Dan Roy@crossgamer.com's blog

This January we ran the first annual Boston Game Jam in The Education Arcadelab here at MIT. I've written a summary of the event as a guest blog for Henry Jenkins. In this post, I want to describe the game that I created, called Conflict Diamond. It's a game for change designed to draw attention to segments of the diamond trade that support violence. Here is the description of the issue included in the game on its About screen:

Conflict diamonds are most definitely not a girl’s best friend. According to Wikipedia, “A blood diamond (also called a conflict diamond or a war diamond) is a diamond mined in a war zone and sold, usually clandestinely, in order to finance an insurgent or invading army's war efforts.”

Synthetic diamonds are molecularly superior to “genuine” diamonds, but are stigmatized by many consumers as not being “the real thing.” Unfortunately, some “geniune” diamonds fund brutal organizations that not only kill but conscript child soldiers, keep soldiers drugged and out of their minds, and amputate limbs in whole villages. Synthetic diamonds don’t fund these atrocities.

This is the first in a series of articles about my experience playing World of Warcraft to learn Spanish. This is the continuation of my thinking with Ravi Purushotma at MIT about how to use commercial off the shelf games as language learning tools (see our GDC 2006 presentation video and Ravi's thesis). The basic premise with all of this work is that commercial games are already localized into many languages and that language educators and game developers can use these resources to cheaply create entertaining learning experiences. Blogger Katelyn Olmstead, a co-conspirator in this experiment, has already begun her own series on playing WoW to learn Spanish. Her first article focuses on the technical challenges we faced getting the Spanish version set up in the US.

I gave my presentation Wednesday at Future Play 2006, as part of the Student Perspectives on Issues in Games panel. I call it, "Multiplayer Gaming v. Board of Education," because it relates to MMOs, school, cross-platform gaming, and what I'm calling positive identity construction. Here's my own summary.

My underlying desire is to improve the game experience for all players and to use these games to improve education (I'm designing educational games right now). I particularly like the multiplayer component of MMOs in the context of education, because so many of the things people want to learn to do involve interacting with other people and because anything we do has more meaning in a social context. So, I've been thinking about MMOs for education for awhile (particularly to teach languages). One property of using any kind of game for education is that assessment is built in -- the game knows if you're succeeding or not. However, I did not consider using these games to improve the sometimes-bane of every student's academic existence: standardized tests. These tests are, after all, basically the assessment without the learning.