Dear reader. Here is an excellent chat, this is part of one of my classes at MIT, and I want to share with you
Prof. Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil, Creative Director of the Education Arcade at MIT, play and discuss aspects of the computer game MathBlaster. Scot explains how «edutainment games» like MathBlaster are not designed to help students who are struggling with the concepts (5:25). Eric then talks about the importance of substantive feedback for student learning (7:31).
Regards
Julia
Again, nobody’s having issues with meaningful decisions in multiplayer games — it’s single player games that are proving to be the issue here, so that’s what I’ll be addressing. Firstly, for any single-player game, you simply have to have random elements.
If your game doesn’t have randomness, then it has a correct answer, and if it has a correct answer, then there aren’t meaningful decisions for a player to make (it more closely resembles a puzzle as described above). Further, if you care about having any meaningful decisions, then «losing» has to exist in some form, and having several flavors of winning doesn’t count!
Many of you who know about the dungeon-crawling genre known as «roguelikes» might know that they are one of the last defenders of this sort of play in a single-player game. The internet podcast Roguelike Radio recently had a show topic called «Roguelike Features in Other Genres» (listen to this episode here).
I was a guest on this episode, and I predicted that we were going to start seeing more and more quote-unquote «roguelike» features in all genres of single-player games. Not because of how great roguelikes are, but because roguelikes don’t own concepts like «permadeath» (which just means, losing) and randomization at all — up until the 1990s, all games had these qualities.
Here’re a few examples of single-player games that do, in my view, have meaningful decisions.
Klondike (the solitaire card game that came with Windows, which we often just refer to as «solitaire») is a solid example of a single-player game that has real meaningful decisions. I’ve been playing the game a long time myself, and while it might not be clear to some who’ve only played a handful of games, I notice these moments where I have a real choice that changes the future challenges and even the outcome of the game.
I was a guest on this episode, and I predicted that we were going to start seeing more and more quote-unquote «roguelike» features in all genres of single-player games. Not because of how great roguelikes are, but because roguelikes don’t own concepts like «permadeath» (which just means, losing) and randomization at all — up until the 1990s, all games had these qualities.
Here’re a few examples of single-player games that do, in my view, have meaningful decisions.
Klondike (the solitaire card game that came with Windows, which we often just refer to as «solitaire») is a solid example of a single-player game that has real meaningful decisions. I’ve been playing the game a long time myself, and while it might not be clear to some who’ve only played a handful of games, I notice these moments where I have a real choice that changes the future challenges and even the outcome of the game.
More recently, Derek Yu’s Spelunky ran with this concept, literally, and became one of the first well-known platformers to do what I’ve always thought platformers should be doing: randomizing the levels. Because the levels are random each time you play, becoming good at Spelunky has absolutely nothing to do with memorization or any «process of elimination». It has to do with your skill at making decisions in Spelunky.
Desktop Dungeons is not only game with meaningful decisions, but it does so in a brilliantly innovative way. In the game, you gain bonus experience for defeating a monster that’s higher level than yourself. So, you can choose to use potions early-game (usually reserved for the end-game boss) in order to defeat some mid-level monsters to get that extra experience.
It’s a great example of an «ambiguous decision» — you don’t know for certain if the spent potion will be worth the extra experience or not. No level of experience playing other games will have helped you make this decision, either. This is what’s so exciting about games: the idea that when someone comes up with a game that’s new, it exercises your brain in new ways. It forces you to make new kinds of decisions that work in a way that your brain never had to work before.
If we can agree that meaningful decisions are important, then we can hone in, focus our games down on offering as many interesting, meaningful decisions as possible per moment spent playing the game. I call this «efficiency in game design.»
While Klondike does have some meaningful decisions, it has many no-brainers or false decisions — so I’d say it has a rather low level of efficiency in this way. Spelunky‘s a bit higher since it’s real time and you’re threatened most of the time, but there are still some situations that are no-brainers. Desktop Dungeons is highly efficient, and while it may seem to newcomers that there are no-brainers, better players realize that the most obvious moves are rarely the best ones.
And here’s another way to look at the whole «ambiguous decision» thing — this is what makes games special and interesting: even when you won, there was always room for you to have won by more, and you’re not sure how. In contests, you always know how — hit the moles even faster when they appear next time. There’s no ambiguity about what you should be doing. In puzzles, if it’s solved, it’s solved. There may be different ways to solve the puzzle, but all solutions are equal. This feeling of «I wonder how I could improve» is what’s so magical and amazing about games. In a way, games ask us to rise to our unknown theoretical highest level of ability, and this is really valuable.
