Haven’t played much of these, but a friend tweeted about this not too long ago, and I just got around to looking at the list. I’d be interested to hear what others think, and if they have played any of these (or would think to add to this list in some way shape/form).
http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.org/blog/2009/50-serious-games-for-social-change/
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Interactive Arts and Media department’s Mindy Faber recently worked with a team of two dozen teens to build a collaborative interactive application using the online social utility tool called Google My Map.
The team worked across the globe (some of the teens were in Chicago, some in Barbados) to create “OurMap of Migrations”; a map that allowed the youth participants to add their own photos, videos, bios, travels and research.
Read more about the project at Google Maps: A Tool for the Youth Media Field!
Brenda Laurel’s statement in her opening paragraph about having to seek out refuge from today’s technological age of video games, advertisements, etc. may be rash. All the ads and banners in the world can’t attract an uninterested eye and the option to sit and do nothing but breath is always, an option unless you are undead of course. Even the most hardcore of gamers need a break every once and a while.
One reason there aren’t many decent educational games is due not to the low demand, but because of the absurdly high demand for fun, beat-em-ups. In contraction even bloody beat-em-ups are slowly gaining more depth and storytelling. The demand for more complex and challenging games is ever-growing with a large enough variety of puzzles to fill a library. It’s rare to find a game that doesn’t come with it’s own [tutor]ial on how to play it.
What makes a game educational isn’t well defined. Some games are obviously educational in the only way to move forward is to impute the correct answer and the ‘game’ is nothing more then an animation between questions. Other games, like many of the Magic School Bus variety, trick kids into learning by having a jumping plat-forming game on different planets to depict the difference in gravity. Some games can be more ‘thought-provoking’ then educational, such as the complete story-line to FF7. Would a simulator count as educational if it accurately depicted flying a plane or other vehicle, or even piloting a human?
It’s the teachers job to make education fun, not the designers for Midway or Bungie. There’s also a lot to do with the ’student’ in question. If the student doesn’t want to learn then there’s not much anyone can do about that. Even if the teacher gave his or her lecture notes to a comedian and displayed all the lessons in bright colors with cute animations, the most that would come of that is annoyance and possibly a seizor.
So once again, Gee didn’t tell me much that I don’t already know. Obviously this book wasn’t written for people like me, those who are already fans of video games, but for parents and adults who don’t think video games have any value. Having already learned about semiotics at least three times since I started at Columbia last fall, I knew most of the non-video game things. There are a few more complex things he talked about, but it was more just the big words, since a lot of the stuff seems obvious once you hear about it. He did bring up an idea that my Writing and Rhetoric I teacher brought up, about literacy not just applying to reading. People who can’t read and/or write a language, can still understand it in terms of semiotic, but the more I think about a lot of what he says about language, the more I think, “Well duh!” or “There’s a word for that?” Hopefully, this book will go into some stuff that I don’t already know about, or at least will give me some good recommendations for games.
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The problem with games right now is that they are not as real as most people would like them to be. Even with the lifelike graphics and amazing physics engines, current games will always have a flaw in that they offer the same thing for everyone. By that I mean that there is no single unique experience per player. Everyone experiences the exact same game code. In this way they’re similar to movies in that everyone sees the same thing. Even if most games claim to be in an open world or a “sandbox” game, there will never be that uniqueness of a real-life experience. You can say games are real as much as you want, but in the end games are just another domain in which we play in to escape a real world.
That is why I propose designers actually try to make a unique game, in which your experience in the game will differ from that of another player. As we read in Steven Johnson’s Everything is Bad for You, as well as in other sources, the player likes to get immersed in the game. Immersion is a large part of the game to me. One of the best ways to become immersed in a game is by being an explorer and finding things out for yourself. Developers need to make games more unique so that they make you feel as though you are more than just a consumer. That is why videogames need to evolve and become something more unique to the player. Even if the designers can make a boatload of money by creating an entertaining linear game, they should try to bring themselves up to the challenge. It would be interesting to see designers create a unique experience for a player and his avatar that will be different from another player. I don’t want to spend a great amount of time playing a game and believing I had a unique experience from it and later in the day hear that same experience from a friend. It would require a great amount of extra work to program these unique experiences but I think that in the end it would pay off. Imagine if you will, a videogame that offers a random experience each time it is played, no two gamers would feel the same way after playing the game. Not only does this present the player with a different experience from that of his peers and from each play through of the game, it would give the player a closer connection to his or her avatar. Videogames right now do little in trying to get the player involved in the character. Even games that were hailed are great works of art and masterpieces, such as Bioshock, are fairly linear and provide little, if any, unique experiences for the player as his character. Today’s games focus more on visual looks than on anything else. A pretty game is worth more than a simple game in the industry’s view.
