Games that Change Behaviors

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Bart Pursel

One of the primary reasons educators get excited about video games is the ability of games to change player behaviors.  From an educator’s perspective, changing behaviors is one of the most difficult challenges we face when, say, we teach a course for 16 weeks at a university.

I recently started playing an iPad game (also available on the iPhone, but does not play nearly as well) called Gun Brothers.  It’s a fairly straight forward shooter, where you take on wave after wave of exceedingly stronger foes.

From smokinapps.com

Gun Brothers represents a great deal of interesting design elements that include:

  • Friend integration.  I can’t play online/co-op with friends, but what I can do is bring a friend’s character into my game instead of the generic NPC that helps you out.  This really encourages you and your friend to continue playing, because the more powerful both characters become, the easier it is to progress in the game.
  • RPG-like leveling system, but very lightweight.  You gain XP, which opens up more armor and weapons as you level-up.  Weapons have a damage stat, as well as an RPM stat that dictates how fast the weapon will fire.  Armor typically contains three stats; Offense, Defense and Speed.
  • Micro-transaction model. The game has simple currency in gold coins, but some of the items can only be purchased with ‘war bucs’.  With most micro-transaction models, I can simply enter my credit card and get x number of war bucs for a fixed dollar amount.

Now the micro-transaction model has a little bit of a twist.  If you opt not to simply enter a credit card and pay for your in-game war bucs, you can click on various advertisements for other apps, download the apps, and run them once to receive war bucs in gun brothers.  Occasionally between levels, you might receive a message “Download and install Farmville to receive 12 war bucs”.

So if you’re like me, you’re not a fan of web-based advertisements.  I can’t recall the last time I clicked on one (at least on purpose) on a website.  Yet last weekend, I sat around for 30 minutes, downloading and running all sorts of iPad apps to get my hands on some war bucs for better armor and weapons, totally changing my typical behavior when it comes to advertisements. I did actually find some good apps as well, like a real estate app and a recipe/cooking app.  Most of the other apps I simply deleted after running once for my war bucs.

What can we borrow from this model in terms of education?  Gun Brothers can be enjoyed without any war bucs, but a player’s progress would likely be much slower.  Is there a way we could ‘incentivize’ certain things in education in a similar manner, changing our students’ behaviors to engage in additional content in some way?

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Gold Farming for Good?

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Bart Pursel

I typically view gold farming (the process of accruing virtual gold in video games and then selling that gold for real money) as a bad thing overall for gaming.  It breaks the magic circle, allowing very real forces (namely, real money) to invade and impact our virtual spaces.  I understand the reason for gold farming as some players have a great deal of money but not a lot of time to build up their virtual wealth.  So, why not just buy it outright?

I found an interesting article today that states gold farming, in countries Vietnam and China, is actually bringing in a large sum of money to these countries. Even moreso than cash crops!

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Little Big Planet 2 and IST 446

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Bart Pursel

This semester, I’ll be teaching a course on game design and development, IST 446.  The primary assignment (or rather, string of team based assignments) takes teams of students through the inception, design, iteration and prototyping of an actual game.  Or to be more realistic, game level or mod.  Of all the tools out there, I haven’t really found a single tool that I feel *every* team could get behind and create some sort of playable demo by the end of the semester.

Enter Little Big Planet 2.  I played the original, but never really plunged into the creation tools.  Based on the recent review of the game, the second iteration seems to have simplified some elements of creation in addition to making the tools more powerful.  The biggest issue?  I’m assuming not everyone (nor every team) will have access to a Playstation 3 in order to access this set of tools.  I’m hoping I can pull something off with the Educational Gaming Commons to alleviate this issue, and give every team the ability to create something in Little Big Planet 2.

If I can make it work, I’ll be sure to post some videos in May showcasing some of the students’ work.

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The changing landscape of gaming

Posted on November 3, 2010 by Bart Pursel

I continue to be MIA a great deal and apologize for those of you still poking in from time to time.  Due to a shift in jobs, I’ve had less time to spend on games and more time data mining and analyzing various aspects of Undergraduate Education here at Penn State.  I’ve been writing some over on my Institute’s blog if these are topics that interest you.

