Pattern Recognition

Given the limited data set on offer, it seems that as time progresses, my posts become a) longer, and b) less frequent. Thus, I expect I shall write another one in 18 months' time that approaches the length of a journal paper.

Unless, of course, I've ruined that trend by posting this. In which case, you can still expect to wait 18 months, only with significantly shorter results.

Learning from...Learning?

Caught this little gem in my Kotaku feed this morning, and found it somewhat confusing.

It seems Neil Thompson from Microsoft doesn't like the idea of educational games, to the point that he is advocating that the games industry completely avoid pursuing the subject, which he considers "dangerous for us as a company and as an industry".

I suppose the idea here, is that he wants the industry to create great games in which people will find educational application, rather than create great learning resources that people can somehow play. This, I agree with wholeheartedly -- the concept is basically the crux of my thesis. Nothing makes a game less fun than the developers forgetting that they're actually trying to make a game. If you actively start out with this mentality, you end up with bad edutainment, interactive stories, and patchy Galaga clones with sums and questions about the Romans instead of boss fights.

So making a game first and foremost is key to successful game development. But as long as this is true, who's to say making some educational content second, or third, or even as a complete afterthought is a bad idea? Provided the gameplay is the primary factor, the educational bits can be included, modified or culled completely based on how well they suit the game-play. Thompson mentions:

"I think for us to quote [the success of certain educational games] as an industry and say let's start producing edutainment type products – we'll lose a lot of money.I don't think it's ever been done in a clever and good way because you lose the focus of it being fun and involving"

This sentiment strikes me as being similar to:

People have made some really delicious cakes in the past, with some really interesting flavours in there. But whenever we make cakes, we always fill them with bees. The bees really hurt when we eat the cake, so I guess none of us should ever make cake again."

I dunno, maybe just don't fill it with bees in future? If your educational games keep going wrong because you forget they're supposed to be games, why not try sticking a Post-It on your monitor to remind you what you're doing? Or glance over at the 360 dev kit sat on your desk, and think why it might be there? By all means make a game first, but don't immediately exclude all ideas of educational content, just because people have messed it up in the past.

The main reason that educational game research is still going, is because the community believes that games can be useful to teach things. They contain complex concepts that the player needs to understand in order to play; they give constant, contextual feedback to keep the player on the right track; contain rich immersive environments to maintain players' "flow" states. All of this is down to the 30+ years of on-the-job research that is The Games Industry.

So why, if educationalists are willing, nay, striving to use the past 30 years of game design research, should The Games Industry actively renounce the past 100 years of educational research? If the two areas do in fact share common mechanics, then surely some benefit could come from collaboration between the fields? While Thompson is correct in saying The Industry is primarily about making "quality commercial products", there is surely some incentive to use educational research that could make the quality of those products even greater.

Annoying, unskippable tutorials; being forced to replay sections of a game you completed perfectly, simply because you failed at the very end; having an NPC berate you for not pursuing an objective that was never properly explained in the first place. Almost all game-players will be familiar with problems like these -- problems of how to teach a player new skills, allow them to practice them, or how to test their proficiency in them.

While game designers have spent the last 3 decades trying to fix them, educational theorists have spent the last century identifying, investigating and solving similar problems. So while The Industry should always be committed to making better, more entertaining games, renouncing educational theory isn't necessarily the best way to do it.

I am not going to call this post "Virtual Insanity"

Last Thursday I had a little day out to Paisley, to attend a workshop on the use of Massively Multiplayer technologies in learning. Whilst presentations about different games were planned, the day essentially focused on one thing - Second Life. As close to Neil Stephenson's vision of the Metaverse as we're likely to see for a while, every corporate and academic force on the globe seems to be jumping on board. Hidden amongst the Second Life/ VLE mash-ups was a single mention of something quite exciting. Something real. Something that had actually been done, instead of been thought about or hinted at or conceived and dismissed in a single, academia-standard breath.

It was the Virtual Hallucination Project.

Set up as a research experiment to test whether symptoms of schizophrenia could be usefully represented in a virtual world, the project exists as a "virtual schizophrenia simulator", housed in an innocent-looking bungalow in the Second Life universe. On arrival, the player is asked to put on the "hallucination badge", and start the tour. Walking through the building, the player is subjected to various visual hallucinations - printed text metamorphosing before their eyes, chequered floor tiles appearing as stepping stones, their own reflection dying in a bathroom mirror. These are accompanied by a constant stream of "voices", telling the player how worthless they are and how they may as well be dead. Whilst the rather underwhelming 3D engine offered by Second Life gave the visual aspects of the tour less gravity than they deserved, the audio elements were really quite chilling, the relentless streaming of which giving (as far as I can tell) an incredibly accurate portrayal of the voices heard by schizophrenics - especially when heard through headphones.

After leaving the tour, I realised something quite scary: Second Life itself is basically one big schizophrenia simulator. Objects appear in the player's peripheral vision or on the horizon, then disappear just as quickly when the player moves to look at them; "voices" appear from apparently non-existent sources, or from inanimate everyday objects; walls, ceilings or even the floor the player is standing on can disappear at a moment's notice. Combined with the fact that the player is perfectly able to leave the hallucination tour with their voices from their "hallucination badge" still running, the whole Second Life experience could become very unnerving indeed. Where else but here could a tourist attraction leave you with such a chilling souvenir, as the virtual equivalent of a crippling mental illness?

Another new blog...

At Mac's request, I'm starting a new blog. Being too cheap to buy database-able webspace, resurrecting the old site was probably never going to happen. Ideally, I'd have used Blogger to make a nice plain text version of my journal, before including it in a version of my old site hosted at uni. But apparently I don't get FTP access, so that can't happen either. So until I (never, ever) sort something more exciting out, this will have to do. Oh well -- at least it looks nicer than this ever did.