I chose Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile" - the computer game that is, not the book, film, play, an episode from the TV series or, more recently, a graphic novel that have lent itself to the Christie brand - for two simple reasons:

1. I like murder mysteries and this story is very familiar to me;
2. I wanted a "gentle" re-introduction into computer gaming having been out of it for nearly 20 years. 

So, in many ways, I took the approach that Gee (2007) originally adopted and went for something that would "interest" me. If you look at Berens & Howard's (2001, cited in Newman, 2005, p. 12) gaming genres, this game sat firmly in the platforms and puzzles domain - though I would say more puzzles and less platforms. The game is definately not roleplaying, even though you are playing Hercule Poirot and it's definately not a first-person game.

Let me explain. my idea of a roleplaying game involves interacting with the other characters - you don't do this in the game. Firstly, there are short black-and-white silent movie moments where the characters "talk" via text at the bottom of the screen, in other words there are no spoken words. Secondly, the "interviewing" of the suspects also uses this silent movie approach whereby you click on the "next" button to read the "conversation" that is going on. So immediately the game isn't immersive as you are not acting and interacting, you're just reading text from the screen.

The first-person approach allows you to see through the eyes of the character and allows you to interact with objects and people. What the game does offer is 24 rooms with "hidden objects" that you have to find over 14 scenes. You are given 25 minutes per scene to find the objects that appears on the list of things to find. Some will be clues to the murder and others are just thow-away objects. After each scene, there's a more traditional slider-type puzzle to solve. So the game is promoting keen observation skills and logical thinking. I managed to complete the entire game in one sitting that took about 5 hours to complete.

Although I had successfully completed the game, I didn't feel any sense of satisfaction from completing it as I didn't feel that the game particularly challenged me; this well-known story was rather secondary and somewhat superfluous; the characters were non-existant as if they were devoid of any personality - it would have, I think, be different if the characters were allowed to "talk" so that their "personalities" were able to shine through the words that they "spoke" and the "accents" that they used to speak them. It would seem that I wanted some that went a little beyond the "gentle" re-introduction that I thought I needed. The game wasn't animated enough, it has already been documented that action-based games are more engaging that still-based games, however nice the graphics and music should be.

I should say that a couple of years ago I did buy one of those interactive DVD games that you play on the TV. I purchased Agatha Christie's "After the Funeral" which was intersperse with video clips from the TV show, games and puzzles and linked together by David Suchet playing "Hercule Poirot". Whilst this game is not action-based like the computer game, it had the added bonus of the video clips and David Suchet as Hercule Poirot talking directly at you, which gave the impression that you were in the game rather than outside of it. There is definately something to be said for computer games that have animated action sequences rather than still ones.

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.

Points to ponder

• “ There are many good principles of learning built into good computer and video games” (Gee 2004)      
• “ Content has never been king, it is not king now, and is unlikely to ever be king. The Internet has done quite well without content, and can continue to flourish without it.” (Odlyzko 2001)       
• “The typical piece of information will never be looked at by a human being” (Lesk 1997)

In my own experience I have found that focusing too heavily on content narrows the range of users (since learners have varying interests) while focusing too heavily on interactivity at the expense of content may leave learners feeling ‘cheated’ (as they have to fill gaps in information on their own). Even the most interactive 3D movies with superb graphics that pull you into the movie, will only engage you so much if the storyline is poor (Anyone who's seen My Bloody Valentine can attest to this).

A common complaint about early car racing games was that you felt that you were really driving, but there simply wasn’t that much to do.  It seems amazing that so much is being paid for access, without paying as much attention to the thing being accessed as to the ability to access it (or not) via their own means.Odlyzko argues that connectivity is more important that content in modern communication industry.

Does this assertion that “most of the money is in point-to-point communication” represent opportunity or an obstacle for the future of digital learning systems? It begs the question: Should we focus on what is learnt, or on how and where it is learnt? Are gamers looking for a good plot, a rich world to inhabit or are they looking for interactivity – the freedom to connect and choose their own modes of access? Finally, should so-called “educational” media be designed for the person (pulling users to their content), or for the systems (targeting the most popular networks of connectivity)?   

