the eighty-second episode of ventriloquy brings you some of my learning points from the Professional Day conference organized by the digital media think-tank X|Media|Lab. these points are elaborated upon and supplemented in this blog entry.
the theme of the conference was 'Learning from games'.
[update: i would like to extend a VERY WARM WELCOME to all visitors who have been directed here by Spore enthusiast sites such as
- Petreak's 7 December post at sporesite.com
- Sterics's 7 December blog entry (Interfaz modificado del editor de criaturas) Spore.es
- The M.A.N6's 7 December post at Spore Mania
- Sterics's 8 December post at the gamingsteve.com forums
- the 8 December blog entry (Novedades en el editor de criaturas) Spore Evolution spore.com.ar
- Gabriel's post at Sporando Site Brasileiro Sobre Spore
- Switch's 9 December post at Spore Source
- and his post at the Gaming Source Network Forums
- the 9 December news item at Spore-Planet.cz
please scroll down to see the pics you've come here for :-) ]
the first sub-theme was 'international perspectives'. Noah Falstein, who sits on the board of the Serious Games Summit, set much of the stage for the rest of the day by talking about 'better living through gameplay'. he suggested that there are at least four reasons why we should be paying attention to 'serious games' (however we define them); namely, that well-designed serious games are creative (in that they bring fresh approaches to important issues, and that through this creativity they are redefining what games are), commercial (they are presently the first steps in what will be a huge market), compassionate (they help people with real-world problems), and consequential (serious games shape opinions, instruct, and some even save lives). Falstein also introduced me to the term 'stealth education', which - as a quick search on the web soon reveals - is a term which seems to have been appropriated by quite a number of interest groups to mean different things. Some of the games that Falstein used to illustrate his points were Airport insecurity, A force more powerful and Freedom fighter 56.
Next up was my colleague at the National Institute of Education (NIE) - Associate Professor Chee Yam San - who introduced the audience to the National Education game that some of us at the NIE's Learning Sciences Lab are developing.
Zhan Ye, who co-founded China GC Networks, made some very interesting points about how games sit, and have sat, in the broader context of Asian culture. his position is that serious games live very well within the cultural norms of most Asian societies. elaborating, he said that under both traditional Chinese culture and communist ideology, play is generally perceived negatively and not welcomed. in such contexts, play is only valuable if it evolves children into better adults by teaching them good values and / or useful knowledge - pure play (play just for fun) is not encouraged. given this premise, serious games are therefore more acceptable and welcome by the public, media and government in mainland China. however, there are limits to the general applicability of this too - even in China - for which he cites the example of the game Learning from Comrade Lei Feng, which i elaborate upon in the 4.2 MB download that is this podcast episode.
[picture credit: Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages]
Associate Professor Katie Salen, of Parsons the New School of Design, reminded us that Professor Henry Jenkins at the MIT distinguishes between participatory cultures and interactive technologies. her point was that the former allow affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem solving and circulations - all of which are elements of engaging learning experiences. she urged the audience to move away from conceptions of what she termed the 'artifact of the game' and towards the 'condition of gaming'. it was in this context that she introduced four gaming literacies, namely reading and modding, world building (eg, Second Life), systems thinking (simulations), and computational literacy. her point was that these various literacies serve the learners equally well outside of gameplay as in it. Prof Salen then shared a game development environment for children (The Factory), which was designed to permit the learning and practice of these gaming literacies, and thus extend the learning experience into the epistemology of the game designer. as players work their way up the 'shop floor' in the Factory, they have the opportunities to become a guild member through the production and critique of games, and thus to eventually attain the level of teachers themselves. one of the findings she shared with the audience was that girls were much more thoughtful about game design and populating the gamespace with game elements than boys - the former seemed more keen to 'narrativize the space', as she put it.
the second sub-theme of the conference was 'practical examples'. Sande Chen talked about three ways in which games can be assessed. completion assessment measures whether the player 'successfully' (however defined) completed the game. in-process assessment asks questions such as 'how did the player choose his or her actions?' and 'did the player change his mind? If so, at what point?'. teacher evaluation seeks teachers' inputs as to the extent to which it is thought the students knows / understands the content.
the third sub-theme was 'tools and technologies'. Jyri Salomaa - of the Nokia Research Centre, Beijing - drew a timeline in which he traced the evolution from social gaming (gaming free from fixed locations, MMORPG), to mixed reality gaming (in which context is added to gaming, social networking and virtual worlds, such as through the use of everyday-life activities (eg, fitness, business, education) in game goals), and to ubiquitous gaming (which describes pervasive gaming which mixes physical spaces, virtual worlds and everyday activities to the extent that the borders between gaming and other activities is blurred).
