Play with Learning

Play & Games articles

There’s a lot of really interesting work going on with play and games – here are some of the articles that have caught my eye in the last couple weeks.

Play

Bring Back Play and Disorganized Sports to Our Children. From The Innovative Educator. http://j.mp/n8tCG3

ChicagoQuest promotes game-playing at school – Chicago Sun-Times http://j.mp/qU8zEk

Parents’ behavior linked to kids’ video game playing. Michigan State University http://j.mp/qLuP63

Helicopter Parents Can Impede Child’s Ability to Play. From NC State http://j.mp/nyPH8v

Gamasutra – Features – Personality And Play Styles: A Unified Model http://j.mp/qV1dvx

Game-based learning

Do Action Video Games Improve Perception and Cognition? Florida Uni research in Frontiers in Cognition journal. http://j.mp/rdxeSI

In the Brain, Winning Is Everywhere. How games affect the brain. From Yale. http://j.mp/oNS856

Five Lessons On Teaching From Angry Birds That Have Nothing Whatsoever To Do With Parabolas. From dy/dan http://j.mp/qpcZ9y

Use

Find Games For Your Players [Marketing] from What Games Are http://j.mp/ob0FIy

Gamers Succeed Where Scientists Fail, Opening Door to New AIDS drug design. http://j.mp/oKX5vk

UK ‘must act to solve games industry brain drain’ Tigra study reported by BBC. http://j.mp/ocsOft

Beach games

pipe game

During the summer I went to North Wales with the youth group I help lead. While we were away, we played lots of games. Not high-tech, computer-based games but real-world, physical games. It was a timely reminder to me that play, even for teenagers, does not always depend on bits and bytes but can happily exist with a few bits and bobs. In fact, the simplicity added to the fun.

We played a variety of short games on the beach. Some were physical, collecting as much water as possible with a pipe drilled full of holes for example. Some were creative, such as making pictures with beach-combed artefacts. Some were simply sporty, such as volleyball. Almost all the games were faintly ridiculous.

The variety of games catered for everyone’s preference and skill and avoided the situation where any of the young people could feel excluded. They gave every one a chance to shine.

The young people played in teams. The competition was an important driver for participation and each game had a scoring system that rewarded achievement and more arbitrary factors such as teamwork and flair. Having said that, everyone recognised that the scoring was simply a device to provide structure and was at the whim of each of the game leader’s discretion. The scoring was wildly inconsistent but no-one really minded.

But team play is more than competition, it is dependent on collaboration.  The games were designed to leave no-one behind – every game required everyone to participate. No-one could fail individually, but the team could succeed together.

These lo-tech games worked because they drew on the fundamentals of play:

• the society of shared voluntary activity,
• simple rules,
• clear goals,
• boundaries in time and space, and
• no material consequence

The morning on a breezy Welsh beach illustrated beautifully the simple joy of playing together.

Play and games articles

Some of the articles about play and games that I have seen in the last few weeks.

Theory

Online Games & Interest-Driven Learning are Transformative for Today’s Young Learners by @constances http://htn.to/anmyvV

Three Qualities That Make Video Games Better Teachers Than Teachers from EdReach http://j.mp/lNARUV

Gamification time: What if everything were just a game? From BBC News via @jonkingsbury http://j.mp/jdbxTK

Video Games and Learning « Sam Pabón’s Ed-Tech Zone http://j.mp/juDIHp

Parents are forgetting how to play with their children, study shows – article from The Guardian last year http://j.mp/jdoiSR

Video Games Help Learning Difficulties – PC Advisor http://j.mp/jIJg55

The British secretary for education Michael Gove and video games as a tool for learning> http://ow.ly/5w90f

Examples

Celebrity Calamity! – a game about financial literacy via @mcdanger http://j.mp/qBH8kj

@SixtoStart and BBC team Up for “The Code Challenge” @bbccode from ARGNet http://j.mp/iNEZfx

Video: A Fast-Moving Video Game Played On Scrolls of Printer Paper from Popular Science http://j.mp/joGpik

Challenge

I’ve written a couple of posts already about motivation (the motivation to learn and motivational momentum) but today I want to explore some of the issues associated with that powerful driver: challenge.

