Play to Learn to Play

A very eventful summer is almost over. It started with renovations to my house and converting our garage into a study and games/entertainment room. Two months of demolitions and building while we lived there was hectic but it feels worth it now, especially when I can now play Split Second and Final Fantasy in full HD on an 84″ data projector screen with surround sound blasting out! As much as I dislike the use of the word – it is awesome! I have been playing quite a few games, especially from XBLA and I may get time to comment on them another time. Limbo is really interesting and very funny in places – if you are into a dark sense of humour.

I spent three weeks in Australia and really enjoyed spending time in Sydney and Perth. I couldn’t resist buying an iPad in the Apple shop in Sydney and have been really enjoying using it over the past month, the 3G feature was really handy in Australia (we picked up a monthly pay-as-you-go sim). I may blog my thoughts on the iPad later but for now I can say that I love it for reading books and apps like Goodreader, eWallet, Nozbe, Evernote, and Dropbox are going to prove very useful in my work – organisationally.

Back at work again we have a paper accepted for the Interactive Digital Storytelling conference in Edinburgh with Richard – Im hoping to go to this in November. Chris is just back from the CIG conference where he just presented our paper on modular reinforcement learning, and I’m looking forward to hearing about that. Now I’m preparing for a new PhD student joining us next month – Barry Herbert will be looking at the use of 3D virtual worlds for supporting learning.

Therese successfully defended her PhD this week in her viva. She received excellent feedback from her external and only has one table to update before submitting – week long party underway!

Therese’s PhD was on the use of game based feedback to encourage greater student engagement in higher education degree courses. I recently co-authored a paper with her and other colleagues that discusses this work and how it can be applied to virtual worlds. This paper has just appeared in the British Journal of Educational Technology and can be found at this link.

Its watching you … it knows who you are and what you like to do!

Curious new information on Natal and potentially fascinating that it may profile users based what they do and what they wear. We are really looking forward to Natal coming out from a health and rehab research point of view – especially if we can program it using XNA.

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.