Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

After completing a 4-month process in mid-october and nearly another month of paperwork, my promotion to Associate Professor is now complete. More specifically, I am now a “Profesor Contratado Doctor” and it is a tenured, non-civil servant position, with teaching and research duties.

Obviously, this promotion means a lot for me. After many years in which I have sustained myself through short-term grants and temporary contracts as a lecturer, this is a great change. It is the confirmation that I can devote the rest of my life to research and teaching, which are my real passions (in fact, my main research area is actually education). From this foundation, I now have the freedom to pursue new projects and ambitious objectives without being constrained by short-term requirements. It is a dream that has come true. This is what I wanted to do in my life, and having this work secured for life seems like the most significant step in my career so far.

My only regret is that this had to be achieved through a competitive process against some colleagues and friends from my department. I really wish them the best luck in the future so that they can also feel this relief.

General reflections, teaching

So, last week we started the classes at the School of Computer Science. I must confess that, even though I try to keep my students engaged by querying them during the class, I am not really using game-based content or game-like activities.

I have been reflecting about this. Is it a hypocrisy to preach that we should be using games in education and teach a traditional lesson? The fact is, I would love to be using games in my subjects, but I can’t.

To begin with, I really don’t have the time. Balancing an active research activity (with experiments, development, articles) with a proper preparation of my classes is demanding from me 70+ hours per week.

Additionally, there are different student groups with different teachers, and we are coordinated (same contents, same exam, same correction criteria). The safest approach, both for me and my students, is thus to stick to the traditional method one more year. Do my lectures. Engage them through traditional means. Be professional.

But it’s slightly depressing. The other day I was telling some first year students about life in the university, and how teachers are, most of all, researchers. But when it came to telling them about my field, I decided not to. I didn’t want any of them to ask me “will we be using games in class?”.

The closest thing I will be doing to game-based learning will be to propose games as the practical exercises for the 3rd year Programming Lab. At least it’s something until next year, when I have promised myself I that I will apply what I preach.

Personal educational games, reflections, teaching

After summarizing 3 years of work in a 50-minute presentation  and 60 minutes of questioning , everything ended in victory and celebration. I got the highest possible grade and some very nice words from the members of the committee. The dissertation, entitled “A Documental Approach to the Creation and Integration of Educational Videogames in Virtual Learning Environments”, basically includes all the work around <e-Adventure> during the last years.

Although the document includes a thorough list of academic acknowledgements (along with some personal ones), people tend not to read them. Thus, I thought I would at least send a greeting to the people that stayed around me while creating this work and knowingly or unknowingly participated in this. And I will use this blog for that (which, ironically, people tend not to read either).

Looking at my publications it’s obvious that my advisor Baltasar and my colleagues José Luis and Iván have worked as much as myself in this project. It is not all that obvious that a lot of the implementation work was done by my wonderful students Bruno, Francisco and Eduardo. They are now starting their professional careers and my best wishes are with them.

Also, I have travelled around the world during this project. 9 months out of 16 living abroad, which took a huge personal toll but at the same time allowed me to meet some wonderful people that compensated all the loneliness of travelling.

In Boston I stayed twice at the LCS. My host, Carl, along with Henry and Cathy made my stay possible. There, I worked with a lot of very interesting people, like Dave, Caroline or Paul. I also met wonderful friends such as Katie, Mark, Netta, Ishir, Mike, Ana or Liz; they all made me feel welcome and at home in Boston. So did my “family” in Boston, Michael and John. Others, such as Greg or Bill made a deep impression (on personal and professional levels) that they are probably unaware of.

In the grey and cold Netherlands I was hosted by Daniel and I also met Gemma. They were both friendly and welcoming when I needed it most. In Coimbra I was hosted by Toze, and the trip allowed me to meet Marta, Paola and Gema. Back in Madrid, people such as my family and Raquel were missing me. It was probably unpleasant for them, but there is a part of me that appreciates being missed.

In the end it was worth the effort, and I’m happy to publish in this blog the two most important documents I have generated so far:  My dissertation and the slides from the defence.

Personal reflections, travelling

Dear thesis:

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here in Portugal. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually a scientific work.

Every scientific work on this planet is the result of a natural equilibrium between creativity, a relaxed and open-minded attitude, and the natural talent of scientific researchers, but you theses are not. When I should be working on you, procrastinating habits appear and multiply and multiply until every time resource is consumed… and the only way I can actually work on you is to ingest vast amounts of caffeine and spread the work to the wee hours of the night.

There is another type of work that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A Program. PhD theses are a form of source code, another by-product of caffeine. You’re a program and I am a programmer.

Let’s get back to work.

Personal reflections

Randy Pausch is a key academic figure in the fields of Virtual Worlds, Virtual Reality and Serious Gaming.

As a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he created the amazing Building Virtual Worlds course, a reference in the field. He co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at CMU, which is also a reference as far as serious games are related (not as much in the “games-can-teach flavour” but in the “games-are-art flavour”).

