Business: October 2005 Archive Page

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Ian Bogost: Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes... If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Bogost reminded the group that, despite the fact the room was arranged for a lecture, this is a roundtable.

Why is an academic talking about project management? “After all, uiversities are not exactly known for finishing things.”

About a third of the audience self-identified as game developers, about a third were educators, a smaller group were owners or investors in serious games projects. Dealing with the diverse needs of a heterogeneous group is one of the most challenging situations I face as a teacher.

Bogost’s talking points:

What’s different? Budgeting, Expectations, Stakeholders, Testing, Deployment, Integration, Other Stuff?

Topics called out from the audience: Distributed teams, risk-averse environments, creativity, production pipelines, efficiency.


Some initial tension between the creativity of the designers and the accuracy of the instructional content. An instructional designer noted “There is no such thing as an educational game model,” while there are educational models for other media.

A woman who said she is from a story-basted instructional design company says start with the learning objectives, moves to what she called the “story envelope,” but trying to get away from the opening exposition, a game that has little to do with the story, and then a final story. Bogost noted (without naming) the position of ludologists (who say that games are not fundamentally storylike).

Instructional designers in attendance said they need more game literacy. One member noted, in jest, that “Instructional designers suck all the fun out of the game.”

One speaker spoke of three champions in the mix – the game design champion, the instructional design champion, and the subject matter champion.

Another speaker invoked David Letterman, who says if you ever learn anything on his show, then he’s lost you. Game designers don’t worry about learning outcomes.

Another speaker noted that a serious game is selling a concept that the game will improve learning, and that the outcomes must be evaluated, while the outcome in commercial games is determined through sales. In a conventional design situation, a particular feature might be cut for time, but certain features in serious games simply aren’t optional.

At this point, Bogost asked a very good question. Is a particular instructional component just another constraint, or is it qualitatively different from other constraints?

I noted that, while you might want to evaluate the success of a game based on how many copies you sell, simply spending money is never the intention of a game customer. In a similar way, the creators of a serious game will have a different objective than the players (who may not want to play a game at all).

Budget: One participant mentioned that 3D prototyping must be “evangelized” so that funders can see the value of that particular technique.

Expectations: When speaking of working in risk-averse environments, Bogost noted the importance of going to the top of the organization. One participant warned that, once you educate the stakeholders about the potential of serious games, a problem is that the decision-makers suddenly develop high expectations – but typically that happens after the developer has committed to the project.

I noted that, as a verbal thinker, I was interested in the assumption lurking behind so much of the activity here that better graphics and more polygons equals a more realistic game, which by definition is a better teacher. But I noted that today’s young people are also interested in animation. For example, we need an abstracted version of an atom in order to understand the forces at work inside an atom. I suggested that we shouldn’t forget about the power of abstraction to teach basic concepts. (Bogost gave a thumbs up and said, “Inform text adventures!” The participants seemed to like that.)

On the difference between simulators and games – good simulators depend on outside knowledge, while a good game teaches you how to play the game (through a context that uses rewards and penalties to get the user to modify his or her behavior). Bogost introduced James Gee’s definition of the difference between games and simulation, though Bogost himself holds that there is no fidelity to the outside world in a simulation (and then, after dropping that bomb on the audience, rather comically changed the subject).

A comment from someone sitting next to me -- designers make games too difficult, because they are typically expert gamers themselves, and they tweak a game until it holds their own attention. The gameplay may be too hard for the intended audience to learn.

Developers noted the difficulty of testing their games on their intended audience, but in response to a question that Bogost and I asked at almost the same time, who in the room has funded such research? The crickets chirped in the room, two hands crept up, but when Bogost called on one, the speaker simply asked, “Where’s the money for that kind of research?”

Bogost will run a similar roundtable tomorrow.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Sharon Sloane: Exploring Game-Based Instructional Methodologies that Reach the Cognitive and Affective Learning Domains (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The presentation, by Sharon Sloane, president of CEO of Will Interactive, began with a long video clip showing a military leadership training game, focusing not on combat but routine decisions, careerism, inappropriate comaraderie (a superior officer being too friendly in response to a screw-up), slackerism, and even on-the-job horseplay.

