Some thoughts on game based learning
I’ve recently started a new job. It’s at a place called CELSTEC, and it’s pretty cool. Almost as cool as the military-commandcentric name suggests. The CELSTEC is an institution of the Open University of the Netherlands, and it’s where some of the brightest people in the field of technology-enhanced learning have gathered together to build cool new things. Amidst sessions of hacking/testing/hacking/developing and playing halo 3, once in a while it almost feels like “work”.
Personally my role will be as a software developer, supporting the researchers of two groups: learning media, and learning networks. I guess my current skillset makes me instantly valuable to the learning network group, and slightly less, but increasingly, valuable to the learning media. This post I will use to reorganize and foxhole some of the thoughts that have been springing up, as a result of my exposure to fertile minds here at the CELSTEC. Through several conversations and exploratory tests of different media with my friend Sebastian Kelle, I’ve come to think about the essence of gaming. I figured out two essential features that games must possess either or both, in order to entice me:
* The ability to build up something (visible progress), I will refer to this ability as “build-up” from now on
* The ability to set back an opponent (reduce/reset their progress), I will refer to this ability as “destruction” from now on [this feature is a sub-feature of simple competitiveness based on points, it goes further]
Most games that I play will possess both of these features, if we take my favorite first person shooter, Quake 3 as an example, we find that it has a rather limited ability for building up. The build up possibilities are few and most are transient aside from points (frags); weapons, armor and health (rebuilding). However the possibilities for destruction (setting back an opponent) are tremendous, and an experienced player can easily “control” his surroundings and completely deny his opponent any chances at progress, even with very little build-up. Depending on the player’s style, he or she might choose to intelligently control resources, and thus rely on better equipment and armor to defeat their opponent, but very experienced players usually have learned how to both keep track of when armor/power-ups reappear and how to deal damage much more consistently than beginners. Adding to the destruction aspect of the game are gory death sequences, and the possibility to “gib” an opponent, which means their body explodes into blood and mutilated body parts, as well as “taunting” which causes the player model to make annoying/obscene gestures as well as sounds (usually haughty laughter).
Another of my favorite games, StarCraft is in a completely different genre; real-time strategy. This game offers, and usually requires, a lot more build-up than FPS games in general, although the ultimate goal is always the destruction of another player, be it human or computer. Certain smaller maps may offer possibilities of less build-up, as if the distance between players is low the one who can launch an attack sooner (a tactic known as “rushing”) often catches the other off-guard, and can defeat them or upset their early strategy enough to cripple their progress and defeat them in a coming wave of attack.
StarCraft, and other RTS games are an example of a game which seems to possess the build-up and destruction aspects in rather equal terms, but there are also games which are almost exclusively build-up, although they are usually single-player, such as various puzzle games (tetris, bejeweled, sudoku, etc), single-player role-playing games, and many older pre-multiplayer era games.
I am sure there are more complicated and accurate ways of classifying games, however as someone who’s spent most of his life casually playing computer games, I’ll take an academic chance and keep rambling, without reviewing existing literature first. So let’s continue to the fun part:
How do we give an application we have, the “build-up” aspect? What makes the user appreciate his actions in a way that they feel they are building something up, achieving something (now this feeling should be quite familiar to learners I hope) — how would we make say, facebook have this aspect?
The answer is quite simple for facebook actually, since it already contains several features which make it a prime example of an application we enjoy using due to the build-up, also many of the 3rd party applications built for it help give facebook properties which are incredibly close to gaming. A few of the ways facebook makes you feel like you’re building something up:
* Your total number of friends
* Your wall posts
* The groups you’ve joined
* The artists/movies/products you become a “fan of”
* … etc
Facebook, like most social software gives you the ability to build-up an identity. The user has the ability to construct a representation of themselves, and this representation is an extension of their being. This is usually done by the user to increase their social currency, or value so to speak. In many cases the identity constructed by people using social software is misrepresenting for the person, people hide their flaws to appear (and thus be) more socially valuable, or in some cases the other way around — an introverted and shy person might better expose their true identity in an online environment, and finally in some cases people use separate online identities to express other aspects of themselves they wouldn’t usually be able to without social side-effects.
However the key element which makes gaming experience more immersive and intensive than using facebook, is usually a short feedback-loop coupled with obvious progress indicators. What this means is that the user sees very quickly whether or not their actions are having a positive or negative effect. This is important to learning, and required for competition of any sorts. Formal education usually has longer-feedback loops, where it can take up to several weeks for a student to receive an assessment of their assignment, and the assessment is usually not very forgiving — if you turn in a lousy paper, you’ll hopefully know why it was lousy, but you won’t get a chance to improve until the next assignment, and perhaps your mistake already cost you the course, possibly causing another year to go by before you get another shot. Another issue is that even if you receive your assessment quickly, it never feels like a game, as it’s all private and you might not know how anyone else fared.
So… braindump over for now, but the gist is: how about a learning application where you solve subject-related problems, see how far from completion you are via progress indicator, and by hastening your progress there is the chance of disrupting another persons (via adding to the total no. of problems they need to solve), or a chance to reduce a competitors workload (via reducing the total no. of problems they need to solve: this implements “teamplay”). Other interesting progress indicators: average standing of students solving the problem, for realtime applications: how far from completion the first one is (possibly using nicknames), and for non-realtime applications: the best time so far, and how close in % you are to it, and besides it you see how close to finishing the project you are. In this idea time is an important element, but so could automatic scoring of the users performance, etc.
