Category Archives: gaming

When We See It As A Challenge

blogging, Education, gaming

My attention lately has turned to game design and notions of gamification.  Part of it stems from the discussion of Reality is Broken that I facilitated earlier this year and part from my own growing devotion to time management strategy games. It has led me to incorporate game language into my ed tech course for pre-service teachers.  They are moving into the gamification phase right now as they determine which areas they wish to pursue in more depth and they’ll level up, achieve mastery, and then choose one area in which they will get to the Boss level.  One of the engaging pieces of games is the notion of the challenge.  If a game is too easy, we tend to be less interested. It has to be just hard enough that we have a sense we can beat it but know that we may fail before we succeed by applying the lessons we have learned in our earlier attempts.

I read two different pieces today that seem to be using the challenge approach to encourage positive change in two very different groups of people.

Education Week profiles Haut Gap Middle School, a school that has used the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Suports (PBIS) approach to discipline. It has something of a game style approach as it seeks to reward positive behavior:

For example, once every quarter, Haut Gap students who have collected the right number of PRIDE coupons earn a special privilege. They also can cash in their coupons for prizes. They earn coupons for asking thoughtful questions in class, being prepared for a lesson, and asking for permission the right way. Coupons or not, when students behave the right way, they are told.

“You have your reading book out,” English teacher Brandon Bobart told his students during a recent class. “I can tell you’re committed to your learning.”

Earlier this month, 6th grader Saniyah King happily reported she had earned 10 PRIDE coupons. If she has 20 by month’s end, she’ll get to take part in a schoolwide dress-up day, when students swap school uniforms for business attire.

I can hear some of you sputtering: why should kids be rewarded for good behavior?  It should simply be what is expected of you as a citizen. But we see rewards in the real world: earning points for good driving, getting at least a small interest rate for saving money, and in San Antonio and Chicago  a wellness challenge that will reward municipal employees for getting healthier with cash prizes and penalize those who don’t by increasing their health benefit payment.

The second article was a reminder from Shelly Terrell about the 30 Goals Challenge for 2012. She has been focusing on one or two goals a week but I may at least get started on the list in anticipation of getting into the 2013 challenge at the beginning. Having specific goals for learning and growth can help guide us as students. When they are set as personal challenges, we may find them even more compelling.  And like a good game, Terrell builds in reflection: why did you learn by completing this challenge.

Of course, I’m already involved in a 30 day challenge of blogging every day.  It’s been a good journey: I find myself thinking about the blog entry throughout the day and then sitting down in the evening to pull it together. But sometimes, like yesterday, I will see a headline that just calls for comment. I’ve allowed myself a fairly wide net of subjects from poverty to technology to Neil Young with a blog entry about Bruce Springsteen is in the works.

I’m doing some reflecting on whether or not I can keep this up after the 30 days ends next week. I would like to very much as I’ve found the practice of writing to be very useful both in terms of codifying my ideas and beliefs but also in terms of making me keep up a bit more as I look for blog fodder. I’m considering ideas for how to streamline it a bit and will share them in a future entry.

On My Own

gaming, learning, Uncategorized

My current iPad game is My kingdom For a Princess. Typical building/time management game. Like many of these games, you can move forward without achieving expert level, but I prefer to play that way.  Well, I got stumped. So, I did what I always do: cheat. Or I should say I tried to cheat.

But I couldn’t find a walkthrough of this level anywhere. It was something of an outlier as it appeared after I completed a level. And no one seemed to be offering suggestions. I was only losing by a few seconds but nothing I tried made the difference. Until…

I remembered a tip I had read when I first started playing. You don’t always have to collect all the resources. Taking that advice along with my own observations, I tried something completely different, working down a different path and ignoring a few caches of materials that I had simply assumed I needed. And low and behold, it worked. I had been seduced by riches and taken my focus off the ultimate goal.

Life lesson? Probably but it is Friday and I am not in a reflective mood so for now it is just a gaming lesson and one I will continue to apply as I move into the next level.

Relaxing with a Game

21st Century Skills, gaming, professional development, Uncategorized

I have been traveling and training for the past two months and finally just needed a Friday afternoon mostly off to relax a bit before the last push next week. So, I opened up my current game: Roads of Rome 2. It is a time management game, my favorite kind, and I was looking forward to a bit of time creating settlements, negotiating with pirates, building roads and picking up crystals and other artifacts. But as I played I was thinking about gaming…something I’ve been doing a lot of this summer with the book group and the discussions I’ve been having with teachers and tech coaches. Two quick observations:

1. There are parts of this game that I still don’t completely understand. They have added a few extra types of buildings that help in some way that, at least to me, is not completely transparent. In some cases, I haven’t built them at all and it doesn’t seem to make a difference to the outcome of the level. It’s odd that I’m able to play a game fairly successfully without being an “expert.”