Sloane warned that some of the worst principles of brick-and-mortar teaching have moved into distance learning and serious games, and set up shop on CDs and on the internet.

She invoked Bloom's taxonomy, and suggested that behavior won't change unless the affective domain is reached, where emotions and life experiences convince people to apply the phsycho motor skills they've practiced, and the information they've been exposed to through cognitive doman. Affective learning leads to cognitive goals.

Tips to engage the Affective Domain.

• Be learner-centric.
  
• Know your audience
  
• Get real.
  
• Reach out to your learner's world.
  
• One more item I didn't get...

Example of reaching out into the world of the intended audience, from an HIV education program designed to change the attitudes and behaviors of young adults.

Rule #1: Never take medical advice from someone hornier than yourself.

Advised that the learners will have different motives. Simply pass a course? Become a more successful person? Avoid casualties and maintain morale in a war situation?

Introduced "Hate Comes Home," a game about bias and ethics, understanding, stereotyping and prejudice, used in California schools and elsewhere. (I'd call it a modern morality play.. just as doctrinal as Everyman, but filmed with shaky-camera effects and a documentary style - including "artistic" camera effects (slow-mo, etc.) and a voice-over narrative - that one doesn't usually see in a computer game. The military is learning, through the global war on terror, that the old style of teaching military doctrine isn't working. Since lower-level people are now making higher-level decisions in the field, the military needs to develop the critical thinking ability of people in the field, rather than relying on the centralized wisdom and experience of the upper-level officers.

According to a slide, "Generic content no longer works. We cannot rely on the leaner to make the leap to today's realities and unique circumstances. In GWOT [Global War on Terrorism], education and training must depict real events in real environments in order to work."

Today's artillerymen are asked to do peacekeeping tasks and interacting with civilians in towns, rather than "putting steel on target."

Described the characteristics of successful "game-based learning solutions." Based on a comprehensive learning strategy; customizing the game on the fly to meet the needs of the learner; get useful feedback that's not simply a score. Games need in-game reference materials that can be accessed easily during gameplay.

(By the way, that term is a wonderful example of marketese - no real human beings talk about "game-based learning solutions," but I can understand why Sloane wants to use that term in her presentations. Her game philosophy is essentially the same as Gibson's. but where he used Flash cartoons to teach a general point, she used videotape and special effects -- blood, simulated burns -- to create a gritty realistic detail. Having said that, the make-up was not exactly top-notch, and the acting was adequate in the training clip, low-key and documentary-style in the high school diversty game and a hostage-negotiation scenario, and really just adequate in a combat simulation. Sloane says her games are designed to recreate reality, and repeatedly apologized for only being able to show isolated clips out of context. Is it flippant of me to note that the games she showed were only partially successful at emulating the cinematic qualities of film?)

(I just asked her the above quesiton. She responded that her test audiences responded postively to this particular method of instruction. There is a difference, she noted, between educating people in the field to change their short-term behavior in order to achieve results, and teaching a complex concept in the context of a college course. While Sloane is an accomplished and confident speaker, numerous times she ran up against a wall when she realized the information the audience was able to glean from a three-minute clip is completely different from what a player might learn from an extended interaction with the whole training system.)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Perla and Whatley's Keynote Address: What's So Serious about Game Design? The Art or the Science? (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Quick Take:

I thought both speakers did a fair job contextualizing serious games, but as a humanist I am used to attending conferences in which speakers are meticulous about plugging their individual observations in to a larger theoretical framework. I did take practical notes during Whatley’s careful walkthrough of the design process, but I could have learned most of this content directly from the slideshow. I felt that both speakers were concentrating so much on delivering a take-home message that attendees could use to inform and persuade other stakeholders, that as a result, just when the speakers had laid out all the pieces, instead of synthesizing and building on the situation the laid out, they backed up and said “And here’s what this really means,” and delivered a much simpler version of the message. I’m not sure what that accomplished, rhetorically, other than to train audiences not to pay attention during the setup. But I recognize the difficulty of speaking to a diverse audience -- I often struggle with how to meet the expectations of English majors while not alienating or terrifying the non-majors in the same class.

