Studying games based learning means I tend to encounter the phrase ‘I’m no good at games’ a fair bit. The problem I have with it is I’m not sure it is possible. What people who say this actually mean is any one or more of the following:

1) I am intimidated by computers or don’t want to learn

Needs no explanation, we’ve all seen it. In this example ‘no good’ translates quite nicely as ‘don’t want to try’. It’s about motivation. I’ll cite my Grandad as case in point. He doesn’t want a mobile phone because he’s no good at ‘technology’, but he can achieve the kind of magic with the cricket on his Sky+ box that I can only dream of.

2) I consider gaming to be a somehow lower form of entertainment

This one might be a little bit specific to the shire of white middle class England I live in, but there’s a social divide in play. You can test this out for yourself. Next time the ‘what did you do at the weekend’ question comes up in a peer group try alternating your responses between:

1. I got my hunter up to level 20 in WoW.
2. We went to the new Titanic exhibition at the city museum and I finally got round to finishing Obama book.

3) I’ve forgotten that ‘games’ is a wider field than that shooting thing my son likes

There’s no question that electronic gaming has got popular. The problem is that people tend to generalise based on what they see in the media. Talk about gaming and our first points of reference are either first person shooters and how they are encouraging little Jonny to go all Black Hawk Down on his school or that weird kid who stays up all night doing strange things with orcs.

Gaming is a massive field. It includes those board games you used to love and still make me play at Christmas, the whole of the sports world, even those stupid games you play with yourself on the commute to work or with the receptionist in your building. I refuse to accept that anybody can be bad at Every Game.

4) I feel the need to project myself as a serious grown up

This is very similar to 2), but needs a section of it’s own. At what point in our lives do we stop playing? Early childhood play is about learning. Go to school and learning becomes work and play what we’re allowed to do afterwards. As ‘serious’ adults do we spend time playing? Would you be prepared to tell your friends in the book group you’ve been playing? Why not?

5) I want to stop this conversation as soon as possible and talk to somebody here who is less geeky

Potentially more a reflection on me rather than the wider subject…

Image source- PS3 Controller by Chi

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”

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

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

This came up in discussion this week, I can save you a read if you like, the answer is no. There's more to it than that though. It's about where we draw the line, what the line actually is, and who has the chalk in their hand.

Breaking down cheating

In my usual spirit of oversimplification, I see there as being a few different levels of cheating:

Which gives us some kind of scale of things. Ignoring the extremes of this scale the middle ground certainly leaves some room for discussion. Certainly educators we would position themselves as encouraging the behaviour at level 2 and 3 in the classroom. Both Bloom and Dreyfus have things to say about adapting, modifying, and the influence of mentors that we've all encountered many times before. It would be bold to suggest that these things should be allowed in sport, but certainly it brings into question what we would consider cheating.

Applying this kind of logic to the walk-through game guide we have to argue that it fits in at level 3. It's no different to having an experienced tennis coach showing you what to do, or getting to practice a Grand Prix circuit in the simulator before you get to the track.

Who are we cheating?

The second question this brings up is about who exactly we are cheating. Ignoring the high profile national sporting examples, we can say this is a question of motivation.

Everybody has different personal goals, and that impacts on our definition of cheating. If my aim is to get to Level X in Warcraft figuring out every stage without reading a manual or asking for help clearly the walk-through is. If my goal is to get to Level Y in the same game faster than anybody else I started playing with at the same time perhaps it isn't.

Again we can look to education parallels for this. In order to pass my science exam I am advised to buy the correct book from the exam board. If I remember that stuff I'll more than likely pass. This is the expected behaviour, not a way to cheat to the GCSE. I might feel personally that I have memorised the content rather than actually learnt it, but in terms of the actual rules of the science game I'm all good.

Potentially more of a comment on the assessment system, but it highlights how our perception of the activity colours our judgement.

The impact of rewards

his is a wider topic to come back to in a later post in more general form. Are the rewards available having positive impacts on motivation, and my desire to cheat?  

n the sporting world we have plenty of examples where the desire for the reward was enough to push people into the wrong side of our chalk line. In the gaming world does the status of being a Level Z player motivate us to use methods that we might not consider to be entirely solo efforts? In the education sector we all have our own opinions on when influence becomes copying becomes cheating. How much are the systems we use to reward contributing to this?

