Unfortunately, Lego Universe announced it’s closure on 1/31/12. While never having played the game, I am disappointed by this announcement because, from most accounts, the game was generally well received. The game received praise by how accurate it re-created the feeling of creation and play that real, physical Lego blocks elicit. I guess that was the problem.
Games and Play certainly have a lot in common, but also differ in a big way. Play is often times without an objective, a goal, a win state or competition. We can play legos. We can play Transformers. We can play house. All of these represent engaging activities for kids, but none of these represent a game. Providing an academic definition to a game can be tricky business as Jesse Schell illustrates over the span of 12+ pages in his book, The Art of Game Design. Jesse finally settles on:
A game is a problem solving activity, approached with a playful attitude.
While this is a bit less rigorous for true academics, it covers the basics. Play is certainly involved, but play alone is not necessarily a problem-solving activity. Games are. Typically many of the ‘problems’ encountered present themselves as competition, where you are faced against a challenge presented by the artificial intelligence or another player. Many of the problems are also presented as goal-based objectives. You need to get from point A to point B to achieve completion, and many challenges emerge along the way.
Lego Universe likely suffered from too much play and not enough game. At least that’s the way some have described it, and I would agree.
It’s really no secret that games are great at scaffolding. Video games, at the most basic level, are nothing more than very complex pieces of software. You, the gamer, need to learn how to operate (in this case, play) the software. If the designers don’t do a good job teaching you how to play, chances are their studio won’t be around very long. Marc Prensky once said that game designers are probably better instructional designers than actual instructional designers in the workforce. I don’t necessarily agree, but game designers MUST be good instructional designers to get players into a game.
I’ve presented about the great scaffolding that goes on in World of Warcraft in the past, but today I wanted to show a great example of scaffolding in Orcs Must Die, the first offering from new studio Robot Entertainment. The game is a mix between 3rd person shooter and tower defense…with a little RPG thrown in for good measure. It follows a similar model as the incredibly-popular Plants vs. Zombies. Each time you complete a level, you are granted an additional tower to place, or ability for your character. For instance, an early acquisition is the “Boom Barrel”.
In this image, the designers illustrate the Boom Barrel’s use. Not only do the designers provide these pictorials of how your new tower or ability can be used (and they get fairly intricate later in the game), but the very next level is designed specifically around your new toy. This forces you not to just understand how it works, but also to apply that knowledge immediately.
A very sound instructional approach, whether your slaying massive amount of Orcs in a game or teaching students Biology!
It’s been a while since posting about Playstation’s Home Network. I only had a few short visits to Sony’s Virtual World over the years, and it’s less than impressive. Sony appears to feel the same way, and is now releasing a totally revamped Home later this year.
From Sony, the new hub will “integrates games, quests, community events and user-generated content, while providing players with additional navigation, shopping, socialization and entertainment options.” Sounds like it will be a much better experience, but is this change going to push Home itself more towards a game?
The line between a virtual world and a game is thin. Some would argue it’s more of a continuum, with ‘virtual world’ on one end and ‘game’ on the other. I would not hesitate putting Home, in its current form, on the ‘virtual world’ side of the continuum, probably out near the end. But with this new update, particularly with the addition of quests, Home is starting to inch closer towards a game. During my few visits to Home, I felt like I was trapped in some sort of renaissance world of advertising. Ads were everywhere, I could watch video ads for upcoming games, play “Drake’s Fortune” mini-games, buy branded clothing, etc. All while surrounded by beautiful avatars, rendered in stunning HD (assuming you have a TV capable of pushing the PS3′s maximum def).
It felt really…weird.
Will the new overhaul bring (and more importantly, keep) PlayStation 3 owners to the Home network?
I recently downloaded Pulse, a rhythm game from the same group that made Auditorium (free web game, very interesting). This iPad game basically revolves around several songs, where you tap various beats that rotate around a circle. The catch is that a pulse originages from the center of the circle, and you need to tap specific beats when it coincides with the pulse. Easier to explain via a video:
I really like the game, but the difficulty curve immediately turned me off. I like to think music games are a bit different than your traditional video games from a design standpoint. Music games, for me, are all about interacting with the music, not necessarily about competition and challenge. Sure, I like a bit of challenge, but the great part about a game like Rock Band is I can adjust the challenge level. With Pulse, I’m stuck with what the designers prescribe.
One of my favorite rhythm games is Audiosurf. From a design perspective, they did two things that I wish Pulse would implement:
The game elements are fairly basic, picking up certain blocks with your vehicle while avoiding others. This mechanic allows me to enjoy interacting with the music without having to really pay much attention to the score or mechanics.
It’s MY music I’m interacting with in Audiosurf, which makes it even more enjoyable. I’m still waiting on Rock Band, Pulse or any other rhythm game coming down the line to implement a feature set that allows me to use my own music to populate the game.
Interacting with music is an incredible feeling, especially for those of us that aren’t musicians but huge music fans. Rock Band got the formula right, as did Audiosurf. Pulse has a really cool mechanic, but I need to be able to tune it down a bit for my enjoyment. Once I get a Kinect, I’m hoping to try out Child of Eden, another game that has a heavy rhythm element that many people report make the player feel like a conductor.
The group I work with, the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, recently started taking a look at Khan Academy, a large collection of educational videos covering a massive amount of content. Some faculty have helped us with this effort, and opinions seem mixed. That’s a story for another entry. What I did not know about Khan Academy is that it’s starting to be gamified. Check out the very end of the TED Talk below.
Khan and his organization have added merit badges and energy points to the flow of instructional videos and assessments. As he puts it, “We’ve added game mechanics to the system.” The results? Khan claims that specific merit badges, as well as activities that award a high amount of energy points, are dictating how people flow through the educational videos. Impressive.
