I’ve been spending a fair bit of time in WoW recently, attempting to mash it into the PLTS framework to see what comes out the other end. More on that to come. In this post I want to talk about failing and how we’re not doing it nearly as often as we should.

The thing about learning to fail is that you learn that it’s actually not so bad. You develop skills to help you manage it, to come back afterwards. But we’re scared of it. We’ve built a system where failing is a big bad thing, and we must avoid it at all costs.

Distinctly Average

The problem with that is it breeds mediocrity. The biggest hardest part of my role is dealing with the fear of change, the unknown. It is safer to stick with what we know, maintain the status quo. You see it in individuals, and in whole institutions. You can’t fail if you don’t push it too hard.

This attitude means we end up falling into a trap where can can easily do the same to our students. At the big scary end of school you must pass your exams to get to the next thing. Want to create an environment that’ll scare you about failing? Not being allowed to carry on if you do will achieve that.

I don’t have a huge problem with this though. We need goals to challenge us, targets we are motivated to achieve. Succeeding at a difficult task is such a positive experience, we can’t take that away.

My problem is that because the fail is scary rather than building their confidence to think they can do it, it’s safer make the task easier. Take the BTEC in X because it’s an easy way to 5 GCSEs rather than doing that triple science you’re not smart enough for, improve this coursework by doing Y in order to tick enough boxes on the mark scheme, your current grades mean you should do the foundation paper and get a safe C grade rather than risking the higher, and so on.

Gamification

In the game world the tasks don’t get easier the more you fail. There isn’t an easy way round a hard obstacle, you just have to persevere. What we in schools need to learn from games is why people come back to them, again and again.

One reason is because it’s safe to fail. I’m happy to admit that in WoW I die fairly frequently. When you die in WoW you become a ghost, a little gravestone appears on your map and you have to head off and find your body. Once you’ve found it you carry on from where you left off, having learned from your mistake.

The quest doesn’t become any easier to accommodate my poor play, I don’t get a man over my shoulder telling me which button to press. I reflect on my own performance and adapt, all the time knowing that if I’m still not quite successful I can just have another go.

I’ll finish with a McGonigal quote:

“When we’re playing a well-designed game, failure doesn’t disappoint us. It makes us happy in a very particular way: excited, interested, and most of all optimistic”

The Introduction to Digital game-Based Learning class met Frank Lassard at the Virtual University of Edinburgh's Sandbox in Second Life for a demonstration of Holodecks for creating scenes for role play and meetings.

In mid 2011, "Kirstens Viewer" based on Linden Labs' open source Second Life Viewer code, added support for 3D stereo vision using a variety of 3D methods, including simple red/cyan glasses.  This viewer is no longer maintained and is not available for download.  but the last version created - Kirstens S21(9) - still works with current Second Life servers. Here is an example image from Kirtsen's Viewer in red/cyan 3D (click on image for a full sized copy and get out your 3D glasses to see the effect):

There was an earlier patch for an early version of  the Second Life Viewer from the University of Michigan to support 3D stereoscopic views in Second Life. See http://3dvision-blog.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=142 and https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2972?

I have been thinking about the game design asessment since Christmas.  It is my style to make notes and get ideas flowing early on and collect assets before seriously starting any work element.  I had originally thought a game using assets already available to me from a project on the "Virtual World of Whisky" might make a suitable topic for the game design.  See for example:

• http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/i-room/resources/vwow/VWoW-I-Room-Final-Report-2008-03-19.pdf
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4nqlqRAd04

I have seen other opportunities while exploring quests in World of Warcraft, a number of space-themed games mentioned in this blog, and playing a range of new (to me) games on the course.

I am finding that a number of themes keep arising in my interests while engaging with these games and thinking about their narrative, objectives, and the ways in which they introduce artifacts and skills.

• Situated Learning and Narrative
• Levels, Scaffolding and Push to the ZPD (Vygotsky)
• Use of encyclopaedia resources
• Community-based Learning
• "Ancient" style of learning at the feet of teachers

My interests continue to be strongly with games which have a social and community dimension, and a way to engage players with the broader community involved is often something they involve.

So, I have begun development of a game design for a quest style game in the Avatar movie theme areas of a MMO such as Second Life. The game is based on an exploration of the Pandora moon flora and Na'vi culture.  It will have strong community and knowledge sharing aspects, but allow for play that engages with others or not, with consequences.  I call the game "Moon Bloom – The Legend of the Bloom of the Aligned Moons".

This is about motivation, but I want to look specifically here at the over justification hypothesis. Lots of work around this, but a nice short read on it here.

The link is a short explanation of work by Lepper and Greene from 1975. What it tells us is that for children who already enjoy a specific activity an expected reward is actually a negative on their motivation. Further than that, it also shows that there is no statistically significant difference between a surprise reward and none at all.

