Valuable Games

After keynoting this year’s Games for Change conference, Al Gore has been rather quiet about whether his Climate Reality Project was going to start adding games to its arsenal of change agents. Well, it seems the effort was in stealth mode, and they’re getting ready to go public.

Read my former colleague Nicole Haber’s blog entry wondering what the “gold coin” is to motivate a change in our national dialogue about climate change: If the earth is our princess, what is your gold coin?

I just learned about Persuasion – the Game of Civic Engagement, which is put out by CTO, the Ontario Educational Communications Authority. In it, your avatar walks around a neighborhood and chats people up about a civic issue facing that neighborhood. It looks like the main mechanic for the game involves clicking on neighbors, which spreads information. Apparently, when enough information is spread, you have a better chance of making the civic change you want. (Interesting model of social change).

iCivics has a similar civic engagement game, Activate, which has a different model of social change, one that involves awareness-raising, fundraising, and pressuring officials.

One decade ago, Edward Castronova woke economists up to the fact that virtual worlds like Everquest contain legitimate economies, and suddenly everyone was talking about them as living economic laboratories. I’m interested in how such worlds can cast light on our political economies, and particularly the question of what’s fair and what’s just.

This NPR Planet Money podcast (“From Harvard Economist to Casino CEO“) about how Caesars Entertainment Corporation’s CEO, a former Harvard Business School professor, Gary Loveman, uses empirical data to shape the gaming experience. Yes, this is “gaming” as in gambling, but the relationship to Farmville and World of Warcraft is more than semantic. Just like WOW and other online games, modern casinos have access to a deep amount of data about user behavior through their rewards cards. But unlike Blizzard, Caesars cannot tweak its formula to guarantee particular results — for example, making sure that newbies win enough to keep them coming back. They can know who all the flailing newbies are, though, and dispatch employees to make things right for them (e.g. comp them some extra coins, dinner, or a limo). As Loveman observes, the goal is to comfort the newbies who fall into the low “long tail” of gambling returns.

Caesars’ approach to resource allocation has interesting implications for what a just distribution of resources might entail in a larger game – the game of our real economy. After all, Caesars isn’t providing a safety net for losers because they care — they do so because it’s good for business. Companies like Blizzard and Zynga are similarly tweaking their rules constantly to ensure maximum profitable participation rates. How might what they are learning inform the way we think about the rules of our political economy? Can game worlds – whether Caesars Palace or Azeroth – provide a Rawlsian space to experiment with different notions of “justice”?

PBS has launched a new film, Wham-Bam-Islam (a bit unfortunately named, IMHO) to teach viewers about the values of moderate Islam. The film supports an existing comic book series, “THE 99,” and — more interesting to me — in turn is supported by a game, Hunt for the Noor Stone.

Hunt for the Noor Stone seems to be a fairly straightforward adventure-style game, typical of most transmedia projects, which is well-executed but not really replayable. Then again, the film itself is also a one-shot deal, so the game needn’t have a long tail of replayability.

The game was developed by Playwala, which roughly means “play business” in Hindi.

I’m here at the launch of the 4th Digital Media and Learning Competition, “Badges for Lifelong Learning,” and listening to the ways in which badges might be superior to traditional grades. The major leap seems to be capturing informal learning in a quasi-formal way that, until now, was only relayed explicitly via resumes or accidentally via Google searches. But it seems that there’s also a spectrum of assessment techniques that flows from totally rigid to totally open, along which badges are more flexible (nimble?) than grades but more formal than pure text:

(Quantitative, simple, rubric-based)
*
Points
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Grades
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Badges
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Tags
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Free assessment
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(Qualitative, rich, unstructured)

I’m proud to announce that the book to which I’d contributed a chapter, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play is finally published! My co-author Scott Seider and I contributed the chapter, “Video Games for Prosocial Learning,” a broad overview of how video games fit in the tradition of prosocial education. (I guess it was so broad that the chapter was thrown into the “Situating Ethics and Games” intro section to the book).

I’m excited, too, that several of my colleagues from Harvard/MIT back when we were writing this chapter are also in featured — Jaroslav Švelch and Sam Gilbert. I’m looking forward to reading their contributions. And I really want to thank our ringleader, Karen Schrier, for bringing this eclectic group of scholars (and, in my case, pseudo-scholars) to put the whole project together.

