What the Internet is For Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Thanks, Raph (it's the "West" link). Now I know what the Internet is for.

Massively Multiplayer Math Wednesday, March 28, 2007

I've blatantly ripped this link from Raph Koster, but the title is just too tempting not to plagiarize.

Named for the student of Pythagoras who is credited with discovering irrational numbers, Hippasus is a new MMO designed to teach math by casting players in the roles of "arithmancers," sorcerers who perform their magic by leveraging mathematics. From the website:

The purpose of Hippasus is to give users a both fun and educational experience. For those users unfamiliar or not confident with principles of mathematics the game helps to both educate and encourage. The purpose is to provide concrete and exciting meaning to concepts that are often considered to be vague or esoteric and to give players a better understanding of the way their world works. For users who are confident and experienced the game provides a sandbox allowing them to test and visualize mathematical ideas, as well as a social world in which mathematical achievement is linked to power, influence and respect.

With the widespread use of online games has come virtual communities, societies and even economies that have had a direct impact on the world that we live in. It is our goal to positively contribute to society through this game by helping players to develop a greater appreciation for and understanding of the world that we live in, with hopes of encouraging those would would otherwise give up on mathematics and related fields.

I think a game like this was due for some time. Notice how the creators of this game are keying on a number of features of multiplayer games that have yet to be fully explored and understood: catering to both newbies and experienced users, building and leveraging the sense of community, using game incentives to achieve real-world change, and using education as both a cause and effect of gameplay. I would be very interested to see how the game plays and will keep you posted of updates when/if I encounter them.

We Don't Need No Stinking Copyrights Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Many thanks to the inimitable Raph Koster. I present: WoW DDR.

Neverwinter Nights in the Classroom Thursday, January 18, 2007

Raph Koster pointed out this article on BBC News, entitled "Computer game to boost key skills" (emphasis mine):

Computer science teachers at West Nottinghamshire College were struggling to get their teenage students into literacy and numeracy classes.

So they took apart Atari's popular computer game Neverwinter Nights and rebuilt it with educational challenges the player must meet to progress.

Success rates in key skills at the Mansfield college has trebled to 94%.

[Nigel Oldman, one of the people who helped transform the game into a learning tool] said: "The little Herberts had realised that not attending their literacy and numeracy key skills classes was not going to affect their vocational qualifications."

"We would be flushing them out of the canteen, chasing them all over the place and they would just say: 'we did literacy and numeracy at school and we've never had to use it since'.

"We were struggling and we had had enough - so we decided we needed something that would attract them."

... [So,] "We ripped the game apart and rebuilt it to deliver educational content," he added.

Players are invited to pick a character and go on a quest in which they have to make decisions about what to take and how to progress using mathematics and their literacy skills.

Mr. Oldman explained: "For example, before they set off in their galleon they have to fill it with the things they are going to need. This requires them to work out the area of the ship and how much they can manage to bring.

"Some students managed it, others sank on the way and never progressed to the next level.

"They would come knocking on the staff room door and wouldn't let us go until we had taught them how to calculate area."

While this particular incidence may be unusually effective and not necessarily indicative of the power of edu-tainment in general, as anecdotal evidence, this is huge.

Educators often talk about a lack of motivation being one of the biggest obstacles to teaching. And games, after all, are nothing more than organized systems of incentives: if you want to "win the game", then you have to follow the rules. As Mr. Koster himself maintains, all games are educational. The reason they're compelling to the player is because he wants to figure it out, so he can get that feeling of triumph when he masters the system, beats his friend, unlocks the final level.

What I think is most interesting about this point is that it illustrates a number of key factors in maintaining the fun of a game while still achieving an educational goal. The way I see it, the Neverwinter Nights edu-mod succeeded because its creators made certain specific design choices.

First, this was a game the required math to advance. It was not a "math game". Many "educational" games are simply boring games wrapped around a series of math problems. There's not much fun in that. If the game itself is not compelling; if you finish the game and don't say "let's play again!" then it's just not a fun game, and its usefulness as an incentivizing factor disappears. The game in the article was based on a highly successful and well-polished, mass-market video game and then tailored to better suit an educational purpose.

Second, the educational goal of the mod's creators was achieved by putting it on a critical path to the in-game goals. Or, put another way, the story provided some goal (say, that the hero cross an ocean with all of the stuff he needs), and the player needed to use his math skills to figure out how to accomplish it (by figuring out the area of the ship's deck). The in-game goal was compelling enough to incentivize the player to perform this other task. From an in-game perspective, the math itself was a secondary goal, even though this was the designers' purpose all along.