New to me – the “OODA loop.” An acronym for Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action. In war, when one side has a more efficient OODA loop, the effects can be powerful. But in a game production context, the developer and the client need to have matching OODA loops.


What follow are loosely-edited notes, taken during the presentation.

Perla

Perla’s book The Art of Wargaming was published by the Naval Institute Press, introduced a scientific approach to designing a game system for military purposes. He observed that war is a fitting topic for "serious games" there is no subject more serious than war. A justification for seeking realism in wargames.

On teaching naval officers to use games to teach military strategy: "How can you teach people to create credible games, if they don't have that spark of genius that all working designers have?"

Perla introduced what he called a bad definition of wargaming: "Any type of modeling, including exercises, campaign analysis, computer simulation without players (CSWP)"

Perla offered his own definition, that differentiates between field exercises and computer modeling that are sometimes grouped under the umbrella of "wargaming," but which are fundamentally different from gaming. To Perla, wargaming is "A warfare model or simulation that does not involve the operations of actual forces, in which the flow of events affects and is affected by decisions made during the course of those events by players representing the opposing sides."

The dimensions of wargames: Time, Space, Forces (not just military, but also civilians and physics), Effects, Information, and Command

The military command structure exists in part in order to counter the effects of entropy. Success involves controlling that entropy better than your enemy.

Tips for "gaming your subject matter" (for those who aren’t doing wargaming)

Identify the "true philosophers of your subject matter" and make the postulates of your subject tangible in your game universe. Then – he offered whimsicaly -- "Just do it -- enter the artist."

Whatley

Douglas Whatley, CEO BreakAway, Ltd, offered a quotation from Donald E. Thompson of the National Science Foundation: “Perhaps the most fatal flaw in the education of young people is that we apprentice youngsters into 19th century science rather than letting them play scientist.”

Whatley presented serious games not just a replacement for e-learning, books, or rote teaching, but “fundamentally change the way we train, the way we educate… and hopefully to improve their interactions with the real world.” Much as “the game publishers are the bad guys in the stories we tell,” those game companies know how to protect the creative arc of the process.

Whatley’s definition of serious games: “A product that is not specifically entertainment, but which uses entertainment or the techniques and processes of the entertainment business, to achieve a purpose.”

Offered a chart illustrating the stages in the development and delivery of a game, with time on the horizontal and manpower/resources on the vertical.

Concept
Design
Prototype
Preproduction
Production (top of bell curve; the only time that simply throwing more people at the project can accelerate it -- when “nine women can have a baby in one month”)
Alpha, Beta, Testing, Delivery, Support (difference between “code complete” at alpha, and “content complete” at beta)

Of the government: “They don’t actually like paying for the testing phase.”

Whatley offered a useful set of terms that expand the concept of a “serious game”:

Simulation: “a speculative exercise with rules, goals and containing a disequilibria outcome. Typically it has a mathematical construct that allows one to test an adaptive skill set within a planned context.”

Play: “outcomes are often unknown and unexpected. We attempt to let kids make things explode.”

Toys: “fun objects that allow one to explore the woodness of wood.”

Whatley returned to the list of dimensions of wargaming, and offered some expansion.

Time – granularity (turn-based… how to force people to deal with a problem)
Space – granularity
Entities – the objects in the game
Effects – what can happen in the game (don’t model the physics of the element, but look at the effects as a separate element – thus, use die roll tables instead of simulating physics)
Information
Command

People are investing major chunks of disposable income and (astonishingly, in a flat-out work-obsessed society where no one has time) untold hours in modding. It's one of the fastest up-and-coming social trends in the United States.

And modding has already tumbled head-on into a legal snake pit. --Andy Oram --Control Freaks: Modding and the Clash with Law (oreilley.net)

Modding is the practice of making and sharing new content for existing commercial games.