The ability to overcome some conflict is central to the engagement of most narrative experiences.  Similarly the level of challenge associated with any game, or stage within a game, is critical in maintaining and encouraging participation in it.  The challenge or difficulty presented by any voluntary task needs careful management if it is to keep the user taxed appropriately, that is suitably stretched but not frustrated.  Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of Flow describes a ‘channel’ where participants enjoy the optimal experience of play-suspended consciousness while developing their skill.

flow

If the challenge is too much for the user’s skill level, the experience quickly induces anxiety and overwhelming frustration; if the skill level outstrips the challenge, the user is swiftly bored and disengaged.

The key to successful engagement depends on setting the appropriate level of difficulty for the user’s current skills.  The difficulty of any game is the product of various elements:

• The quantity of the tasks
• The complexity of the task and
• The pace at which the tasks are presented

The appropriate level of challenge is dependent on the differing needs and levels of expertise of the target user group and even on the type of task.  Games employ different strategies for determining a satisfying level of difficulty.  At the simplest level, the game offers options at the start of play such as easy, normal or hard.  These levels might manifest themselves in the sheer quantity of conflicts to address as in Sim City with its ability to turn on more features or the ‘intelligence’ of the opposition as in electronic Chess and its ability to ‘think ahead.’  Some games, such as Silent Hill 2 recognise that different types of task might require alternate settings.  In this case, the game offers players settings for the puzzle and action aspects of the experience.  Ritual offers users control over both the level of challenge (between ‘casual’ and ‘extreme’) and the assistance given to players by other characters (ranging from ‘quickly’ to ‘never’).  The Grand Theft Auto series operates a ‘mixed economy’ of challenge with the free-roaming environmental playground offering user-defined activity and specific missions giving greater reward for higher levels of difficulty.

Rather than giving the user control of difficulty, some games, exemplified by the car-racing genre, provide adaptive handicapping of the computer competition.  In this approach, the system alters the intelligence of the non-player characters according the player’s current performance to provide opposition that is slightly above and below the user’s current competence.

The most sophisticated forms of difficulty setting offer dynamic and escalating levels of challenge.  Elaboration Theory is a learning model that advocates a progression of successively more complex problems.  Proponents argue that the clear sense of progression is a powerful motivator.  However, these challenges need careful sequencing if they are to keep offering players the optimal experience.  Most story-based games like Metal Gear Solid provide increasing levels of challenge where players ‘graduate’ to more difficult levels by achieving the desired goals.  Each successive level assumes a degree of competence as demonstrated by the successful completion of the previous one.  However if the leap is too great, the challenge is too much for the potential skills development; too small and the player loses his sense of progression.

Players take risks in games because the consequences are rarely significant in the real world but it would be incorrect to believe that there is no comeback from repeated failure.  The cost of lack of progress in a game can range from simply lost time to loss of hard-earned privileges and reputation.  Particularly in multiplayer games, long terms failure has a genuine social impact, as one veteran player of World of Warcraft commented: “No one wants to be a member of a guild that always wipes out.”

It is far to say, therefore, that the measure of the effectiveness of a game is its ability to develop player skills to tackle ever more challenging scenarios.  As players learn, so clever games increase the level of difficulty to maintain the user’s position in the flow channel; getting the level wrong leaves players bored or frustrated.  Isn’t that the main cause of disruption in learning?

How many educators need to play a few more games?

What is a game?

dice

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been doing some thinking about the nature of games for the BBC.  With gamification the new hot idea and with it the attempt to apply game mechanics to just about every industry both online and real world, it felt like a good time to revisit the core concept of a game.

A game is more than simply an activity with a score

There are countless definitions of ‘game’ by academics and social theorists including:

Dempsey’s “A game is a set of activities involving one or more players.  It has goals, constraints and consequences.  A game is rule-guided and artificial in some respects.  Finally, a game involves some aspect of a contest or a trial of skill or ability, even if that contest is with oneself.“

And Avedon and Sutton-Smith’s suggestion from their book, The Study of Games: “At its most elementary level…we can define a game as an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome.”

