Dan:
Subject: I’ve now tried Dwarf Fortress three times…
This time following a painstaking step by step tutorial. Dwarves just wouldn’t dig, they went fishing instead. With no feedback to confirm whether or not my “dig” command was even successfully given, I had no idea what the problem was. I feel like I’m trying to join a club where the members hit themselves in the head with a hammer.
Thoughts?

Moses:
My first reaction is laughter at “they went fishing instead.” You’ve provided me with yet another piece of evidence for why I’m unlikely to ever play DF, but am nonetheless very glad that other people in the world are.
If you want help, try asking [a friend of Moses]. Also, I noticed on BoingBoing that there’s a guy giving a class:

http://boingboing.net/2011/07/25/online-class-to-teach-dwarf-fortress.html

Dan:
That class thing is actually what spurred me to email. If games are such brilliant learning devices, why in god’s name should i be required to take a traditional class just to play it? Why not just play TF2, which has plenty of strategic depth, but also happens to be ACTUALLY ENJOYABLE to play and learn?
There’s an RPS thread about the course, and I’m heartened that the common consensus is “it might be a brilliant game, too bad the UI is needlessly obtuse”.

Moses:
Here’s where we get into “not all games are created equal.”More importantly, not all games behave the same way in relation to humans simply because they’re games.
Jim’s [He means James Paul Gee] assertion (that we’re all generally in line with) regarding games as brilliant learning devices only works for those games that are designed to be brilliant learning devices. We can think about this in terms of books for that matter. Some books are actually brilliant learning devices so long as you have the requisite reading ability (The Way Things Work or Drawing on the Right Side of the Mind are pretty good examples). Others are hopeless as learning devices despite the fact that they have massive chunks of knowledge embedded in them (i.e. anything ever written by a German or French philosopher).
Dwarf Fortress is perhaps the Karl Marx or Pierre Bordieu of digital games. There’s a whole lot to get out of it if you are willing to slam your head against a wall repeatedly. For the rest of us, there’s Civ and Portal.

Dan:
So true. Mind if I take this email correspondence and turn it into a quick post on dannorton.com?!

Moses:

Go for it!

“Book Learning: An Oxymoron?”

In this session the presenter explored how one might learn while reading a book that you would enjoy. Since obviously any pleasure derived from the act of reading must clearly not be on-task and non-standards-aligned, this presenter had the cunning idea of pasting multiple choice quizzes onto pages near the end of each chapter. In this way, we can get that critical “just in time” assessment integrated into the reading experience without worrying about whether or not the reader is perhaps not reading the correct sentences or deriving the expected meaning from the material. Fascinating!

“Pages…of Terror? “

In this session, the dangers of violence in books is explored, with some worrisome new findings. It turns out, not only can books contain disturbing depictions of sex and violence, but THE BOOKS THEMSELVES can immediately be used as weapons, if the child’s book-infused bloodlust demands instant rage and retribution. While of course several books with intense violence are considered works of art, and everyone present at the conference agreed they were intelligent enough to parse them without punching or stabbing someone immediately afterwards, new technologies like foam wrappers for book spines and printing books on spongy pieces of bread were discussed, shown, and ultimately eaten.

Intermission

In the break between sessions, I ran into a researcher who was very excited about books and learning. The oddest thing about it though, was that he’d never actually read a book themself. “My son reads books though. Loves them. I saw him reading just the other day, and he was having a great time. When I was younger, I looked at some pamphlets, but obviously books have gotten more sophisticated now, and I just didn’t keep up.” I thought it odd that someone who intended to study the media didn’t even have a passing literacy, but hey: who am I to judge? To be frank I’m just glad they’re here.

“The End of Language As We Know It”

This presenter was extremely anxious about the anti-social implications of books as a media, and felt they had no place in schools. “Books will be the death of spoken language. With the efficiency of storing words on pages, and with authors able to craft word-based experiences vastly more compelling than your nearby friends own off-the-cuff oratories, we’ll soon see people stop talking to each other altogether. Children will no longer form sentences themselves, and will simply refer to passages from books they’ve read to convey meaning to each other in some kind of atrocious shorthand language that I’ll never figure out. Books? Not on my watch!”

At this point, the presenter was visibly shaking, and I ducked out.

