Dan Roy's Future Play Presentation: Multiplayer Gaming v. Board of Education

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.

The Education Arcade

I spent the first half of the talk introducing Comparative Media Studies, The Education Arcade, and the Learning Games to Go project.

Comparative Media Studies is what you make of it, and it's different for every student, but for me it's a game design program that encourages me to think historically, culturally, interdisciplinary, and internationally.

The Education Arcade, formerly Games to Teach, is what inspired me to design games for learning, or Serious Games. I got involved with them near the end of 2002, working on Revolution (I won't take any credit for it, as my involvement was minimal). Revolution was a total conversion mod of the fantasy game Neverwinter Nights to teach high school students about the American Revolution. It was a collaboration with colonial Williamsburg , and we replicated that town in the game.

Then I described Making History, the multiplayer PC strategy game I helped design while at Muzzy Lane Software. That game teaches history, international relations, and political science to high school and college students. The gameplay focuses not only on military strategy, but also economic, domestic, and diplomatic. Version 1 came out in 2005 and is being used in high schools and colleges across the country. Version 2 is nearing release this fall.

Our current project at The Education Arcade is a collaboration with Maryland Public Television called Learning Games to Go. It's funded by the Department of Education. The Education Arcade is doing the design work, and we've contracted Fablevision to do the development. The game is best described as a multiplayer, story-based puzzle game to teach math and literacy to middle school students. And, as the name suggests, it will have a mobile component. I'll be writing a lot more about the mobile component and how it connects to the rest of the game in this blog and my thesis.

I also described our research manager Scot Osterweil's past work on the Zoombinis line of games. They are math and logic puzzle games, and have heavily influenced our design for the Learning Games to Go project.

I forgot to mention this in my presentation, but I'd like to call attention now to another project, called Star Logo. It's a visual programming environment for teaching the concepts of coding and especially making them accessible to children.

Finally, I summarized some of the work going on in The Education Arcade and the Teacher Education Program around augmented reality games. We're making augmented reality games for indoor environments which use WiFi connected PDAs to determine where players are inside of preset buildings and rooms. We're also making similar games for outdoor environments which use PDAs with GPS. Both lines of games involve multiple players and learning objectives.

Positive Identity Construction

I spent the second half of the presentation talking about why it's so important that players construct positive identities in games and how that contrasts with my experience in schools.

I want to talk today about the benefits of using persistent, multiplayer, online games for education. I won't say massively multiplayer online games specifically, because I'm open to more limited scale multiplayer games or even massively single player games like Spore. The persistent, multiplayer parts are important because I want my actions as a player to accumulate into an achievement that is notable and visible to my peers. In other words, my accomplishments in the game must take place within a social context, otherwise my investment in them is reduced.

It's important to give players an opportunity to construct an identity for themselves that feels comfortable to inhabit. They must feel comfortable enough in this identity that they enjoy spending time in it. If the identity is studying, and it feels good, they will study more. If studying feels bad, because it reminds them that they're not good at it, it will take much more effort for them to make themselves study. Thus, if we want to produce good students, we must first cultivate a love of learning, or a love of oneself while learning. That's what games can bring to the table.

Contrast that with school, where students are typically expected to supply their own motivation for assignments. Grading is both a carrot and stick. However, what grades get you is too far removed. Yes, grades will help get you into college, but when you're in fifth grade maybe you don't know whether or not you want to go to college. So, what relevancy do grades have in fifth grade? Very little, beyond pleasing and impressing the adults in your life. However, your peers may or may not be impressed by grades. And, as you grow older and become a teenager and perhaps start to distance yourself from traditional authority figures, you may also distance yourself from the goals you used to pursue in order to please those authority figures. Namely, grades. Life may be easier in the long run if you get good grades, but that doesn't mean you're going to enjoy studying to get those grades. If you don't enjoy studying, you won't do it as much. I want to make studying feel as good as playing, so it's easier to succeed and feel good about yourself while doing so.

I'm interested in games going beyond fun (and even engagement). Fun is important, but I also want players to become invested in the game. I want players to see themselves more positively based on accomplishments they accumulate in the game. The game genre that does this best is massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The main qualities of MMORPGs that are important here are 1) the persistent nature of accomplishments -- that what I do now doesn't just go away when I log off -- 2) the social context -- that whatever I do and I'm proud of is easy to share and show off to friends and strangers – and 3) the ability to start fresh -- that, in an MMO, if I grow tired of one identity or feel it's limiting me I can simply start over with another and instantly remake how other players see me. The ability to start fresh, in particular, it is something we don't get enough of in schools (especially middle and high school). We get stuck in ruts, playing out the role of, say, the class clown or the underachiever. We feel social pressure to maintain our past identities. If a nerd tries to become a jock, generally the jocks will do their best to put the nerd back in his place. Games let us start fresh, exploring underdeveloped parts of ourselves and reconciling the differences between who we are and who we'd like to be.

As great as I think MMOs are right now in the ways just explained, we can still improve them. In particular, I'm researching what can happen when we extend MMOs onto cell phones. The problem with MMOs is that you have to be sitting at a PC or sometimes a console in order to play them, and that time is practically limited for most of us. However, if you carry a cell phone, you might like to access that identity and sense of accomplishment you've built up in the MMO from wherever you are. You might like to play the game, or interact with friends, or check on the progress of some event that takes time, or show off some equipment. And, you will probably want to do all of these things both online and by showing your phone to the person sitting next to you. Thus, when I think of mobile games, I think of cell phones, because they are already connected.

Let me further describe the game I'm working on now as a concrete example of these ideas. The game I'm working on with The Education Arcade (Learning Games to Go) is focused on teaching math and literacy to middle school students. It's a puzzle game, a lot like the game Zoombinis. The puzzles teach the math. The literacy component comes both from reading and understanding of the extensive story and from the multiplayer aspect, where players can use a message board within the game to share strategies about the different puzzles. If a player completes a puzzle successfully, the game encourages her to write a strategy about that puzzle to share with her team. Teams will be relatively small, maybe limited to six students. Every member of the team is trying to contribute to the team's success, so students will have incentives to write valid strategies quickly. They will also be rated by their team members similarly to how you rate Amazon reviews (helpful/unhelpful), so if they write more helpful strategies than unhelpful strategies, they will be able to increase their personal scores. This game will be playable online on computers, but will also be accessible from mobile devices. We haven't settled on a platform yet for mobile, but we're looking at cell phones, PDAs, PSP and DS, etc.

I wanted to describe that project now because it connects to the argument I'm trying to make on positive identities. Among other things, this project is a prototype for the idea that by using mobile games to connect to persistent online multiplayer games, players can have a fundamentally improved experience. They can immerse themselves more frequently in their online identities, can stay there for more time, can make more progress, can learn more, can feel better about it, and can show off their accomplishments more easily to friends, family, teammates, and competitors.

In addition to making this game with The Education Arcade, I'm writing my thesis on this concept of extending MMOs to cell phones. I'm researching how this connection affects player and learner identities and senses of accomplishment. If any of you have an interest in this area, please talk to me afterwards so we can share ideas and resources.

Cross posted from CrossGamer.com.