An Article and a Presentation

Dr. Richard Ferdig over at U. Florida edited a special issue of the Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia on educational video games. He included my article, “New media resistance: Barriers to implementation of computer video games in the classroom.” I did a qualitative review of the research and found six barriers to using video games for classroom purposes:

Barriers included negative perceptions toward video games as educational components; the difficulty of providing state of the art graphics in educational video games; a lack of adequate computing hardware in the classrooms to run advanced video games; a school day divided by short class periods which hindered long term engagement in complex games; a lack of real world affordances; and a lack of alignment to state standards.

This paper was an expansion of one I delivered at AERA 2006. Check out the abstract at this link. If you are on a university connection, there’s a good chance you can access the full text. Check out the rest of the issue for six other articles on educational gaming.

In other news, I’ve been invited to speak at the Fall TECSIG meeting in Austin this October. TECSIG is the Technology Coordinators Special Interest Group, the largest SIG in the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA). TCEA is the largest state organization for technology in education, and holds one of the biggest educational computing conferences in the nation at the Austin Convention Center every February. In my presentation at the October meeting, I’ll touch on research surrounding instructional games and demo a virtual interactive environment or two.

References
Rice, J. W. (2007). New media resistance: Barriers to implementation of computer video games in the classroom. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. 16(3), 249-261.

Positive and Negative Uses of Race in Video Games

There has long been interest among academics in examining things along racial and gender lines. For one thing, race and gender are easy to code: 0 for male, 1 for female or vice versa. The racial characteristics of subjects can likewise be easily coded. Coding leads to data crunching. Once subject characteristics are coded, relationships with other data become more readily apparent.

Much video gaming research we’ve looked at recently has at least given lip service to the differences in gaming habits of boys and girls; such easily coded research will no doubt continue to be published. Social scientists will continue to be interested in investigating race as well as gender, and the relationships both groupings have with media and consumers of media.

Now, The Escapist magazine has an interesting article detailing the history of race in video games. And by race, we don’t mean elf, dwarf, orc, or human; we mean what non-gamers think of when discussing race. Andy Chalk writes a brief history of gaming’s darker side, with a look back at patently offensive games brimming with racial epithets and put-downs. He examines the following games: Prey, Daikatana, Shadow Warrior, and the infamous 1982 title for Atari, Custer’s Revenge.

Chalk ends by pointing out the positive ways many current titles have dealt with race, mostly by presenting minorities in positive roles. The titles he brings up include F.E.A.R., Half Life 2, Deus Ex, and Grand Theft Auto (though some might argue that although the GTA series do show minorities in leading roles, the violent nature of the games do not lend themselves to positive portrayals).

Chalk’s article may be good for academics looking for a primer on race history in video games, as well as a good reference to both good and bad racial presentations within popular games. Foul language alert for those more sensitive to swear words. Chalk also has a brief history of game ratings here.

References
Chalk, A. (2007, August 16). A short history of race in games. The Escapist. [Online.] Available: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/
1353-A-Short-History-of-Race-in-Games

Researching Morality Through Video Games

Recently there has been a spate of articles and online discussions regarding the study of morality in video games. Wide open spaces allowing a seemingly endless array of options in open-ended environments such as those offered in the Grand Theft Auto series let players do pretty much what they want to do, within the confines of the game. So, what do folks do? Do the straight-laced and moral types go on virtual killing and stealing sprees? Do the morally ambiguous in RL stick to codes of honor in games? Or do folks try different things, within a safe “playground” environment where their actions don’t harm anyone?

Alexander Gambotto-Burke writes in today’s online Guardian that gamers want a panoply of choice within the three dimensional environments they roam. He focuses on Ken Levine, president of Irrational Games, with key title System Shock 2, and the forthcoming BioShock.

Levine calls the type of environment in which BioShock players will engage, “emergent spaces.” Things become a lot more interactive in emergent spaces than the three dimensional gaming environments of yore. For instance, games renowned for their AI capabilities such as Half Life or Call of Duty were programmed for NPC events to occur within specific areas. But, “in a game like BioShock, AIs will wander around and follow you around.”

One becomes intrigued with the possibilities. This advanced programming creates a much richer open-ended environment, one in which players can do “good” things, “bad” things, or perhaps nothing of much use at all (or task neutral activities). This wide open arena has benefits for exploration of touchy issues.