In 2003, researchers Salen and Zimmerman compared 8 academic definitions in their book Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals and came up with:

“A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules that result in a quantifiable outcome.”

Rewarding learning

star of the week

My little girl was ‘Star of the Week’ at her school last week for ‘great number work.’  She was ecstatic to receive the recognition.  And it’s a big encouragement to her to keep on trying.  I’m very proud of her.

Coincidentally but far more trivially, I went up a level in Modern Warfare 2.   It made me think about how we reward learning compared to the achievements celebrated in gaming.

I am not very good at Call of Duty, indeed my role largely seems to be cannon fodder for American teenagers, but I am persistent despite my thousands of deaths.  According the stats, I’ve been playing for more than 4 days over the last year.  That’s a lot of time but it’s less than a tenth of that spent by some young people I know.  One of the elements that keeps us coming back is the quality of the game’s encouragement – it rewards every achievement and all the effort.

If you’re not familiar with Call of Duty, here are the potential rewards:

In single player mode, you progress through the game unlocking harder levels, viewing cut scenes and revealing new elements of the storyline.  There are 18 ‘scenes’ split over 3 acts.  Each has a progressive but different set of challenges, characters, settings and equipment.  It’s a level of richness that proves compelling in its own right.  But it’s not all.

In multiplayer mode you also receive a public accolade at the end of each game and XP and bonus points.  There are public leaderboards to show your global ranking and private ones to compare your scores to that of your friends.

You earn points by using each weapon.  For example, assault rifles have the following challenges:

emblems

Pretty impressive list, isn’t it? Notice how achievements are rewarded with points, emblems, titles and new content unlocks.  It is persuasive feedback to players.

Now consider this.  There are

• 28 challenges for each primary weapon
• 24 primary weapons
• 22 challenges for each secondary weapon
• 20 secondary weapons

Mastering the game’s arsenal offers more than a 1000 separate challenges.

And there’s more.  There are:

• 96 perk challenges
• 25 equipment challenges
• 22 basic training challenges (unlocked at level 6)
• 27 operations challenges (unlocked at level 10)
• 57 killstreaks challenges(unlocked at level 16)
• 32 precision challenges(unlocked at level 26)
• 14 finishing moves challenges (unlocked at level 35)
• 19 humiliation challenges (unlocked at level 41)
• 15 payback challenges (unlocked at level 47)
• 19 elite challenges (unlocked at level 53)
• 16 intimidation challenges (unlocked at level 61)
• 57 prestige challenges (unlocked at level 70)
• 25 hidden challenges

That’s nearly 1500 different challenges in total, each rewarded with new content, status and points.  There are 70 levels, 297 different emblems for players and 570 callsigns.

This post isn’t a celebration of Call of Duty or the violent type of gameplay associated with it but it is an example of how games do everything they can to engage users.  It’s not just the sheer quantity of awards, it is the variety and value of them that we need to acknowledge.   Games reward effort and achievement in the following ways:

• status
• statistics
• token and badges
• progressive difficulty
• public accolade
• new content

It makes the tick after a right answer look a little paltry doesn’t it?

Reflecting on gameplay

I lose a lot of games. In fact, on balance I almost certainly lose more times than I win.  But I’m not going to let it get me down.  Repeated failure in games demonstrates a number of important aspects of in-game learning.  The fact that getting it wrong, often terminally, is an intrinsic part of gameplay and yet doesn’t discourage us from having another go clearly illustrates the effective scaffolding of the system.  Each failure is supported by a series of devices to improve the player’s performance.  If the designers have done their jobs well then the challenge is tough but not too tough.

Games promote reflection in a number of ways:

• Delay
• Replay
• Parley (please forgive the pretentiousness of the rhyming!)