But I want to know more. As an educator, I use gamification myself, and like all instructional methods aimed at motivating, it works with a subset of my students. As a researcher, I want to know what types of students are highly motivated by gamification strategies similar to achievements and leader boards. One assumption is that it’s the young male demographic, but I’m not convinced because no one has any data on the subject. With the amount of tracking Khan Academy has in place, I wonder what types of hints we could glean about gamification and it’s place in education?
KHAN! (sorry, I had to drop a Star Trek reference…) This is a research project waiting to happen (and fundable) that I would be eager to participate
Some of my students sent me descriptoins and screenshots of their games from the Spring 2011 section of IST 446 that I taught. Overall, I was very pleased with the course and received a lot of great feedback. When I teach again in Spring 2012, I will likely change about 20-25% of the course to focus more time on small, iterative game demos in place of individual student presentations. Getting 50 individual presentations squeezed into a semester takes a lot of time and coordination; that’s time I could be using to generate more prototypes in, say, Flash.
One of the primary reasons educators get excited about video games is the ability of games to change player behaviors. From an educator’s perspective, changing behaviors is one of the most difficult challenges we face when, say, we teach a course for 16 weeks at a university.
I recently started playing an iPad game (also available on the iPhone, but does not play nearly as well) called Gun Brothers. It’s a fairly straight forward shooter, where you take on wave after wave of exceedingly stronger foes.
From smokinapps.com
Gun Brothers represents a great deal of interesting design elements that include:
Friend integration. I can’t play online/co-op with friends, but what I can do is bring a friend’s character into my game instead of the generic NPC that helps you out. This really encourages you and your friend to continue playing, because the more powerful both characters become, the easier it is to progress in the game.
RPG-like leveling system, but very lightweight. You gain XP, which opens up more armor and weapons as you level-up. Weapons have a damage stat, as well as an RPM stat that dictates how fast the weapon will fire. Armor typically contains three stats; Offense, Defense and Speed.
Micro-transaction model. The game has simple currency in gold coins, but some of the items can only be purchased with ‘war bucs’. With most micro-transaction models, I can simply enter my credit card and get x number of war bucs for a fixed dollar amount.
Now the micro-transaction model has a little bit of a twist. If you opt not to simply enter a credit card and pay for your in-game war bucs, you can click on various advertisements for other apps, download the apps, and run them once to receive war bucs in gun brothers. Occasionally between levels, you might receive a message “Download and install Farmville to receive 12 war bucs”.
So if you’re like me, you’re not a fan of web-based advertisements. I can’t recall the last time I clicked on one (at least on purpose) on a website. Yet last weekend, I sat around for 30 minutes, downloading and running all sorts of iPad apps to get my hands on some war bucs for better armor and weapons, totally changing my typical behavior when it comes to advertisements. I did actually find some good apps as well, like a real estate app and a recipe/cooking app. Most of the other apps I simply deleted after running once for my war bucs.
What can we borrow from this model in terms of education? Gun Brothers can be enjoyed without any war bucs, but a player’s progress would likely be much slower. Is there a way we could ‘incentivize’ certain things in education in a similar manner, changing our students’ behaviors to engage in additional content in some way?
I typically view gold farming (the process of accruing virtual gold in video games and then selling that gold for real money) as a bad thing overall for gaming. It breaks the magic circle, allowing very real forces (namely, real money) to invade and impact our virtual spaces. I understand the reason for gold farming as some players have a great deal of money but not a lot of time to build up their virtual wealth. So, why not just buy it outright?
This semester, I’ll be teaching a course on game design and development, IST 446. The primary assignment (or rather, string of team based assignments) takes teams of students through the inception, design, iteration and prototyping of an actual game. Or to be more realistic, game level or mod. Of all the tools out there, I haven’t really found a single tool that I feel *every* team could get behind and create some sort of playable demo by the end of the semester.
Enter Little Big Planet 2. I played the original, but never really plunged into the creation tools. Based on the recent review of the game, the second iteration seems to have simplified some elements of creation in addition to making the tools more powerful. The biggest issue? I’m assuming not everyone (nor every team) will have access to a Playstation 3 in order to access this set of tools. I’m hoping I can pull something off with the Educational Gaming Commons to alleviate this issue, and give every team the ability to create something in Little Big Planet 2.
If I can make it work, I’ll be sure to post some videos in May showcasing some of the students’ work.
I continue to be MIA a great deal and apologize for those of you still poking in from time to time. Due to a shift in jobs, I’ve had less time to spend on games and more time data mining and analyzing various aspects of Undergraduate Education here at Penn State. I’ve been writing some over on my Institute’s blog if these are topics that interest you.
Some of my gaming friends find this frustrating, as the quality and depth of these games by Zynga really doesn’t come close (from a story or game mechanic standpoint) to most of the AAA games being produced by EA and Activision-Blizzard. “This is just a trend!” one gamer declares, “EA and the other big publishers will certainly take back the top spots!”. Well, EA jumped on the Facebook bandwagon, penning a deal to take some of their own games to 500 million user platform.
I’m very curious to talk to my game design students this spring about how they feel about this whole social gaming explosion and its impact on the gaming industry as a whole. Some of us gamers feel like we have our own little hidden fantasy land with games, and we’re kind of territorial about it. This in and of itself is unfortunate, because games won’t grow as a medium until it is opened up to the masses.
Don’t be so disgruntled, fellow gamers! Even though these Facebook games are kind of boring for those of us used to, say, Warcraft and Mass Effect, it will usher in a whole new demographic of gamers that can help us keep pushing the medium forum.