Indeed, one of the videogaming’s greatest strengths is its ability to construct “moral playgrounds” - safe arenas in which people can explore different philosophies, principles and personalities. This has, however, also attracted most of the criticism and controversy surrounding the games industry in recent years.

Gambotto-Burke then pulls Mike Jaret, chief designer for Postal 3, into the conversation. Jaret makes an interesting point regarding ratings of games versus ratings of movies. The latest Die Hard installment goes light on swear words, but is heavy on action, with violence, things blowing up, car chases, etc. It received a PG-13 rating from the MPAA. Postal 2 was likewise low on swear words, but heavy on action and violence. It received a rating of MA from the ESRB, or the equivalent of an R rating for a movie. There is apparently a double standard with newer forms of entertainment.

***

Researchers are curious regarding the moral playground possibilities within these types of games. The burning question is, if a game provides opportunities to do morally bad things, like killing people, will this trigger homicidal tendencies in people? The short answer is no, but with the caveat that an emotionally unstable person may decide to go on a killing spree following any number of stimuli … a perceived slight from someone on the street, a bad day at work, a jilted lover, etc. All the blame for all the killing in the world can’t be laid at video games’ doorstep.

On another note, props to Chris Kohler over at Wired for pointing out a couple posts on the topic of moral studies through games that Henry Jenkins put up this week. Dr. Jenkins, everybody’s favorite gaming academic (certainly one of the better writers out there) points out the work of one of his grad students, Peter Rauch, who has been researching and thinking about the use of the game Fable as a Petri dish for studying the moral decisions people make.

Peter Rauch came to CMS with a strong background in Philosophy; what he wanted from our program was the chance to employ those tools to think deeply about games, trying to explore in what sense it was appropriate to think of games as ethical and moral practices.

You can read Rauch’s thesis excerpts here and here. On a side note, Fable caught my eye when I was looking at the possibilities for higher order thinking in video games.

References
Gambotto-Burke, A. (2007, August 16). Real moral choices in virtual game worlds. The Guardian. [Online]. Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/16/
guardianweeklytechnologysection.games4

Gaming Industry Looks for Positive Side

David Perry of GameConsultants.com has a nice article in the current issue of BusinessWeek focusing on beneficial aspects of commercial games. Rather than dwell on purely academic benefits, Perry delves into the topic of how popular video games positively impact the audience. The first example he uses to illustrate this point is what a six year old girl learned about trebuchets from playing a video game.

Perry brings up Gee’s first book on the subject, then spends more time discussing Rusel DeMaria’s new book Reset: Changing the Way We Look at Video Games. DeMaria’s much heralded five learning powers of games (motivation, immersion, identification, interactivity, and choice) comprise much of the remainder of the article. Joining in his conversation concerning these matters (via e-mail, apparently), were Chris Taylor, CEO of Gas Powered Games, and Bing Gordon, Chief Creative Office of Electronic Arts.

Perry concludes on a positive note, predicting a strong possibility of future efforts from the major gaming studios that will result in, “games that promote positive values, or that teach or inspire players.” Here’s hoping Perry’s prognostications come true.

References

Perry, D. (2007, August 13). Video games entertain and educate. BusinessWeek. [Online]. Available: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2007/
id20070813_874107.htm

Two Major Articles on Second Life

The dead tree media have been paying attention to SL for a while now, but last week brought major articles from arguably the two most important East Coast papers. The first was in The New York Times. Reporter Seth Kugel offered readers an inside look at SL, introducing the uninitiated to such things as avatars, virtual architecture, and Linden dollars.

The second article dealt with the more salacious aspects of SL. It was published in The Wall Street Journal, and focused on the sexual content available in this most popular of virtual worlds. I, along with others, have long maintained the main portion of SL is inappropriate for K-12 educational use due to the unregulated “anything goes” atmosphere. Author Alexandra Alter focused on a married man who engaged in an affair of the heart (and avatar) with another person in the virtual world. Edward Castronova over at U. Indiana, Bloomington, gets a prominent mention as does Nick Yee from Stanford.

Wrapping up the article, and summing up the virtual affair, Alter keys in on the RL wife:

Sitting alone in the living room in front of the television, Mrs. Hoogestraat says she worries it will be years before her husband realizes that he’s traded his real life for a pixilated fantasy existence, one that doesn’t include her.