2. I also haven’t always had to upgrade the buildings in order to get the expert score. In fact, I suspect I got the high score because I DID NOT upgrade the buildings. It seems that one of the lessons of this game is learning how to prioritize your use of manpower and resources. When do you hire new people and when can three people do the work? Which buildings must be upgraded in order to succeed? Sometimes I get it right on the first try but often I replay the level, putting my knowledge from the previous tries to work. Which resources were in short supply? Did I get a lot of warnings about needing more workers? With time ticking away, there really can’t be any down time as you wait for more gold or for a worker to scurry home.

Can these lessons be applied to life? In the James Gee video from Edutopia that I shared with some teachers yesterday, Gee talks about how World of Warcraft teaches collaboration by forcing you to work with others who have different skill sets and expertise, certainly a very important real world lesson. The lessons above should also be part of a real life toolkit: being able to live with a little ambiguity and knowing how to use resources and people wisely are mentioned by many leadership experts as characteristics of successful leaders.

Am I rationalizing playing a game on Friday afternoon by trying to write something thoughtful? Sort of….but my audience yesterday was not made up of gamers and I could tell they were surprised by learning about some of the features of games and what kids (and grown ups) might be learning as they are playing or how games like Chore Wars could make houseclearning fun!

Learning As You Go

21st Century Skills, gaming

I am in the midst of playing several time management games and one thing they have in common is that they don’t come with any help files.  Unlike the board games I played as a kid, there are no directions printed on the lid. In her book Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal points out that this is the big difference between digital and predigital games:

Many, if not most, computer and video games today are structured this way. Players begin each game by tackling the obstacle of not knowing what to do and not knowing how to play. This kind of ambiguous play is markedly different from historical, predigital games. Traditionally, we have needed instructions in order to play a game. But now we’re often invited to learn as we go. We explore the game space, and the computer code effectively constrains and guides us. We learn how to play by carefully observing what the game allows us to do and how it responds to our input. As a result, most gamers never read game manuals. In fact, it’s a truism in the game industry that a well-designed game should be playable immediately, with no instruction whatsoever.

This observation resonated with me and reminded me of an experience I had with a group of non-gamers in graduate school.  I was charged with showing a group of educators a simulation, and I chose Food Force, a game developed by the World Food Programme.  I gave them the overview of the game, showed them how the various virtual aid workers would guide them and then let them go.

The biggest complaint at the end was that I did not give them enough information and background in order to play the game.  Essentially, they wanted me to take them through each section of the game and show them how to be successful before they ever started.  Learning as they went meant that they often “failed” and this was not something that doctoral students liked doing.  The mind set was that you either did it right the first time or you were a failure and I couldn’t help wondering how that translated into the way they worked with their students in their classrooms.

Learning as you go and learning as you fail are part of the lessons of digital games and I wonder how those lessons play out in the game of life?  Are gamers more observant in the real world?  Are they better able to navigate an unfamiliar landscape?

I’ve Been Meaning to Write This Post But

books, gaming,

I got stuck on Level 17 (2.7) in Roads to Rome and just had to beat the expert time.  The game lets you move even without making expert time, but somehow I just needed to see the next little bit of the statue revealed and that only happens when you finish all the tasks before expert time runs out.  Plus, each time I played the level, I got a little bit better and could tell that if I just started building the road a little earlier, I would make it.

Now, I know there are a few of you who are rolling your eyes and thinking that this just proves that games are time killers.  After all, I could have been doing something productive and creative like writing a blog post.  But since I knew this post would be about gaming, I’m going to call it research.  And, part of my brain was writing the post even as I learned how to beat the level in expert time.  I was thinking about how I applied what I learned each time to eek just a little bit more speed out of my workers.  A few times I restarted when I realized I had not applied the lessons which meant workers were idling away in camp while I waited for resources to regenerate.  It has been the toughest level so far in the game, and when the last patch of road appeared with the time bar still in the green, I experienced what, in Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal calls “fiero”: an Italian word that basically means “proud” in the sense of “yeah! I finally did it!”  As I played the game, I experience what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” that sense of being completely absorbed in the moment.  Two pretty good feelings to achieve on a late Tuesday afternoon.

Last evening, I found flow and fiero in Second Life as well.  The crew on VSTE Island had arranged a wonderful July 4th party with lots of activities from kayaking to skydiving.  I particularly enjoyed kayaking.  I kayak in my first life and found that I could apply my knowledge to the virtual version in order to make my way through the wonderful streams and rivers that are part of VSTE Island. And, in what might seem a strange way, it was relaxing. I think it was the concentration and then the success–flow and fiero–that helped create that sense of calm.

I am not completely sold on all McGonigal’s tenets in her book.  Parts of it seem overwritten and undersupported.  But as I continue to play games, I find that some of what she writes resonates with my own experience so I am not willing to completely deride her.