e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

"U.S. Spies Use Custom Videogames to Learn How to Think" (WIRED)

(WIRED link)

excerpt:
"In the wake of the intelligence bungles that propelled the United States into the Iraq war, it's no secret that the nation's spies have been working to improve the quality of their analysis. Now the top U.S. military intelligence agency has come up with a new tool for teaching recruits critical thinking skills: videogames.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has just taken delivery of three PC-based games, developed by simulation studio Visual Purple under a $2.6 million contract between the DIA and defense contractor Concurrent Technologies. The goal is to quickly train the next generation of spies to analyze complex issues like Islamic fundamentalism.

Given a choice between a droning classroom lecture or a videogame, the best method for teaching Generation Y was obvious. "It is clear that our new workforce is very comfortable with this approach," says Bruce Bennett, chief of the analysis-training branch at the DIA's Joint Military Intelligence Training Center.

Wired.com had an opportunity to play all three games, Rapid Onset, Vital Passage and Sudden Thrust. The titles may conjure images of blitzkrieg, but the games themselves are actually a surprisingly clever and occasionally surreal blend of education, humor and intellectual challenge, aimed at teaching the player how to think."

SHOCKER: Most Kids Think That Learning from Games Would Be a Good Idea

Paul McNamara over at Network World's BuzzBlog reports on a study from Project Tomorrow.

This survey data is evidently drawn from all 50 states, American DOD schools, Canada, Mexico and
Australia including 319,223 K-12 students - 25,544 teachers - 19726 parents - 3,263 school leaders
from 3,729 schools and 867 districts. According to the report the responding schools were 97% public schools – 3% private schools, 32% Urban – 40% Suburban – 29% Rural, 43% Title I eligible; and 29% majority – minority student population.

Some of favorite findings:

Games make it easier to understand difficult concepts – 51%
o I would be more engaged in the subject – 50%
o I would learn more about the subject – 46% (56% of students in K-2 chose this as their #1 reason)
o It would be more interesting to practice problems – 44%

Here is another: "Only 3% of elementary students say they don’t play electronic games on some kind of device, 9% of middle school kids and 17% of high school kids."

Hmmm....wow....I wonder if maybe we should continue the debate about whether or not games are good for learning or maybe, here is an alternative...just shut up, accept the data and start really figuring out how to do it write and for PETE"S SAKE understand that design principles, ESPECIALLY design principles (except they aren't really design principles are they Adriana? ;-))...are not crafted in stone and can and should change and that BY ALL THAT'S GOOD AND PURE the classrooms and instructor-led training  were  probably NEVER studied RE their effectiveness as learning environments but rather as production environments. I'm sure that the Romans thought their empire wold stand for all time as well and look what happened to them.

Phew....Someone had me my water bottle.....sorry...its just that some of the comments on the original article are so wrong-headed that they just sent my blood pressure reeling - you should read them...

Grid 16: How Fast Can You Learn, Prioritize, and React?

OK...take 3 minutes and head over to Kongregate and try Grid 16. I don't care if you're a 'gamer' or not (whatever that means)...head over and see how you do...no instructions...just the admonitions to "Use Your Gamer Logic" and "Do Not Panic"....play it twice...did you get better?

Now take a look at the results page....
...nice feedback...I'm glad I scored high on "Prioritizing" ...I think it really matters in which order the mini games come up too....wow...nice experience though and the music alone is enough to get your heart rate up....

"The Core of Fun" (Raph Koster via IT Conversations)

Why I just found this podcast, I don't know (it was recorded a year ago). Still, its a great listen and may actually become a collector's item or at least an object that some will point as being from the "Pre-Dark Raph" era. ;-)

(excerpt)
"Fun is something everyone loves and it can make any experience better, but few people really understand it. Fortunately, Raph Koster has turned fun into a science and he breaks it down in this keynote from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. He gives a list of ways in which an activity can be made more fun, with examples from social media and ecommerce. Fun comes from learning and mastering new experiences. Just as any game is composed of smaller sub-games that need to be mastered, so can any activity be broken up into sub-activities, all of which can be made more fun. Some of the elements of fun are that how you complete an activity should matter, it should be hard enough that there's a chance of failure, that should be able to get better with practice, and that context should be provided and should matter for every action."

...and by the way....everybody should support The Conversations Network.....

The Invention of Good Games:Understanding Learning Design in Commercial Video Games (Katrin Becker thesis)

Katrin's important thesis is now available both as a Wiki and a PDF download.

"In order to design educational games that remain effective as both games and as learning objects, it is necessary to understand how successful games teach. However, the best games are designed for entertainment and not education, and while they teach effectively, their designs are not expressed in educational terms that could be used by designers of instructional games. Although current literature often cites examples from COTS games to support claims about how games teach and there is a growing body of research on the use of games in formal learning situations, the main focus has been on the learners and there have been no comprehensive detailed examinations of how specific games teach. By treating the COTS game as though it had been deliberately created as an educational game, it becomes possible to identify the learning requirements for the game as well as the strategies used to support that learning in a form suitable for examination as instructional design. Using methodology adapted from reverse engineering called 'instructional decomposition', both macro and micro design elements can be identified. This work will contribute to the body of knowledge on elements important in the design of educational games by identifying specific strategies employed in top-rated games to facilitate specific learning requirements."