When we lose or die in a game, we’re not instantly catapulted back to moment just before the end. Instead there’s a delay and some form of resetting to a previous ‘checkpoint.’  We see it in the respawning during first-person shooters like Left 4 Dead, the restarting of levels in games like Angry Birds and return to the starting grid in the likes of Forza.  Although it’s largely the consequence of technical issues (the need to reload all the appropriate data), it gives us just enough time to curse our misfortune, consider what went wrong and prepare ourselves for another go.  It’s part punishment, part breathing space.

killcam

In games like Call of Duty we have the pleasure of watching our own death from our assassin’s point of view.  The killcam is a bit disconcerting.  Still, it reveals some interesting information about our demise – where we were killed from, the type of weapon, whether or not we wounded our assailant.  It’s all valuable feedback about our performance and inevitably encourages us to think about how we might minimise the chance of it happening again and how we might deploy those same tactics offensively.  Just as in sports television, racing and football games have long used action replays to show what’s just happened.  It’s not simply gratuitous eye-candy: it’s a lesson in the winning strategy.

The final form of in-game reflection comes through a dialogue of sorts:  a combination of multiplayer chat and system feedback.  It is easy to be given (at times fairly blunt) feedback to improve our performance from team mates during a game, non-player characters too.  Similarly, the game itself often provides prompts for reflection through hints and tips at the end of each ‘life.’   It is a conversation that starts with our performance and concludes with the game’s response.  These prompts help us to frame our thinking and ultimately support our progress.

Of course there are many other forms of feedback that describe performance but they don’t necessarily encourage reflection, rather they simply describe the current state of play and progress to date.  That’s not to say it’s not valuable but it serves another purpose – encouragement.  More on that another time.

Where games meet learning

game progress

In earlier posts, I’ve looked at the research evidence for and against the learning potential for games and how play in general relates to learning.  This post looks at the overlap between games and learning.  Although many people become quite aerated about definitions, for the sake of today’s note, I’m simply using ‘games’ to mean rule-based play.

In their 2005 report for Becta, Richard Sandford and Ben Williamson describe computer games as “ideal learning environments” where the important educational aspect of gaming is not what is being learnt but how – a recognition of a game’s tendency to promote higher order skills, that is independent critical thinking.  Computer games display three significant characteristics to facilitate learning:

• Control;
• Practise;
• Presence.

The level of interactivity that is possible within a computer game gives a player unparalleled control over content. This control enables him to manipulate a ‘system’ and observe the consequences. In doing so, a player discovers the underlying rules and relationships that drive the environment and can formulate strategies to achieve the given aims.

The increasing complexity and difficulty within computer games requires dedication and practise to resolve. This repeated exposure to challenges encourages problem-solving skills and the refinement of thinking.  Those improving skills reveal the game world rules and provide the basis for new application of those same skills to later and evolved problems and situations.

The themes and narrative of many computer games encourages players to identify with on-screen characters and situations. This identification stimulates a sense of presence and association with the events unfolding within the game. This presence often utilises specific environments, vocabulary and language which is particularly valuable the objective is real world training.   Even in non-realistic environments, players will combine the role-playing aspects of controlling an avatar or character with their own attitudes and desires and therefore experience some degree of cognitive or affective change, that is to say, they’ll change their outlook on a particular issue.

There are two forms of learning associated with game play:

1. Understanding the game environment, structures and interface
2. Understanding the game content

The first point, at first sight, appears relatively superficial and simply enables the player to complete the current game task. However, players demonstrate a wide range of skills in accomplishing even the simplest activity within the game environment. These skills may be transferable and have application elsewhere. Although the tendency is to only think of motor skills (particularly when considering ‘twitch’ games) game play often requires the successful deployment of higher order skills such as synthesis and problem solving. Obviously, these skills are highly valuable in real-world contexts but require relevant translation. This translation is a skill in its own right.

The second form of learning is often perceived as more valuable, and the rationale for almost all educational games. In most cases, the game contexts for this learning are realistic ones, that is virtual facsimiles of aspects of life even abstract activities such as financial calculations .  The game continuum describes the transparency of learning related with game world.

