Although I have been keeping up with my course readings, writing regular posts into my blog and doing a spot of game creation using Google Earth, this course has given me an opportunity, or is that licence?, to reacquaint myself with computing / video / arcade games that I haven't really touched since my very late teens.

My peers have come up with some rather wonderful web-based games that include the sublime Grow v.1 by Eyemaze and the wonderful Fantastic Contraption; both of which enchanted me and brought out a child-like wonder in me (not seen since 1999) much in the same way as the "Living Books" CD-ROM series did in the early 1990s with Mercer Mayer's "Just Grandma and Me" (1992). Then there is the ingenious Wiki Paths: The Great Link Race, described as a "Wikipedia-based scavenger hunt game" though I would say that it would have more in common with the "six degrees of separation" idea and would seem to lend itself nicely to Prensky's suggestion that the, now irrelevant, digital native have hypertext-like minds - all I can say is that I found it frantic especially as you are up against the clock.

For my part, I have also reacquainted myself to the classic text-based "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" game which is now online over at BBC Radio 4 and graphical. I also did something that I haven't done since my late teens and that was to buy some computer games for the PC that were on sale. Like Gee, I went for something that interested me and were of very different gaming and literary genres - Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile", "Lost" and Clive Barker's "Jericho".

Tune in tomorrow for a report on my experiences with the "Death on the Nile" game.

Week 4 of the course saw the teams being given an exercise that involved building a game around the Google Earth platform. Team 2 member, Nicholas Palmer, got the ball rolling by providing a useful mind map of the task at hand - this instantly gave us a quick, ready visual aid.

There was some suggestion that we should have some learning outcomes, which I, personally, was not keen because a) we didn't have an idea for a game; and b) is there such a thing as attributing learning outcomes to a game? attributing rules to a game, yes! but learning outcomes??

A quick Google search trawl came up with the following resources that might provide us with some inspiration for a game, included:

• Google Earth blog
• Google Earth Outreach
• Google for Educators
• Top 10 Games with Google Earth
• Google Earth Community

Marie Leadbetter suggested that we should meet up "virtually" using Skype to discuss the project and Bill Babouris gave the team the idea for a game based up the recently conceived New Seven Wonders of the World - the game idea was tentatively centred around the notion of a "knowledge quest".

On Wednesday evening of Week 4, the team met via Skype to thrash out the aims and objectives of the game and to decide who was going to contribute to what. It should be said that this was the most amazing brain-storming, project management session ever conducted virtually. We went from an idea to a fully-realised project plan in 1.5 hours.

One of the ideas we liked was a quiz that was created by My Wonder World on Asia. The quiz was created using Keyhole Markup Language (KML) which is an "is an XML-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future Web-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers" which I had been playing with a couple of weeks prior to the team project. Unfortunately, we were not able to see how the KML file was constructed as it had been compressed into a KMZ file. Bill Babouris came up trumps again for finding a KMZ-KML converter that us to uncompress the file to see how it was constructed.

It became very clear to me that the quiz would be very doable and that I probably should be the person to code it as I had already been using it as well as having a long and varied computer programming background. All that remained was to identify the tasks and action points to be done and to assign each one to a team member. By Sunday, all questions, introductory text, images, coding, testing was completed.

An interesting topic that came out of the discussions was the notion of feedback and how it should be presented to the user. We felt that terms like "right" and "wrong" seem too hard and final and that we should endeavour to use more softer, and less negative, language in the feedback boxes. This team exercise turned out to be a very fulfilling and fun ride from "Oh, what are we going to do?" to "Ta-da, it's finished".

Let's get one thing clear. I've never read anything by James Newman before other than "Chapter 2: What's a videogame? Rules, puzzles and simulation" - without reading Chapter 1 or a preamble, it's hard to say where James Newman sits on the pantheon of videogame scholars.

