Design: 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 2005Tim Holt:  (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Remediating the classic Atlas body-building cartoon, Holt presented the scenario in which a big burly organization kicks sand in the face of a scrawny game designer. He suggested that modding is a way to create a great-looking game, that can be used to get further funding, without requiring a million bucks for the prototype. In some ways I'm more advanced than the target audience for this talk, but what Holt is doing now is what I'll have to do if my own idea for an educational game is going to go anywhere.
Holt noted that open-source and alternative development options are available, but he got a little FUDdy on the audience. When Holt, who used to work for Valve (the company that makes Half-Life) first suggested that he would talk about several alternatives to the traditional commercial development process, then admitted that would only talk about modding, the audience chuckled. The presentation walked through the process of using Half-Life 2 as a source for mods.

Differentiated modding - resuing somebody else's wheel -- from the traditional development process. The process starts with buying a commercial game such as Half-Life 2, noting that the companies want users to create their own modifications. Modding is a great playground, but you don't have to start from scratch. Half-Life 2 includes lots of grungy bitmaps, which wouldn't be acceptable for a hospital simulation, of course, but are easily expandable. Holt's laptop has 14 GB worth of content that can be reused in original mods. That content includes code that defines the AI properties or the in-game characters.

Holt showed the Half-Life 2 characters, which his collaborators complained they slouched too much, turning the oppressed out-of-work civilians of Half-Life 2 into confident, confidence-inspiring doctors (with white work boots).

Used Half-Life 2 greenery functions for a forestry simulation, expanding a function originally designed for grass and shrubbery, turning it into a system to populate a forest stretched across kilometers.

"It's too hard to explain to a bunch of foresters why they're running around with a crowbar."

Showed a proof-of-concept game for "Pulse!!" - a first-person medical game that featured an in-game EEG monitor synchronized with an in-game patient. The PC, with stethoscope in hand, touches the patient's chest, and we hear the heartbeat and breathing, based on where the hand is touching. (In the background, slouching hospital workers wash their hands or punch buttons.)

Indicated that in order to do mods, you'll need to play the game in order to understand its capabilities. "If your co-workers don't like it, invite them to play too."

Saved me a bit of time by noting that there aren't really any books out there on the subject of modding games.

In response to a question from the audience, briefly mentioned other platforms such as Neverwinter Nights and the new Civilization IV that offer modding capability.

Noted that, in addition to a copy of the game, you'll need a 3D modeling program (he suggested XSI), a programming environment (Visual C++), and an image editor.

Holt's virtual forest needs a system where people can share data, posting persistent notes within the game world. [That really got me thinking? would that be virtual geocaching? Let players leave audio comments for each other? That would let students annotate the same simulated world in different ways, according to different objectives? that really opens up a huge range of ways to reuse the same generic simulated environment. Lots to think about! -DGJ]

Giving students a virtual patient that they have to take care of day and night [That would be an extremely interesting variation on neopets, or the parenting simulations in which adolescents are given dolls that they have to take care of]

Offered the advice to "keep it simple," as applied to "Pulse!!"

Holt mentioned Garry's Mod - a sandbox version of Half-Life, with a scripting language called Lua.

Played "A Few Good G-Men," a wonderful demonstration of what can be possible with simulation. Perhaps only a scene that features a cold, stiff military officer in a courtroom setting would work. While the clip was fascinating, I would rather have seen a demonstration of a game - using a remediated version of a movie to demonstrate what modding can do.

(Holt's use of the buzzword "pedagogy" in his remediaton of the bodybuilding cartoon was hilarious.)

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

Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Blogging (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Here's my schedule for the first day of the Serious Games Summit, which starts in a few minutes here in Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington D.C. I do enjoy the mixture of commercial, government, educational and indie content, but the biggest draw is probably the dollars at stake to be extracted from government agencies for military training. I'll check out the booths of course, but the government/military/business angle is not why I'm here.