One of the little projects I'm working on at the moment is related to how we could use Warcraft to teach particular skills. The hypothesis above causes some concerns here, and an idea that can be more generally applied to using other games in education.

In our early years we learn through play, and it is only once we arrive at school that learning appears to turn into work. Something we have to do in order to achieve a specific goal rather than purely for the sake of learning itself.

In a general sense we see this in secondary with the games branded up as 'educational'. To make a sweeping generalisation about those we usually see that they aren't hugely popular with students, just another task set in the classroom. Yes, they are often more popular than achieving the same outcome using pen and paper but I wouldn't be going too far out on a limb to suggest this is more about the novelty of the activity rather than the specific game mechanics at play.

The challenge for me with Warcraft, and to educators using other games for an educational purpose is to avoid this over justification. I have a group of students who already enjoy MMORPGs, they spend hours of their own time already doing it. If it becomes a school task with associated reward for completing certain things is it too much?

Like the students who enjoyed drawing in the example- once it becomes a task they must complete in order to achieve X certificate we are in danger of damaging the intrinsic motivation (and any learning that was going along with it) they had to participate in the activity to start with. Image sources- MMOsymposium.com, perspicuity.com

On the importance of objectives for game, learning and activities design

“A key challenge when designing a game for e-learning is ensuring that the goals within the game support to the learning objectives and not detract from them.” (Whitton, 2010, P.90)

The importance of a well defined 'learning goal' in the design process became painfully apparent during the third and fourth week of the course. Somewhere during the activity of designing a Learning game using Google Earth group 2 focused more on the interactions (activities) then achieving the learning goal. The reason: a learning goal was not defined.

I think the main reason behind this was the reversal of the design process: instead of asking - “Can a game help me deliver content (or concept) X?“ the question leading the group was: “Design a game with a learning goal”. The time scale made the problem worse – instead of designing a coherent game with a story threading through it the group focused on specific gaming like activities.

Gee claims that “Good game designers are practical theoreticians of learning” (Gee, 2004) – especially if the reverse is true one would not go about designing a lesson without having defined the learning objectives first.

Scot Lake from the BrandonHall discusses the difficulty of introducing the 'game' idea into the workplace and instead suggests the gamification of specific experiences: as an example he provides loyalty cards – the idea of getting 'points' for specific Activities (in this case shopping with a specific store) is then used to encourage us to do more of that activity (and of course there are also 'prizes').

The idea of using commercial-off-the-shelf games has been discussed in different publications (Gee, Whitton, Malone etc) but, while existing off-the-shelf games can be included in day-to-day learning (in schools or universities) the same cannot be said of the workplace (with a few specific exceptions). Regardless of the scope of the planning (single activity or a complete game) it is hard to ignore the Importance of object definition.

References

• Lake, Scot “Gaming Mechanics” http://brandon-hall.com/blogs/learning/ Accessed: 25/1/2012

• Whitton, Nicola. 2010, “Learning with digital games”, Routledge, New York

• Gee James Paul, 2004, “Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines”, available at: http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/documents/Game%20Paper.pdf

A couple of posts ago I wrote about game walk-throughs after a conversation with a fellow MSc-er suggested that they thought they constituted cheating. I'm quite a fan of them and it got me thinking about the true value of these documents in a learning context.

So, Bloom. He and his committee mates wrote themselves a taxonomy. This is the revised 2001 version which most of us are familiar with, it is worth going back and looking at the original too. As always wikipedia a good start point.

And, this is the WOWwiki. It's a community created guide to the game spanning over 90,000 pages, after Wikipedia it's the 2nd largest community authored document on the Internet. There are loads of examples of game walkthroughs out there, but the really interesting ones are those that involve this level of collaboration. 

Here are some ideas about how each of the skill levels in the diagram are demonstrated by the wiki users:

Knowledge: Do I need to explain this one? I've been to the wiki and read up on a particular quest, remembered what I needed to do, job done.

Understand: At a basic level of ability in the game I can read the wiki to fill in any blanks, and have successfully broken down complex tasks into simple individual stages I can share with others.

Apply: I can take something I read in one quest, and see where a particular skill would work in another. This is also where the benefits of writing the walkthrough rather than just reading it start to come in. I take something I discovered in the game, write it down to share for others.

Analyse: Writing the walkthrough forces this. Look back at how you got through a particular stage, was it similar to something else you have done? Are there other possible outcomes? As an individual player you may do some of this in passing naturally, but the act of authorship brings it to the foreground.

Evaluate: This is the real high order part of the walkthrough. If you look in any detail at a quest page in the WOWWiki it's really obvious. This page is discussing a single task in a huge game, but it looks at the best method to complete with each particular race, strategies for approaching it in a group, and places it in context with other things Warcraft related both past and present.

