would this take away something from the experience?
I’m still not sure the title of this entry reflects the content of the post…but it’s the first thing that came to mind. A few colleagues and many others are taking part in an event called “Hacking Education” going on right now. I don’t have a lot of time to put thoughts around all the great things I’ve read already coming out of the conference, but I come across a great post by Jeff Jarvis (thanks April!) that illustrated some of the thinking behind this.
Call me a utopian but I imagine a new educational ecology where students may take courses from anywhere and instructors may select any students, where courses are collaborative and public, where creativity is nurtured as Google nurtures it, where making mistakes well is valued over sameness and safety, where education continues long past age 21, where tests and degrees matter less than one’s own portfolio of work, where the gift economy may turn anyone with knowledge into teachers, where the skills of research and reasoning and skepticism are valued over the skills of memorization and calculation, and where universities teach an abundance of knowledge to those who want it rather than manage a scarcity of seats in a class.
With my PhD nearly complete, I do have dreams of teaching at a teaching-centered university, fully intent on breaking old traditions and leading by example in new ways to reach students (and students reach me, for that matter). In addition to following these types of conversations online, I picked up a copy of Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. After reading the introduction, I felt similar to when I read the above quote: I couldn’t agree more! Our educational system is in such a rut, how will we ever recover? Then I realized that this book was published in 1971, and everything cited during the intro STILL holds true today.
Our system is (and has been for a LONG time) screwed up all the way to the core.
In Don Norman’s book Design of Everyday Things he alludes to two types of knowledge:
1. Knowledge in the world
2. Knowledge in your head
Taking this out of Norman’s design context, I think this is a HUGE part of why everything is screwed up. We are testing students at all levels in the educational system for knowledge in the world. That is, knowledge that is easily found by simple searches, often times within seconds of a question being asked. Why do we test students on this type of knowledge? It only ever becomes knowledge in the head for a short time period, then it is gone. The ‘knowledge in the head’ should be things like scientific discourse, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity…these are THE skills individuals MUST know to be successful.
end rant
