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

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