One great way the developers can offer a unique experience for the different players would be to allow them to mould their own world. I am a big fan of user-made content and believe it is the future of games. This would be similar to how you can evolve in Spore and would allow for several unique worlds. Imagine a game like World of Warcraft in which the actual world on your server was created by the developers but shaped by the players that had originally started on it. It would add a more personal level to the situation since the player would be playing on something that he helped create. It would also be interesting to allow the players to actually destroy the world they created and start anew, which I doubt many would want to do. The game could also be split into factions of players fighting for the current world and those fighting for a new world. In a game like that, the world you helped create would gain support from other players or would be hissed at by the rest. It would basically be a global version of Sim City in which you would protect the planet or want to destroy it in hopes of starting over again, in which case you would have to protect it the next time around. The players would be able to decide if they wanted to continue on in the world they created. It would also allow for custom user-created content so that the players can populate the world with their own creations to some extent, without making the place seem cluttered. It would feel more like an open world because it would be an actual world open to the player’s opinion and creativity.
It would also be interesting to have a game world that is everchanging in that new content is added everyday while older content is erased (to save on disk space). It would be interesting to play a game in which you are on a cybernetic world of some sort that has a virus wiping away the older content and leaving behind new content, or even a game in which the world is a giant canvas board you can roam on but that gets painted over every couple days to make way for new content.
It seems that the easiest solution for the player to have his or her own world would be by actually having a part in the creation of the world. This custom content would go as far as the player’s imagination and create a unique experience for the player. The best thing about something you create is that you have a part in it, it is unique to yourself. No other player can feel the same way you may about the content you have created or the world you have helped to shape. The intense immersion allows the player to feel more a part of the game.
A unique game in which the players create the world and shape it allows for an endless amount of exploration and discovery. Players will find new things and by just playing the game will bcome more involved in it, even to the point in which they will try to create their own world. A unique world would allow the player to have a more personal experience with the game and would allow the player to actually say that he had a part in the making of another world. If a game like that were made, I would be one of the first ones trying to shape the world, or if necessary, destroying it to start anew.
In the digital world where Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) rule a large section of the world and everything may seem peachy, but in fact everything is not all right. One of the major issues with MMOs is that the game is changing the reward curve. By this I mean that rather then giving the players just rewards to further their game experience the game developers dumb down the difficulty to get rewards and hence dumb down the game and its content.
This issue will come up when ever the game developers try and add new things into the game. When they add new content, new worlds, new races, new dungeons, etc. they add better and better items. This itself is not an issue at all and it almost always starts off great. New items and content are not intrinsically detrimental to the game play, instead the problem that arises is the game developers choose to make items that used to require lots of hard work and time, easier and easier to get. So in the end new players are able to get items that used to take hours and hours of work to get in less then half the time and effort. Not only that, but because of how items are in MMOs, since they are, or were, hard to get items, they are usually extremely good, and it soon puts the new players nearly on par with players who have the best gear. This has happened in numerous games, but has more prominently happened recently in World of Warcraft (WoW).
One of the first things that WoW did in its expansion, The Burning Crusade (TBC), was add in something called Arenas. Arenas were a new system for player versus player (PvP) and a way to get new PvP items. What you did was you had to join a team and with that team you went up against other teams of the same number of people as yours. Originally this was a great idea; you could fight against others with friends of yours and see how well you did against others. The items you got from it were originally specifically for PvP and were used for that. But as time went on the Arena gear became better and better, in order to keep up with the advancing player versus environment (PvE) gear. So soon enough the PvP gear was being used in PvE and ended up surpassing the lower end PvE gear. Basically, to put it simply the creators were making PvP gear that was easy to obtain, and that had the same stats as gear that came from high end instances (PvE). So anyone who was new to the high end content could have PvP gear that was just as good as anyone who spent hours in instances or raids. By making these PvP items so easy to get, they have unbalanced another aspect of the game, crafting.
In Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Player Suit MuDs we are presented with the idea that different players are drawn to MuDs or MMOs for different reasons. One of these ideas is that people will join a game so that they can achieve stuff, and one of these things that achievers can aim for is crafting. What the PvP items have done is that they have unbalanced the need for crafters, making it so that they are unbalancing the game play for people who don’t live only for PvE and PvP. As the reading says, “It’s a question of balance: if something is added to a MuD to tilt the graph one way, other mechanisms will need to be in place to counterbalance it…” (Bartle, 783). Clearly WoW does not have this in place. It is destroying the Achievers way of playing the game and replacing it almost entirely with the Killers method.
