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Jan
14
Games Can Inspire Creative Thinking
Filed Under creativity, gaming | View Comments
This really became an accidental series, but I think it reflects some of what’s often in the back of my mind when I’m playing a game or watching others game.
So far, the series has covered games as:
- a means to develop a better self-image while building team skills
- a means to learn how to interact with others fairly
- a means to learn how to best utilize resources and develop patience
Now, we have a skill I think I probably developed from playing all sorts of games when I was younger- the ability to solve problems, think outside the box, and innovate.
I know this is going to sound crazy, but for me thinking creatively really starts with thinking logically. What’s the procedure here? What are the absolutes? What’s the goal here? What’s the common sense here? And then I start looking at what I have and where I really need to go, and I make a decision from there.
Sometimes, it’s not so clear how I’m going to put things together to solve my problem, and that’s when the creative thinking comes in. I start theorizing ways to get where I’m going and pick the simplest or most effective one. When the first doesn’t work, I pick a solution that accounts for what caused the first to fail and go with that. I keep trying until something works.
It turns out I’m not so odd in my thinking. Researchers are finding that there are gamers who make guesses, execute their guesses, and then alter them to better fit the situation when they fail. They also document their data from earlier trials to help them later on. They apply the Scientific Method to their gaming. (You knew there was a reason you should pay more attention in science class.)
Sometimes, I’ll get stuck while playing a game, and then I have to resort to walkthroughs. I have found, though, that a walkthrough is really just an account of someone else’s trip through the game, and no two walkthroughs are ever the same. So, I’ll look at how they did it to see if I’ve overlooked something, and then I continue on. What’s really interesting is that Nintendo has a patent for the “Kind Code”, an in-game walkthrough of sorts so you don’t have to go looking for outside resources when you’re stuck (and so you won’t quit the game in frustration). But you can use the in-game hint, and then decide to resolve the problem your own way if you see something that would work just as well, if not better than the game developers’ solution.
With a little experimentation and a nudge when you need it, you can actually develop some well-honed problem solving skills simply by playing games.
Jan
11
Gaming Can Be Training
Filed Under gaming, lifelong learning | View Comments
Last night, my roommate explained Farmville to a friend of his. I personally don’t play the game, so I was fascinated as I listened to him explain the game and why he does what he does in game. For example, he explained he cultivates a certain type of crop because they’re cheap to plant and are guaranteed at least three times their worth when you sell the grown plant.
Having watched him play similar games, I know he’s applied this same mindset to those. As they keep working, he’s now always on the lookout for the best ROI, even though he has no clue what that means. And he’s looking to do the same when he makes deals with friends, coworkers, and others away from the game.
He’s also learning to be patient while he waits for things to happen in game so he can get what he needs to move on. I sat with him one night while he was playing the cafe game. We were chatting and he was cataloging the movies he’d just added to his collection, periodically looking at the screen. When I asked what he was doing, because it looked like his characters were moving around doing things on their own, he explained that he’d set up some things to cook, and he was waiting for one of them to finish so he could set up the next dish. This particular roommate can be impatient at times, so watching him find ways to keep himself occupied and calm while he waited for the in-game action to complete was impressive.
So, games can impart many lessons to both children and adults: being the best solo and team player you can, fair deals and interaction, and how to wisely invest resources.
Jan
8
Games Develop Transactional Awareness
Filed Under gaming, lifelong learning, personal development | View Comments
During grad school, I spent my weekends helping out at a friend’s game shop. The shop hosted the Pokemon League and held a weekly tournament, which meant there were a lot of tweens and teens in the shop. My friend was often handling sales and doing orders and to say the other owner wasn’t good with kids would be a gross understatement, so I ran League and the tournament and my friend did all the official paperwork for it.
Watching the kids between games and tournament rounds was interesting. They would swap strategy tips and help out confused newcomers. The more experienced kids would take on a trainer or mentoring role, adopting the new kid and showing them how to best use their cards or how to combine their cards. They would help them navigate the League procedures. The newcomer was quickly settled in, and the kids were helping each other become better players.
Sometimes, the kids would trade cards. They’d work together to find a comparable trade that would make both parties happy. Sometimes, they’d come borrow a trade magazine to check and make sure they had a fair trade going. When a dispute came up, they worked it out themselves or asked a third kid to help them resolve it. They only brought it to the owners if they absolutely couldn’t work it out on their own.
A couple of years after I left, these same kids were working together to set up in-store leagues and tournaments for other TCGs, continuing to mentor new kids in as they showed up. We were pretty proud of them.
