One thing I’m intrigued by already is the 3D GameLab tool for shaping projects, assignments, and coursework into experience (xp) -based systems of quests.  (For those who may be following along, this is a much more polished and well-built version of the by-the-seat-of-our-pants system Kirk Everist and I used to manage our Immersion Media course back in Spring 2009.)  The tool is in closed beta at the moment, but one of the creators is a THAT Camp attendee and has provided us with a preview version to play with.

One of the quests our coordinator (Dungeon Master?) posed for us is to watch Tom Chatfield’s TED talk on “7 Ways Games Reward the Brain” and comment on it in some “digital reflection.”  So let this serve as that (it’s 25 points on the line here).

I find the factual recounting of the data Chatfield presents to be accurate, at least anecdotally from my own gameplay experience, as well as in comparison to what I’ve seen other games and psychology researchers report.  But I find the overall tone of his talk to be overly instrumentalist in a way that degrades the complexity and depth of human thought, learning, and experience.  He presents these data as if now we simply need to apply what games researchers have learned about keeping players playing to education, using the same methods to keep learners learning.

But the problem with this angle on the issue is that game designers, especially those he features (especially World of Warcraft designers at Blizzard), always have at least a passing interest (and quite often much more intense than that) in profiting from players’ play.  But if educators are invested in profiting directly from learners’ learning, all kinds of undesirable outcomes accrue.  (Some of you may argue that I’m naive to suggest this — call me a romantic or an idealist if you like, but for me education and profit should not be linked in any practical sense.)  So the basic analogy is at least incomplete and problematic.

I would argue that what quest-based learning does offer for education is an alternative to a system of evaluation that is arguably even worse, and that is the A-F assignment-based system.  That dinosaur encourages teaching to the test, skill and drill, brain-dump cramming and purging, and a host of other fundamentally useless skills for students, whereas quest-based evaluation can, in the best circumstances, allow students to create chains of skills and learning into larger, more complex systems of thought and experience that can be more in line with the way people actually encounter, address, and solve problems in today’s complex world.  And it is for this reason that I’m still hanging around flirting with these ideas.

• Austincollege.edu (where I work)
• Boessen.wordpress.com (this blog)
• Calendar.google.com
• Docs.google.com
• Echobazaar.failbettergames.com (great game!)
• Facebook.com
• Google.com
• Hopper.austincollege.edu (my institution’s online portal-thing)
• Iaman00b.wordpress.com (student’s blog for my Games and Culture class)
• Jdprice13.wordpress.com (another student’s blog)
• Kayak.com
• Maps.google.com
• Netflix.com
• Osram.com (this is a little bizarre — I visited this site once two weeks ago looking for replacement bulbs for the media production equipment I supervise)
• Pandora.com
• Quickscreenshare.com (cool webapp I was pointed to for low-hassle screen sharing)
• Reader.google.com
• Shermanisd.net (local school system)
• Thatcamp.org (I’ve been to two of these in the past six months and am scheduled for a third in January 2012)
• Ultimate-guitar.com (I like to play)
• Valuesatplay.org (neat site focused on serious game design)
• WordPress.com
• (first hit in Chrome is “xbox”)
• Youtube.com
• (first hit in Chrome is “zillow”)

I’d say this is somewhat illuminating of my habits and interests, at least in terms of the sites I visit often:  higher ed (especially my institution and students’ work), the Googleverse.  The rare letters like Q, X, and Z are not surprising, but there are a few head-scratchers that I’m guessing have more to do with the way Chrome archives web history than anything personal about me.

Anyhoo, maybe this will start a FB trend or something.

NB — I don’t think this works in Firefox because of the way ff searches its web history.  I tried it on my wife’s ff and it brought back all kinds of weird stuff.

I say don’t forget about it because I don’t see much discussion of it any more among the blogs I follow, but I do think it is still one of (if not the) best gamestory/cyberdrama/interactive fiction projects out there when it comes to a certain kind of responsive AI that builds story on the fly.  It makes many compromises to enhance that effect — three and only three characters, two of which are AI, two (OK, technically three) small rooms in which to act, and a pre-made narrative setup that heavily constrains reasonable actions, plus a fairly limited 3D engine — but it still provides a credible environment in which a player interested in exploring the possibility space Façade provides can replay the story in several different ways, with a range of emotional outcomes.

What is the successor to Façade?  We’ve been talking a bit about Heavy Rain in my Games and Culture class, and that seems like it could be a contender.  But (not having yet fully completed it but hearing the criticism’s of folks like Michael Abbott) I’m not so sure.  What ever happened to the XBox Kinect game where you’d interact with a boy and the AI would read your facial expressions?  Wasn’t that pulled for some reason? (UPDATE: Wikipedia indicates the game, Milo, was halted, but the tech may be incorporated into another notable narrative-game hybrid title, Fable: The Journey).

So I’m left wondering what project will push beyond Façade to take 3D interactive storytelling to the next stage in its development.

What’s most cool about this is the way the game’s designers obviously were comfortable with the idea that games can be put to serious and important uses (or that serious objectives might be reached more quickly if paired with a little fun).  To me, this bodes well for the short and long term, in that others will be able to see the benefits of such experiments, perhaps even accelerating the funding and support cycles for them.

Of course not all, or perhaps not even most, of these kinds of experiments are likely to bear intellectual fruit.  But having a relatively early example of success should embolden others to try new approaches.  Good news all around.