Signs That I'm Not at a Humanities Conference

1. Demonstrating the seriousness of the situation: Whatley mentioned that one of his EULA (end-user license agreements) includes the warning “death and dismemberment are not our fault.”
   
2. When I asked a question about simulation, Whatley’s response began with, “If I shoot a bullet at you…”
   
3. The word "pedgagogy" appears in one of the presentations, not simply to be dismissed as pedestrian and non-theoretical, but in the speech bubble of the beach bully kicking sand in the face of a scrawny little game designer, in a remix of the classic comic book advertisement for body-building snake oil.
   
4. To be continued??

Last year there was a T-shirt. This year? A plastic bag with a program, a promotional CD from Anark (one of the sponsors) and a few other fliers. (I overheard one of the conference organizers say that nobody offered to sponsor the t-shirts. Shame.)

I certainly hope there are muffins or cookies somewhere around here. [Update: There are.]

Keynote: Peter Perla and Doug Whatley
"What's So Serious about Game Design? The Art or the Science?"

Tim Holt
"Healthcare and Forestry -- Half-Life 2: Meet Serious Games Modding"

I'm conflicted... I'm interested in both of these topics, and may bail out of the first one to visit the second.

Dolly Joseph and Mable Kinzie
"Boys [sic] and Girls [sic] Game Play Preferences: Survey Results"

Lauren Davis
"Inside our Hidden Agenda: Using Contests to Generate New Ideas for Games in Education" (Never got to this. I've actually blogged about the Hidden Agenda effort before, and I would have loved to hear how the project is doing, but Joseph's presentation held my attention.)

Michael Gibson
"Creating Life Experience Through Dramatic Simulations"

Sharon Sloane
"Exploring Game-Based Instructional Methodologies that Reach the Cognitive and Affective Learning Domains"

Ian Bogost
"Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes... If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now"

Well, it looks like the exhibit hall is supposed to be open now.

Update, 01 Nov: See my liveblogging from day 2

Since we currently cannot make games of sufficient (accessible) complexity to rival the heights of our best storytelling, we perhaps should focus on the other side of the equation. Games produce play and implicit narrative: we can look at ways of making those implicit narrative situations tie into an explicit narrative, thus deepening the sense of involvement (and the mimicry) of a game, and (crucially) of building dynamic explicit narratives which support whichever implicit narrative situations the player chooses to favour. --Chris Bateman --Between Stories and Games (Only a Game)

For the last decade, most game companies have been governed by one obsessive idea: that making games more lifelike?more three-dimensional and hyperreal?will make them more fun. But this hasn't worked. Even the crappiest game today has an elaborate 3-D world you can wander around and marvel at the superb rendering of shadows, the elaborate tattoos on the characters, or the lens flares when you look up at the virtual sun. But after you've finished admiring the scenery, the game itself is often incredibly tedious. You're just running around, solving obtuse puzzles, and listening to wretched pseudoacting by virtual characters.

What's missing? Game-play. What today's game designers have forgotten is that a video game isn't about 3-D rendering. In fact, a video game isn't about "technology" at all. It's a game, and as game theorists such as Eric Zimmerman have argued, a good game is created by crafting a few simple rules that make your goals teasingly difficult to achieve. --Clive Thompson --Blasts From the Past: What today's game designers can learn from Space Invaders. (Slate)

At what point did the carving of pumpkins turn into a "cute" event? When did boys stop carving pumpkins and moms start? Where did we lose touch with one of the years coolest events? --ExtremePumpkins.com

Don't miss the story of carving "Carrie".

Via Machina Memorialis.

Games and game technology are poised to transform the way we educate and train students at all levels. Education and information, skill training, even political and religious beliefs can be communicated via video games. But these games and repurposed game technology, collectively called "serious games," have yet to be fully embraced by educators.

It's not enough to declare that "games teach" and leave it at that. Teachers aren't going to hand out a game to a bunch of students and simply trust that the students have learned the material. -- Proof of Learning: Assessment in Serious Games (Gamasutra)

Unlike many articles on serious games, this one presumes the audience knows about games but doesn't know much about education. It educates a gaming readership about education.

