Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

e-Adventure was born with the objective of reducing the barriers for game-based learning adoption. As such, it was a platform that attempted to make it simpler for small development teams, or even individual instructors, to create their own educational adventure games without any programming knowledge.

Five years later, I believe we have been successful, and I’m proud of how e-Adventure is maturing as an open platform, at a rate of 300 monthly downloads, and with new features and usability features added on every release.

In the past three years we have been organizing courses at different Spanish education institutions, such as universities or high schools, with one clear objective: To teach teachers how to teach with e-Adventure.

So far the reception has been great. Teachers like the courses, enjoy using the platform and always give us back positive and valuable feedback.

The organization is simple: For two entire days (or three days with half-day sessions) we walk the participants through the constructions of a complete game using the e-Adventure platform. We usually start with a short motivation and context lecture, and then one of my colleagues (usually Javier or Ángel) go step by step through the construction of the game, while I walk among the participants bringing anyone who lags behind up to speed. This method works great, as it allows us to impose a reasonably high pace without being concerned (or interrupted) by people getting lost in the process. The pace of the class is enough to keep advanced students engaged, while the support by the second instructors is a relief for those who sometimes loose pace.

The course is very complete, and the by the end of the second session, the students have mostly completed the Fire Protocol Game (available at the e-Adventure website). The last day we give the students an empty version of the 1492 game, with all the scenes, characters and conversations, but without any connections or behaviors. That last day is usually fun and engaging. There is no new content (just a review of previously used features) and the students appreciate the rapid progress in the creation of the game (it feels like those books in which children can paste stickers to create their own stories).

Right now Javier and myself are in Puerto Real, having just completed the first day of the course. The participants seem interested and motivated, and rather capable from a technical perspective. I think this is going to be a great course…

I have been invited by the organizers of the 10º Congreso Internacional y 13º Nacional de Material Didáctico Innovador (International Conference on Innovative Educational Materials) to visit Mexico City next week.

There I will deliver a lecture about game-based learning. I am expecting a mixed audience on the topic of GBL: Supporters, detractors and just oblivious. Thus, I will start with a short pitch on the (potential) benefits about game-based learning. However, my intention goes beyond merely proselytizing.

In the last few years conducting GBL research, we have met more barriers than actual opportunities. In this talk I also try to raise awareness on the fact that GBL, no matter how exciting, is still an emerging trend with little solid facts about their power as educational tools. Society is not really ready for games, which are still considered as an industry that only targets male kids (and actually, only targets them in order to turn them into psychopaths). In addition, digital games can be disruptive in a classroom and will certainly meet more opposition than support from teachers. I will try to review these potential issues and give some ideas about how to tackle these problems, including our own research.

I hope I will be able to provoke a reaction on the audience, reducing the opposition or detractors, challenging supporters to think about new research questions and, most of all, sparking new ideas in the mind of those oblivious to games as an educational medium.

I will let you know whether I succeeded in a couple of weeks (or in three months, given my blogging habits).

I am currently involved in a development project where we are trying to mimic the scheme of Brain Training for the Nintendo DS (released as DS Training in Japan and Brain Age in the US), with exercises focused on the different subjects from Computer Science studies.

It was thus very interesting to read this article about the game being “no better than paper and pencil”. The valorations presented in the article are so dramatically off-target that I couldn’t resist ranting about them.

The article starts from the notion that “Brain Training no better than paper and pencil” and then constructs an attack against the game as mostly a great scam. You only need to read the first paragraph:

“A 10p pencil is just as good as a £100 Nintendo at stimulating the memory, according to a study that dismisses the DS Lite’s claims to boost the brain”.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Bad news? A scam? Demonstrating that the game is as good as traditional pen and paper exercises is awesome news! Really, have you ever known a child that arrives home and grabs a piece of paper to do math calculations? The brilliant design of this game is having turned some of the most boring tasks ever into a compelling game, tapping into our competitive nature to turn boredom into excitement. The only risk was that, in the process, we could have spoiled the cognitive value of the tasks. Dr. Lieury has not killed our research into the usefulness of game-based learning. He has validated it, and I’m thankful.

It is also interesting how, according to the article, Dr. Lieury goes on to state: “There were few positive effects and they were weak. Dr Kawashima is one of a long list of dream merchants.” After reading that, I could no longer trust anything in this research. Prof. Kawashima is a renowned neuroscientist, doing state-of-the-art research on brain imaging. In an attempt to be moderate, I will simply say that calling him “dream merchant”  is a disinformed statement. Being aggressive I would use other words.

2009 has started strongly for us, at least in terms of mediatic impact. We started the year with a radio interview with our colleagues from UNED, which was aired on national radio very early in the morning of January 7th 2009. We spoke about the benefits of games in education and outlined our main ideas about how to use games properly in education.

Download radio interview (in Spanish)

More or less at the same time, we were contacted by the Science News Service from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation. They had seen our paper about Educational Game Design in the Journal Computers in Human Behavior and wanted to prepare a short piece about games in education. A bit later, they decided that they wanted to complement it with a short video interview.