…

This post is not an accurate reflection of where the contemporary field of games and learning is, but I’m constantly on the lookout for for the shreds of these sentiments. Overall I’d love it if everyone who loved games and learning started with a love of both…games…and learning…but there are still people who see games as a simple gimmick or shallow receptacle that can be used to help swallow the bitter pill of conventional teaching. We have a long way to go and many, many more games to make before we’ll see learning games as a normal, healthy part of instructional media, but the sooner we can get people to accept that games as a media, art, and fundamentally unique way to express information, the sooner we’ll let our children learn in a richer, better world.

Commercial games have tried a lot of solutions, but from my perspective it’s all starting to boil into a philosophy that gamers are going to have to ultimately accept: On the road to mastery of a game, players contribute several different resources into games, and skill is only one of them. I humbly suggest that there are three main factors that a player can pour into a game to succeed:

• Skill:  Reflexes, strategies, instinct and pure pwnage. This is literally how good the player is at performing the mechanics of the game. This is also the component of games that make them uniquely suited as learning engines that can transcend normal media which generally only account for….
• Knowledge:  From raid boss dance routines to 3d shooter level layouts, this is the researchable rote content that a player can absorb to get to the health pack faster, stay out of the fire, or otherwise put them into positions to exercise their skill as effectively as possible.
• Time:  Originally only hardcoded as a factor in RPG games, the design of inexorably mathematical advantage (+2 sword is better than +1 sword!) based on time spent has poured into just about every nook and cranny of gaming. WoW has levels 1-through-Magic Pants, CoD Blops has weapon unlocks for ranks accrued, and worlds like Farmville live on the passage of time and time alone as a measure of progress. With levelling systems based on participation bwing ground into just about ever genre, playtime itself has ascended into a Goal that is rewarded (Level 50 AssCreed:Bro player here! Ask me about my special festive costume unlocks!)

These obviously slosh together, of course. Research into a raid turns Time into Knowledge. The simple act of play itself turns Time into Skill. Knowledge informs use of Skill, and Skill and Knowledge can help lower the amount of Time needed to meet a goal.

So what happens when a game company decides they want their players to give them more money? Let’s ignore hats and other cosmetic, non-gameplay affecting upgrades: What can a player get that keeps the game-space fair and balanced?

• Money for Skill is…intrinsically offensive. Giving someone an ability that substitutes for Skill is a fancy way of saying “cheating”. Imagine if publishers sold aimbots or wallhacks as DLC? The fundamental act of mastery is subverted, and the game is fundamentally broken. Games can get away with some of this in either single-player or free-to-play collaborative spaces, but it’s pure poison for competitive multiplayer. Let’s hope it stays that way.
• Money for Knowledge is slightly less offensive, but is still generally a no-go. Prima Strategy guides have been around a long time, right? But this can also slide into murky territory quickly: paid DLC that provided in-game minimaps or health bars or raid-warnings would be outrageous for almost all players.
• Money for Time. Hmmm. Money…for time. This is where things start to make sense. Some players have time, and some have money, but until the first gaming generation retires, very few players have both. We have the high schoolers and undergrads pounding away at games like they were working a second job, and we have gamers with jobs (and second jobs) who want to sneak a weeknight or two for adventure. Now that time is a goal, we can actually see an inequity emerge in the player base.

Nowhere is this as obvious as in MMOs, where players will actually pay outsourced contractors (or, it seems, prisoners) for in-game currency with hard earned real-world dolars. Getting gold in these games generally isn’t hard; skill or knowledge can help, but really the main investment is time. Some players who don’t have time can (and do) opt for an illegal black market, just to stay competitive with the young and unemployed. We have money exchanged for time, whether the developers like it or not.

Some games, particularly casual games, are embracing this inequity as an opportunity. Take Spiral Knights- a game where players can easily and conveniently buy the games currency at any time. This currency actually loops back around and is spent as TIME ITSELF, with the player having to spend some every time they dive into a dungeon. This limits the advantage of “hardcore but broke” players, and empowers the “casual but willing to pay” players. This currency is also used to purchase Skill, in that you can purchase the materials necessary to craft superior armor and weaponry for yourself. Since Spiral Knights is free-to-play, and is purely a collaborative game, this is not the riot-inducing violation you might expect.