 

“Basically, the other person is widowed,” she says. “This other life is so wonderful; it’s better than real life. Nobody gets fat, nobody gets gray. The person that’s left can’t compete with that.”

I sympathize with the SL widow, Mrs. Hoogestraat. But, I must say, nothing is better than RL. Hopefully her hubby will figure that out soon.

References

Kugel, S. (2007, August 9). A house that’s just unreal. The New York Times. [Online]. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/09/garden/09second.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin

Alter, A. (2007, August 10). Is this man cheating on his wife? The Wall Street Journal, (pp. W1).

Of Grognards and Heroscape

Nate Combs posted an entry on Terra Nova about Grognards, a term for folks playing traditional board games as opposed to modern video games. In the comments that followed, Thomas Malaby over at Wisconsin mentioned his 12 year old nephew was heavily into Heroscape from Milton Bradley. Intrigued, I bought the master set yesterday, and my kids and I started playing it this morning.

One intriguing thing was the potential for everybody to play together, a characteristic common to just about any board game or cards, etc. With World of Warcraft, we’re usually limited to two or at most three players without seeing the Internet connection take a serious drop. We have played together with friends at a distance, of course, which solves the problem but we lose some of the benefits of proximity. Then there’s the issue of paying for multiple accounts…

Heroscape is sort of an advanced form of chess. First, the players lay out the board, which is divided into hexagonal pieces. The board may consist of hills, mountains, water, etc. Play pieces are detailed figurines, and they include a wide variety from the pantheon of board games past. There are Vikings, a dragon, a dinosaur-mounted warrior, American GI types from WWII, robots, samurais, etc. Each character has different moves and abilities, which are helpfully spelled out on accompanying battle cards.

Players take turns moving their pieces about the board and attacking/defending opposing pieces. Battles are decided by dice. Some pieces have higher attack or lower defense capabilities, and strategy and planning is involved throughout. Expansion packs are all the rage, and we have our eyes on the Marvel expansion pack, with figurines from the comics including ones for Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk.

Educational value seems typical to strategy games. There is a little math involved, but not much. Primarily, the value lies in thinking things out and in planning ahead. Think chess on steroids. The box says the game is appropriate for ages 8 and higher, and the set comes with basic rules which can be played for simpler games. Andy Havens posted on Terra Nova that his five year old likes playing around with the board and pieces, although he has not yet graduated to more advanced, rule-governed play.

Board games have their share of research interest as well. Matthew Kirschenbaum pointed out his blog, Zone of Influence, which is focused on game studies. Matt has a nice wrap up on the Terra Nova comments here. He has a chapter in the upcoming Third Person, the second follow up to First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan.

All told, Heroscape was well worth the price I paid, about the same as a typical video game.

One Avatar for All Virtual Worlds

We use one web browser to surf all the sites on the web. Why can’t we have one avatar and use it to visit all the 3D worlds online? Such is the thinking of the Web 3D Consortium, Second Life parent Linden Lab, Google, IBM, and others, according to a recent article in BusinessWeek.

Another work in progress highlighted by article author Aili McConnon is that of The Multiverse Network, a product of Netscape alumni. Make a world using Multiverse tools, and any Multiverse avatar can traverse it. McConnon notes that abilities to traverse seamlessly between multiple 3D worlds owned by disparate companies is likely a decade away, give or take a year or two. But, progress is being made. Envision this day in the not too distant future: your avatar leaves class from the university and stops by the online mall to try on the latest fashions. Could happen.

References

McConnon, A. (2007, August 13). Just ahead: The web as a virtual world. BusinessWeek. [Online]. Available: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_33/b4046064.htm

Virtual Holograms Offer Remote Possibilities

I blogged earlier about my article, The (Virtual) Classroom of Tomorrow that discusses educational efforts within three dimensional environments using human-like avatars. This is akin to using holograms for academic purposes, although the technology requires very simple representations of something only partially resembling a hologram.

In a recent issue of Simulation & Gaming, Korean researchers show what is possible with state-of-the-art technology. Sang-Yup Lee, Sang C. Ahn, and Hyoung-Gon Kim over at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, and MyoTaeg Lim at Korea University, wrote Real-time 3D video avatar in mixed reality: An implementation for immersive telecommunication. Using multiple cameras, a more realistic projection of participants can be transmitted into the virtual environment than traditional avatars. When this happens, facial expressions and gestures combine with vocal inflections to give a real time representation of the participant.

