I'm Serious.net

"Keep going"

  Things are looking scary out there. First Electronic Arts, then Sony, now Microsoft - not to mention tens of smaller studios - have all moved forward (?) with plans to cut back, even eliminate, game studio personnel. Projects are being mothballed, titles have been removed from catalogs.

This is not the time for those of us on the learning and productivity side of the map to waver. The solutions our industry offers are precisely what is called for in this era of diminished resources and changing priorities. We bring people together; we foster communication, collaboration, creativity and efficiency. We advance "green" initiatives by reducing, if not eliminating, the need for travel. We advance knowledge, and the application of knowledge and know-how to everyday problems, large and small.

Rather, now is the time to heed the words of the great abolitionist, Harriet Tubman:

    If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going;
    if you want to taste freedom, keep going.

I'm serious,

Anne

Sweating the small stuff

  Bill Brandon, editor at the eLearning Guild just reminded me about Albert Mehrabian's conclusions regarding how humans determine whether we like one another. Mehrabian and his colleagues wanted to determine the relative influence of facial expressions and spoken words in human relations. After various experiments where subjects read words, listened to words spoken, and watched someone speak specific words, Mehrabian et al. concluded that the totality of interpersonal communication is conveyed:

• 7% through spoken word
• 38% through voice tone
• 55% via general body language

To be sure, these exact numbers can and have been challenged. But the relative influence of these communication modalities is generally accepted.

These findings have important implications for those designing immersive environments. Take, for example, a frequent in-world situation where a user must gather information and apply it in a new, potentially ambiguous context. The designer must decide the best way to present the new information and the best way to present the context for the user to apply it. Is a block of text the right way to set this up? Perhaps voice-over will assist in smoothing out ambiguities. Maybe an NPC with a facial expression or a gesture will be necessary to convey the full meaning, particularly when feedback is involved.

The process of design can be greatly informed by this awareness, as well. How do you develop and review storyboards? Is this an entirely paper-based process? Or, do you do storyboard walkthroughs with reviewers taking different "roles" so that the review is active, participatory, and more "life-like"?

While these details may seem to be more trouble than they're worth, it's this attention to detail that can make the difference between a transformational experience for your users and just another (maybe) learning event.

I'm serious,
Anne

Dashboard learning

In 1956, cognitive psychologist George Miller published a paper entitled, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information". In his research, he had determined that human short-term memory had a capacity of 7±2 chunks of information. Since then, this "fact" has taken on the mantle of "the Way It Is." Ever wonder why local phone numbers are 7 digits (at the time, it was too expensive to call long distance to worry about remembering area codes)?

If Miller were to conduct his experiments these 53 (Happy New Year, btw) years later, I suspect his findings might be different. The amount of information we must have available to us at any given time is such that we use up our chunks by remembering the places we keep the information we need rather than the information itself. Ellen Wagner recently referred to this as our "dashboard life."

This month's Wired Magazine offers a look at a typical player screen in World of Warcraft, shown below.

And why would a player have so much clutter on the screen? I mean, you can barely see the actual game.

In fact, except for the Bejeweled game ("I need to play Bejeweled so badly I can't even wait to quit WoW first."), each of those windows and icons represents information or tools that are critical to game play. Between item availability lists, food levels, quest tracking, power ups, weapon activation, team communications, area maps, and more, this player would be only marginally effective without all these dashboard pallettes at the ready.

What lessons can designers of immersive learning experiences draw from this?

1. A click away - when I was a baby designer, the folks at Apple taught me that good interface design meant that the user should always be only a click away from what s/he wanted to do next. User demands and expectations haven't lowered.
2. Dashboard interfaces are familiar and comfortable - if well implemented.
3. Dashboard design should not be separate from the overall interface design. These two layers should complement each other for the ease of the user.
4. An effective dashboard is the result of smart, tight information architecture, UX design, and usability testing.

I'm serious,
Anne

It's Back to School - Unless You Want to Be a Game Designer

  Richard Bartle (I include his book, Designing Virtual Worlds, in the Reading List <- for serious game designers) spoke this week at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival (poorly scheduled for the same time as SIGGRAPH). You will, of course, remember Dr. Bartle for being co-creator of the first ever multi-user dungeon (MUD); Bartle is currently a Principal Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems at Essex University. I'd say all that adds up to some chops - at least when it comes to game design and higher education.

You can imagine, then, how thrilled I am that Bartle is echoing my clarion call for more and better game design and development programs at the university level. In an amusing twist, he laments that public money in the UK is going toward games-as-anything-but-games program(me)s as a means of legitimizing the industry, but I digress.

Most interestingly, Bartle notes that only "modern" UK universities, those that used to be polytechnic or vocational schools, are offering degree programs in this space. The implication of this is that those who are entering the world of game production will do so without benefit of any particular liberal arts or philosophy education prior to receiving a degree.

In recent months, I have had discussions with two public universities and a private/corporate post-secondary institute, both interested in introducing serious gaming into their curricula (each from a different part of the institution: corporate development, journalism, computer science, student placement). In each case, we have talked about the difference between game design and game production, and how integrated these activities are. For the moment, the complexity of the knot that represents the practice of game development together with the complexity that is a university system have derailed these organizations in their progress.

Failing to meet this challenge head-on today, however daunting it may seem, will only make for a thornier problem tomorrow, if Katie Salen is to be believed (she is!). In addition to having co-authored the seminal text for Intro to Game Design and her faculty post at New School (also on my Reading List), she has designed a middle school for the New York Public School system based entirely on gaming. She spoke just this week at SIGGRAPH, where she pointed out that kids don't think of themselves as gamers; the concepts of networks, play, and everyday life are already intertwined in their experience. "Gaming is more collective, not individual," she says. "Kids are learning how to play from each other and mentor from each other."

