After a fairly intense year at work and study, it was great to have a chance to wind down a little in sunny Brisbane for the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment.

I’m not altogether sure what I was expecting – the program covered a broad spread of content from A.I, the use of space, mobile games, online media performance, robotics, storytelling and games-based education.

Keynote speakers included Caryl Shaw, who manages the Spore online community; Jeff Brand, a researcher at Bond University who recently published an extensive statistical overview of gaming in Australia (Interactive Australia 2009) and John Passfield from Krome Studios in Brisbane, a long time game designer.

While the majority of presentations were a little too academic for my taste (heavily technical and narrowly focussed), there was more than enough interesting and useful content to make the trip worthwhile.

At this juncture I have to issue an impassioned plea to academics making presentations about funky projects – show us the project/demo/game first and then bang on and on about the rationale, existing literature, underpinning conceptual frameworks and what not. This is most important when the project is something that is hard to understand without experiencing it. I promise I won’t leave once I’ve seen the goodies.

The attendees were a great bunch of people – a mixture of academics (primarily people undertaking doctorates in some gaming related field of I.T or another), game-design lecturers and QUT game-design students. After the initial “forming” period, it was surprisingly easy to have a chat to pretty well anyone.  After the tenth time of being asked whether/what I was presenting, I realised that the point of these things really is to share information (not that I have a lot of first hand knowledge to share just yet) and I was taking on something of a passenger role. Maybe next time around.

There were a few things that I will follow up on – I’ll go into more detail about them in upcoming posts but I will mention one right now.

Auditorium – beautiful flash game about pushing beams of light around the screen to create music

Thanks to the conference organisers (Ruth Christie in particular) for putting on a great event and also to the presenters and fellow attendees. With luck, I’ll be back.

The simple premise that I started with – that I want to see how it might be possible to use FPS style games for learning – has twisted and turned all over the place as I have tried to figure out how to accomodate learners who don’t normally play games, how to deal with the issue of violence in games (and what impact this has on learning), what kinds of learning activities might be suited to the FPS genre – initially I was thinking fairly straight forward drill and practice (although what form this might actually take is another matter) and what elements of games actually support learning.

I’ve taken side trips to the world of casual games in search of answers for making games easy and appealing to non-gamers – I think that casual games have a lot to offer but there are still a lot of key differences between them and an FPS style game – most notably in the controls. Casual games seem to work best with just the one controller – preferably the mouse while the FPS game controls may be overly complicated for novice gamers. I still haven’t resolved this issue in my mind yet.

Violence in games isn’t as cut and dried as you might have thought – some studies even go so far as to suggest that it can enhance learning for some gamers. (Not many but some). Action games are most closely linked to violent behaviour in gamers as well.

The application of learning theories to games is an incredibly rich and encouraging field – the more I read, the more it seems that games can do in terms of developing sensori-motor skills (which may be inextricably intertwined with higher cognitive skills like problem solving and decision making), motivation, emotional connection to the material, relevance and much more are all enhanced in a game environment.

Issues of story vs gameplay have been interesting – story appears to be important and separate (but equal) to gameplay elements in making a good game. How this relates to my initial leaning towards basic activities I’m still synthesising at the moment.

I definitely feel that I’m on the right track though and I’m a believer in the teaching power of activities and the rich worlds that games can offer.

The question of drill and practice is one that I’ve instinctively felt is important but I haven’t been able to properly solidify. I’m thinking about language learning here (although there are other scenarios where it could be useful) and the need for repetition.

This is what has drawn me to the world of casual games, the fact that the best of these games have high replayability (or addictive qualities if you prefer) and players are happy to come back to them even when they have finished. It’s not for the story then (most casual games don’t have one) but for the challenge and for the game play elements. The fun, the pretty graphics/sounds/etc, the rewards, the positive feedback and the sense of achievement and progress. I think a high score or fastest game table might also enhance this experience and encourage multiple replays.

This and the accessibility of casual games to non-gamers is why I’ve been floating around this area.