People frown on the obsessiveness that can come from gaming, especially TCGs and miniature gaming, but they’re missing the benefits these kids get from engaging in them. They learn to share their knowledge. They learn how to help out someone else, selflessly in most cases. They learn how to resolve their own disagreements. They learn how to negotiate with an eye toward win-win results. They learn how to interact with each other, and they learn what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in interacting with someone else.
Gaming develops a wide range of skills, which helps younger gamers develop into adults who can better handle the world around them.
Jan
4
Gaming Builds Business Skills
Filed Under gaming, lifelong learning | View Comments
Over the holidays, I had the opportunity to play Rock Band with some friends. I was already playing when they showed up, and I had to fight to not let my stage fright get the better of me (especially since I used to play with one of them all the time). But I stood there, hoping they weren’t listening to me, hoping they weren’t watching the screen. Deep down, I knew they were making mental notes of every phrase I completed that wasn’t perfect.
They really weren’t. They were too busy discussing the background to care what I was doing, and as soon as the song was over they were grabbing guitars and logging on. Lesson #1: No one expects you to be perfect. They just want you to try.
Before long, the three of us were jamming out, having fun. Everyone worked at their own level, and we sounded great. Occasionally, one of us would try to play something a level higher than we normally would, just to see if we could do it, and the others were supportive. Lesson #2: You don’t have to be as talented as the guy next to you. You just have to do well at your own level and stretch yourself periodically.
Of course, in pushing ourselves (or in trying songs one of us really didn’t know), we’d inevitably find ourselves struggling. No one would really notice until part of the screen started glowing red, and then someone would activate their Overdrive and save us. Lesson #3: When everyone is keeping up their end of the job, no one notices your mistakes until there’s a noticeable call for help, and then they help you out.
I’ve felt for a long time that gaming, like playing, is necessary for skill development. Small children learn about the world around them through play. Children and adults learn how to interact with each other and the world around them through gaming. There are companies that are starting to view skills acquired through gaming just as strong or as valid as those earned through work and volunteer experience.
You just have to open yourself to learning and to what constitutes a “learning experience”.
Nov
9
Questioning strategies as game deisgn?
Filed Under content development, education, gaming | View Comments
One of the issues I’ve been struggling with as I try to imagine how I would develop game-inspired educational material is how to incorporate my teaching style into my work. The problem is: I’m a Constructivist with Socratic tendencies.
That first isn’t too big a problem. Sequential story-lessons are easily planned out and created, and mythocentric game design makes a compelling argument for letting story-lessons that don’t rely on each other serve as a “level” that the learner can explore at will before being allowed to move on to the next “level” and building on what they’ve learned in lower “levels”.
The second, however, is a bit more challenging. I tend to direct my students through questions, helping them to make their own connections and to see why they’re doing what they’re doing. When the teacher isn’t present, though, it’s hard to know what sequence of questions to set up to help facilitate that type of learning.
After reading Emily Short’s series on modeling conversation in interactive fiction, I thought I had it somewhat figured out: create a Guide NPC to ask more common or basic questions to guide learner between encounters and to help the learner think through the problem when they’ve made a mistake. The Guide NPC could even go so far as to offer a review if the learner is completely off-topic.
The more I thought about that, the more I felt myself getting turned around because I felt I was making too big an assumption with the basic or common questions. Then, a former student and I gather around a virtual whiteboard to see what was going wrong on a homework assignment, and I found a preliminary answer. As we talked, I found the probing and directing questions I nearly always ask, mainly because she was asking herself those questions with a preface of, “I know you’d ask me…”
The next problem to either resolve or let go is wait time. I use that to help feel out where a student is in understanding what they’re working on, but I can’t exactly give a fictional character that same instinct.
Nov
3
A friend loaned me this game when I was laid up with tendinitis in my ankle, and I’ve been slowly working. my way through it.
Well, I was. The game play has finally pushed me too far, and I’ve lost all desire to return.
At first, I liked working my way through the conversations and the trial. But soon enough I was finding that a character would tell you exactly what you needed to know to break their testimony, but because they told you, there was no evidence to present and you actually had to figure out what piece of evidence sort of related to that testimony to get them to say it at the right moment. Except they didn’t seem to remember they had already told you that piece of information, and the judge would throw it out.
It got pretty frustrating after the first couple of times it happened in the first case. Add to that the repetitive nature of the movement and conversations (at one point, you have to have the same conversation with a character five times before you finally get the information you need to move forward in the case), and the game became fairly stale.
Phoenix and the Fey girls are fairly entertaining, but they aren’t enough to make you ignore the game play.