I’m still keeping an eye on the gaming scene, and two recent articles jumped out at me.  The first is that Zynga (creators of Farmville and other ‘ville titles on Facebook) is estimated to be worth more than EA or Activision-Blizzard.

Huh?

Some of my gaming friends find this frustrating, as the quality and depth of these games by Zynga really doesn’t come close (from a story or game mechanic standpoint) to most of the AAA games being produced by EA and Activision-Blizzard.  “This is just a trend!” one gamer declares, “EA and the other big publishers will certainly take back the top spots!”.  Well, EA jumped on the Facebook bandwagon, penning a deal to take some of their own games to 500 million user platform.

I’m very curious to talk to my game design students this spring about how they feel about this whole social gaming explosion and its impact on the gaming industry as a whole.  Some of us gamers feel like we have our own little hidden fantasy land with games, and we’re kind of territorial about it.  This in and of itself is unfortunate, because games won’t grow as a medium until it is opened up to the masses.

Don’t be so disgruntled, fellow gamers!  Even though these Facebook games are kind of boring for those of us used to, say, Warcraft and Mass Effect, it will usher in a whole new demographic of gamers that can help us keep pushing the medium forum.

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Activision Blizzard and Obama

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Bart Pursel

Just read that Activision Blizzard is teaming up with the President on his “Change the Equation” (CTEq) initiative, aimed at increasing STEM interest among America’s youth.  Activision Blizzard will be:

using video games to promote student interest in science and technology.

It’s good to see one of the top publishers committing to this initiative, especially a publisher with access to a wide variety of technologies (re: oodles of studios and tech) that could do wonders in the hands of creative educators.

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Privates!

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Bart Pursel

I wrote about the game Privates in May, hoping that Microsoft would pass it for XBLA.  No news from Microsoft about the game passing internal tests, but the game is available for free via Channel 4’s website.  After spending 30 minutes or so playing, I believe this game is a fantastic example of educational games done right.  Recently, I’ve been involved in a few discussions around the design philosophy of educational games.  In the context of these discussions, two somewhat conflicting viewpoints arise:

  1. The instructional design paradigm.  The game needs to be instructionally valid and accurate above anything else.  Content is still king in this paradigm, and the content should be extremely accurate to convey the material effectively.
  2. The game design paradigm.  The game needs to be…well, a game.  It needs to have game mechanics, that combine educational content with fun.  Content isn’t necessarily king, but still important.  The *design* is king, making the experience fun and engaging for the player.

The first paradigm seems to lead to more simulation-style games, where designers attempt to insert very accurate content into an interactive environment, allowing the player to experiment with variables that affect some sort of model the designer is trying to convey.  The second paradigm focuses more on blending the instructional content into a game experience.  Personally, I tend to fall in the game design paradigm, but understand the value of the instructional paradigm.  The biggest pitfall I see from folks in the instructional paradigm is the mindset that the game should be able to stand entirely on its own, as an instructional activity.

I think this is a mistake.  Think about how we learn for a moment. Think about how good teachers go about teaching their students.  It is almost NEVER a single method or a single instructional strategy.  It’s a combination of things, like lectures, assignments, powerpoint, etc.  A game is just another way to engage students, it doesn’t need to be 100% accurate, it simply needs to provide enough content to spark a student’s motivation, to drive them to other learning outlets like Wikipedia, friends, instructors and so on.

The designers for Privates sum this up nicely:

You know how you wouldn’t write a history essay based on your experiences playing a World War II shooter? Well, Privates is a bit like that – while the action takes place in and around peoples’ parts, the anatomy is in no way biologically accurate. We’ve had to make loads of concessions in order to make the game fun to play. There’s still loads of important stuff to take from Privates. Just be sensible about which bits, eh?

I urge everyone to give this game a try.  It certainly is NOT a standalone sex education game.  But I can already envision what would happen if my niece were to play this.  It offers enough content to be compelling, but also offers solid and fun gameplay to keep you interested.  Once the game is over, I’m sure my niece would have a lot on her mind to go and look up on the web, as well as ask some questions of her parents (that they may or may not be ready to answer!)