Of course I hope people will get the word out about the book, and that libraries will go and buy it, but if you’re not interested in shelling out $132, I’m making available an earlier draft of our submitted chapter here:

Download Video Games for Prosocial Learning by Gene Koo and Scott Seider.

Abstract: In this chapter, we consider the capabilities video games offer to educators who seek to foster prosocial development using three popular frameworks: moral education, character education, and care ethics. While all three of these frameworks previously considered literature and film as helpful tools, we suggest that video games are unique from these other media in the multiple levers through which they can influence the worldview, values, and behaviors of players. Similar to literature and film, video games possess content — plot, characters, conflict, themes, and imagery — with which participants interact. Unlike other media, however, video games scaffold players’ experiences not only via narrative and audio-visual content but by the rules, principles, and objectives governing what participants do. Moreover, many video games possess an ecosystem that impacts players’ interpretation of the game itself — for example, on-line hint guides and discussion groups as well as the opportunity to play in the company of peers in either physical or virtual proximity. We consider opportunities and challenges presented by each of these unique facets of video games for fostering the prosocial development of participants.

Would love any feedback on this chapter, on the book, or on the entire concept of games and ethical learning!

One of the most exciting things that the Open Government Initiative has brought to the federal government is a newfound appreciation for video games as a persuasive and educational medium. (No doubt in part because of Deputy CTO Beth Noveck’s background in games and virtual worlds). Earlier this month, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced the Healthy Kids Game Challenge, and notice and comment on the design of the contest is now open on the Open Government blog here:

Innovations for Healthy Kids Game Challenge: Help Design for Success

Again, the USDA is seeking comments on the contest design itself. The post directs commentators to four main areas of focus:

1. Target Audience
2. Timeline
3. Criteria for Success
4. Outreach

I hope the Serious Games / Games for Health / Games for Change community will weigh in on these questions. I’ve posed my own response, which I’ll repost below:

2. Timeline: I encourage the USDA to consider dividing the Challenge into a two-stage funnel. The first stage would focus on game design, where the goal is to flush out as many good ideas as possible. The second stage would then focus on implementation, perhaps with the rules of the Challenge refined as a result of what is learned from the first phase.

This two-phase process recognizes that people with good game design or education concepts may not also have game development skills (nor would good game developers necessarily understand either nutrition or education). The community of game-developing educators, as Joey C. previously pointed out, is quite small. Insofar as this Challenge intends to generate innovative thinking, maximizing the number of participants by lowering the barriers to entry should be a top priority. The wide end of a two-stage funnel should be so large that even the schoolchildren who will one day play the game could themselves enter the Challenge.

In theory, online collaboration between educators and game developers would overcome the challenge of missing skills I have identified. In practice, however, collaboration of this nature is very difficult to foster online, especially in the context of a contest where trust is difficult to build. The transaction costs of teamwork on something as complex as game development are so high that even assembling a concept, never mind a working prototype, is prohibitive to most people working together. The USDA may wish to talk with the Knight Foundation’s efforts to build teams among competitors in that Foundation’s annual challenge if the idea of online collaboration remains appealing.

3. Criteria for Success: As my co-author and I discuss in our forthcoming book chapter, Video Games for Prosocial Learning (Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play), transference is a major obstacle in educational games, or any educational effort. Certainly two possible criteria of a successful game design could be cognitive learning or attitudinal change. However, demonstrating transference between that learning and actual behavioral change – the ultimate goal of the intended video game – is much more difficult to measure and achieve.

Therefore I encourage the USDA to also include direct behavioral shaping as a possible criterion of success in the Challenge. For example, Nintendo’s Wii Fit does not ask players to “learn” about flexibility, but rather engage in physical activity that will increase flexibility. Likewise, hybrid cars’ miles-per-gallon gauges shape drivers’ behavior through a game-like interface (the Honda Civic even shows a virtual forest growing as the driver’s MPG results improve).

A game that incorporates actual player behavior, rather than assuming transference between learning and behavior, is much more likely to succeed in its goals in a measurable way.

Weigh in with your own comments.

NPR’s Open Mic featured a fascinating discussion between two of my personal heroes, Will Wright and E.O. Wilson. Their overlap, naturally, was in ants, which were a personal fascination of mine since very young. I remember with great fondness that my roommates bought me SimAnt as a gift during my freshman year of college (it was also one of the few games for Mac back then), and I played the heck out of it, even though it wasn’t a terribly deep game.

