gaming » Genius On Hold

Serving Sizes of Content

Oct 022012

Confession: I am a huge fan of the webseries The Guild. The short episodes fit nicely into the breaks in my day, and the sum of the episodes together makes for an amusing, coherent story across the season. I watch other webseries, too, but The Guild accomplishes both the bite-sized story chunks and the overall effect of the full story better than most. (You could place the praise squarely on the fact Day has worked in serial television, but veteran Bryan Singer has a webseries running right now that really needs to relocate its spine.) I also enjoy reading (and, when I can find the time, writing) serial stories posted to sites like deviantArt and FictionPress. They often lack the good strong episode structure, but you can see where the writer is trying to master that skill. (It gives me hope that one day, I will master that skill.)

What keeps these webseries and serial stories interesting enough to keep following is that they use a technique called “chunking”. They take one section of the story and, if they do it correctly, give that chunk its own mini-story, complete with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The consumer gets a story within the smaller story that leaves both a sense of completion within that chunk and a question or two to drive them to want to see the next bit of story.

It’s what made serial stories so popular in the late 1800s, and what keeps them popular today.

Interestingly, these aren’t the only chunks we run into. We see it when we play digital games. Some games let you explore a region or storyline until you’ve seen everything they want you to see so the next part will make sense, and then they open the next region or storyline. You continue this way util you give up or finish the game. (And boy, are there some interesting arguments over using this technique in a world that is otherwise open once you have opened new regions!) You keep playing because you want to see that next region. You want the next part of the story.

Even education has its own version of chunking in lesson planning. In most curricula, each lesson is a chunk, focusing on a specific skill or aspect, and the chunks together build a learning unit, which in turn build a curriculum. Even in corporate and informal settings, there is often some sort of spine that relates different trainings, workshops, and seminars together. You follow the courses along the spine to develop your mastery over a related group of skills or over a given topic of study.

By breaking things down into these smaller chunks, writers, game designers, and educators are giving consumers the ability to take in the information, process it, and then move on to another chunk, thereby building a complete picture and a better understanding of what’s been presented.

Starting Over

gaming, teaching

Apr 302012

The other day, I was thinking about all the times I’ve listened to gamers complain about having to restart from a save point, or worse the beginning of a level, when they die. They don’t want to have to re-do all that work just to get back to the area they were struggling with. They do it because so many games are designed that way, and they have to do it if they want to continue on in the game, but they complain the entire time about how lame all of that repetition is.

But I don’t hear similar complaints from students who have to retake a course or a grade level, which seems odd to me because it’s really kind of the same concept.

Think about it. In a class/grade level, a student learns various skills to the best of her current ability/desire and does all of this work, only to get to the end of the course/grade level and learn that their mastery score just wasn’t high enough to let them move on to the next class. So the following school term (be it year, semester, or quarter), the student retakes the class/grade they failed. And they don’t take just the parts they failed; they retake everything. It’s the nature of how our education system is designed – you can’t just pick out specific topics to re-study.

And no one complains. Some kids actually fail out of a class so they can take it next term with a different teacher. It’s just part of the education game to them.

So, what’s different? Why will they tolerate all of that repetition in their schooling, but not in their games? It’s the same idea – gaining more practice with skills they were weak with until they can do those skills well enough to be less likely to fail at the next level. What’s the shift in perception?

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

gaming, learning, teaching

Dec 202011

Motivation is a bit of a hot-button issue for both teachers and game designers, mainly because it’s so necessary for continued success but so difficult to design for. There are two types of education – extrinsic and intrinsic.

Extrinsic motivation, like it sounds, is a motivating force that comes from outside of the person. Stickers, gold stars, and grades are great examples of this from teaching. Game design has really embraced badges, achievements, and gear to motivate players to continue the game. Generally speaking, extrinsic motivation is showy, but otherwise useless, and when the goodies stop coming, whatever behavior was being motivated by the goodies trickles off to a stop. Think about the misbehaving child who cleans up his act once he’s promised some sort of treat. More often than not, once the treat has been acquired, the bad behavior is back because the child has no reason or desire to continue being good. (The savvier misbehaving child also quickly figures out that bad behavior will get him more treats than good behavior if the situation isn’t handled correctly…which makes things fun when different people are handling the child.) It’s the same with gamers. If the gamer has become attached to the achievements, once they’re done earning them they’re also done with the game.