One of the limitations of the FPS that I’m feeling more and more is the general lack of ability to enter text. Typing of the Dead has it but that’s about it. Actually, scratch that – I’ve just done taken a look at this video for English of the Dead – an FPS based language game for the Nintendo DS that ingeniously uses the bottom interface of the DS for learners to write letters on. (Interesting that they don’t just have a keyboard displayed on the bottom screen for learners to use the stylus to “type” the letters with – forcing them to write the characters instead. Clever. (You can try a basic – and non-violent – version of the game here)

Another issue I’ve bumped up against a few times while thinking about this project has been the single-player/multiplayer divide. There are a number of different factors that come to play with these types of games and the multiplayer ones, while highly interesting, just bring too much to the table, so I’ve decided to focus on single-player games for now.
I’m interested in the possibilities of players being able to leave their mark on the game world – for example, someone playing the game on a Tuesday writes a message on a wall for a friend playing the game the next day. (Both separately) – I think this is more of a virtual world kind of thing though.

Some of these can already be found in the project proposal I posted here the other day but it’s good to have all of these in the one place. (By the way, if you have a good answer to any of these questions, your input is most welcome

What are the possible users of FPS/FPP games in VET learning? (Or rather, training based on developing foundation skills – including language learning)

How can different educational approaches be applied to FPS learning games? – primarily behaviourist, cognitivist and constructivist

Do I want to develop games for gamers or for people who don’t normally play these games?
If it is the latter, how do I ensure that these games are accessible to these people?

What is the end purpose of these games? (Depends on the educational approach being applied to some extent):

• Reinforcing material covered elsewhere (in class or online)
• Presenting new content in a fun or engaging way
• Developing problem solving skills
• Using scenarios to illustrate concepts/knowledge
• Presenting information in a more memorable/understandable way

Where is the point where the knowledge/skill require to play the game is secondary and 100% of the player’s attention is on the activity? (Depends on the player?)

Can the games be broken up into 5min (or less) digestible chunks like web/casual games?
A series of puzzles which increase in complexity and have high replayability (and the capability to drop in to the level that you left the game at previously)

How can the space, appearance, sound, movement through and emotion (e.g joy or fear) of the game environment be used to enhance the meaning of the content and experiences?
(Like a big bright space with grassy floor vs a dark narrow trail bordered by lava pits)

What do we lose by making the playing experience fairly directive and linear – rather than having a broad info space that the learner can choose their own path in and focus mostly (or only) on the content that they are interested in. [This may be another project entirely - I probably just want to focus for now on the directed, scaffolding type VET learning]

Is decision making/collaboration still possible in a more directed style FP Learner?

Should this be targetted (initially at least) at learners who are already comfortable with the conventions and controls of FPS gaming?
Who are these people and what are they (generally) studying?
(Can I get CURVE – our research unit – to include some questions about gaming habits in their next student survey?)

What kind of structured tasks or knowledge are appropriate to development into an FPL game?
ESL (consider English of the Dead)? Business and I.T? Spraypainting? AIE? Media? Flex.Ed?

What is the anatomy of an FPS game? How does it differ from 3rd PP and virtual world games and what are the relative advantages?

(How) can FPS games be educational?

What impact might game violence or destruction of objects have on the learning experience?

In what circumstances might game violence or object destruction be appropriate in a learning activity?

Do single player and multiplayer games support different educational approaches?

To what extent does the level of realistic representation of the learners environment affect their engagement with the game? (Uncanny valley + Understanding Comics)

What makes a game enjoyable and what makes a player want to play a game repeatedly?

What kinds of interactions can there be between multiplayer users exploring the same knowledge space?

Can players in a multiplayer environment communicate asynchronously as well as synchronously – leaving notes or tips for those who follow?

How do the limitations of the game building software/environment impact on design decisions?

Does the size of the screen that the game is played on affect the user’s sense of being lost/nauseous if the screen content is overly complex/busy (P.85 Fuchs & Eckermann)

What motivates a player in a game?

What kinds of information/data content and experiences/activities can be used in an FPP/FPS game?:

• Video
• 3D models
• Audio
• Photographs/Graphic images
• Text
• Conversations (with other players or Non Player Characters)
• ?
• ??

Now clearly I’d rather be at the point in this exercise where I have answers to a lot of these questions but it still feels like progress.

I think the question about casual games is more important than it looks.