On Oct. 31, the Serious Games Summit gets underway in Washington D.C. Its sole focus: To bring together the computer gaming industry with other experts from various fields for more than just a good time. --Beyond 'Flinch and Twitch' Games (Cybershake)

Thanks to some (partial) funding from SHU, I'll be going to this event. My students were crushed when I told them I was cancelling most of my classes Monday and Tuesday.

(There's a Monday class that meets for just one hour a week, and I'm going to let the students run that class themselves.)

But I, for one, do not believe that journalism's future is gloomy. In fact, I think that when we look back on the early years of the 21st century, we will recognize it as a period of exploding opportunity for journalists and the start of an exciting new era for journalism. I also think it's quite possible that we'll look back on these years as a period when a better informed public began to emerge, thanks to new communications channels and technologies.

Am I nuts? Maybe. The signs of decline in traditional forms of journalism are real. But declining audiences and financial returns for newspapers and television news do not necessarily translate into worsening prospects for journalism, nor into a more poorly informed society. --Rich Gordon -- Printer-friendly version Online opportunities make journalism’s future bright, despite gloomy feelings (Online Journalism Review)

Okay, given the source one expects a wee bit of bias, but it's still good to see these arguments made this clearly.

At first glance, it seems like a regular blog. But look closer and you'll see there's something very odd about the blog's content: It's very familiar. Too familiar.

That's because you wrote it, six months ago, on your own blog. The rest of the content doesn't make sense: The same word repeated over and over again. There are ads all over the sidebar for products like Viagra and mortgage loans.

This, you realize, is a splog, and you're the victim. --Nicole Lee --How to Fight Those Surging Splogs (Wired)

It's happened to me.

You'll not only be able to watch every film, but also every TV program, news show, documentary, music video, and video blog, and all of it will be playable wherever you go. Great, you think: Thousands of channels, millions of choices, and still nothing worth watching. Nevertheless, "nonlinear TV"—watching the tube on our schedule, not the broadcasters'—is our destiny. The revolution will not be televised, however, until the companies that funnel the content into our homes figure out how to control it. The best advice for now: Study the music industry and do the exact opposite. --Adam L. Penenberg --The Death of Television (Slate)

Links are now devalued. Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning. It won't be long before Google itself is infested. Tim Bray is right, below, it's time for Google to get on top of this. They're both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank. You could drive a truck through it. I was the early warning system on this, the canary in the coal mine. --Dave Winer --[Google and Splogs] (Scripting News)

Winer is talking about how spammers have started creating their own fake blogs ("splogs"), which they populate with links drawn from Google, and which they create on Google's free blog service. While Google doesn't really notice the traffic on its huge servers, the holy PageRank is being defiled.

Let's hope Google does something about it. Maybe every so often asking a blogger to do one of those wiggly word puzzles, and if the blogger declines or fails more than a reasonable number of times, blocking the whole blog from Google's pagerank.

So for instance, shows like Law and Order, CSI, and all their different versions can fetch more than 1mm dollars per episode. Most other shows fall in mid six figure price ranges and can go as low as 50k to 75k for hit reality shows like Survivor. The reality shows go for far less because everyone knows the winner already.

But what if CBS sold Survivor episodes the day after it aired like ABC is with Lost ? What if they sold them not just on ITunes Store, but through CinemaNow, MovieLink, Netflix, Walmart Online, wherever.

Think some people would buy them to keep up with the action ? Possibly to sample the show ? Think they might sell more than 75k downloads at $1.99 each ?

Could this move have created a new market that could be comparable in size for some shows and more money for others than the current syndication market ? --Mark Cuban --How Bob Iger Saved Network TV (Blogmaverick)

This column discusses Apple's move to sell TV show downloads. This might be another "Information Purity Directive"-smashing moment for Apple, and represents a second chance for Hollywood.

For the past few years, the TV that I've most enjoyed has been on DVDs. Not all of it old stuff, like 1970s Wonder Woman, but more recent stuff, too, like Farscape.

The new commercial model is clearly for those who are young and have time to fill their days with a lot of media. I don't have time to find out whether I would like the TV that's currently on, much less time to re-watch copies that I purchased.