Intrinsic motivation comes from within the person. It’s the child who persistently practices cartwheels until she gets them right because she wants to be able to do them. It’s the gamer who makes a point of exploring a game map from one end of the other because they’re having fun exploring new places. The intrinsically motivated person is more likely to become engaged and to return to an activity because they enjoy it or it fulfills a goal they personally set for themselves. It’s also harder to design for because it’s dependent on the person herself rather than any reward the teacher or game designer can set out.

Generally, it’s agreed, both in education and game design, that intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic motivation because those who are intrinsically motivated are more likely to return, to push themselves to accomplish more.

Teacher as Game Master

gaming, learning, teaching

Oct 202011

Tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs) get a bad rap, and they get it unfairly. Outdated stereotypes either scare people away or justify scared people trying to scare others away. It’s silly. Tabletop RPGs are little more than collaborative storytelling where there is one person directing the spine of the story and other people each working on building a character within that story.

Honestly, that sounds like a bunch of writing buddies bouncing ideas off each other…except they’re working on the same story…and playing with dice whose shapes are based on natural crystalline structures. Those nerds!

The most important player in the set-up, though, is the person in control of the story’s spine — the Game Master, commonly called the GM. (Yes, different systems call this person different things. For the purposes of this post, I’m using a generic term.) The GM determines the major plot points of the game’s story and then guides the players through those major points, all the while allowing the players free reign to explore the world and develop their characters and throwing the occasional obstacle in their path to help them grow and to help keep them engaged in the story. But the full richness of the story comes about through the collaboration of the GM and the players.

There’s something in this that could be taken and applied to education. If we could step away from the current lecture-based curriculum and move toward a more project-based system (and there are schools already exploring this idea), the teacher becomes the GM – guiding the learners through a project, enabling them to explore and grow, and providing obstacles appropriate to their necessary growth. Rather than lecture or tell everything, the teacher then becomes a facilitator and encourages the learners to develop their curiosity, research, and creativity skills to successfully create their projects.

Self-Directed Learning in Games

gaming, learning

Oct 142011

I recently started playing Glitch, my first MMORPG. I’ve decided that I need to explore MMORPG skill building as part of trying to sort out my own thoughts on education reform and game-based learning. I was about to surrender to the insanity that is WoW. (I may still if I can ever choose a name for my character.) And several people pointed me toward Glitch, saving me while still giving me somewhere to think.

Glitch is billed as a kid-friendly MMORPG, and the play is certainly simple enough. You explore the world, go on quests, and try to beat other players to resources. (Having years of Mario experience has really helped me edge out people for XP and currants, the game’s currency.) But you spend most of your time trying to collect resources in the form of catching coins, digging up dirt, mining stones, and petting trees. Okay, so you also water and harvest the trees, but you pet them. And you massage butterflies. It’s a little odd. None of that really matters because what you’re really doing is “grinding”, or doing boring, repetitive actions to gain what you need to do the bigger, cooler things. Really, it’s the game equivalent of homework.

Speaking of learning, there is a wide range of world-relevant skills for you to learn. You can choose to learn how to cook, to create, to perform alchemy. It’s up to you to decide what you want to learn and in what order you want to learn them, provided you have the appropriate prerequisite skills. In real life, I’ve been known to screw up macaroni and cheese while making herbal tea for allergies, so in the game it was no surprise that I started working on learning paths that lead me toward herbology and away from cooking. I’ve also taken up with alchemy, even though I found chemistry fun but challenging, and tinkering, when it’s been years since I took something apart and put it back together.

But these were my choices. I had choices to make involving my in-game learning, and I chose to make them similar to my real-world interests. I have also recently fallen in with The Sims Social, where I do practice cooking, but I also pursue writing and music (which I have a real-life background in). The only reason I want to try out World of Warcraft is because they created the archaeology profession, something I might have considered doing if I weren’t so in love with teaching math and science.

While skills learned in a game don’t translate into real-world skills, it can be a chance to explore how you might see the world differently if you pursued a different set of skills than the ones you really have or even to help you see what skills you really are drawn to. Developing your in-game learning paths can also give you a structure for developing your own real-world skills, complete with proposing you include some sort of mastery project as proof of your learning. Wouldn’t it be fun if we were taught to make these types of learning plans by something that wasn’t a video or computer game?