Games a more effective way to learn stuff

There are currently 30 companies in the UK working in Serious Game development. What are serious games and why should you be using them?

Digital 2.0 is a serious games consultancy. They don’t have in house developers however, they work with the client and manage the project. They support developers by providing the people needed by small developer companies. Digital 2.0 present Serious Games as ‘not for entertainment purposes’, a distinction which I think will be very problematic in enthusing users to play the games. For Digital 2.0, Game-Based Learning, Experiential Learning (role playing), traditional education and E-learning are all brought together in Serious Games. These are played online and run on a lower band width hence the graphics aren’t as fancy as is usual with console games.

Examples of games made by Digital 2.0.

Marketing game ‘The Process Game’

MRSA Prevention - a game to help prevent hospital super-bug.

Oil and Gas - learning the evacuation drill for oil rigs.

Team building game for young people.

Maverick TV have another approach which does consider serious games to be based on entertainment and a revenue model. These are sponsored games which are add-ons to establshed TV formats eg How to Look Good Naked. The TV show format allows for only one audience apricipant for each of teh eight shows. with 10,000 women applying to atke part, Maverick saw an opportunity to include a wider audience by creating an online ‘serious game.’ They believe the game would stand alone without the TV show as they also see it as a commercial outlet. The game has an avatar system and it also makes fashion recommendations with selected brand sponsors ie clothes retailers. This game is commissioned by Channel 4.

“TV can’t exist in isolation anymore, it’s about going out and finding your audience”.

Podcasting as a platform for Serious Games or Informal Learning.

The NTI in Birmingham uses podcasts in serious gaming which they call ‘informal learning’, meaning all the styuff around formal learning. Formal learning isn’t too great at getting information into people’s heads. Podcasting is a good part of the informal learning tool kit: person to person communication really works.

Sorry guys, what you’re saying could be interesting but the panel presentation is verry dull.

How Can Games Be Used For Teaching?

A panel of games designers and academics this morning discuss using ‘serious gaming’ to help people learn. They were referring to ‘video games’ and only mentioned Alternate Reality Games very briefly when one of the makers of World Without Oil asked about it. This showed that there is still very little understanding of ARGs and their potential as a learning tool is still not recognised by the computer games industry.

Having said that, the producers of video games for learning have a lot of useful tips on serious game design:

Aliza Gold http://www.dmc.utexas.edu/ says school isn’t working as well as it could. There’s a 30% drop out rate in the US. how can the engagment that games give be applied to school. abstract ideas without enough context makes it harder to learn - trigonometry is more interesting when you’re building a bridge. College tutors need to be gamers themselves in order to use games as a teaching tool.

Games aren’t so new anymore and we can think about using them for more ‘important’ purposes. What mechanisms are we going to use to make this work? can games teach in the way a good teacher can? not all games are about killing things. ofcourse games can teach, how can this be done?

A teachers role these days is about facilitating learning amongst their students, helping them to ggrow understanding of themselves and the world.

Many serious games are boring, how can they be made more fun? Gold says the mechanics of the game should reflect what the students are going to learn by playing it. you’re learning a process during the game. so the game helps to teach a process. Wikipedia and google can be used as part of the game.

How can an online game be as addictive as say Halo 2 for students? Is just a competive game enough or would it need add ons like itunes for free? The student gamer on the panel says just the fact that its so different would make kids want to try it. Games will give the oppotunity to keep trying and keep learning if you miss certain aspects of the subject or some classes. The game fills in where the teacher doesn’t have time to go back over things with the student. There’s no secret answer how we motivate players. Study of player direction and ramping up of challenges, operating just outside the comfort zone and stretch your skills but sometimes you succeed and the more you succeed the better you get. It’s just beyond your skill but you see how you can get better. Almost winning keeps you going. The problem with larger classrooms is that not everybody learns at the same pace, the only kids that get motivated are a thin slice. Challenge, motivation and direction can be helped by games. Match the level of difficulty with the player.

Aliza Gold on large class sizes and larger online groups of thousands… games have the abiltity to scale. In a massively multi player context the game can be scaled so you interact in small groups, you also get peer mentoring and helping other players out. students can learn from mentoring and they like to do that. how do you know that the students ahve learnt anything? How do we assess the learning? Games assess the players constantly as they play the game. The challenge is to develop assessments of learning through games. The students themsleves might not see the underlying skills they’re learning. They need to be made to see what they’re learning, what they’ve learnt must be fed back to them.