Video Interview (in Spanish)

News piece about e-Adventure (in Spanish)

Translated version (in English)

I guess that this amount of media attention means that these ideas are catching on. This cannot translate into a feeling of “we did it!”. The current and short-term research is critical for the success of educational games. As Dr. Van Eck put it, now everyone is paying attention to educational gaming. We must live up to those expectations now or fail forever.

The March issue of Computer (an IEEE magazine) includes a report on the development process model behind <e-Adventure> as included in my thesis. The full citation is:

Pablo Moreno-Ger, Iván Martínez-Ortiz, José Luis Sierra, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, “A Content-Centric Development Process Model,” Computer, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 24-30, Mar., 2008

An this is its brief abstract:

Working from the belief that when content is king, content experts should lead, a storyboard-driven approach provides a sound methodology for developing educational games that helps ensure that no good storyboard becomes a bad game.

Let us know your feedback!

(we will publish the original draft at the <e-UCM> website soon)

…and therefore, school is not learning.

In the book mentioned in the previous post, Gee states that part of the reason why games are fun is precisely due to the satisfaction of learning them. What this means is that games tap into a common human trait, the satisfaction of mastery. This is neither new nor specific to videogames. It happens, for instance, when driving. Many drivers (myself included) refer to the pleasure of driving. Paraphrasing Steve Swink, when driving a car, you have a very strong sense of the direction, speed and behavior of that car and you feel the effect of steering and controlling it. A feeling of control and mastery. You develop the ability to extend precise control over something outside your body. There is a great amount of pleasure in the learning and eventual mastery of such a motion translation. In scientific terms, cognitive scientists argue that this control is exercised through remapped neural pathways, and when mastery is achieved, your brain rewards you with pleasure.

Games transmit these feelings too. Complex games, when mastered, are deeply satisfactory just because of that mastery. Gradually, the myriad of controls that you need to lookup constantly and keep mistaking, becomes an intuitive process where you think the action and see it on the screen, no longer thinking about buttons or even about your thumbs. This is what my mind process when learning a new game feels like:

Ok, now I need to jump this gap, which is means I must run towards it and then press button 1. There is an enemy on the other side, so I draw my sword with button 2 after completing the jump. I need to attack him, and the attack is with button 3… oh, shit! I ducked! agh! It was button 4!. Ok, button 3 to stand up again, now button 4 to slash the sword. Oh, and I approach a wall, I can use button 1 to jump against it and dive towards my enemy. Ok, that was a cool move… now keep pushing button 4 for more slashing, move here… wow! that was awesome! How did I do that? Did I press 2 and then 1?

At this point I’m exploring the game space, trying to learn the controls as the in-game tutorial instructs me. The example is somewhat inspired by the new Prince of Persia series (altough it could be any other game) because these games offer a very interesting and fine-tuned learning curve for some very complex controls. The theory says that mastering these controls is a great part of the fun. Here’s a figurative line of thought a few days later into the game…

So, there is a crowd of enemies below, the space is ample which suggest an easy fight if I manage not to get cornered. Ok, now I dive from this ledge and do a controlled descent using my dagger to cut this hanging curtain and in the middle of the descent, do a back flip and fall in the middle of the group with my weapons unsheathed. I slash a couple of enemies and then jump over a third one with a back flip, performing an execution move as I fall behind him. Now I’ll use the wall to bounce above another enemy and slash yet another opponent. Since I got at least two seconds, I will actually do the cool backstabbing move, and then quickly turn back to attack the last enemy.

Now I’m proficient in the game space. I think of actions and plan my moves, but no longer think about the controls. The game-pad is an extension of my mind, and my fingers are doing their job on their own. Gee says that when you achieve this kind of mastery, the game is fun. Let me tell you, in a good game, it’s actually exhilarating. Your mastery has immediate results and you see your character on the screen perform amazing feats just as you think them.

But if I’m absolutely proficient, the novelty and feeling of mastery may eventually fade… my brain wants to keep learning and mastering more things! Thus, a good game, will keep a consisting learning cycle in which it teaches the player a new skill, allows her to practice and master it and then moves on to new skills and challenges before she gets bored.

Prince of Persia has a great implementation of this cycle, in which you keep learning moves and techniques until the very end of the game. The design is so conscious of this having-fun-because-you-master-the-controls aspect that, often, after learning new amazing moves, you are presented with in a room with a few of lesser monsters so that you can practice your new skill and recreate on its use. Finally, when you have mastered all the feats, the learning process is over and the fun is over. Thus, the game ends there.

The moral of the story is: learning complex skills is fun. If you are not having fun, chances are you aren’t really learning them, just being exposed.