To say that this chapter iritated and angered me beyond belief would be the understatement of the millennium. The problem starts with defining what a videogame is. The working, though quite broad, definition offered by Frasca (2001, cited in Newman, 2004, p. 27) worked quite well for me. Frasca says that a videogame is:

"any forms of computer-based entertainment software, either textual or image-based, using any electronic platform such as personal computers or consoles and involving one or multiple players in a physical or networked environment"

So why-oh-why is Newman even mentioning the likes of Furby or Sony's AIBO as being possibly thought of as a "videogame" because they are computer-based. Well, if you followed that line of thinking, you may as well chuck in the microwave and the washing machine to boot; after all, they are computer based as well you know! He then tells us about the two schools of thought on videogames, the narratologists (story telling) and the ludologists (game playing) arguing what makes a videogame what it is today. It's at this point that I lose the will to live as for me, the very nature of videogames lies in the term itself "video" (as in screen) and "game" (as in to play). This argument to define "videogame" becomes rather belaboured and futile. Even the deployment of game genres (Berens & Howard, 2001, cited in Newman, 2005, p. 12), those of:

• Action and Adventure
• Driving and Racing
• First-Person Shooter
• Platforms and Puzzles
• Roleplaying
• Strategy and Simulation
• Sports and Beat 'em-ups 

becomes belittled and not worthy of scholastic scrutiny - and that is what is at the heart of all this, dare I say it, nonsense. Making videogames a "respectable" subject discipline that is recognised for it's academic rigour and scholastic standing. I know some of my more cynical colleagues with scoff at Newman for using his book to justify is monthly salary - well I don't know about that.

The videogame and the various genres does exactly what it says on the tin - that is the nature of the beast. Alongside the videogame, sits the arcade game, the slot-machine game, the mobile device game, the text-based game, etc. as these are part of the same computer-game based continuum. It's the chain of gaming evolution that can be traced and catalogued. Upon this evolutionary scale are those who have survived and those who have become extinct; there are those that have evolved and metamorphised into some new and those that have made minor enhancements and are instantly recognisable.

Most of the reasoned arguments came from Newman's references and not Newman himself (but of course, I could have entirely missed that for being impossibly annoyed with his "scholarly" work). I put this question to my partner's two sons who are both ardent gamers. I asked them: "what is a videogame?" They said a videogame should be:

• entertaining
• challenging 
• have good characters
• have a good plot / story
• good graphics (which would suggest that it is screen based)
• good sound / music
• totally immersive (my word, not theirs, but that is what they meant)
• engaging

I've rattled off a list of characteristics that get mentioned in both Newman's and Gee's work as to what defines a videogame. To say that Newman's chapter iritated and angered me beyond belief would be the understatement of the millennium!

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Newman, J. (2004). Videogames. London: Routledge.

Before I launch into my (recent and past) experiences with Pac-Man, the arcade game developed by Namco, I would like to say something about this week's reading, Chapter 7: "Video Games" from Greenfield (1984). Greenfield (ibid, p. 88) makes an important statement by saying that "children with a television background develoop a preference for dynamic visual imagery" before going to say that "visual action is an important factor in attracting the attention of young children to the television screen"; from this statement Greenfield goes on to suggest that "moving visual images" in arcade / video games is one such reason for the genres popularity - more so than those of text-based or "still visual image" games.

Greenfield (ibid, p. 89) goes on to suggest that children pick up and assimilate a lot of audio-visual information from the action sequences depicted on the TV screen. This is an important statement in that it suggests that children weaned on TV have the potential to be better at video games that those "generations socialised with the verbal media of print and radio". A couple of thoughts struck me here: Firstly, children are surrounded by movement and colour in real life, what is depicted on the screen could be construed as being an extension of that - am I stating the obvious here? Secondly, could we possibly hypothesize that children "socialised with the verbal media of print and radio" might have an overly developed imagination? People talk of imagining how characters and scenes from a book that they are reading are "played over in their head".

Greenfield goes on to suggest that other aspects that contribute towards the popularity of video / arcade games include:

• an active participatory role;
• a sense of active control;
• presence of a goal / task;
• automatic scorekeeping;
• audio effects;
• randomness;
• importance of speed.

Although Greenfield doesn't explicitly express this, but we can see affective elements come into play with games such as sound (ambience) and visuals (information). The other element that Greenfield alludes to, which has been expressed by the psychologist Eric Erickson (Gee, 2007, p. 59) is the notion of "psychosocial moratorium" or a safe environment in which the user can take risks where the real-world consequences are minimal.

