Play to Learn to Play

Our journal paper on using virtual landscapes for student feedback has now been accepted and should hopefully be published soon in the British Journal of Education Technology. One more task off my desk and that has allowed me to play a bit – and by play I mean that have had time to write c# programs to use Q-learning and Sarsa reinforcement learning algorithms in an XNA program. I have some fun research ideas that I want to play around with – looking at dealing with large state-action value spaces.
Since Metaplace has died I have switched to using Kodu with my Foundation year Computing classs – that seems to be going quite well so far, though the first assignment is only due tomorrow.

I loved the Baldur’s Gate series of games; this type of thoughtful, strategic, group-based (almost RTS) RPG is one of my favourite styles of games. Dragon Age promised to be the spiritual successor to Baldur’s gate, and I think to a great extent it lived up to this promise. In many ways it is an very ambitious game: creating a coherent storyline for a range of player characters with multiple story trajectories is not easy. Dragon Age is a huge game – it took me over 80 hours to complete – creating the text and managing the quality and complexity of dynamic conversations must have been an enormous task, not to mention all the other graphic and audio assets. At times a dynamic conversation breaks down – it is rare though – and at times conversation trees are repeated unnecessarily.  It was fun game to play- one of my games of the year – however, I can’t help thinking that the story wasn’t as well created and carried through the game, as they were in the Baldur’s Gate games. Dragon Age starts wonderfully well with an interesting pre-story for your character (plus training), and then moves into the game proper as your character joins the grey wardens and joins an early battle with the Dark Spawn. As a player, early in the game, you are aware of the empending doom of the world and threat of the Dark Spawn. You know of the threat of the Archdemon and that it is likely that you will have to face him/her to end the blight; this adds to the fun of the story. However, the long mid-sections of the game find you bogged down politics and hack-n-slash dungeon crawls where you can forget completely about the Archdemon and the dark army marching on the world. I think that some of the sections of the game are too long to keep the story moving and the designers could have kept the players focus more on the central narrative. By the time I had got to the end, I had turned my difficulty level down and really didn’t care so much about fighting the end boss but rather I just wanted to complete the game. Crafting a great character is not so easy first time and it may require a couple of attempts to make a character that really suits. Having a group of characters to play with makes this less of an issue than in other RPGs but as in Baldur’s Gate I came to like some of the non-player characters more than my own! There are some fantastic moments in the game though, some great surprises, and the character development is fun. One personal issue that I had was that I wished the player character spoke on my behalf though, the silence in response to a question is strange (no, I don’t say the dialog for my character!).

I’m strangely depressed at the passing of the virtual world universe, Metaplace! It’s not as if Metaplace was a relative or that I had invested large sums of money in to it. Its not just me though and many seem to have had the same emotion - if the reading of the obituary-like responses to the official announcement are anything to go by. Its sad that something that was so different and that inspired so much creativity could not survive. Metaplace had ambitious goals, and it really worked as a concept! It makes me feel a little angry at the nature of the consumer market just now. I visualise the consumer zombie, mouth open like PacMan, wandering aimlessly and muttering “feed me! feed me!” The modern day entertainment junkie wants continual hits of pleasure, and they want someone else to construct the means to these experiences. I worry about the vicious circle that is in evidence today; consumer child wants junk food and the parental provider finds it easier to oblige than to educate and offer variety. I hope that Metaplace rises like a Phoenix from the flames, transformed into something worthy of the legend. In the mean-time I have to find a new virtual home, and in a more practical sense, I need to find another platform for my research and teaching.

From the staff point of view a reading week gives us the chance to keep our head above water! To prepare for the last half of the semester, complete tasks that have been on hold for 5 weeks and for our school to schedule meetings and yet more tasks. This week I have been programming an XNA flocking example for my final years – finished it more quickly than expected. I’m calling the demo “Dancing on Mice” as it has a cat controlled by a player that feels like its skating due to the forces modelled in the simulation. The cat chases flocking mice (or rather cheese! because I couldn’t find a good mice animation!). Doing this reminds me of two things: one that you need to program algorithms from scratch in order to get a good understanding of them, and two that to be a good game designer you need to test your ideas in practice with a complete game.

This week I’m also trying to finish fixing a BJET hournal paper and read a PhD thesis for a viva (I’m internal examiner on an image processing PhD). Opps! I have a exam paper to write for 2nd years that is a few weeks late. Tomorrow I have a full day of placement job practice interviews. No pressure in my job at all

The student view of a reading week seems to be that it’s a holiday! Perhaps a few see it as an opportunity to do coursework.

Therese and I presented papers at the European Game Based Learning conference this week. We felt that our presentations went well enough and explained our work clearly. We had a number of good conversations with researchers who were interested in what we were doing and I really enjoyed chatting to a couple of researchers from France who were on the same research wavelength as myself. Hopefully, I can maintain links with these guys and take the education virtual world RPG ideas forward. EGBL 2009 had a mixed quality of presentations but was well worth the trip for the conections made.

Therese and I finished Halo ODST co-op campaign last night on Heroic difficulty. We enjoyed playing Halo 3 in co-op and on the whole we weren’t let down by ODST. There are some great set pieces and it really brought the experience right back to Halo 1 and 2; the Hunters scared me again and there was a nice balance to the battles. I liked the addition of the visor which really improved the atmosphere by having quite a few dimly lit scenes. On the down side, it was quite short for the price, the detail on character models is pretty average, and the story-line was weak (a bit like a short story rather than an epic). Firefight is a good addition, but I think for me Gears of War 2 still beats Halo for this type of gameplay.

As usual, I am playing several other games at the same time. Shadow Complex on Xbox Live is excellent, really like Super Metroid (which I adored). I also  tracked down the PSP game Jeanne D’Arc which is fun tile based RPG. It is funny having historical based gameplay with actual locations and historical characters mixed in with turn-based battles with orcs and mages!

While I wait for the endless updates for the new mmo Aion I have started playing Mario Galaxy on the Wii - what a great game. In between trying to get some work done in the afternoons I find myslef being called into Kaci’s room (6 yrs old) to help her progress in Spyro for the Wii. All good fun.