Other aspects

To follow in extension posts- what is the value of writing a walk-through? What can we learn from the social networks growing up alongside games to act as guides and walk-throughs?

Image source- Hand of God courtesy of Paolo Camera, 

Clifford Nass knows about multi-tasking. Quite simply, his message is that we're no good at it. And, the more we try to multi-task the worse we get at each of the tasks we're attempting.

Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) is with him. While it seems that the popular interpretation of Miller's Magic Number 7 that we can store up to 7 things in working memory at once was not entirely what he meant in 1950's, Carr goes on to tell us that this number is actually more like 2, maximum 4. The idea of cognitive overload is that if we put more in than we can take, something else has to come out. Keep pouring into that glass and it overflows.

So, brutally summarising their work in one sentence Nass tells us we need to focus on one task at a time to be most successful, Carr that if we need more than a couple of things in our working memory that'll start to go wrong. We can't multi-task.

The good news is years of research into cognitive science are backing up my Pac-man strategy. Nass and Carr wouldn't be watching the ghosts at the same time as planning their route round the maze, with the television on in the background and their phone ringing. They would have a strategy in place, complete a section, pause to watch the movement of the ghosts and then carry on, focus on each particular skill as required.

Pac-man is a beautiful model for something that I'm certain I'll return to in later posts. As both men allude to in the clips above, the skill here is not trying to process many parallel streams at once, but in learning which to filter out, how to prioritise the many sources of information coming in.

If you're wondering what it is that Pac-man is teaching us as educators, and why I'm still writing about it after 2 weeks, that's it right there. Pac-man makes us better uni-taskers.

Image sources (and apologies to all concerned for what might be the worst piece of Photoshop I've ever done) - Wired, Atari Age.

In the previous post I discussed how I got myself back in to Pac-man, and the little set of tactics I came up with that I thought made me good at it. Here I want to look at why I appear to be rubbish at Pac-man on iPad, or at least worse.

The iPad version of the game (well, iOS) introduces some new control options. Playing on the computer I simply use the arrow keys to move the little chap around, I'd even got as far as discovering that I could hold down an arrow key in advance of the turn I needed to make so he turned as soon as possible.

Moving to iPad gives some different options. There's a joystick control at the bottom of the screen, or I can take advantage of some of the other tablet input methods and control Pac-man by swiping the screen or tilting the entire device.

2006 saw the launch of the Wii, and with that came the popularity in far more physically involved methods of controlling games. As a culture we got pretty excited about this, suddenly computer games could be an activity as part of a healthy lifestyle. We even have a couple of Nintendo Wii's in our PE department now.

However, it's ruining my score.

It's about inefficiency. With my arrow keys underneath my finger tips, the time required from brain to Pac-man is significantly smaller than if I have to tilt an iPad a certain degree to make the same activity happen. It's also a far more practiced activity- my body is already set up well to make these subtle movements very quickly. This can't be said for swiping or tilting.

Obviously if I'd started playing the game using the other control methods it wouldn't have been a problem, I wouldn't have noticed. But it is interesting how the input method changes the nature of the challenge and the experience of the game as a whole.

Returning just briefly to the Wii again I want to pick up on a wider issue around this idea of inefficiency. After a fairly small amount of time playing Wii Tennis or similar you realise that you don't have to mimic the exact on court actions of Andy Murray to become a skilled player. Far more subtle motions with the controller will achieve the desired result. We refine our motions to speed up reaction time, maximum reward for minimum effort. There is some question as to whether this could be marked up as cheating- would using a more simple on/off type device connected to the Wii make me so much better at tennis that it's an unfair advantage? But that's a whole new post.

1. Clear one corner at a time, using the energy pill at the latest possible moment & then moving to the next.
2. Watch the movement of the ghosts as much as Pac-man himself, stop sometimes to watch/wait.
3. Don't waste time eating blue ghosts.
4. Ignore the fruit bonuses.