It’s little surprise an article like this should come out of South Korea, which is one of the most wired countries in the world and consistently on the cutting edge of online virtual worlds. One of the key stumbling blocks in using virtual worlds for teaching has been the lack of communication affordances the avatar structure imposes on participants. Basically, participants typically gaze at slightly animated versions of one another. Hand gestures and other motions are mostly restricted with traditional avatars. But, with the technology outlined by Lee and colleagues, a much richer educational environment becomes feasible, with avatars largely mimicking what the person is actually doing in RL.

Look for this technology to gain interest among educators in coming years.

References

Lee, S., Ahn, S. C., Kim, H., & Lim, M. T. (2006). Real-time 3D video avatar in mixed reality: An implementation for immersive telecommunication. Simulation & Gaming, 37(4). 491-506.

SAGE-BC Offers Research Paper Treasure Trove

Up in Quebec, researchers and their assistants have been busy reviewing papers on gaming and simulations for education. The Simulation and Advanced Gaming Environments (SAGE) for Learning links ten related research projects across Canada. SAGE Base de Connaissances (knowledge base), or SAGE-BC, is an online resource freely available to other researchers or any interested parties.

The way it works: SAGE members find an article dealing with educational simulations and/or games. They submit the article to SAGE-BC, and the article is coded, then entered into the knowledge base in both English and French. From the introduction page:

The SAGE Repository is a knowledge base comprised of reading grids based on articles dealing with educational games, simulations and simulation games and of analytical grids based on existing games, simulations or simulation games. It brings together these grids in a catalogue format, thereby making it easier to find items thanks to user-friendly research tools.

The article analysis grids on the site are broken down by activity: Games, Simulations, Simulation Games, and Undefined Activities. Researchers can browse the analysis grid and sort the articles by year published, author, index numbers, or notations. Commentary and coding is bilingual.

The work is ongoing, and is far from complete. Not every peer-reviewed paper on simulations or gaming is listed. However, there are some very interesting finds here, and browsing through the listings gives a sense of what is out there, particularly within fields the researcher may be less familiar.

Also, users can perform searches on keywords. I searched on “Civilization,” and found four articles listed that touch on Sid Meier’s Civilization series, including one by Squire and Steinkuehler that appeared in Library Journal.

So, what are the folks up north doing with this treasure trove of gaming references? One thing they’re doing is publishing papers based on the collection. Louise Sauvé (Télé–Université, Québec), Lise Renaud, (Université du Québec à Montréal), David Kaufman (Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC) and Jean-Simon Marquis (Télé–Université, Québec), recently examined the papers for differences between simulations and games in the journal Educational Technology & Society.

Their queries revolved around the issues of definitions. There has not yet been developed and accepted by all a thorough lexicon defining terms precisely. Thus, what one researcher may call a simulation, another may call a video game and vice-versa.

The authors spell out attributes of games and simulations, and use documents from the SAGE knowledge base to back up their assertions. Their final paragraph sums up the paper nicely:

In closing, we offer the following quotation (Feinstein & Cannon, 2002) that provides the motivation for this literature review:

“This article rises out of frustration, the frustration from reading a wide variety of papers each using words like simulation, game, role playing, gaming, and symbolic modelling either without definition or inconsistency from one work to another.”

In short, SAGE-BC is well worth a look-see. Video game researchers may uncover a few gems for their own through this very nice online resource.

References

Feinstein, A. H., & Cannon, H. M. (2002). Constructs of simulation evaluation. Simulation & Gaming, 33(4), 425-440.

Sauvé, L., Renaud, L., Kaufman, D., & Marquis, J. S. (2007). Distinguishing between games and simulations: A systematic review. Educational Technology & Society, 10(3), 247-256.

Squire, K., & Steinkuehler, C. (2005). Meet the gamers. Library Journal 130(7), 38-41.

A Third of British Teachers Use Video Games in Class

Here’s an interesting survey from January of last year, reported by the BBC, indicating a third of British teachers use video games in the classroom, with most agreeing that video games are useful in education. Nesta Futurelab conducted the survey:

The survey of 1,000 teachers in England and Wales suggests a quarter also personally use them in their free time.

 

Over half of the 1000 teachers questioned by Nesta Futurelab said they would use them in future and believed they were a “good motivational tool”.

Read the complete report here. Check out Futurelab’s Teaching with Games site here.