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

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:

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Screenshot taken with second life graphics set to 'Ultra'	Battlefield screenshot with graphics set to 'High'

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:

Age group	18-24	25-34	35-44	45 plus
%	15.5	35	28	20

However the even more interesting piece of data was the average usage per month based on age:

Age group	18-24	25-34	35-44	45 plus
Average usage hours per month	37.84	55.55	66.06	70.17

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

 

I want to say that I spent lots of time in this game. Due to the fact that I was a big fan of SIMS computer-based version, I want to discover more about the difference between game devices which contains diversity.

 

The similarity:

- There are five main occupations you can choose from, and I have completed all of them to the highest degree.(Chef, teacher, sport man, fire man, artist)

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- The task of occupation is set up with different levels and the requirements of skills and qualification should be met in order to achieve highest honor.

- You can give birth and build up a family with your partner.

- There are some random tasks and personal desires can be achieved as part of the overall goals

 

The difference:

- Mobile device provide easier access to the game, no need to turn on the computer and connect to internet

- The game control in the version is quite loose which means the goal can be easily achieved compared with computer-based version. For example, you don’t need to maintain the friendship with other citizens, and they will always consider you as friends no matter about if you contact them frequently or not. You can even develop your relationship with every citizen to be your partner. (I try to do so, and it really works!)

- The main player (sim) in this game does not have free will to take actions unless their emergent needs need to be satisfied.(ex: hungry, tired)

- No new game content is added

In other words, there won’t be any new citizen for you to discover, only 12 persons are available.

 

At very first beginning, I am keen on playing this version due to the loose design of the game. I am thinking I can achieve something I can’t do it on the computer version. Well, after all, I must admit that I feel bored soon when I complete every single task. It is very interesting to note that when the difficulty is eliminated, the fun decreased. However, if the goal is not attainable, the fun will no more exist.

 

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:

Level	Description	Example
1	Direct breach of the rules	Rosie Ruiz- Boston Marathon, Thierry Henry - France vs. Ireland
2	Interpretation of the rules to gain an advantage	Red Bull- blown diffusers, MIT blackjack team- Card counting
3	Getting outside help or support	Tour de France- team radio ban, Sponsorship in F1 (not the best link, sorry..)
4	Working entirely independently

 

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, 

        I would like to take some notes about the definition of play in one of our readings, ’The ambiguity of play’. According to Sutton-Smith (1997), play is a paradox, and there are so many forms of play. In very specific and general definition of play, we usually concern ‘contests’, such as games or sports, as the one and only form of play. However, regarding the wider definition of play, in my opinion, it refers to any form of activities which aim to ‘HAVE FUN’. As a result, even the daydreams can be considered as a private form of play. (This point of view really attracts me a lot, which means we are actually playing all the time.)

 

Turing back to my personal experience, I have an unforgettable experience of ‘Sky Diving’ in Lake Taupo (New Zealand) five years ago when I went there for a long-term backpacker travelling. This can be considered as a ‘risky play’. The scenario is located in the air. I am the player and the coach must play with me at my back in order to guarantee my safety. The playing equipment is so essential to keep me alive and all I need to do is to jump out of the plane into 12,000 feet of sky. To be honest, when I jumped into the air, I have a true feeling of committing suicide. And I am also convinced that I will never do it again in my entire life. However, I realise that kind of excitement (or maybe less would be better for me) is one of the main factors of any various form of play.

 

By looking deeper to the true natural of play, I think it will benefit us to carry out game design in the following session. For example, not only the competition form of play is involved but also different form of individual or social events should be taken into consideration when designing or reviewing a game design.

 

Reference

Sutton-Smith B. (1997) The ambiguity of play, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

 

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.

Mission to Timocharis region on the Moon.

• Ai Austin - Team Captain
• KaronMcB - Explorer
• indrimagri - Explorer
• Kimberley Pascal - Explorer

MoonWorld Virtual Field Work: http://moonworld.cet.edu/ and http://www.avatrian.com/moonworld/

Mission Data

• Team Pythagoras Journal and Logs
• Teleport to Moon Orbit Station
• Rock Sample Analysis (as this is not currently working in Second Life)
• Mission Images Folder 

 

 

 

Surveys for Team Members

• http://atate.org/mscel/gbl/MoonWorld/moonworld-gee-survey.html

• Please also complete the MoonWorld project questionnaire for NASA (Teacher/Adult version) at https://oedc.nasa.gov/dc/anonymous.jsp?a=1065378030737543106513231896

On the definition and form of games

Defining games

As part of the introduction to digital game-based learning course I was keen to start by establishing some ground rules for the discussion. The cornerstone to these would be the definition of a 'game' (which would then give way to the definition of a digital game). The importance of definitions in any scientific endeavour cannot be underestimated. The quote I have used in the past makes the point eloquently:

“Controversial and unsystematic terms are the cause of serious problems in examinations of learning situations. Without a consistent vocabulary, it is difficult to relate investigated learning situations to each other and the results are confined to single cases. ” (Zürcher, 2010)

If this is the case, unless we define what a 'game' is we will be unable to have a coherent discussion. A good examples this is the fact that one of the threads discussed the 'game of life'.