Wilson is typically far-sighted in seeing video games as pointing the way to better education. While he imagines this future teaching centered on virtual reality, I continue to believe the greatest hope for learning will be in teaching systems-thinking, something that Wright has excelled at doing.

For Wilson, the greatest unanswered question in biology is “the origin of altruistic social behavior.” I suspect this question is what drew me to my interest in ants as a child: how these animals work together as a social organism to accomplish incredible tasks. And again this is the kind of concept that’s best conveyed via a video game – complex interactions among many small parts, as well as the ability to switch perspectives to take the point of view of one of those parts. I’d love to see Wright take on this grand task that Wilson has laid out: can altruism be the basis of a fun, exciting, blockbuster game?

Read/listen to the story: Ant Lovers Unite! Will Wright and E.O. Wilson on Life and Games.

Interesting chat in last week’s Gamers with Jobs Conference Call instigated by a listener email on the “trend” towards moral choices in recent games (especially Infamous for PS3). The caller wondered if games should offer better rewards for “good” or “evil” choices, which generated a great discussion among the podcasters. Julian “Rabbit” Murdoch noted/complained that in games, “evil” is often the quick and easy path, while “good” often coincides with patience (and larger long-term rewards). His observation makes me wonder whether such gameplay implicates not so much morality (right vs wrong) than virtue – specifically, the virtue of patience. This particular approach to virtue is particularly interesting given that video games have a reputation as tools of twitchy, instant gratification.

In that same podcast, Rabbit also emphasizes that it makes more sense to tie the consequences of moral choices to story outcomes, much more so than game effects like upgraded weapons or skills, although the distinction can be blurry. (The example he gives is villagers giving you critical information in gratitude for helping the village). This division between gameplay and story illustrates the continuing incapacity of games to make stories into games, which I argue is because remains an absence of a social physics engine which would make such gameplay as fun as throwing objects around using existing physics engines.

At the dawn of the music game genre, Parappa the Rapper set standards for original art style and gameplay that today’s Guitar Hero cohort has yet to match. Here was a game that valued your creativity, awarding you points for not just mastering rhythmic patterns, but stringing them together in novel flows. Parappa took the feature that make arcade games so attractive, this remixing of set patterns, and married it to its natural partner, music.

The result was no less jazz than hip-hop, and by comparison today’s music games are Simon Says with plastic guitars. Music was meant to be made, not recited, after all. Rock Band lets you pretend to make music; Parappa pointed the way to game consoles as musical instruments. If anyone was to offer an alternative to the narrowing of the music game genre into karaoke with points, it would be the original Parappa team – developer Masaya Matsuura, artist Rodney Greenblatt, and studio NanaOn-Sha, with the long-awaited spiritual sequel Major Minor’s Majestic March.

Sadly, while MMMM retains the hand-drawn charm and nutty characters of Parappa, its gameplay goes in entirely the opposite direction, amounting to little more than keeping the beat with a Wiimote. Gone is the creative license to mete out freestyle flows; instead you’re reduced to a human metronome.

Even that small premise might offer some dose of fun – kids, after all, seem to have an innate ability to rock a hot beat. But MMMM‘s rigid interface sucks the soul out of the rhythm. Sure, not everyone daydreams of being a drum major, but those who do probably don’t imagine themselves just pumping their fist up and down (a gesture uncomfortably in an unfortunate similar to an obsene gesture). And even such an activity as robotic as this might still offer a bit of amusement if it didn’t also demand such precision. Deviate from an exact up-down path and your band members split like groupies in a drug bust.

Like their peers in this generation, the creators of MMMM have lost the spirit of improvisation. (Wii Music lets you re-arrange public domain tunes, but the activity isn’t very natural, nor much of a game). Rock Band drum solos are about all you’ll find these days in terms of freestyle play in music games.

“Flow” – a state of selfless, almost meditative immersion – describes the most absorbing aspect of game-playing and music-making alike. Guitar Hero and Rock Band made this connection so successfuly that they have changed pop culture itself. But what of the pleasures of musical creativity? A few months ago I watched the Princeton Laptop Orchestra performing with synthesizers controlled by a modified joystick (a “joyful noise” indeed!). It didn’t sound like jazz, nor did it look like an arcade game, but it shared the improvisational qualities of both. In so doing, PLOP inherits from Parappa the possibility that game hardware can function as musical instruments. Sadly, the direct descendant of Parappa instead illustrates why, in games as much as in music, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.