Create: Beyond the obvious here, how the users structure and link throughout the wiki is an interesting aspect of the creation process.

So, what is interesting here is that while we can apply these skills to gameplay itself (I probably should have written a post on that too..), what the walkthrough achieves is to extend these. The cognitive abilities involved in this process are certainly something that justify it more attention from educators than simply labeling it as cheating.

Image source- Signpost by JMC Photos

Although they are going to sound pretty similar this is two questions really. Firstly, how do I know if I'm good at a game? And, the extension of that is what makes me feel I am good at a game?

See, they kind of overlap.

Scores would be the obvious answer. The higher my score gets at any particular game, the better I am at it. Simple. My previous post about Pac-man shows my score nicely improving, I'm getting better at it. But, while I may be improving am I actually any good?

Game Center on iOS is a good example of how we can answer this. I can put my own score into context, see how good I am compared to the rest of the world. There are examples of this in most games now, league tables give us a way to rank ourselves against others.

In absolutely every game I have on my iPhone I am not even close to being near the top of these tables, so I'm suggesting I'm not good. But, there is more to it than that because I don't feel particularly bad at them.

We develop our own internal rules and assumptions to deal with it. If I'm in the top 40% of the world I might be happy, others pick a different number. Maybe if I'm higher than 50% does it count as a pass?

To take it one stage further than that I want to return to Pac-man again. When I started playing Pac-man I began noting down my scores. I also asked each of my team to play one attempt at the game and let me know what score they got. I can now score 5 times their best score, so I consider myself good at it.

But here's the restriction- they were only given one attempt. I haven't asked again if any of them are still playing, if they'd got any better. My measure of good against them isn't a fair measure. I know it isn't, it doesn't bother me.

On Assessment

Can we use these ideas to make some sweeping generalisations about the assessment system?

I can easily compare my assessed work to classmates, benchmark myself against the league table that it creates. Probably why it's better to be the top of the middle set rather than bottom of the top set. There's definitely something about motivation in there that I'll need to come back to. Are we encouraging students to find themselves little bubbles where they feel they are doing well? Is that safer than really challenging myself?

There is also a thought here about predicted grades too. Can you think of an example of a game that tells you how well it thinks you'll do before you try it? 'Based on your ham-fisted (thumbed?) attempts at Osmos you should clearly start Skyrim on easy mode'...

Image source- Winner's Circle by reallyboring

On the importance of visual quality

Both Greenfield and Gee talk about the importance of visual quality in video game. As part of the online discussions accompanying the course I put this point as to be one of the issues I have with second life as a gaming platform. While I have previously written about the demographics of second life based on age the issue of visual quality opened up a new interesting angle for me.

I have been a part-time gamer for a while now – I started with the traditional consoles such as Atari And today focus mostly on PC based games. For me a game with poor visual quality provides a limited amount of what Newman refers to as the player's sense of 'being there'.

An objective(?) analysis

Armed with this point of view I set out to Objectively compare second life with the games that I prefer to play, was I biased? Or was I missing something? I started with an objective test, a screen-shot taken in both environments:

In my personal opinion it is clear that second life graphics are not as good as is technologically possible. It is important to note that both shots were taken at a ' typical' location, without any preparation made ahead of time (other than adjusting the level of display graphics).

The source of the problem (?)

The “willing suspension of disbelief” is a critical element In the enjoyment of a video game (this can also be applied to books, films etc). Into larger amount of 'suspension' needed the less enjoyable the game. This becomes a specific issue when games have to compete with other visual media (such as other games, TV and film) – be for real-time 3-D visuals were possible game producers would overcome this by using 'connecting sequences' that were shot with well-known actors – to give the game a film like quality. In the past few years regular display cards have been able to crunch the numbers necessary to create 3-D images in real time this means that the messy change of media type (from computer graphics to cinematics) is no longer necessary.

Obviously, there would be a greater need for this type of 'self deception' in an audience that is more frequently exposed to the visual media used in TV and video games, in other words – old people (who have less exposure to video games) would feel more comfortable with lower quality graphics because of the smaller need for the suspension of disbelief. This tied in very nicely with usage statistics available from Linden labs. In 2008 about half of the population In second life was above the age of 30:

However the even more interesting piece of data was the average usage per month based on age:

Source: banana verse

While there is no doubt that other elements affect these numbers, how big an effect does visual quality have?

References

• http://holyroodpark.net/adegani/weblog/3541.html

• Wikipedia entry on “the suspension of disbelief” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

• “Know Your Customers: Second Life Demographics” http://xdfusion.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/know-your-customers-second-life-demographics/

• banana verse