Play to Learn to Play

For a long time I resisted backing up my data online, but I now use Dropbox for most of my documents, my email all comes though gmail and I’m trying out Live Mesh. The online future seems increasingly “Cloud”y – but then we are used to clouds Northern Ireland.

Over the past month a lot of my thoughts have been directed to streaming/down-loadable/online interactive digital media technologies. The most recent development is the announcement of work towards 3D browsing and allowing Javascript to hook into OpenGL ES. Companies are increasingly looking at streaming/down-loadable content for applications. In the games sector it is seen to be important to secure digital media against piracy and to build a stable revenue stream. STEAM, console DLC and the casual game market (e.g. Flash games) demonstrate that people are interested in downloading digital interactive media. Are we ready for streaming game content (or server based games) using a system such as Onlive or Gaikai? Advocates of this approach argue that it would stabilize the potentially destructive nature of the console upgrade cycle. If processing is primarily being done on the server side then games such as World of Warcraft could potentially be played on many different clients, e.g. iPhone, TV, computer. Hardware could be more easily and more regularly upgraded on the server. This approach is also popular with developers who see the 2nd hand market in retail shops as stifling creativity and revenue within the industry.

Developments with server-side game processing is an exciting prospect but I think we are some way off streaming triple-A graphics quality games to the masses. Server technology already supports the approach but the network infrastructure is not fast enough nor does the internet, in general, have the consistency and reliability required. Edge magazine carried a discussion with four top UK game designers this month in their 200th issue and one of the predictions for the future from the group was the increase in server-side game processing. It seems that this technology service has a future but I’m not sure how widely it will be adopted/pushed by the major games companies. Sony, Apple and Microsoft’s approach to date has been about putting a hi-tech device (entertainment hub!) into a user’s living room or pocket. Platforms such as Second Life and Metaplace demonstrate the state-of-the-art for streaming interactive digital media. For now these are low resolution graphic platforms with a key emphasis on social networking as opposed to high speed interactive entertainment.

Just back from presenting my paper at the VS Games IEEE conference in Coventry. Overall I felt that the conference was pretty successful for its first year. The keynote speakers were excellent. Alan Chalmers of Warwick talked about multi-modal sensory virtual experiences and the use of helmets fitted with all sorts of sensors – that’s something we would love to play with for games or educational virtual worlds. Steve Benford from Nottingham spoke about his blended context, live action experiments. Of particular interest to our research group were his ideas about trajectories through a dynamic narrative space. Some of these ideas may have interesting applications within the MMO context.

There was quite a focus within the conference on Second Life which remains a popular context for academic research in virtual worlds and business appears to be interested in exploiting it in different ways. I still remain skeptical about the importance of the “3rd dimension” in the use of virtual spaces for education, as a meeting place, or virtual representations of the real world. Personally, I believe that Second Life is still too complex for student use and I prefer to continue to focus on Metaplace for now.

Second Life is quite good as a host for virtual conferences. Below is how James looked when he was presenting his paper – from within Second Life. Great news from the conference was that we received the prize for best paper for this particular paper!

James presenting his paper as I look on in 2nd Life and in the conference room!

I’ve always been keen on games. Before the days of Pong our family played board games such as Scrabble and Monopoly. Though I was brought up in the countryside with few neighbours, we still played soccer, tennis, badminton, hockey, darts, snooker, cricket, basketball and other sports – and mainly out on the country roads of Co. Tyrone! I still play 5-aside soccer but now I’m mainly addicted to console (and sometimes PC) games, so I’m more often off the roads and indoors.  For example, in the past month I have played Gears of War II through twice in co-op on two difficulty levels and I’m now close to the end of Halo 3 (again!) in Heroic! In the past week I’ve also been playing Dead Space and toyed around with Eve online. I’m a gamer before I’m a researcher.

Now that I’m involved in educational technology and the use of structural ideas from games to enhance education process and systems, I find that I look at games with different eyes. “Look at the educational potential on that!”. I agree with several authors, including Raph Koster, that education and entertainment are highly related. That we learn best when we are having fun, and we have fun when we have fresh (appropriate) challenges to take on, and new information to decipher. Computer games are about learning – learning to play. Once we understand this then we look at games and game design with different eyes. In turn this helps us look at educational systems in a new light. It helps if you have played hundreds of games to”grok” the basic notion that games are learning based. However, if we play modern games with our education goggles on its easy to find many interesting approaches to teaching and guiding players through complex worlds so as to overcome increasingly difficult challenges. I like Dead Space’s option to light a path in the direction that you should go next by pressing the right thumbstick . Use it or not, its your choice. Many games that we are nostalgic about never had this option and how many educational processes don’t “light up” the way forward for students. Free choice is all very well until you get irretrievably lost! Other games have ways of guiding the player in a path but Dead Space’s is very slick.