I propose this philosophy about games not to be pedantic or controlling about how we look at games. It is my sincere belief that the only way we can improve our games is by looking closely at what makes a game a game. I don’t see many people doing this; instead, I see a lot of people simply echoing safe but conversationally useless ideas like «games are different things to different people.»
Again, I propose that we remember that there is a thing called a game, and even if you don’t agree with my ideas, I hope that you do pursue your truth about what games are so that you can focus your games into the most efficient, fun games they can be. To quote the author Robert McKee in his book Story, «We need a rediscovery of the underlying tenets of our art, the guiding principles that liberate talent.»
I am sure that this post will be very interesting for who will want to understand some theory and practice.
Cheers
Julia Echeverria
Hi, going on with game designer and my interest is to design and make an an educational video game, so here are some tools and reflexions.
Cheers
Julia
[Keith Burgun, founder, and designer at 100 Rogues developer Dinofarm Games argues that some video games are not «games» at all — and posits a way to home in on the precise elements that make games engaging to players.]
In the beginning, Tetris had a much looser system for the random piece (Tetronimo) generation. This meant that when you were playing, you could not be sure of how long it would be until your next line piece would come. This made the decision to «save up for a Tetris, or cash in now» a lot more ambiguous.
Between the new «7-bag» system of piece generation (which puts all seven pieces into a bag and draws them out one at a time, guaranteeing that you will get a line piece every 14 pieces at the latest), the «hold box», and usually five or six «next» boxes, modern Tetris is largely a matter of execution. Maybe you love what Tetris has become, and think that these changes are purely positive. That’s fine — but I think we can all agree that something has been lost.
I propose that games are a specific thing.
What I mean by that is that I think there is a unique concept that I can only call «game», and this is something different from the large blanket term we use in the digital game world. We video gamers call everything from digital puzzles, interactive fiction, simulators, to even digital crafting tools «games» (or «video games»).
Essentially, anything digital, interactive, and used for amusement gets called a game. And the dictionary will go even further — it calls a game an «amusement or pastime.» So watching TV is a «game.» Hell, eating a can of beans can be a «game» if it amuses you!
The thing is — there exists a special thing, a thing that isn’t a toy, isn’t a puzzle and isn’t any of those other things I mentioned. It’s a thing that’s been around since the dawn of history, and it still thrives today. We have no other word for it, really than «game», so for this article, that’s the language I’ll be using. To refer to the larger category of «all digital interactive entertainment», I’ll use the term «video game.»
I define this thing — game — as «a system of rules in which agents compete by making ambiguous decisions.» Note that «agents» don’t necessarily have to both be human, one is often the system (as in a single-player game). But the «ambiguous decisions» part is crucial, and I am here to argue that it’s the single most important aspect of a game.
This is a prescriptive philosophy — a way to look at games that you may not have before — not a description of what exists. In other words, of course, there are video games (I prefer to adopt the mobile-gaming term «apps») that are puzzles that have elements of games, and there are games that have elements of simulators. I’m here to argue that because of this blurring of the word «game» and its inherent qualities, we are somewhat inadvertently losing this meaningful, ambiguous kind of decision, particularly in the area of single-player digital games.
It’s possible that some of us have forgotten how good it is to make an interesting, difficult decision that we can never take back.
Games have a very special kind of decision-making. In a good game, the decisions have the following qualities: they’re interesting, they’re difficult, and the better answer is ambiguous. Above all else, however, the decisions have to be «meaningful».
I don’t mean «meaningful» as in personal meaning, such as «they make you think about your relationship with your dad» (although they certainly could). By «meaningful», I simply mean that your decisions have meaning and repercussions inside the game system; they cause new challenges to emerging, and most importantly of all, they have meaning with regards to the outcome of the game.
Some may be quick to point out that all video games — puzzles, simulators, toys — all involve some form of «decision-making». That is true, but nothing else forces the player to make decisions in quite the way that a game does. Any decisions you might make in a puzzle, for instance, are either correct or incorrect, and decisions you make in a simulator do not have a larger contest (context) inside which to become meaningful.
See you in the next post.
Hi, as you all know by now I am studing at MIT «educational technology, in this moment I am learning how to design a educational game, and I have find this video which ilustrate what designer do, it is easy to understand and the vidio it self is nice.