Meeting the need vs. meeting the user? In a sense these are not issues unique to digital learning. All forms of learning encounter the need balance content with interactivity. But I hesitate to use purely commercial criteria as a measure of the effectiveness of media, particularly in the context of learning. Surely the content of a good game include skills and problem-solving abilities, more than mere information. The challenge is to see how educational “information” be integrated in a meaningful and engaging way in digital games.

References

Gee, J.P. (2004) Learning by design: Games as learning machines. Interactive Educational Multimedia, 8 (April 2004) 15-23.

Lesk, M. (1997) How much information is there in the world? Unpublished paper, available at  http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/diglib.html!.

Odlyzko, A. 2001. Content is not king. AT&T Labs Research. http://www.research.att.com/amo

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".

I hate asking people for things - I'll buy a whole book of raffle tickets myself rather than try to sell any.  Yet I don't mind when other people ask me to buy a raffle ticket … or fill in a questionnaire. Not usually.

I didn't like being hounded by HESA to return their questionnaire, though - that felt intrusive, or would have if I hadn't already returned it at the second request.  I suppose it depends how many other things a person is juggling - in the last week, a few things I've agreed to do (write references, review papers, be an internal examiner, see students and many other things) have suddenly materialised rather too closely together.  If anyone sent me a survey just now, I'd be likely to ignore it (apart from people on the Research Methods module, of course).

When we ask someone to complete a survey for us, we have no idea what level of burden or anxiety it might be adding to an already overfull intray.  I suppose that is what causes me concern, especially if they see it as a pointless exercise for them.  I'm OK with piloting our group questionnaire on some of my colleagues - so I'm not recording a concern about that here.  While I was reading Robson this morning, I just became very conscious of my reluctance to use surveys in general, other than things that can be done very quickly (like the one-minute paper, as a classroom evaluation tool, for instance). 

When I have used the simple single open question surveys described in my last entry, these didn't put immediate pressure on any individual to stop everything to attend to my research.  Rather, I got a quick response from those who were interested in the topic.  That didn't feel as though it was being intrusive, though no doubt there were some who thought, "oh no - not another email from her".

I think that that my concern about being intrusive means that surveys are not for me.  It possibly also accounts for some of the idiosyncracies of my research history - and some other things that I'm still thinking about. But questionnaire fatigue is a real danger, especially among students.

Big quesion still lingering: do I need to measure learning or learner participation? In an ideal world, the former. But there are probably too many variables to do this. Therefore we have to assume that, based on the literature/theory, increased participation leads to increased learning - as long as that participation is ACTIVE. And from there, we measure participation.

I'm thinking at present that the best research method to do this will be a combination of direct observation and structured interviews (perhaps an attitude scale). Direct observation seems like the most logical method of gauging the extent of leaner participation, via blog, wiki and synchronous communication. Interviews appear a useful way of ascertaining a valuable insight into learners' own experiences, which could supplement data gathered in direct observation - and after all this is very much concerned with their own experience. ...or an unnecessary extra??

"how these 'embodied' role plays compare to avatar-less ones, in terms of your learners' experience" - very good idea, I think.  It must be a key concept of what I'm exploring.  My theory is that the online environment, especially in the form of role-play, might aid these particular learners. But the question is whether a traditional F2F role-play serves just as well!

There's a lot of common ground between our potential topics. Should be useful talking more about them. Are you considering anxiety as a conscious emotion experienced by learners?

Measurement of progress: might take a long time to measure properly - if indeed it can be measured at all, given the number of variables - aptitudes, circumstances, motivation of learners, etc.

Measurement of participation - of active involvement - manageable and, after all, the premise might be that active involvement improves language learning.

I'm half-dreaming of this stuff now - jeepers!

After re-reading, my potential project appears to be part-explanatory (Does extended online role-play cause improvement in particpation / linguistic ability?) and part-emancipatory (extending abilities of learners; enriching their experience). One more than the other? Hmmm... I *feel* that there is more explanation than emancipation going on here.

Is the learning to be measured or the participation evaluated, though?? This question (and its answer) would determine perhaps whether a fixed or flexible design is warranted.