When I was in my 20s, before I morphed into Daddyman, would I have paid $1.99 per episode of Star Trek the Next Generation or Babylon 5, if I could get a clean, commercial-free copy, and also know that I was supporting a show that I loved? When my part-time work schedule was flexible enough that, if I had wanted extra spending cash, I would have just worked more hours?

Yes, I probably would have.

Audience members, mostly senior-level editors and writers for women's magazines, joined the panelists in voicing many familiar complaints about the industry: too many skinny models, even more emaciated feature stories, and too much advertiser influence on editorial content. Laurie Abraham, executive editor of Elle magazine, however, had something else on her mind. The worst thing about women's magazines, she asserted during the panel discussion, is how much "we lie about sex."

Under normal circumstances, a roomful of experienced journalists might rise up in outrage at being called liars. But Abraham's statement was met with nods of guilty agreement and mildly embarrassed "tell me something I don't know" shrugs. No one denied the charge.

This is not Watergate, of course, or even Monica-gate. Yet these ubiquitous stories about sex are presented as journalism, chock full of analysis and quotes, and they are surely believed by many of their readers. They are a formidable cultural force, shaping and reinforcing our attitudes about men and women, orgasms and relationships. Women's magazines run scrupulously reported and fact-checked articles on such subjects as breast cancer and women under the Taliban. Do they have a problem with sex?

Well, yes, it turns out, they do. Many writers, editors, and fact-checkers involved with these sex articles (most of whom asked that their identities be protected with the top-secrecy accorded Seymour Hersh's CIA sources) agreed that the editorial standards for them are abysmal. --Liza Featherstone --Sex, Lies, and Women's Magazines (Columbia Journalism Review)

I've blogged this before, but the CJR reorganized its archives, breaking the link. So here it is again.

Morgan 'Super Size Me' Spurlock at Seton Hill (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Morgan Spurlock, whose movie Super Size Me documents what happened to his body when he ate nothing but McDonald's food for 30 days, spoke at Seton Hill earlier this evening. I asked him to autograph this burger. My journalism students were required to attend the class, and have a short article due tomorrow. I asked them to do advance research, which they were supposed to submit in class yesterday. Many of them are really getting into the assignment. More than one has asked, "Are you sure we can only write 400 words?" One showed about six pages of densely-packed notes, lamenting, "I've got about twelve sources!" There's a healthy competition among the students to get good outside sources, so that the article is more than a record of what Spurlock said tonight, but a wider article that uses Spurlock as one of several sources. The news hook is the fact that Spurlock spoke here tonight, but the article itself can be much wider in scope. I'm looking forward to seeing what the students will do with their 400 words. I hope at least some of them will blog their work. Update: Added top photo, taken by Mary Cox. Update: A few students have posted on their blog. Ashley Welker. Michael Diezmos. Leslie Rodriquez. Erin Waite.

Basically, I remember being afraid a lot of the time. I felt incredibly unsafe. I remember a couple of trips to the hospital after being in freezing water for long periods of time, losing quite a bit of my hearing for days at a time due to explosives, having my heart monitored when one went off relatively close to me, etc. I remember running through this long sort of corridor where explosives went off every few feet, things were on fire, etc. I cried hysterically in my dad's lap and begged him to make sure I wouldn't have to do it again, but I did. I think I did it quite a few more times. I remember the terrifying scene where we were in the boat and the horse jumped out and ended up surfacing a plastic explosive that went off right under my face. I remember being half trampled by a mob of extras and then repeating the scene several times. I remember working very long hours.

I know I had some fun as well, but it's pretty much obliterated by the sense of fear, and exhaustion, and of not being protected by the adults around me. And again, the adults who should have been there to protect me were my parents, not you. This, of course, took some time to arrive at. I admit I was pretty furious at you for a lot of years. --Sarah Polley --Polley recalls trauma of Gilliam set (Toronto Star)

The little girl who starred in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen writes director Terry Gilliam about the trauma she remembers. Gilliam gently points out that she may be constructing memories from having seen the finished film, but Polley responds that that's part of the point -- he had no idea how the film would impact her, overall.