Between gaming and playing

One of the first things that I ran into when thinking about the definition of games was the difference between the terms 'playing' and 'gaming'. For example, 'gamers' are individuals who spend considerable time playing video games and, in some cases, invest considerable amounts of money in the hardware used for this activity. On the other hand, children at schools have 'play time' (and we also have 'supervised play').

Looking at the dictionary definitions are helped a bit:

play/plā/ Verb: Engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose. Noun: Activity engaged in for enjoyment and recreation, esp. by children.

game/gām/ Noun: A form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.

I find it interesting that the emphasis in 'play' is on enjoyment and recreation where as the emphasis in 'game' is on rules, skill, strength or luck. This to me defined a match more rigid and planned game and a much more flexible and open play. The competitive element mentioned in the definition of game indicates that they would typically be an objective, the attainment of which is defined by the rules. This raised a few questions for me – is there no objective in 'play', Can it not have a serious purpose? Can a 'game' not be enjoyed?

On the importance of games and play

Maria Montessori mentioned the importance of experiential play for preschool children – experiencing different materials, different objects and playing with every day objects such as opening and closing buttons and zippers. Greenfield mentions the importance placed by developmental psychologist Piaget on the development of motor skills.

The form of games

Surprisingly something that these definitions tied very nicely into was the manner in which Zürcher tackles the definition of formal and informal learning; This, from the very same article I used to explain why a definition is needed in the first place.

It then struck me that a clear distinct line can be drawn between the different forms of learning Zürcher deals with and the two definitions that I have been struggling with:

Play – informal learning

Game – formal learning

Children playing with zippers and buttons in a Montessori preschool do not have an objective they need to achieve and are not abiding by any rules – they are learning from experience. In a similar manners city design students using Sim City can understand how different variables interact in a city environment. Rules can be used to transform play into game (so a game can be built with Lego bricks etc). Zürcher defines the relationship between formal and informal as a scope rather than two opposites and so is the case between play and game.

My general feeling is that play can be used where there is less need for testing and monitoring and games when there is greater need to monitor skill and improvement (its easier to watch a learner vocabulary grow as their scrabble score improves but harder to understand how much better their imagination has improved form playing with lego).

The final question for me is – can we use the notion of formality to decide between gaming and playing? And can we go further and use it to design the actual activity...? That's a whole other post.

References

• Zürcher, Reinhard (2010). 'Teaching-learning processes between informality and formalization', the encyclopaedia of informal education. [www.infed.org/informal_education/informality_and_formalization.htm. Accessed: 20/1/2012

• Greenfield, Patricia M. (1984). 'Mind and media : the effects of television, video games, and computers'. Chapter 7 pp. 86-114, Fontana Paperback, London

• Google definitions, accessed 23/1/2012

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.

I've been reintroducing myself to Pac-man this week. Seems poetic in many ways that my starting point to look more seriously at games and what they have to contribute to learning is with one of the first games I played as a child. There's a nice free web version of the game here- it might be good to go and have a quick attempt at it before reading on. Having devoted a few hours of my week to it, I'm at a point where I think I understand the game & what is required to be 'good' at it. Exactly how I would define being good at Pac-man is somewhat up for debate, but I'm going for simply labelling it as achieving high scores. And, my benchmark for good has been made by taking an average of the score each of my colleagues got playing a single game (5200). I'm aware this isn't exactly scientific, and probably suggests something about my personality by identifying that 'good' for me basically means 'better than those around me'... It's not the best way to present the data, but the graph attempts to show my score progression over the week. The easier way to look at this is that the average of each of my main playing sessions moved from 4500 - 8500 - 9500. More interesting is how my attitude and approach to the game changed over the week. I'll return in a later post to how and why I think we get hooked on certain games, but for me once I was involved Pac-man became an exercise in reflection, in developing a strategy and adapting it. For what is on the face of it a simple arcade game the methods involved are more complex than they seem. My approach moved from 'eat as many dots before dying as possible' to the following set of rules:

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.

From a wider perspective on the game, and my experience of it as a whole whether these rules are correct or not is largely irrelevant. My score improved which demonstrates I improved. More interestingly, particularly as I expect we can see the same pattern in more complex game setups, is that effectively what I did was create my own set of rules to go alongside the ones established by the game designer. Rules is possibly not the correct word- but, as highlighted by a fellow student what this simple little game is doing is not just reflection/adaptation, but demonstrates the very natural human need to make and form patterns with our knowledge.