I'd like to think that I am one of Greenfield's generation of TV kids as I was pretty much glued to that cathode ray tube during the 1970s and 1980s. However, I was also a very voracious reader during the 1980s, eschewing my paperback companion to that of the "idiot's lantern". It came as a surprise to me to read that Pac-Man was a lot more complex and nuanced than I first imagined. The game, superficially at least, requires the player to move around the maze, avoiding the ghosts and eating up everything in it's path. What is not so obvious to the player is that Pac-Man operates on a number of "hidden rules" that can only be deduced from observing what is going on in the game; such as: each "ghost" has a particular characteristic behaviour and certain sections of the maze has a particular behaviour that could enhance or impede Pac-Man's progress.

Despite playing this game on and off for a number of years, I didn't realise that there was more to the game than meets the eye. I have always said that I couldn't "read signs" - so this could be a cognitive dysfunction on my part? Or is it because, I prefer the medium of print to that of televisuals?

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Greenfield, P.M. (1984). Mind and media : the effects of television, video games, and computers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Gee is such an absorbing read and lots of wonderfully quotable nuggets like:

"But all learning is ... learning to play 'the game'. For example, literary criticism and field biology are different 'games' played by different rules. (They are different sorts of activities requiring different values, tools, and ways of acting and thinking; they are different domains with different goals and different 'win states')" p. 7

I have only just finished chapter 2, but I was interested in his notion of "semiotic domains" which he describes as "an area or set of activities where people think, act and value in certain ways" (p. 19). These "semiotic domains" employ a range of modalities (or multimodalities in this case) which would encompass the following:

• oral or written language
• images
• equations
• symbols
• sounds
• gestures
• graphs
• artifacts, etc

These modalities are embued with specific meanings which are communicated in very distinctive ways - in some respects I see these as being very similar to the idea of transliteracy which Sue Thomas (of PART) defines as:

" ... the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks."

Transliteracy, then, becomes an umbrella term to include the likes of literacy, digital literacy, media literacy, information literacy, visual literacy and computer literacy (to name but a few). The idea of images and symbols that have become to represent real-world objects is as old as neolithic man and used by the ancient Egyptians in the form of hieroglyphics (we can include other cultures that made use of glyphics and pictograms here). It is interesting to see how symbols and imagery has come full circle with the power of the pixel and the ascension of nu-hieroglyphics like semacode and data matrix code which contain information tucked away within those barcode-like symbols and can now be captured and translated by mobile phone technology. What would the cognitive archaeologists make of these symbols in 2000 years time I wonder?

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

I had deliberately left it quite late in the evening last night before venturing into Second Life (SL) as I wanted some time on my own to refamiliarise myself with the SL environment, the user interface and to ensure I had the latest update from from SL as I knew that there would be a Second Life Treasure Hunt game commencing next week. I also wanted to ensure that I had Team 2's SL contacts added to my SL contacts list.

I didn't get too far when I was approached by Dagma Kiranov (a.k.a. Iris Bosa) who had also popped up late into SL. After about 20 minutes typing messages between eachother - that strange typing motion that the avatar undertakes to inform the other user(s) that they are typing has been likened to "stroking the cat", Iris added her own metaphor by suggesting, given Wray's costume, that it looked like I was "playing the piano" - Iris asked "can I change my voice?". This struck me as an odd comment to make until I realised that she was talking about the speech feature within SL that was added several months ago. I plugged in my microphone headset and began to talk to Iris, like one does with Skype and presumably using the same kind of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology that Skype uses. It became clear what her question meant.

In Second Life, and indeed in other virtual worlds, the user invests a lot of time and effort to create their avatar and their "virtual" identity in a way that they want to be seen and perceived by other users within that shared world. One was able to further enhance that identity with the kinds of words and phrases that they used to talk to one another. In my mind's ear, I can "hear" Wray talking with a deep, rich, urbane voice, not too dissimilar to that of Christopher Lee's voice. But of course, the experience that the other user gets is not that of Wray sounding like Christopher Lee, they get Wray sounding very Kentish and not terribly deep, rich or urbane - you could almost hear the record scratch at that moment as reality breaks into the virtual world and these whole persona and identity that you have carefully created begins to unravel before your eyes.

Whilst there has been a lot of work in identity in terms of roles, gender, sexuality, demographic variables; I am not so sure whether any has been done on voice as an identity construct in terms of accent, dialect, pitch, etc. The inclusion of the speech feature within SL is a very interesting addition to the software's capabilities, but I wonder if it will have a detrimental effect on one's virtual presence and identity?