It is not just the characteristics of game play itself that makes games potentially useful for learning, they have a number of features that make them desirable learning environments:

• Opportunities for reflection and evaluation
• Access to feedback on performance
• Record progress
• Purposeful interactivity
• Achieving learning objectives
• Opportunities to collaborate, investigate or experience
• Chance to correct and learn from errors

These game ‘mechanics’ are highly transferable attributes that encourage greater effectiveness and engagement within resources of any kind and we’re increasingly seeing them deployed in all sorts of domains in the emerging process of ‘gamification’.  I’ll expand on them in a later post but I’d be interested in your thoughts about gaming’s other learning characteristics.What else do they offer?

New Year’s Revolution

calendar

I’m excited about this year. I’m not one for making New Year’s resolutions but this year is something of a revolution because I have something better. A new business. A new opportunity.

After years of working as an academic, for the BBC and a couple of great independent media companies, I have started my own business, Play with Learning; this blog is its online face.

I’ve decided to take the experience and expertise I’ve gained from working in educational media over the last 16 years and translate it into a service I can offer to a wider audience.  Play with Learning is my vehicle for working with partners to create meaningful experiences.  I want to exploit the combination of academic rigour, editorial integrity, innovative creativity and robust project management to provide real value both for content providers and end-users.

So what am I actually going to do? Three things, all focussed on optimising the user experience:

• Concept design and testing – helping to establish the most effective solution to needs and requirement for proposals and pre-production and then testing them with users during development
• Creative direction – helping teams to maintain the highest level of quality during production by acting as a ‘critical friend’
• Evaluation – helping to assess impact and return-on-investment on delivered products and services

I’m excited about it.  Maybe we could work together?  Why not drop me a line?  I’d love to see what opportunities there are for us.

Where play meets learning

Play’ and ‘games’ are dirty words to many traditional educationalists because of their connotations of trivial, wasteful and indulgent activity.  It might hark back to our WASP-ish philosophy that only hardship and suffering are good for the soul.   Even the seminal play theorist, Johan Huizinga, argued that play is “an activity connected with no material interest.” (1)  Huizinga defined play as:

• free
• meaningful
• carried out for its own sake
• spatially and temporally segregated from the requirements of practical life
• bound by a self-contained system of rules that holds absolutely

However, play is a valuable means of facilitating learning because the act of playing encourages imagination, creativity and spontaneity.  These are are key elements of cognitive plasticity – the ability of our brains to flex and adapt.  Many evolutionary biologists and psychologists suggest that play is  a unconscious, instinctive and practical pursuit that is purely a training ground for adulthood but Brian Sutton-Smith (2) believes that the dynamics of play mirror the biological processes that lead to adaptive variability, that is, play is characterised by quirkiness, unpredictability and redundancy.

play & learning

Play is an intrinsic part of learning where learning is the development of thinking (cognitive), emotional  (affective) or physical (psychomotor) skills.  Indeed, Piaget (3) and Vygotsky (4) both contend that play, in its various forms, is central to development from birth to adulthood.  The instinctive play of children is good at developing the range of psychomotor and affective skills but not so effective at cognitive ones.  For example, simple games of ‘shops’ help children understand the social interactions involved in basic shopping and even the physical movements required to use a cash register but fail to instil any sense of value for money.  Piaget defined play as a process of assimilation of experiences through which a child reaches higher levels of cognitive development.

However, for play-developed learning to be meaningful outside its own context, it must breach the magic circle (what Huizinga means by play being “spatially and temporally segregated from the requirements of practical life”).  In other words, the learner must be able to transfer the skills developed within the game to other, real world contexts if the playing can affect wider experiences.  This transfer is what makes play-based learning extrinsically valuable to the player.

———-

(1) – Huizinga, J., (1950), Homo Ludens, Roy Publishers, New York (n.b Hector Rodriguez has an excellent summary of Huizinga’s work)

(2) – Sutton-Smith, B., (1997), The Ambiguity of Play, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

(3) – Piaget, J., (1962), Play, dreams and imitation in childhood, W. W. Norton & Company, New York

(4) – Vygotsky, L. S., (1962), Thought and Language, Wiley, New York