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Site undergoing some maintenance

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Bart Pursel

Just an FYI, due to a recent barrage of comment spam, I’ve temporarily turned on ‘required login’ for comments.  Once I find some time to upgrade to the recent version of WP and apply some better spam protection, it will back to normal commenting shortly.

Also, I plan on adding some of the recent research on blogs, wikis and podcasting in education into the mix here at virtual learning worlds.  We’re uncovering some interesting trends with data on ~35,000 users of these systems at PSU.

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Lego Universe

Posted on July 23, 2010 by Bart Pursel

I remember hearing years ago that a Lego MMO was in the works, dubbed Lego Universe.  Being a huge Lego fan as a kid, and still playing with Legos with my nieces, I felt this was a fantastic idea.  But the more I thought about what Lego represents (free-form building and creation) compared to the generic MMO mold (linear gameplay, little-to-no custom creation), I wondered how they team at Net Devil would pull this off.

Lego Universe is set to release this October, and judging from the videos, it looks fantastic.  In several of my Virtual world talks, I get into the “virtual world roadmap”, the idea that as kids grow up, a sort of r0admap of different MMOs exists as they mature.  My nieces started with Toon Town, then tried some Whyville and continue to spend some time in Club Penguin.  Disney created Pirates of the Caribbean to be part of the “Disney MMO Roadmap”, but it feels like they might need something between Toon Town and Pirates.  As I read more about Lego Universe, it appears that it could be *the* bridge MMO, easing players into the ‘traditional’ MMO model leveraged by Warcraft, EverQuest, Lord of the Rings and most adult MMOs.  But it also maintains some of the playfulness and low-stakes environments that the children’s MMOs exhibit.

Below is a fantastic video illustrating how Net Devil leveraged a large portion of the Lego community to not only contribute ideas, but to learn the toolset to actually contribute content that is in the game world.  Also, Lego Universe will have a large user-generated content area and these Lego enthusiasts will represent the first ‘power user’ group in the Lego Universe, having the ability to create and add content at launch.

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NASA’s foray into games

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Bart Pursel

NASA announced a gaming initiative a couple years back, and it looks like we might have our first glimpse of the results with Moonbase Alpha. A recent article describes NASA’s goal with the game:

The game is a proof of concept to show how NASA content can be combined with a cutting-edge game engine to inspire, engage and educate students about agency technologies, job opportunities and the future of space exploration.

The game does look somewhat interesting, based on the short teaser video embedded below. My big question: but is it fun? The video makes the game look rather dry, aside from the part where you pilot a robotic rover across the surface of the moon. I understand that a big part of this is to educate, but part of the magic of games is the fun factor, which leads to a huge impact on engagement. We talk a lot at ‘serious game’ conferences about the balance of fun vs. educational content. With the audience NASA is shooting for (K-12 I’d wager), this game has to be fun first, with the educational content built-in to the flow of the gameplay. If this was a captive audience, maybe you could get away with focusing on the content first and the fun second…but that is not the case here.

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Casual Games

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Bart Pursel

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a HUGE player of casual games. I’ve tried Mafia Wars and Farmville (among others), but just don’t stick around for long. Although, I DO like to keep an eye on trends in casual gaming as I believe this sector of gaming has a LOT to offer and is experiencing incredible growth. I specifically keep an eye on Facebook games because a lot of the insane growth numbers were generated by games like Farmville and other games by Zynga.

A recent article on Joystiq pointed out the massive decline of casual Facebook gamers in May. The original gamasutura article states:

…23 of the top 25 social games on Facebook (determined by monthly active users) forfeited users in May, and 12 of those saw an exodus of at least one million players. Zynga’s FarmVille, the most popular app on the social network, suffered the biggest losses as it surrendered over 7.7 million gamers just last month.

Things are definitely getting worse for Farmville, as they lost an estimated 4.4 million users in April. The likely culprit for this mass exodus? Apparently Facebook has changed the method that notifications from apps work. They want to make app notifications more streamlined and less spammy; but the spam part of these apps certainly seemed to have an impact on growth. Without the app spam, what’s the next method these innovative developers will try to get you back into your digital gangster or farmer lives?

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