Jul
24
The Token Girl
Filed Under character development, gaming | View Comments
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been keenly aware of female characters in the everything I read or watch. I love a good strong female character, but was always very aware that there just weren’t that many, protagonist or otherwise, in the action series I was fond of.
I was so aware of how few girls there were that by middle school, I was calling characters like Gloria Baker and R.C. “token girls”, a term I still apply to the girl character in a group of guys. I was keenly aware of the token girl in every cartoon I watched or book I read. I resented when Gloria was knocked unconscious and one of the men had to rescue her. When Artemis Entreri took Catti-Brie hostage, I was nearly ready to walk out on IceWind Dale.
Playing with my boy cousins, I was invariably the person who got kidnapped by the “bad guy”. (I was always fairly well-treated by my captor, too.) When I grew up and fell in with a LARP crowd, I often found myself the only girl around and therefore the damsel in distress during games. Sometimes, both as a child an an adult, I didn’t really care because it made sense with the storyline of the game. But then there were times where it was clear that the caveman thinking went: She’s a girl. Girls always get kidnapped by the bad guy. Let’s go to great lengths to kidnap her in favor of a more easily snagged guy. And I protested.
There are plenty of examples where the token girl is allowed to just be part of the team, but there aren’t enough of them to have a strong impact on children, their games, and the stories they create.
Feb
10
Reacting to an adaptation
Filed Under animation, content development, gaming, reading, writing | View Comments
Last week, a coworker loaned me the first second Death Note movie after she found out I’m a fan of both the manga and the anime. It was subtitled, which I don’t enjoy, so it took me most of Sunday to get through it. What I found really interesting was how they took elements from all along the manga and compressed them into this movie. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “Wow, this is a very creative adaptation.”
On Saturday night, a friend patiently sat through my tirade on a Wired article about Warner Brothers revitalizing the Tomb Raider franchise roughly a year and a half after completely giving up woman-led action movies. In my ranting, I ended up professing my love for the first movie because I felt it was a strong adaptation of the games and condemning the second for being little more than trendy. I’ve known other Tomb Raider fans who’ve felt the same way.
Books and video games have been adapted to television shows, cartoons, and movies for decades now, and fans are quick to scream when the adaptation doesn’t reflect their own impression of the book or game in question. A well-done adaptation can be shredded by the fans because a beloved character was left out, or a setting doesn’t look the way the fan artists have drawn it. We’re quite vicious about it sometimes.
Sitting there Sunday night, adoring the actor who brilliantly played the rather inhuman character L, I realized I’ve heard very few complaints about this movie. But it is an adaptation, and I’d fill up a page of notebook paper trying to list everything that was changed. But no one really seems to care.
I wonder…is our search for a close adaptation a cultural thing?
Apr
14
Gaming can promote literacy
Filed Under gaming | View Comments
I’ve blogged in the past about using Pokemon to get a child resistant to reading to start reading. It seems I’m not the only one who thinks gaming can get kids to read.
Often, when you try to encourage a child to read, all they can think about is reading in class, where they might be expected to read out loud but are embarrassed because they don’t read as fluidly as another child. They might associate reading a book with comprehension quizzes that they might not do so well at because they have a hard time reading quickly and deeply enough to actually understand what they’re reading. You could be trying to encourage the child to read a book on their favorite sports figure, and you’ll get more of a reaction from the wall. The child’s experiences with reading in the school setting are a far stronger motivator than reading about how Michael Jordan became a fantastic athlete.
When you sit a child down in front of a game, regardless of how text-heavy it is, the child is motivated to read. If you hand them a TCG game, they want to read the cards to see what each one does. If you hand them a game like Kingdom Hearts (I realize I’m dating myself slightly just a hair here), then some will choose to read the story while others will choose to focus solely on the directions for accomplishing a task in the game.
Either way, the child is reading.
The article focuses on encouraging students to decode symbols, which really is what’s taking place in reading, but I think just seeing characters read a picked-up letter, a book, or a newspaper also reinforce and encourage literacy ideals because the child sees that and can understand that reading allows the character to gain the knowledge they need to move on. Now it’s not just trying to decode the symbols on the page, it’s associating meaning with them, and most children can follow that.
In the attempt to reach tweens and teens, games are likely going to incorporate more and more literacy concepts, both to help the student navigate the game and to keep them engaged in learning how to read and think critically.
Jan
15
Wii are (apparently) amused
Filed Under gaming | View Comments
Queen Elizabeth II is quite the woman. Well traveled, fluent in French, an avid photographer. She’s also sat for a holographic portrait, sent emails even before it was common to do so…
…and apparently, she enjoys playing the Nintendo Wii.
How cool is that?