The industry and the market are bewitched by the idea of more pixels and polys. Higher visual quality is fair enough, but why is it equated with better stabs at photo-realism? What's the point of aesthetics at all? If they don't matter, how come E3 can sucker-smack a "wow" or two out of so many gamers each year? Why, after gushing over how good stuff looks, do we hypocritically trot out that almost apologetic load of bollocks about gameplay moments later?

I'm guilty of it. I think it's time that particular conversational old dog was taken out back and shot. By no means am I suggesting that aesthetics are the very substance of games, but obviously, "it" is not all about gameplay. I suspect even the most fanatical ludologists have been watching tech demos with the curtains drawn.

We may not know a great deal about what they are or exactly what they do, but aesthetics are clearly important to us. As a phenomenon, aesthetics have manifested in every culture and sub-culture throughout history, and furthermore survived the demise of each. From food through to music and architecture, all of our possessions and many of our experiences are purposely shaped by designers for aesthetic as well as functional purposes. Aesthetics pervade all media, and games are no exception. --David Hayward --Videogame Aesthetics: The Future!

Also check out the discussion on Slashdot.

I say we need photo-realistic text adventures.

We expect them to be able to follow us around the house, picking up after us, chattering with us like C-3PO, reading our emotions with the accuracy, if not the intent, of HAL. While robots have proved indispensable in narrow kinds of work, like assembly lines, when it comes to interactions with unpredictable, flesh-and-blood humans, they have yet to deliver on the promise of more lifelike responses. --Larry Gallagher --R Is for Robot  (Wired)

There’s no question that certain things are lost when documents are prepared and transmitted in electronic formats. The texture, heft, even smell of the paper, the coffee cup’s stain, the crinkled edges and dog-eared pages, the physical abrasions of marks and erasures. Let’s think for a moment about what’s gained though. By opening my word processor’s Properties window I can ascertain, to the date- and millisecond, when the file was first created and when it was last edited. I can count the number of words and characters, but more interestingly the number of minutes spent editing the document. This is the kind of information scholars and editors of the literary classics would weep to have. How long was Coleridge really at work on “Kubla Kahn” before he was interrupted by the man from Porlock? The point here is that electronic objects are self-documenting to a remarkable degree, and this is a phenomenon that can and should be exploited as new social and technological practices evolve to preserve them. --Matthew Kirschenbaum --Lost and Found in Cyberspace (MGK)

This man is insightful and rigorous in his observations about a technology that far too many people either take for granted or treat as "the enemy".

There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us - so seemingly obvious - that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here's a case in point - the weblog post's permalink. I mean - let's think about it. The problem was that a weblog's front page is by far its most visited page. This is the page where everyone actually sees your content (or at least it was until the creation of RSS feeds). But it's not possible for someone to effectively bookmark or link to that particular entry on that page, because shortly it will scroll off the bottom. Added to that, bookmarks operate at the level of pages, not posts. So how do you handle that? --Tom Coates --On Permalinks and Paradigms... (Plasticbag.org)

I'm saving this for the next time I teach "Writing for the Internet," but also for the next time I introduce blogging to a class. Some students get the whole package right away, but others need to be brought along in stages.

This year, I asked students to get used to blogging their reactions to texts by having them post brief comments on the course website, then bring 200-word reflection papers to class. I then asked students to move their initial brief comment to their own blog, asked them to read and comment on peer blogs, and invited them to post the 200-word reflection on their own blog, if they wished.

I lost some students along the way, by which I mean that some students stopped posting regularly, which means that their first blogging portfolio was a frustrating exercise in writing furiously in order to catch up.

But I added an extra blog portfolio, and moved the first due date up, so that students would quickly get the chance to see just why it is more valuable to blog a little bit each day, rather than wait until the night before the portfolio. We'll see how it turns out.

Coates credits Matt Haughey with the term "permalink" and Paul Barusch with the concept "permanent link".