 

 

 

 

 

GDC Update 9: The Game Design Challenge

OK...so this is my favorite session and I have high hopes. The last session that Peter Smith and I were in, Halo vs. Facebook,  was just awful. Evidently the big takeaway there was that you can social experiences in both and that those experiences will be different. I am probably being heretical here (nothing new) since evidently the lady who presented this session has presented multiple times before and her key presentation is entitled "Four Fun Keys." Some good slides in terms of mapping out interactions but the hert of the session just didn't grab me. ...but enough about that....

The room is getting seriously packed up as usual...John Lester, Mia Consalvo, Ian Bogost are just  some of the notables in the audience...so I guess they have high hopes as well.

The crowd actually wahoos wen this sessions starts and Eric Zimmerman's enthusiasm is infectious. (Portal won Game of the Year BTW - you can try a 2D version on Kongergate).

The theme this year is inter-species: a game that can be played by humans and at least one other species.  This is a riff on opening up new markets. The idea is to take an important trend facing the games market and spin it.

The Contestants:
Alexi Pajitnov
Steve Meretzky
Brenda - Wizardry

Rules of the Challenge: Its an intellectual wrestling match. Can't be an ordinary game that is played by an animal...has to be a new game. Could have special hardware UI but that can't be what the game is about.

Alexey Pajitnov: Dolphin Ride
Original idea was that game should take place in real 3D space...went more conservative and went with an underwater game...takes place in real world with real dolphins and in virtual space, 1 dolphin and 2 players, 1 navigator 1 shooter...the dolphin is a mount...the "Dolphin Saddle" has two "virtual cabins"...shooter consists of paint gun w/ digital camera...the playfield is a virtual space superimposed on real space...targets are color balls of different value....the goal is to shoot balls and try to shoot the other team's dolphins....

Steve Meretzky: the foxhunt as animals being involved in both a competitive and cooperative roles, what does it mean to play games with an animal? Can they actually know that they are playing? Lawyers as non-human species. What animals have disposable income? Pets. What animals produce things of value? "Shear Poker" Opponents acted like sheep. ;-) 1 Quadrillion ants as demographic but bacteria are in the trillions! The TrayStation! Classic RTS gameplay. The bacteria grow as you manage resources and that growth is projected as armies. Your defenses enable microwave projection which kills the bacteria. Evolution ensures that the bacteria that survive are stronger and immune to microwave! You own the rights to these improved bacteria and you can sell them to the bio-tech company of your choice! Awesome.

Brenda Brathwaite: An Interspecies Facebook ARG
seriously funny photoshop ideas....what about the wii? What about GPS? What about a transceiver? Realized that there was already play going on with animals. Co-op not vs.  OneHundredDogs.com. Starts at Westminster. Phase 1 - The Dogpack..go the site and register. Get challenges. Designed to build community between dogs and owners. City winner becomes "alpha dog" for that city. 50 real dogs.
Phase 2  - Dog Fifty One: Quest progression starts with friend invite from this dog and when you finish you get to an invite from dogfiftty two and so on. Now cities are working together.
Phase 3 - A Breakdown at the top....everyone must work together to find dogninetytwo...vast doggie conspiracy....

This stuff is funny but at its base, really shows insanely talented designers grappling with issues that no one should ever have to deal with...and they do it with humor, skill and just enough truth so that you can almost believe it happening. Brilliant. Just brilliant. Almost out of power...will post winner if possible.....

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GDC Update 8: Ray Kurzweil Keynote

The Next 20 Years of Gaming

The telephone as virtual reality
Virtual Boy
creating mathematical models of technology trends
current diet drugs work by inhibiting appetite, that's like a birth control pill that works by decreasing interest in sex...fat insulin receptor gene...our intuition wants to work in a linear fashion, it was only 6 or 7 years that most people did not even use search engine...you can't ignore the exponential, the new Kurzweil readung machine is integrated into a cell phone, this is a great exampe of using a cell phone for what it is best at, great demo, if you understand something in only one way - then you don't really understand it at all,   "play is how we principally learn", 5 years to tipping point when watts from solar power will be cheaper than watts from oil/coal, doubling the amount of solar power every two years,

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GDC Update 6: Game Studies Download 3.0

Ian Bogost  - Ga. Tech / Persuasive Games
Jane McGonigal - Institute for the Future
Mia Consalvo - Ohio University


Top Ten Countdown

www.avantgame.com/top10.htm

#10 How do you keep players at the edge of performance?
variations in limited environments can be more fun than wide open games

#9 Does immersion really have to be seamless? Breaking the fourth wall can be a good thing if done in the right way.

#8 Reality-based gaming market is already a bigger market than you think. Are game players getting tired of screens? Majoy City

#7 Gamers can be altruistic, empathetic and nurturing. Can games tap into "nice" emotions?
    Prospect-based emotions
    Attribute
    Fortune of others
    Attraction
There is an unexplored design space using the fortune of others and attraction emotions.