As part of the "Introduction to Digital Game-based Learning", this semester's cohort have been made up of 4 teams of 6 people who will work together as a team to either construct game-based tasks (for others to participate in) or take part in game-based tasks that have been given to us, as well as giving presentations to the other teams.

I am part of "Team 2" who consist of:

• Bill Babouris
• Myself
• Chris Hambley
• Eleisha John
• Marie Leadbetter
• Nicholas Palmer

I am very excited about the potential of group-based activities where the participants are at a distance and working remotely using a range of technologies like discussion boards, Skype and Second Life. It would be good to try a develop some kind of "good practice" guide that can be passed on to others who are also planning on this "virtual" approach to group work.

As a results of the "introduction to digital environments for learning" (IDEL) module and the research that I have been doing around the topic of digital literacy; I have crossed Marc Prensky's path many times over; he should also add agent provocateur to his list of roles. It started with my IDEL essay called "Bridging the Generation Gap: A Pathfinder's Tale" and this has led to presenting a talk called "The Generation Game: Exploding the myth behind the Net and Google Generations" to a number of organisations.

It's quite clear that I have issues with Prensky and the whole digital dichotomy of "natives" and "immigrants". These terms, according to Prensky, were coined by John Perry Barlow (1996, para. 12) in his "declaration of the independence of cyberspace". Prensky (2001a) and others have popularised (and added more to) these stereotypes to that they are now firmly cemented into the public domain like some kind of meme. Like Bayne and Ross (2007), I share the following sentiments which I explored in an earlier blog post:

"In the current political climate, talk of immigrants and natives inevitably evokes complexities and anxieties around migration, integration, and racial and cultural differences in Western society."

Indeed, Palfrey and Gasser (2008) want to reclaim the term "digital native" to mean something else entirely and suggests that:

“...rather than calling Digital Natives a generation – an overstatement, especially in light of the fact that only 1 billion of the 6 billion people in the world even have access to digital technologies – we prefer to think of them as a population … The vast majority of young people born in the world today are not growing up as Digital Natives.”

Prensky is rather keen on using a quote attributed to Dr Bruce D. Perry (now of Child Trauma Academy) which goes like "different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures". In earlier copies of his now infamous papers, Dr Perry went under the name of "Dr Bruce D. Berry" and it's taken 8 years and a lot of flack before Prensky finally corrects it. At the heart of Prensky's work seems to lie a lot of scaremongering rhetoric that's not backed up with any references for the reader to check his claims against, it's quite an odd thing to do considering Prensky has 3 Master level degrees behind him. It's little wonder that Bennett, Maton & Kervin (2008) chastise Prensky and others after him by suggesting that:

“...proponents arguing that education must change dramatically to cater for the needs of these digital natives have sparked an academic form of ‘moral panic’ using extreme arguments that have lacked empirical evidence.”

This was echoed earlier by McKenzie (2007), using a little more sensationalist language, who accuses Prensky of being "guilty of 'arcade scholarship'". 

However, Baroness Susan Greenfield, the eminent neuroscientist and current Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, comes to Prensky's aid by suggesting that further research would be needed to see if there might be a link with the three-fold increase of the drug Ritalin over the last 10 years and the increased exposure of young children to unsupervised and lengthy hours in front of a [computer] screen which, in turn, means their young brains would get use to rapid responses (Settle, 2008).

I do agree with Prensky on one thing and that is the need for learning professionals to be able to "speak" using both "legacy" and "future" languages through the lens of "digital literacy" so that students are better prepared and better equiped to deal with the changing nature of their digital worlds.

References

Barlow, J.P. (1996). A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. [online]. Available at: http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html [Accessed 26 January 2009] 

Bayne, S. and Ross, J. (2007). The "Digital Native" and "Digital Immigrant": A Dangerous Opposition. Annual Conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education. December 2007.