How about budget and time to make these games? Games are very expensive to make eg $1.5 million - so what does it do that a book doesn’t do at much less cost? eg a game for the US Navy called 24 Blue. The job of the game makers is to help them understand where thigns were in teh deck of the ship. can the game replace training? no but it can show you more about what to expect, so the game adds quality to the training. So the money is well spent on such a critical need for good training in life and death sitiuations. What’s the difference between serious games and simulations? Sim City is a game used for teaching, it is a complex system where you learn the processes involved in running a city. As simulation and 3D environments become quicker and easier to make, immersive experiences in simulated worlds will become more and more common for learning all aspects of life.

Engineering happiness

Interactive designers are in the happiness business, designing services and experiences which improve people’s lives.

Today’s keynote is from ARG queen Jane McGonigal. Despite her worry there would be less excitement than previous day’s sessions, she delivered a great talk on how ARGs are helping to define a new type of happiness.

Presenting happiness as the new social capital, she described a near future where wellbeing may be the metric against which we measure all design.

Satisfying work, the experience of being good at something, being part of something and collaborating with people we like, makes people happy. Multi-player games then, are the ultimate happiness creating engines. They are community based, collaborative, come with a clear mission and feedback mechanisms which can make them more rewarding than real life.

How then do we take some of the involved, interactive and collaborative elements of gaming and use them to make real life better?

Signals people are already doing it:

• Chore wars - kids earning game points when they do chores.
• Seriosity - You want me to read that report/attend that meeting? It will cost you: virtual currency for the workplace.
• Citizen logistics - a located game-like way of working, volunteering, finding assistance and having a good time which gives points for making other people’s dreams come true.

Talking through her new research exploring the characteristics of ARGs, she ended with three main points:

• We are all in the happiness business, we might just not be fully aware of it yet.
• Game designers have a head start because they are used to optimizing experiences.
• ARGs are important because they signal a desire in all of us to redesign reality for a better quality of life.

Phizzpop - a digital design showdown

We headed out last night to see the final of Phizzpop - http://phizzpop.visitmix.com/ a digital design challenge that pitches the creative and technical teams of 5 leading digital agencies togther from LA, New York, Austin, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago.

We headed to Maggie Mae’s a huge multi level bar donwtown, to see how each agency would tackle their final 15 minute pitch.  It included a team from AKQA so we ordered a beer and pushed our way to the front.

The teams presented their designs and concpets to a panel of 6 judges and a very packed an noisey room.  The pitches varied drastically in style and content and some of the poor guys looked totally terrified as they took to the stage and gave a live demonstration of what they’d spent the past 6 months developing.

All agencies were given the same brief - to develop and market a multiplatform system that engaged American voters in the political process, enabling them to debate issues together in realtime and then to develop the functionality that actually allowed them to cast their vote.

It was fascinating seeing the different presentation styles, how each agency had gone about tackling the creative executuion and getting their heads around all the usability issues. 

Our favourite, which also turned out to be the overall winner was from an agency called cynergy http://cynergysystems.com.  A very sharp and confident user experience chap took to the stage, totally blew away the crowd (and the judges) and presented an fantastic concept that stood head and shoulders above the rest of their fellow competitors.  Nice work boys…

Big Market - casual games for girls.

Casual Massively Multiplayer Online gaming is not only a mouthful of words it’s also very, very big business and success is to be measured by the level of engagment experienced by the users and not by large numbers of click throughs.

What constitutes immersiveness with casual MMOs?

Any place where a number of people gather online and there’s some kind of loose game structure and the game itself has shorter ‘compulsion loops’: eg could even be Club Penguin A casual MMO virtual world such as Gaia is built around a community and enagement between the users themselves is very important.

However, virtual worlds where you walk around using an avatar has become incredibly competitive over the last year, its very crowed but there are other opportunities such as Facebook games or Pmog.

Not being 3D has a lot of benefits as it reduces the barrier to entry, you don’t have to download anything. It’s the engagement that matters if these worlds are immersive enough they can be made in html.

Immersive is the right world to focus on, as is engagement eg Puzzle Pirates. Immersion is much deaper than just a tool. 3D experience isn’t everything, the experience and sence of place is important and can be done on html because the experience happens in your mind not in the graphics. Graphics don’t matter, the mind models the situation. Tweens and teens are less graphically sensitive as we get older we demand more graphic details.

Core demographic:

For Gaia on line mid to late teens 15- 20

Mind Candy Moshi Monsters virtual pets 7-12 year olds with secondary of any older age.