[special flag for Spore visitors from:
- Petreak's 7 December post at sporesite.com
- Sterics's 7 December blog entry (Interfaz modificado del editor de criaturas) Spore.es
- The M.A.N6's 7 December post at Spore Mania
- Sterics's 8 December post at the gamingsteve.com forums
- the 8 December blog entry (Novedades en el editor de criaturas) Spore Evolution spore.com.ar
- Gabriel's post at Sporando Site Brasileiro Sobre Spore
- Switch's 9 December post at Spore Source
- and his post at the Gaming Source Network Forums
- the 9 December news item at Spore-Planet.cz
pics are HERE :-) ]
Caryl Shaw of Maxis wowed all of us with her previews of Spore. we were allowed to take pics of her demo of the creature editor.
the final sub-theme of the conference was 'new kinds of teaching and learning'.
Deb Polson of the Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design introduced to the audience the idea that games in education can be represented on a spectrum from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), mods, customized, and user-created. in what seemed to echo closely my own doctoral research, she went on to suggest ways in which text-messaging could be used in exploratory activities, such as SMS trails and historical walks. she also shared an intervention carried out in Melbourne, in which the learning task took children from the computer game environment, to a text-messaging environment, and finally into a museum. a point to note was that the learners were given 'agent badges', which she said gave them a sense of membership (see Prof Salen's points (above) about guilds and apprenticeship).
Richard Sandford of FutureLab talked about five qualities of well designed serious games which explain "What's in a game? Why players and teachers want the same thing". These are:
- autonomy (being able to control your path through the gameworld (freedom to explore); genuine choices (space to make mistakes, reduced real-world consequences); opportunity to exercise agency)
- simulation (sufficiently accurate space in which to model (need to choose appropriate degree of realism); chance to do things that you can't do in real life, eg build & test a rollercoaster, tune a racing car)
- consistency (a believable narrative (helps immersion and authenticity); clear causal relationship between variables (enables hypothesizing)
- feedback (real time; test and refine hypotheses; assess consequences of action; from either internal mechanics or wider community)
- authenticity (tasks aren't contrived (relevant to gameworld); meaningful demonstration of ability and understanding; opportunity to construct new knowledge; actions take place in context; players define their own tasks)
finally, Professor Tracy Fullerton, of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab at the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, introduced to the audience that technologies of learning dictate not only how things are taught, but what is taught, as well. to illustrate her point, she contrasted traditional board-games such as checkers, chess and othello with first-person shooters. she argued that the mechanics of the former emphasized fairness in competition (through turn-taking), rationality above random fate, strength in numbers (while permitting strategy to triumph over strength), and the concepts of 'honourable' war and serious play. the latter, on the other hand, were akin to a digital version of 'tag', in which the world is hostile and unknown, survival is imperative, killing enemies is key to survival, and direct combat is the primary (or even sole) mode of expression. what got me most excited was learning that it was one of Prof Fullerton's graduate students who was responsible for the conception and design of the game Darfur is dying, which i first talked about in Episode 72 back in October. Prof Fullerton closed the conference by sharing with us a quotation from George Leonard's (2000) The ultimate athlete:
"how we play the game signifies nothing less than our way of being in the world".
Show notes:
- X|Media|Lab Professional Day conference 2006
- Serious Games Summit
- Airport insecurity
- A force more powerful
- Freedom fighter 56
- China GC Networks
- Comrade Lei Feng (wikipedia entry)
- Parsons the New School of Design
- Jenkins on participatory culture (first brought to my attention by Billy Tan on 25 October)
- Nokia Research Centre on the Manhattan Story Mashup
- Cathy's Book: if found call 650-266-8233
- Spore
- Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design
- FutureLab Racing Academy
- Joint Information Systems Committee Racing Academy
- Playing games with a conscience (Wired 22 Apr 2004)
- Ayiti: the cost of life
- Darfur is dying
[special acknowledgments and gratitude to:
- Petreak's 7 December post at sporesite.com
- Sterics's 7 December blog entry (Interfaz modificado del editor de criaturas) Spore.es
- The M.A.N6's 7 December post at Spore Mania
- Sterics's 8 December post at the gamingsteve.com forums
- the 8 December blog entry (Novedades en el editor de criaturas) Spore Evolution spore.com.ar
- Gabriel's post at Sporando Site Brasileiro Sobre Spore
- Switch's 9 December post at Spore Source
- and his post at the Gaming Source Network Forums
- the 9 December news item at Spore-Planet.cz
for tripling my site's traffic :-) ]