This is also not only an issue for the overall balance of the game, but it is also very important to think about if you are the developer of a game. By making high end items easier and easier to get you are cutting down on the content that players are able to experience. If you are cutting the content for people to experience you are cutting the amount of game that players are experiencing which hurts you as a developer. Wasted content is player time spend other where, making it so they never get to see places that would regularly require lots of time spent in. If developers make it so that players cannot skip over places, which means that they will be playing the game more so that they can catch up to the high end people. Not only that, but players enjoy a challenge, and by giving players high end stuff you are making it so they get bored of the game faster. As James Paul Gee points out in his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us: About Learning and Literacy “The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging but not “undoable.” (Gee, 71). By giving the player more chances to challenge themselves the game is rewarding them to a much greater level then just by giving the player the really good items.
With as large of a market base as MMOs have it would be wise if they try, and target all the players instead of just a few types of players. By doing this the games will be more challenging, involving and overall something that players will be happy with and keep coming back for more. Also by creating a game that is balanced it will make every one a lot more happy and will also create a game that people will feel rewarded playing, not just with what they get, but with that they do.
Works Cited
Bartle, Richard. “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs.” The Game Design Read: A Rules of Play Anthology. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006.
Gee, James Paul. “Learning and Identity.” What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York, N.Y.: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2003.
Twofour Learning’s and Beyond Distance Research Alliance’s Second Life Media Zoo project is taking off with input. Second Life Media Zoo is an experiment on educational learning within a virtual 3-D environment. The idea of using televisions in the classroom is going to the next step; optimizing the internet for, not only entertainment, but educational purposes. While instead of using forums, instant messengers, or web cams, the students and teacher could meet up to their online classroom with their avatars, having access to videos, sound and perhaps voice chat for better communication for those who cannot attend physically.
“Integration between real and virtual events provides a great opportunity for people unable to attend events in real life, providing a deeper sense of ‘being there’ – something we wish to see more of in the future.”
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/02/organising-virt.html#more
Turned level 19 and now people are telling me I need to start over to level a job. People are telling me to level white mage or black mage. Which I don’t want to do, because they are really weak jobs that need to depend on other people. So, I did some quest for grabbing 3 items that is impossible to do alone. Some level 44 paladin came to help and took me into some mine to get me one of the hardest items apparently. Magicked Skull I got in like 4 minutes with this guy cause he was just attacked like 10 skeletons at the same time, and killed them really fast. So I get all 3 items, go to the town and turn them in to the NPC who controls the subjobs function. It allows me to have two jobs of the same time, but the subjob can only be half of my main job. 10/5, 20/10, 30/15 etc, I go back to my home nation to my mog house and switch my job to blm. Blm is really strong job, but really slow and I die a lot. I tried doing some of the missions one of them called “Save the Children” had to fight a bunch of orcs which was really exciting, but easy. Apparently that mission was for people level 10 and I was level 19 so fighting those orcs was like swatting flies. This game went from fast to slow to fast again with all the things that happened so close together. When I get this job to level 15 or so I’m gonna go to the area where the stronger players go which is apparently called Jeuno. That’s where all the airships lead to, and basically like the main merchant town. This game is so weird, I didn’t hear that from a NPC or game booklet, players in the game told me. They almost play out the story instead of NPC’s, players really make this game. Talking about defending something in a town that I haven’t been to yet. Telling me to keep leveling up redmage cause they need me to help fight.
I kind of saw a kind of “Pure War” as stated in the Chapter “Game Time”. Everything around this game is completely centered around a a war that happened 20 years ago. How the opposing forces are trying to get back into power and as long as the people of the world keep fighting the beastmen and keep getting stronger there won’t be a major war again. This game kind of feels like…World War II as far as ally forces and how japan, germany, and Italy. The game has 3 main beastmen forces Orcs, Yagudo, and Quadavs. Who from the story tells wouldn’t work together normally but after persuading decided to fight together. Not saying Japanese, Germans, and Italians are Beastmen, but you know what I’m saying.
I think I may have missed the point of this reading. Learning from surroundings does not seem to be an abstract notion. People are constantly attaining new knowledge whether they realize it or not from people, places and things they interact with. The idea of affinity groups is one I particularly found interesting. The idea that people can come together with nothing in common but a specific endeavor is a promising one. However I am not sure that this really works outside of spaces such as online spaces where differences, racial, cultural, relifious, don’t matter because they can be masked. The knowledge and experiences people bring to the group are interwoven with who they are and I don’t know that they can be seperated. Afterall isn’t the United Nations a sort of affinity group who have a common endeavor but clash at times due to differences of opinion rooted in cultural differences. I do however like the attention paid to the fact that people due learn skills that are assets in the real world while engaging in game play. The notion of social as interacting with others and learning from them gets lost as we get older. You always hear how children soak up everything in their environment, well it’s not just children.
Jeff and I attended Lida Tang’s Talk “Meeting Players Halfway: Using Adaptive Systems to Prevent Player Frustration” (Lida is a gameplay programmer at Irrational Games). Two main ideas were explored (backward chaining and frontward chaining) and then ideas used in Bioshock’s system (called Adaptive Training) were shown and explained.
Then came the packing up the booth session 