Hope to can see and enjoy it
Julia Echeverria
SMARTPHONE TABLET AND LEARNING
Introduction proposal
Attracting teachers to the use of technological devices in the classroom as part of the Project: learning challenge in the use of Technology for teachers with MITx and Peeragogy.org, Chapter II
This because none of both participants in this debate knows how to use it, students haven’t had adequate guidance or have not been at all. Teachers have not had time to learn to use to do the same, and the end is a problem somewhat difficult.
THE STUDENTS
“If educators teach the respectful and appropriate use of technology in the classroom and use it to build their skill as well, the future of education technology looks bright.”
«Learning is natural; another thing is to teach.»
Dear reader, to finish with the Idea and acknowledge about challenge to learn, I am glad to show you two videos:
«The first one features Greg Schwanbeck, a teacher and instructional technology coach at Westwood High School, and the second features Dr. Matthew Schneps, who works on several projects here at MIT and elsewhere. Both videos introduce a thought-provoking and difficult design challenge and your help is needed».
«Watch both videos and then decide which design challenge is most interesting to you.»
Waiting for your comment and ideas, here or in any social media I share with.
Greg Schwanbeck video:
Dr. Matthew Schnep:
Hope you like it
Julia Echeverria Moran
Dear readers, as I am taking the following post about the digital challenge, I leave this interesting and nice infographic.
» Good for us»
Have a good day, here in Spain, is beautiful with spring coming.
regards
Julia Echeverria Moran
Big four accounting firm Deloitte has waved goodbye to standard question and answer psychometric testing and developed a customised «game» which places potential graduate employees in real life work situations at the firm.
The interactive assessment was developed by Deloitte and Talent and the professional services firm claims it’s the first of its type in the country.
Deloitte national talent acquisition and mobility director Tanyth Lloyd said it would yield more accurate results than the generic question and answer tests.
«Gamification is a really effective way of testing people. If you can make it fun and apply gaming principles, you get more accurate outcomes because people forget that they’re being tested and stop trying to predict the outcome,» she said.
«The majority of testing tools in the market are based on sound psychological methodology, but they don’t have the opportunity to use the testing to model out and test on actual work based scenarios.»
The new assessment takes 20 minutes to complete and aims to test an applicant’s problem-solving capabilities.
It incorporates videos and tasks from real Deloitte employees, based on situations which regularly occur in their work environment.
It’s being used for the first time by current graduate program applicants, of which 500 will be successful nationwide, but Ms Lloyd said Deloitte was also considering developing similar assessments for job seekers at other stages of their career.
«Our vacationers (interns who work over holiday periods) will also use this … it is limited to this audience for now, but now we have a solution that is customised for our work environment, we’re looking at the viability of extending it,» she said.
«It’s a matter of making it relevant to the types of people we hire. There is a big variation in people’s experience and competencies and it’s hard to have a universal and consistently applied testing suite.»
Fellow big four accounting firm KPMG was the first of the major professional services firms to implement this form of testing in Australia last year. At the time, KPMG said the new testing provided a 79 percent reduction in applications that had to be individually reviewed and a 58 per cent reduction in the numbers who go through to final interview sessions.
PwC in Hungary has also jumped on the trend, creating a game called Multipoly which gives job seekers tasks around the skills the firm is trying to develop – digital competency, business acumen and relational skills.
Deloitte in New Zealand has also created a customised game assessment simulating an employee’s first day in the office.
Ms Lloyd would not reveal how much it spent developing the assessment, but said it was around the cost of off-the-shelf psychometric tests.
To ensure that the customised solution is more effective, Deloitte intends to monitor the performance of the new employees and compare them to older employees who were employed based on older methods.
«The data we’re getting is so much better than what we had previously and we hope it will let us make better-recruiting decisions,» Ms Lloyd said.
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Seguimos con el aula invertida o Flipper Classroom, estos pasos parecen bastante sencillos pero deben ser estudiados paso a paso. Vía
Otro asunto muy importante, una vez que estamos convencidos o al menos deseamos probar, debemos exponer a nuestros alumnos y enseñarles de qué se trata y realizar algunas pruebas a este efecto. Sin los estudiantes, nada podemos hacer, recordemos que ellos, al igual que los profesores están acostumbrados a las clases tradicionales y todo debe irse introduciendo poco a poco, no podemos invertir el aula así por las buenas. Enseñanza & aprendizaje & creación &motivación & competencias digitales & curiosidad motivada por el profesor..= educación en el siglo XXI
Además, debemos saber que para llevar a cabo esta metodología, nuestras competencias digitales deben ser al menos las básicas.
Un saludo
Julia Echeverría Moran
Gamification eLearning and Ed Technology 