Sources:

Good Videogames + Good Learning, by James Paul Gee
Principles of Virtual Sensation, by Steve Swink (Gamasutra)

James Paul Gee is an author that has written several essays and books around the concept that games exhibit the purest forms of learning. Not the usual statement that “games could be used for learning”, but a subtler yet absolutely true concept: games are really complex applications and yet, players, learn to play them. Without ever reading the manual. And with a very low tolerance towards studying and learning (after all, they just invested 60$ in a game). Modern games, out of neccessity, have developed in-game tutorials and other learning mechanisms that allow the players to learn the game mechanics as they play, as opposed to first teaching them how to control the game and then starting play. Those games unable to provide successful learning experiences resulted in a failure. Game players don’t offer second chances. They expect to be having fun shortly after launching the game, and boring lessons are out of the question.

Good Videogames + Good Learning is a compilation of essays by James Paul Gee on the topic. I recently purchased a number of books that I did need, but this one was not one of my objectives. However, Amazon returned it as part of the “related books” function, and I simply couldn’t help buying it. Why the impulse?

Well, here is a deep secret. In 2003 I was passionate about games in general and mildly interested in serious games and in the concept of learning while playing. Out of that curiosity, I ordered a book by J.P. Gee. It was called “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy“. The book, as the rest of his writings, was not explicitly about learning with educational games, but about the learning that takes place in comercial games. For me, I admit, reading that book was a life-changing event. I read the entire book in one day, finishing late at night and then pondering about it until even later. Next morning, thinking in the shower (my favourite place for deep thoughts), it dawned on me: I had found the field on which I wanted to base my research. Or, with a special wink to a specific reader of this blog (as if there were many), I had found the shirt on which I would eventually find a spot to clean.

That summer I would graduate and, up to that morning, I was thinking whether to pursue an academic career or try my luck as a developer in the videogame industry. After reading that book, I decided to stay in the university, and try to get a PhD working on this field. As life-changing as it gets.

Among all the books I purchased, Good Videogames + Good Learning may not be the one I needed most for my research, but I have devoured it almost as quickly as the other one, and again loved it. Unfortunately, this time it hasn’t changed my life in a noticeable way (yet), but it is a remarkable read that I recommend. Personally, it has reminded me why I believe in this field and I will actually try to squeeze some time out of my current stay in Portugal to write a couple of posts about this topic.

It is easy to spot a certain tendency to jump into the game-based learning wagon with a shallow approach that I would summarize as “Kids play videogames, let’s teach kids with videogames”. Sorry guys, but that is not the good position. It is shallow because it observes an effect (kids play videogames) and tries to leverage it (let’s teach kids with videogames) without actually analyzing the cause of the effect. It leads to awful “games”, usually centered on a popular IP (Disney comes to mind) in which you get your average school content and a fancy presentation. And the result is always the same: A boring product in which parents (sometimes schools) invest great sums of money and the box is left on a shelf after failing to capture the attention of the student.

In a column about good writing and stories in commercial games (completely unrelated to game-based learning) Matt Sakey states:

I’d love to see a game like Solaris, or Fiasco, another Lem book – essentially mysteries, both reflect on the inherent unknowability of nonterrestrial intelligence, but are still hard sci-fi that as games would theoretically allow you to kill aliens (Hey, I said innovate fiction, not turn games into homework).

And he hits the nail there. When game-based learning feels like like regular school work it won’t be accepted as a game by gamers.

The correct approach should sound more like “There is something about videogames that fascinates kids, and we should use it to improve our teaching”. Simply stating that games can teach is a gross simplification. There are elements in games that engage the player in a motivational and FUN activity. And those elements (ellusive as they are) are the key to a successful learning experience. We are talking of eye-candy, fantasy, action, challenge, proyection of the self onto the avatar, and, high and above, conflict. Those are the ingredients hat make game-based learning interesting and useful, but the industry tends to forget it and keeps pulling myriads of boring learning products (go to your usual retailer and check the “Educational Software” section).

And I have heard that “some interest is better than no interest” but that is, again, a serious mistake. There is a growing interest in game-based learning which migth become excessive. If ten thousand boring games fail to teach anything, the perception of “games can’t teach, sorry, nice try though” may become generalized and then the idea would die before reaching a mature state. So, if you are working in a game-based learning initiative, please ask yourself: Is my product fun? Would a student play my game outside an educational context? Would he pay for it? If the answer is “no” for all three questions, you should step down or start all over. Successful game companies are those that manage to find out that their game is crap before publishing it.
If you got at least the first question right, you are on the track. Most of us are in that level. It is fun. At least, more fun than regular school and the students love to play it in an educational context.
If you got two positives you can consider your initiative very successful and I would like to hear of your design and how it magically mixes fun and education. Few titles have gone there and they deserve proper recognition.
Finally, if you got three positives then you hit the sweet-spot. Congratulations, you nailed it and went beyond all expectations, reaching a product that competes against state-of-the-art games and yet manages to provide a learning experience. We all dream of getting there, but we are no envious, for your success may unlock the doors to a wider acceptance of game-based learning as a valid learning medium.