Club Penguin 4-7

Habo Hotel tweens teens

Puzzle Pirates is below 13 but officiallly its over 13.

Above 25 is where the most oppotunity for growth is. College kids building their social lives on line, for that age group it becomes more about building their own personal identity that equals a very different type of product for that demographic. Experimenting with identity is tradional for casual MMOs so why be different? Core demo for WoW and Guitar Hero early to mid 20s, taking the demo mainstream and pick up on people who have grown out of Club Penguin.

Moshi Monsters is not as niche as WOW because more mainstream themes will have much bigger user numbers. So things like dancing and pets are a much bigger market even than sci-fi or fantasy.

Successful multiplayer games for females are a very good idea for attracting large user numers. There are many opportunities for girls’ casual MMOs, this is a very big market.

6-10 year olds is a big sector but a tough one to crack. What people are not being served? Having a specific focus is important, bringing needed stuff to a focussed demographic.

Big brand competition -Disney - Tinkerbell, Pirates of the Caribbean online, Barbie online very successful. But it’s unique users that matter and how often they come back. Building on-going engagement is what matters and there is a lot of hope for small start-up companies in this market.

Mind Candy with Moshi monsters creates a rich emotional relationship between audience and their pet and also an educational element - the pet sends you puzzles everyday and the parents and teachers Mindy Candy have spoken to are very keen on this.

How do we make money from this business?

The panel concentrate on virtual goods for sale and subscription, or mixing of the two:

virtual item sales - users expand the kinds of things they can do within the game of gaiaonline.com and what they can do witht heir friends by buying virtual items. Gaia also makes money from trading of virtual goods, virtual cash and evolving items - they start as one thing and turn into something else - Gaia makes a million dollars a month from virtual goods. There’s also a strong opportunity for syndicating virtual goods ie they can be used across different games. Gaia has 5 million users a month.

Subscription rather than micro payements is much more popular with the younger audience because its easier for the child to ask their parent to pay once with their credit card. This is a multi million dollar business and rather than with regular real world retail, web companies can start small and grow rapidly.

Should you charge for all of game play or make game play free and charge only for enhancement elements? Both can work.

Sponsorship:

Gaia - $75K to £200K sponsorships for three months

It’s a fine balance between user engagement and pushing brands too much. try to bring in sponsors who bring in intereesting, cool stuff for the users.

Another idea is having user competition for them to design items themselves.

Tie in how the users engage with the sponsorship, define the success around engagment rather than click throughs and all that.

In next ten years kids who grew up on Habo and Club Penguin will be in the work place. We still make a distinciton between real life and virtual life but as these young people age they won’t have the distinction. They will have the same collector motoivations but they will maintain their lack of distinctions between real and virtual goods to purchase. Teachers giving homework in these worlds is allready happening in Asia and will continue to grow everywhere. Culturally, virtual worlds engagement will grow and grow.

lightspeeddvp.com

freeroplay.biz

conduitlabs.com

moshimonsters.com (Mind Candy)

gaiaonline.com

World's Top ARG Producers Sit Around The Table

 So yesterday was my best one yet! I sat at a small round table with some of the coolest and most creative people in the gaming world. A step towards turning Alternative Gaming into an industry distinct from the video gaming industry. The business model? Funding from clients and not subscription.

Amongst those attending our cosy chat were Steve Petersof 42 Entertainment (The Beast etc etc!) Jane McGonigal and Dee Cook (World Without Oil), Dan Hon (Perplex City)…and yours truly…Hazel Grian of Licorice (MeiGeist).

 The discussion was chaired by ARG producer Tony Walsh (secretlair.com) 

postsecret

Post Secret is a simple concept that invites people to share secrets anonymously by snail mail. The results are shared on a blog, and published in books. It’s a great idea, a great project. Part of the discussion around it touched on how free web tools make this possible. This publishing power is amazing, and amazing tools support it. One thought that stayed with me after the event was that this service – and others like it - just doesn’t a revenue model. It’s a labour of love, an art project driven by one committed individual that has spawned a community and a few hundred thousand meaningful events. Things like that don’t need anyone to get paid. The costs are trivial and will only get lower; the people behind such projects (maybe) don’t need to get paid. No-one’s mortgage rides on this. I run a commercial business, so I’m always asking where’s the money; other people’s mortgages really do ride on decisions I make. Post Secrets convinces me that some things really do want to be free.