Bennett, S., Maton, K., & Kervin, L. (2008). The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(5), pp. 775-786. [online]. Available at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/bjet/2008/00000039/00000005/art00002 [Accessed 26 January 2009]

McKenzie, J., (2007). Digital Nativism, Digital Delusions and Digital Deprivation. From Now On, 17(2). [online]. Available at: http://fno.org/nov07/nativism.html [Accessed 26 January 2008]  

Palfrey, J. & Gasser, U. (2008). Born Digital: Understand the First Generation of Digital Natives. New York: Basic Books. 

Prensky, M. (2001b). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants II: Do They Really Think Differently?. On the Horizon, 9(6), NCB University Press.

Prensky, M. (2001a). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), NCB University Press.

Settle, M. (2008). Is computer use changing children? BBC News, 15.08.2008. [online]. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7564152.stm [Accessed 26 January 2009]

Prior to the "Understanding Learning in the Online Environment" module that I undertook last semester, I had used Delicious and Connotea as my principle web services for collecting, storing and sharing bookmarks, news articles and journal articles with my colleagues and interested parties.

On the module, Hamish Macleod suggested that we might like to create a Diigo account to share any bookmarks and resources around how learning could be facilitated through an online environment. The tool is very easy to use and allows you to create lists and groups. I had created a list for the learning challenge that I was undertaking at the time. I am now using Diigo to collect, store, compile and share on anything pertaining with gaming and, in particular, game-based learning - this collection can be found at the following address: http://www.diigo.com/list/heywayne/gaming

This is the first week of the "Introduction to Digital Game-based Learning" module. Over the next 12 weeks, we will be exploring the world of digital games in terms of ideas, concepts, issues and controversies and in particular how games can aid with the learning process - what lessons can be learnt if any? I do believe that exploration and play are the building blocks of learning.

But before we begin our adventure into the realm of gaming and the gamer-learner, we must start with that time old tradition of storytelling - the back story or rather my back story which will provide some historical context to my relationship and engagements with games.

I was never fond of traditional sports like football or rugby and as such a lot of my peers felt that I must be a misfit or something. But I did enjoy games that were created from my own imagination involving LEGO, Meccano and toy figures. This extended to the traditional board games like "Cludeo" (a personal favourite), chess, draughts, "monopoly", "snakes and ladders" (another favourite) which I played with friends and family - so the socialisation of game playing became an important aspect for me. I was very keen (and still am) on "Top Trumps" and other card games like poker, 21 and cribbage.

By the time I reached my teens, this would be the 1980s with the advent of the arcade games, like "Pac Man" (another favourite), "Asteroids" and "Breakout" and some of the earlier computer games. I owned a Binatone TV Master that played a number of rudimentary games like "Pong" and "Tennis", this was later superceded with an Acorn Electron which ran a version of BBC BASIC and allowed me to play such games as "Repton" and the near legendary "Elite" which made use of wireframe technology and was one of the first games to make use of the "back story" in the form of a mini novel. At college, I had become hooked on the game version of Douglas Adams' "The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy", which was a text-based role playing game (it has since been updated by a friend of mine who went to the same college and was a collaborator of Douglas Adams).

However, these early games soon lost their appeal on me as that all important socialisation factor was missing - while some people could be engaged with the competitive nature of trying to beat the computer it lacked the camaraderie. I became aware of the role playing game genre or RPG that involved creating characters and becoming them to be able to perform a range a series of tasks or activites usually within fantastical settings that required creativity, imagination and team work. The RPG that I enjoyed the most was based upon H.P. Lovecraft's stories and was called "Call of Cthulhu". What struck me the most about this game was the narratory skills of "The Keeper" which, if played well, was atmospheric and damn-right scary - here you were completely immersed with the story and the character which you are playing. Whilst there were a load of game-based resources for this game, I had preferred to create my own "Call of Cthulhu" scenarios inspired by the works of Lovecraft, Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie and such like - if only the Internet was available at the time.

In the mid 1990s which saw the rise of the Internet within the Higher Education sector, I had developed a SF / murder mystery game called "Murder on the Aurora" which was developed using HTML and Javascript and was created to help new users to the World Wide Web get to grips with this new, emergent technology.

Whilst I don't own a Wii, X-box or any of the PlayStation variants, I have become interested in the alternate reality game or ARG phenomena which have been made popular by TV shows like "Lost", "Spooks", "Heroes" and "Torchwood - again, this plays heavily on story telling and having the gamer to "live out" the role.

That's my "back story", so let the adventure begin...