I think this is a fascinating story. It would be interesting to determine whether other examples of particularly successful educational games follow this formula, as well. Please post suggestions in the comments if you know of any.

Top 50 Books on the Game Industry Thursday, October 19, 2006

This article was making its rounds last week, but remaining true to my own schedule, I figured I'd share it late.

Ernest Adams, author of a number of books on game design, wrote an article for Next Generation entitled "50 books for Everyone in the Game Industry", highlighting 50 of the most influential and insightful works on the topic to date. He breaks them down into twelve categories, such as theory, business, and the history of games, attempting to cover a very broad range of topics that the gaming industry deals with. One of his topics is "inspirations," books "whose influence can be felt in many games" and "have helped make the game industry what it is today":

1. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors
3. Star Trek, originated by Gene Roddenberry
4. The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
5. Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
6. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
7. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray

This seems like a rather odd set of "inspirational" choices. I think D&D's influence on games of all kinds is undeniable, and it, in turn, owes its inspiration mainly to Tolkien, Moorcock and Howard. But Tom Clancy instead of Ian Fleming? Sure, Splinter Cell and its kin are popular games, but how many incarnations has James Bond seen, including dozens of novels, 22 movies, and countless table-top and video games? Star Trek instead of Star Wars? Puh-lease. How many Star Trek games have there been in the last 10 years, as opposed to the tireless efforts of LucasArts marketing the Star Wars franchise?

As for the rest of the list, I've only read one of the books: Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which I got after attending the author's seminar on visual design a few years ago. I got a lot out of it, and had a chance to speak to the man briefly afterwards. I brought up the topic of user interface design and asked him what he thought of the fact that UI design is not treated as a discipline in its own right. He responded: "That's because it's a solved problem." I was shocked. It was as if, to him, it was somehow entirely clear what the best way to convey information to a user is, and what is the most efficient way to gather input from him. He couldn't have meant that, could he? Even after thinking it over for a good 3 or 4 years since the seminar, it seems obvious that he meant just that. Either he didn't understand my point or he doesn't know what he's talking about.

For those looking for the whole list, I've reproduced it here in title order:

1. 21st Century Game Design, by Chris Bateman and Richard Boon
2. A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al
3. A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
4. Balance of Power: International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game, by Chris Crawford
5. Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities, by Amy Jo Kim
6. Creating the Art of the Game, by Matthew Omernick
7. Designing Virtual Worlds, by Richard Bartle
8. Developing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide, by Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Petrovsky
9. Digital Game-Based Learning, by Marc Prensky
10. Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors
11. Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson
12. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
13. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins
14. Fundamentals of Game Design, by Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings
15. Game Over, Press Start to Continue, by David Sheff, with new material by Andy Eddy
16. Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, edited by Chris Bateman
17. Gender-Inclusive Game Design, by Sheri Graner Ray
18. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
19. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray
20. Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga
21. Joystick Nation, by J.C. Herz
22. Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, by Gerard Jones
23. Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois
24. Masters of Doom, by David Kushner
25. Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, by Mark Stephen Meadows
26. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd edition by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
27. Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, edited by Joseph Tobin
28. Postmortems from Game Developer, edited by Austin Grossman
29. Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
30. Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby
31. Star Trek, originated by Gene Roddenberry
32. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee
33. Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971 - 1984, by Van Burnham
34. The Ambiguity of Play, by Brian Sutton-Smith
35. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman
36. The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness, by George Alastair 'The Fat Man' Sanger
37. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
38. The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
39. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
40. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks
41. The Oxford History of Board Games, by David Parlett
42. The Ultimate History of Video Games, by Steven L. Kent
43. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Visual Explanations and Envisioning Information, all by Edward Tufte
44. The Xbox 360 Uncloaked by Dean Takahashi
45. Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames, by Steven Poole
46. Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
47. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan
48. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost
49. Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
50. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee

And for anyone who's looking to get me a Christmas present, consider this a shopping list.

A Different "WoW" Friday, August 18, 2006

Thanks, Raph Koster for showing me a different "WoW".

What the Web and Games have to Teach Each Other Friday, May 19, 2006

Ralph Koster has a cool article on his blog called What the Web and Games have to Teach Each Other. As a web guy and a game guy, I found this very interesting and would like to expand on the topic a bit, but no time to do so now. It'll just have to wait for a future post.