I’ve played most of the MMOs to date but Eve Online is the most intimidating to jump into – its the only MMO that provides a health warning against not working through the beginner tutorials! The complexity of the world and game system is stimulating after exhausting the  possibility space of WoW so quickly. After the level/experience (cloned) grind of most MMOs, I find the time based (rather than task based) skill training refreshing. Leveling up while I’m at work and checking in occasionally to see how I’m getting on. This feels a bit more strategic and simulation based than other MMOs and I appreciate the pace of this game so far in my busy lifestyle. Its not so easy to discover educational metaphors in this process. However, the notion of students being able to investigate their possible educational development by simulating future skill/knowledge advancement in a similar manner to Eve is intriguing.

Reading this revisiting of Final Fantasy VII to question its greatness, has got me considering how we can judge the relative merits of games over the past 3 decades or so. Can we compare FEAR II and its high quality graphics, embeded narrative, and adaptive enemies with Wolfenstein 3D without considering the temporal context and culture? Wolf 3D certainly had more impact on me and perhaps may have been more fun than many more recent games because I wasn’t as saturated with 3D shooter gameplay as I am now. The modern 3D shooter is certainly more complex but this doesn’t mean that it has better gameplay mechanics. In many cases the added complexity just means that the aesthetic layer of a game has been enhanced and this does not guarantee a more pleasurable gameplay experience.

Is Final Fantasy VII the best role play game ever? Is it even the best of the Final Fantasy series? Is this one of those questions like “was the Joshua Tree, U2s best album?” – at some point it becomes fashionable to be critical and forget the context in which a product was  released. Judgment can be very subjective, however there is no doubt though that the Joshua Tree was a very popular album as was FF VII when it was released. Popularity does not imply greatness or hold these products up as examples of their artform. I think FF VII was popular because it demonstrated art within a games medium. At the time, and perhaps still, it demonstrated that games could move us, that we could become embedded in the journey through an interactive narrative. But this alone is not not enough to hold it up above all others, the product needed to be constructed to the highest standard – and FF VII was.

Is FF VII my favourite all time RPG. No that would be Baldurs Gate I and II. Would I play FF VII again if it was made available for the DS or PSP? with enhanced graphics? Maybe – probably, but I’d prefer the essence of the story to be transferred in to a modern telling of the game for the PS3. To play it now in its original form would still be fun, but mostly educational or nostalgic! Maybe FF XIII can recapture some of the magic of FF VII without the painful random battle encounters but that does not take away from the great experience that we had playing FF VII all those years ago.

At UUC we are interested in playing the best examples of XNA community games and making our own. We have good a community of students who are developing XNA games and we have seen some quite exciting work over the last year (I must put some links to samples later). A game that we are looking forward to is “Shellshock Skirmish” by Richard Paul – it just went through its first playtest on creators.xna.com and is now getting a control update and AI opponents. It’s a Worms-like game that seems to have better gameplay than the recently released XBLA game “Death Tank”.

Nicktheduderino does a regular podcast reviewing the latest games on XBox Community and his latest one is just out – very useful in deciding which games to try out. The XNA Team Blog covers a few other websites that focus on XNA Community games.

The BBC has an interview with Raph Koster this morning about Flash games. Koster is an influential figure in the games industry and is well known for his involvement, for example, with Star Wars Galaxies and his book “A Theory of Fun” – a theory which I subscribe to! In the article Koster discusses the movement towards the network for games – online play and downloadable content and distribution. He discusses Adobe’s role in this and comments on the increasing quality of Flash based games:

“Right now Flash is rendering in high-end 2D, equivalent to games like Diablo (from 1997),” says Mr Koster.

“There are a few 3D engines out there – Papervision, Alternativa and Away3D – and they are developing rapidly.

“They are surprisingly good and are all built on top of Flash.”

The backdrop to these comments is Koster’s new baby, Metaplace, which is a web based game system built on Flash. I have been on the beta for this software for a while and I continue to be impressed. They have now added height maps which will be very useful for a few ideas I have been developing.