But to play and mentor together successfully, kids need games that provoke their minds in appropriate ways. They need social gaming networks that facilitate positive behaviors and sideline negative ones. They need games that match both learning requirements and social/emotional maturity. They need a means to use/manipulate/interact with content in ways that they can't otherwise do in their classrooms or homes.

Who will design and develop these games for the next set of middle school students? Who will have the technical skills and the liberal arts knowledge to bring all this together?

Understanding learners' minds, learning content, and learning behavior requires study together with experience in the world. Developing successful serious games requires this understanding. The few programs (<- look left) available to those seeking such knowledge and understanding expose students to a cross-section of the liberal arts together with technical skills. But they are oh-so-few in number.

I'm serious,

Anne

Do you know where your critters are?

 There are only 45 days left before Spore is launched! Have you gotten Spore Creature Creator yet? No? Not even sure what I'm talking about?

Spore is the next game phenomenon from Will Wright, creator of The Sims franchise. In Spore, players nurture single-cell animals into sentient beings that create community and build civilizations, eventually exploring and colonizing space. In this video, Will presents Spore - and his game design philosophy, based in large measure on Maria Montessori's philosophy of education. Notably, Will underscores the importance of user-generated content to the player's attachment to the game and the player's overall game experience.

To my mind, there are three key take-aways from Will's presentation:

1. The notion of attachment is vital to learning, too, of course. Attachment creates personal meaning and relevance - important factors to learning, retention, and transference.
2. Learner-generated content is not only useful in demonstrating content mastery; it keeps a learner/player engaged with content - and potentially with other learners/players.
3. Serious game designers have much to learn from the gurus of entertainment game design.

After you look at Will's presentation, create your own critters. Yes, you'll get attached to the little buggers. You'll be very excited to launch them into the Spore universe and grow them into complex societies. Along the way, you'll learn about evolution, biology, geology, climate change, cosmology... Now that's a seriously fun game.

I'm serious,
Anne

Could it be?

Is someone at SOE reading this blog? Today, and in the wake of my post about the enormous gap between the number of male game developers and the number of their female counterparts, Sony Online Entertainment has announced a new competitive scholarship aimed at female developers. The competition is part of their new "Gamers in Real Life (G.I.R.L.)" program. The winner will be awarded a $10,000 scholarship to The Art Institutes. Way to go, SOE!

I'm serious,
Anne

You Know You Wanna

We just finished up with the ILS Report webinar. If you were unable to join us, a recording of it is available here. You can also download the report at the eLearning Guild's site. Great stuff in each!

I'm serious,
Anne

Food for Thought

Test my vocabulary and feed the hungry at the same time? I'm in.

Freerice.com is a simple, addictive little game from John Breen, an independent developer in Bloomington, Indiana. All you do is select the proper definition of the word on the screen. Words like "hypocorism" and "clowder" (oy!). Keep answering correctly, and you are rewarded with points, increasing difficulty - and a donation of 20 grains of rice to the poor of Bangladesh.

The visuals in this game are great. Each time a player answers correctly, a wooden bowl receives 20 grains of rice. As a typical American with a full belly, those 20 grains look mighty skimpy. And so one must press on to fill the bowl in order to assuage the guilt derived from having plenty.

Fortunately, there are over half a million players on the site every day. As of this writing, 23,202,482,290 grains of rice have been donated. That's 1,160,124,115 vocabulary words correctly defined. And thousands of Bangladeshis going to sleep tonight with food in their bellies.

Thank you, John.

I'm serious,
Anne

Put On Your Glass Beads, Baby

Conceptuary, a start-up serious game company based in Salt Lake City, has just launched its first game, Glass Bead Network. The game is free for all at this point; a subscription service will be added shortly as an upgrade to the free game. The only technical requirement is a Firefox browser.

Glass Bead Network is a turn-based, strategy game. Players (up to 4) each receive a set of beads which form the players' hands. Each bead represents a concept, e.g., "Pat Metheny", or "honeymoon", or "Lithuania".

The game is played on a shared "board" that looks something like a Chinese checkers board. Each player, in turn, lays a tile on the board so that it touches one or more other tiles. For each "touch" point, the player must explain the linkage between the touching tiles, which can be accepted or rejected by the opponent(s). The object of the game is to be the first to place all one's tiles on the board.

Glass Bead Network is not just good fun, as it challenges each player's knowledge and creativity. Turns can take up to 5 minutes, giving players the chance to inform their play through on-the-fly background research. In fact, it is possible to play customized game by selecting a topic in advance, with players receiving tiles that are particular to that topic.

At this very early stage in the game's life, it is limited by a couple of things. The reservoir of beads is in early production, according to the game's website. So far, I have not seen duplicate beads; those who would like to assist in bead production are encouraged to contact Conceptuary.

At any given time, one is likely to find a couple of dozen people online, making it somewhat challenging to find a game partner. I hope you'll give this one a try, as it's a great example of how technology and games can make for an entertaining and thought-provoking experience. Plus, I'm trying to scare up a good game.

I'm serious,
Anne

The Funny Papers

Yesterday, as if to herald today's opening of Game Developers Conference, the San Francisco Chronicle ran the following comics:

 

As my darling says, "If it's in the Sunday comics, it's already part of popular culture."

I'm serious,
Anne