Although these rules are brought into sharpest relief in the multiplayer space for commercial games, they have deep implications for learning games, even in single player experiences. Why? Because what is a “fairness for competition” metric in multiplayer commercial gaming turns into “no learner left behind” in educational gaming.
It is, simply put, a direct violation of the mission of a serious game to not engineer every possible advantage and leverage point to help a player learn that games learning objectives or serious goals. Giving one player more advantage in a play environment to learn over another one is…an ethical lapse on the part of the designer. Pre-engineered learning inequity? Not on my watch, you brigands!

And yet…the auto-mo-bills must be paid. Can DLC work at all for learning games? I think…yes. Maybe? Yes.

I think the key is to make sure that “time spent” has NO bearing on the game-based learning mechanics other than the aforementioned “slosh”. Time can be engineered as a “Hey, stick around and learn more!” component of a game, offering incidental rewards (hats, badges, etc.), but should never be engineered either as an element that artificially stymies progress or, heaven forbid, used as an assessment metric itself.

This all of course assumes that you’re engineering a learning game large and persistent enough to even make DLC relevant. Games made for classrooms for example demand a “half-hour in-and-out” structure. It’s unlikely those kids are going to want to buy a hat for their all-too-brief stay in your little learny world.

BUT, if you are looking at longer-term, out of classroom play experiences, either as an MMO structure or possibly even an ecosystem of interconnected games, than DLC options that don’t interfere with learning objectives seem more feasable. Granting  access to new places, new ways of expressing yourself, new ways of showing off or new puzzles to experience based on the existing mechanics all turn into useful and powerful tools for asking a player to pay just a little bit more for a play experience they value.

OR, let’s just let the kids pay 10 bucks per each .1 GPA they’d like added to their in-game assessment. What could possibly go wrong?

Mr. Wright also mentioned that a player honestly begins playing a game the second they hold the box in their hand- the wheels of your mind start turning, and you begin to imagine what it would be like to experience the world that the box promises. Sometimes the play experience and the box don’t quite align, but hey, them’s the breaks.

I completely agree with Mr. Wright/my recollection of Mr. Wright, but I think this points out a critical hazard for serious games. Serious games are ostensibly built from the ground up to address a serious goal or a fixed set of learning objectives. I’ve always tackled this challenge from the perspective of “how can I make a set of game rules and interactions that best embody these learning objectives”? It’s led to some weird games, and I’ve had a blast, to be sure.

But I’ve come to realize that this methodology has a critical weakness: these games don’t sound fun. And unless you’re someone who intrinsically either enjoys the subject matter at hand or the act of game design in general, these games (MY games) can be too abstract and alienating to ever pull you in. I don’t want to drag other designers into my problems, so let me stick with things I’ve helped build.

Here’s an example of one of our more successful titles:  Coaster Creator. Just LOOK at that name: you’re going to be creating roller coasters! This is a double whammy of victory for a game about potential and kinetic energy:

• Whammy one: Coasters! Kids like roller coasters, and building them sounds super cool to just about anyone!
• Whammy two: Coasters! Teachers have been using lesson plans, field trips and worksheets that use roller coasters to describe energy transfer for decades. This makes intrinsic sense to them.

Compare that with something like Eco Defenders- honestly one of my favorite games we’ve ever developed. But favorite or not, there are a sequence of disconnects that can unplug potential players right from the start:

• Disconnect one: What does one do in a game called Eco Defenders? Do you defend…eco? Perhaps you recycle things, or something? (Hint: No, no you don’t.)
• Disconnect two: Oh! You’re playing the game now, and you’re building a creature. That’s pretty cool…but really, why? What’s happening?
• Finally connecting: Whoa. You’re playing now, and your creature is designed to eliminate a native species in a miniature ecosystem! Oh, okay.

The game is built from the ground up around the learning objectives around native/invasive species, ecological balance and analysis of data. It does many, many things I’m very proud of. But it lacks the literal, two-second “oh cool I get it” factor of Coaster Creator.

So what to do? Should we abandon any game concept that alienates a two-second explanation? As a design frontier, learning games is a thrilling landscape of strange places to explore, and new treasures to find. How can we help players understand that the new places we’ve found on the gameplay map are worth traveling to in the first place?

Hey! I’m fixin’ to relaunch dannorton.com with some ruminations on design. Stay tuned while I futz with things!