#6 It takes 10 hours of gameplay for women to play with the same spatial attention skill as men. men start out strong but don't improve much over the 10 hours, women come almost equal and maintain the skill sets over the long term (5 months)

#5 The exit screen really matters. Interesting definition of gamespace.

#4 Musical instrument tutoring can make you a real music hero.

#3 Voice chat makes you like your guildmates more, usually. How does voice chat impact the social bonds of gamers? VOIP intensifies existing emotions. Text users will tend to start conversations with strangers more frequently than VOIP users.

#2 There are three key ways to increase the monetary value of your avatar. Check Nick Yee research on motivation of online players. 

#1 Videogames are the future of live sports. **Sports games do seem to be routinely ignored here.

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GDC Update 5: Player Generated Content in Casual Games

Player Generated Content in Casual Games

One of the presenters is Kris Soumas and dig this title - "VP of Games, Lifetime Television" I wonder if they even have a CLO....but they have a VP of Games.....

Brian Goble - Hipsoft: developed 16 self-funded titles to date. Flip Words, Puzzle Express, Ocean Express, <these could be some interesting applications for DAU..and we could use player-generated content from the DAU students>, challenge in creating the server-backend, human editor, automatic filtering system, need to keep all material, even the approved stuff so that you do not continue to approve similar content, ang daily submissions 2,000, peak daily 7,000, total to date 3 million (in 4 years), total approved phrases 19,000,  unique creators 315,000, percent active creators 10%, approved v submitted .07%, percent auto filtered 91%, dev cost of system +servers+editor (editor works about 10 hours a week),  game feels fresh after 4 years, (goble@hipsoft.com)

Kris Soumas - Lifetime Television:  DressUpChallenge.com
The reason we went to games is that our audience (women 18+) was playing casual games, game section on lifetime.com accounts for 45% of traffic and avg time is 18 minutes, "My Story is ....Makeover" has over 15 million users, 300K journals, 15% of all traffic to lifetime.com, dressupchallenge integrates Flash and Drupal, point system for PGC adds to rank progression,

Daniel James - CEO Three Rings
djames.org/gdc
Whirled - PGC in a Casual MMO
Flash 9/AJAX client, java server, Issues with Flash: awful bugs, docs, esp. Flex, not well designed for complex apps, problems with security model, Thorny Issues: Local client code supported, server-side code is not supported, no DRM

Will Harvey - imvu,
starts with video in which every single avatar is some kind of hyper-realized female form, I wonder what the VP from lifetime thinks, 35K developers have created almost 1.5 million items,  <how could DAU use a PGC user-revenue model?> one developer (not the top one) is making over 700K per year, one way that they do this is that imvu allows people to create products that others can mod and re-submit so as a developer you can create products that others re-use and then you derive profits from that addtl. use, (ARPU annual revenue per user), they are actually generating more ARPU than facebbok and myspace

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GDC Update 4: A Basket of Stuff

www.life20.net - need to check this out...supposed to be an online virtual world conference in a virtual world....

interesting tidbit (look at racetomars.ca) Unreal 2.5 can generate 3D content that can run on machines that don't even have hardware graphics cards but use only software renderers.

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Facebook and the new Web of Social Gaming

...so geez was this room packed with people lining the sides of the room and sitting in the aisles...and as people do....they were all breathing and generating heat and it got a wee bit hot both in the audience and on stage, let me explain.

Are you all on Facebook?  No? Well sign up and find me. In the meantime let me introduce you to the world of Facebook apps. Facebook is a social platform what can host a range of applications like shared calendars, photos and the like. It can also host games. The trick with Facebook games is that they are all social, meaning you play them by involving your friends. That can also make them highly viral and they have the potential to spread super fast and generate huge pageviews very quickly.

So this presentation featured the creators behind some of the most popular Facebook games going - Warbook, Vampires and Texas Hold'em. The amount of hits these games are generating are insane...they dwarf by orders of magnitude the numbers of something like Second Life or even World of Warcraft. Sure, the people coming there are spending a lot less time but they still come.

As the discussion went on, the debate got very heated about the difference CPA (Cost per action) v. CPM (Click per thousand) v. CPC (Cost per click) models of generating ad revenue. What really struck me here was that there were a couple of guys on stage in their early to mid 20's debating, at a high level of sophistication, a variety of web-based advertising and revenue-generation models on incredible scales. This has got to be an unintended consequence of the Web etc....I started thinking, what kind of models will these people be thinking of when they get 10 or 20 years under their belt? How will that level of sophistication impact our organizations? How will we handle people who can define "starting their own company" by writing a Facebook app?

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Wii Session

Funded by NIH, using the Wii for Gait and Balance exercises for people with Parkinson's.........
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The "Ground Truth" of Serious Gaming
Donna Djordjevich - Sandia

Ground Truth Platform
designed to prepare decision makers for catastrophic events in metro areas...
Used enterprise modeling

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The Paradox of Play

Don Daglow - Stormfront
Richard Wainess
Frank Lantz
Alex Games

...more later from this session.......battery ran out and had to actually use paper.....

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