http://elearningblogs.education.ed.ac.uk/oldelgg/elgg/nklosborne/weblog/ http://elearningblogs.education.ed.ac.uk/oldelgg/elgg/nklosborne/weblog/3664.html http://elearningblogs.education.ed.ac.uk/oldelgg/elgg/nklosborne/weblog/3664.html Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:31:28 GMT
Whitton's highlighting of the fact that not all games will suit all types of gamers does, however, raise some interesting issues for including games into a teaching programme. There will, however, also be limitations of access in many games since the most immersive and engaging games are often slick and multimodal and that offers challenges ranging from game and learner style through to accessibility (e.g. compatibility with screenreaders etc.) through to the types of hardware needed to run a game. As a mac owner I have occasional but important problems gaining access to games that PC using gamers have access to. For instance games like The Sims - which explicitly advertises it's Mac version - can take months or years to port from PC to Mac though even this puts it in the minority of PC games since most do not bother to create a Mac edition at all. My Unix and/or Linux using friends also find themselves excluded from using various games. Since higher education students are increasingly expected to provide their own computing equipment (with institutions providing wifi and power points rather than a profusion of computing labs), that compatibility issue will form a (minor) part of learners' expectations along with the (major) issue of pedagogical justification.

In terms of motivations for playing, learning and learning through games I found Malone (1982 [2] and 1980 [4]) really interesting but very flawed. Malone's Heuristics for Designing Enjoyable User Interfaces (1982 [2]) for instance seemed to be based on examples where many more factors were at play than Malone chose to recognise. Discussion around this reading we have examined the role of gender in feedback and the construction of fantasy in learning games. Malone draws on a Darts game for his example here (a fairly male dominated sport/representation to use) and it's usage in a teaching analogy for math (a subject ) where a positive outcome results in destruction (balloon popping) and a negative outcome results in a numeric indicator (on what appears to be a more logical part of the number line than is actually shown if a positive outcome is achieved). It's a baffling visual analogy in terms of the maths it intends to illustrate and I have found myself failing to see either the fun or the achievement of  learning outcomes in the game

The intrinsic fantasy in the game may tie skills to plot but they do not provide much in the way of motivation if the popping of balloons (quite an odd reward) is not sufficient. In his experiment Malone found the addition of music (at the end as a reward for achievement) to be the most popular addition with his female subjects. This addition is an additional pay off for the balloon popping. For the boys observed I think the balloon popping was seen as a reward itself, much as is the case in first person shooter games where it is the process of violence (gory effects, sounds, etc) and the process of inhabiting the character than it is about the reward of reaching the end goal. I suspect in the Darts fantasy the girls may have seen the balloons popping as a form of feedback but not a reward in itself, making the addition of music that much more motivating. Indeed accounting for individual expectations, cultures and experiences is a difficulty for any teaching but particularly in games design I think as the immediacy and human interaction and feedback cannot always be taken for granted as easily as any more direct relationship between tutor and/or course designer and student.

Malone (1980 [4]) seemed stronger as a paper to me - despite being based on 'intuition" rather than experiment - as Malone highlights convincingly the importance of intrinsic fantasy in games as opposed to the extrinsic fantasy of unrelated goals and rewards. This sits really interestingly with research I have recently heard about that has been undertaken on the motivational effects of performance related pay which has shown financial incentives often do not map to better achievement and sometimes lead to worse performance - this would seem to be a wider confirmation that there is something innately more engaging about tasks and objectives that can be motivating in and of themselves than tasks where one is encouraged to perform only in order to receive some abstract reward one desires.

Finally this week I wanted to turn to Quest Atlantis and the two remaining readings Barab, Arici & Jackson (2005 [3]) and Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Carteaux & Tuzun (2005 [5]) where the authors, also co-creators of Quest Atlantis (QA), talk about their work on the project and their conception of a "Learning Engagement Theory" and, interestingly, the development of QA the brand, rather than the technology. I think what I found interesting about both papers was the background information on the evolution of QA through research and ethnographic observation of quite an eclectic mixture of schools and community groups and the co-creators immersion in existing childrens games and environments. This shows through in the game - it is clearly a well founded concept (though as a test user it is hard to experience the collaborative and social aspects (Turkle 1995 quoted in Barab et al 2005 [3])) but also perhaps a few years out of date and based on what is available rather than what might exceed expectations in quite new and different ways. Nonetheless the visual panache of the game is impressive even when game play seems, as a lone player of the game as a stand alone experience, rather constraining (see my earlier post for more on this).

What I would be interested to see after this week, if such a thing exists, is a paper outlining the design process of a successful commercial game that could be compared. I think a genuine issue with educational games and in making them fun is that the funding to test and iterate designs is simply not as viable in the education sector. Thus it is not the educational content that makes many educational games seem particularly dry but the more academically structured development process that seeks not only to embed pedagogy in design but also seeks to ensure that the design process is academically valid - which is an interesting restriction to place on a design process that needs to be creative and original as well as educationally valuable. It's certainly something that I will need to consider further before developing my idea for the final game assignment for this module.


    •    [1] Whitton, N. (2010) Chapter 3, 'Understanding the Pedagogy of Digital Games'. In Learning with Digital Games: A practical guide to engaging students in higher education, London: Routledge.
    •    [2] Malone, T.W. (1982) Heuristics for designing enjoyable user interfaces: Lessons from computer games. Proceedings of the 1982 conference on Human factors in computing systems table of contents. Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States. (pdf)
    •    [3] Barab, S., Arici, A., & Jackson, C. (2005) Eat your vegetables and do your homework: A design-based investigation of enjoyment and meaning in learning, Educational Technology, 45(1), pp.15-20
    •    [4] Malone, T.W. (1980) What makes things fun to learn? heuristics for designing instructional computer games. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium on Small systems table of contents. Palo Alto, California, United States.
    •    [5] Barab, S., Thomas, M., Dodge, T., Carteaux, R., & Tuzun, H. (2005) Making learning fun: Quest Atlantis, a game without guns, Educational Technology Research and Development, 53(1), pp.86-107]]>