A friend from graduate school recently contacted me about what aspects specific to Austin College an applicant for the position might want to consider in that regard, and I thought reposting an anonymized version of that exchange might be helpful to anyone else interested in the position who wanted to know more about it.  I imagine it could also be useful in a general way to folks thinking about working at a SLAC. (I should note in passing that I’m indebted to Jason Mittell for posting an exemplar of this kind of transparency on his blog two years ago.)

COLLEAGUE:

Hey Brett,

I’m writing my cover letter for the Media Studies position. Any suggestions?

how’s Sherman?

ME:

Sure. We need to know what your teaching experience and interests are, how you approach teaching, working with students, etc. Research experience and interests are important, but secondary.

Sherman is definitely a small town — about 35k residents, of which the faculty and staff of AC make up only a few hundred. However, it is about an hour from Dallas, and larger suburbs like Plano and McKinney can be reached in as little as 30 minutes.

COLLEAGUE:

…thanks for the advice – I tend to focus on my experience and qualifications in these cover letters, but as you point out, I better put more of my attitude and approach towards teaching/students in there. By the way, how would you compare your students to [the major public university where we received our degrees]?

ME:

Compared to [that public university], I’d say our students are brighter, more involved with activities around campus (meaning their time is spread more thinly), and more determined to have access to you (as their professor). This isn’t a place where you can really just be around for your classes and your two hours a week of office hours and be successful. The PR-speak these days is “high touch,” and AC is most definitely that.

It seems like a natural experiment, given a broad recognition of the importance of failure for innovation, especially in our digital networked reality, as well as the significant degree to which games designers regularly attend to the concept of failure and its application in their work.  Perhaps we would discover that, like any good design, straightforward, systematic reinforcement of failure would encourage even greater experimentation among participants in a way that would be productive for the larger populace.

The first response you’ll have is “games already do this, in a way, by have success and failure in the first place.”  Games allow iteration, and provide a challenge that is not immediately surmountable, so players inevitably fail.  And when they do, as Jane McGonigal notes, they learn from and enjoy it.  So why would we need to reward it at all?

I would argue that while in many games and all good ones, you wouldn’t, in game-like systems in which rewards might be offered as a means to assess more useful lines of inquiry, encouraging a little bit of failure up front could be valuable.  For example, I ask my students to blog in my classes, because I want them to try out different writing styles, methods of argument, and modes of address than they’re used to in a standard essay.  But they tend to be very wary of getting a bad grade, so they don’t tend to experiment with these variations as much as I’d like.  Incorporating a specific aspect of the assignment oriented toward failure would encourage them to take risks.

Your next response is likely to be, “Why not just increase the challenge of the assignment, so they have no option but to fail?  Wouldn’t that be easier?”  I’d argue that it would and it wouldn’t.  It would be easier to implement, but it would make the overall goals of the course — which include each student increasing in his or her confidence in and competence with the material — harder to achieve, because students would be more likely to become frustrated with the work and mentally “check out” of the class.

You might say “What you need is a rubric.  If you can offer them a well-ordered characterization of the components of success for an assignment, then you won’t need to use failure so bizarrely.  And anyway, this whole ‘failure is good’ thing you’re playing with is crazy.  Everyone knows failure is bad.”  And I agree that a rubric could potentially be helpful.  But when experimentation is only one of several factors that determine an assignment’s success, and perhaps even only help earlier in the process than later, then including it in a list of good habits might not be enough for many students.  And failure is not always or even mostly bad, if it is used within a system of other rewards.

I would consider awarding points for failure in a tapered fashion, awarding more earlier on in the process and for a student’s earliest entries, but less or not at all as the student develops her individual approach to the assignment.  This wold provide the student with motivation to experiment early on in the process, when the practice of experimentation needs to be habituated most powerfully, but still avoid gaming the system in an unproductive way.

For me, this is ultimately a question about ends: would something like this encourage the kinds of habits I want to cultivate in my students?  But there is a larger question here as well about the value (or lack thereof) of failure, which may not have been fully explored by games studies scholars because of biases against failure as a tool for learning.

• What is the role of non-industry-oriented digital media production in a Media Studies program?
• How much a part of a games education within a Media Studies program ought to involve the study of non-digital games?
• What are we really asking students to reflect on and practice when we teach Screenwriting in a liberal arts context?
• Is it productive to maintain a distinction between “digital story” and “video essay” when discussing new media forms?
• Is Digital Humanities problematic in the way Ian Bogost describes?  If not, why not, and if so, are those problems surmountable?  And how so?

All of this is on my mind.  Plus my 3-year-old seems to hate school.  Why.  Why?!  Hopefully I’ll get to some of it between class-related posts this semester.

But you must keep on keepin’ on.

Tower of Goo was made as part of the Experimental Gameplay Project, a rapid-prototyping assignment-thing at Carnegie Mellon.  The four grad students who ran it have just released a sort of After Action Review of their Lessons Learned from the Project, and it’s awesome.

They raise a number of salient points about game design, many of which are also about the creative process in general.  Some of these points are basic principles you can find in game design manuals like Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, just arrived at through practice/experience and therefore from a slightly different angle.  But many seem to me to be fairly unique to the form their own process took, and yet clearly applicable to a broader array of design situations than just a-game-a-week.

I’m looking forward to seeing what future iterations of the EGP at Carnegie Mellon produce, as well as what directions these original four take they’ve learned.