But the first time I came to hear his name was actually as the mind behind Alice, a tool that facilitates the creation of 3D animations and environments, lowering the access barriers to learning java programming, object orientation and 3D programming.

On Tuesday, Prof. Pausch delivered an amazing lecture at CMU, in a cycle that used to be called “Last Lectures” (now, Journeys) in which CMU asks their star professors to give the lectures they would like to be remembered for. It was an amazing lecture about life, the relations with others, and an overview of an entire lifetime.

It also drags a huge emotional background due to Pausch’s fatal medical condition. However, just as he does during the lecture, I only wanted to mention that point but not make it central to the discussion. The lecture is amazing by itself and I really recommend investing two hours of your life in listening to the story of his life.

Lecture in streaming video

Note that the lecture itself does not address any academic issues. For that reason, I was doubting whether to post it here. But this morning I realized that listening to this lecture has been the most important thing that has happened to me during the entire week. From that perspective, I actually couldn’t post about anything else.

Personal reflections

…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)

Research books, game design, reflections

Haven’t I used that title before?

Just a quick post to remind myself that I’m not dead, that I supposedly maintain a blog and that my vacations haven’t started yet. Mostly bad news.

I’m currently trying to put together all the stuff I’ve done in the last few years about games and learning in a big boring document that noone will ever read but that my advisor strongly feels I should write and won’t allow me not to do it. He calls it a thesis or something like that. Sigh.

Personal reflections, travelling

This post in TerraNova recently called my attention. The summary is that Second Life is apparently getting rough on issues such as offensive content (namely, violent or child-related porn). The content of both the post and the comments is in the line of the political analysis of the role of Linden Labs in Second Life.

The actual spark that ignited the discussion is the statement on an official post that “our community has made it clear to us that certain types of content and activity are simply not acceptable in any form” and thus they are going to enforce the ban of some material. The main page of Second Life states that “Second Life is an online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents”. And yet Linden Labs enforces some rules within that world. The post (along with the comments) is an amazing read, with the typical TerraNova level of maturity and depth in the analysis. As always, reading their posts is intellectually enriching, with highlights such as identifying the “our community” phrase as a Marxist reminiscence, or the analysis of SL as an Anarchist Utopia with self-organization through mutual agreement.

However, the topic and the comments entirely miss the point. Second Life might feel like a country with their own currency, politics or culture. A Virtual World with forms of government that may or may not be legitimate. But it is not. Beneath the marketing layer, Linden Labs is a corporation and Second Life is a service (even when you pay for it). The fact that you own Second Life is not true either. The TerraNova post sees a political speech where in fact there is just a sugar coating over an official announcement that they expected would cause some unrest in their politically-minded residents.

The question of what is the role of Linden Labs inside Second Life was brought in a talk I attended about a month ago. In words of Cory Ondrejka (Linden Labs CTO) during that talk, Linden Labs is a corporation and the content is stored in data centers that belong to them. As these servers are located in the US, they are subject to the US law. If there is any kind of illegal content in their servers, they are responsible for it and legally forced to remove it.

And when they do enforce policies, their marketing divisions uses expressions like “our community has made it clear to us”. You cannot interpret this literally and study them as a government because they are in fact a service provider that owns the data centers and they can (and must) enforce rules through their Terms of Service agreement.

Research reflections, virtual worlds

Nick Yee once published on his website a very interesting critique on the research methodology on most tests relating aggressive behaviors with videogames. The article is not new, but its main assertions are highly relevant and I still consider it a a must-read. Essentially, it critiques studies that survey for a relation between playing violent games and exhibiting aggressive behaviour. A researcher surveys a number of children and tests whether they like violent games and whether they are aggressive. Seeing a correlation, the researchers takes a leap of faith and states: Playing violent games leads to an aggressive behavior. And it even gets published in a renowned Psychology journal.

Now, the mistake here is to see a causality where there is just correlation. Nick Yee’s metaphor is for researchers going to a kindergarten to study the average age of its inhabitants and concluding that attending kindergarten makes you younger. Aggresive kids like violent videogames would be the right conclusion, not the other way round.

Being a long-time admirer of Yee’s work, I have many times used it to refute similarly poor tests that errouneusly infer causality relations. But this blog entry is not to bash anti-videogame research. On the contrary, I have seen the same flaw in a study in the other direction. Newspiece: Study: Surgeons who play video games more skilled.

The research queried a number of surgeons for past experience playing videogames and checked for higher performance in skill tests, seeing a correlation. I do believe that playing videogames enhances coordination, reflexes and similar. And I would love to see this article as a proof of that idea. Alas, it is not. It has the same problem as the opposite research. Just like the aggressive kids feel attracted to violent videogames, kids with high motion skills will feel attracted to the fast and difficult interaction with videogames. It would follow that, even if videogames could improve the skills of future surgeons, this study is contaminated by the noise introduced by those “higly skilled kids” that simply felt more attracted to videogames (instead of, say, TV) before they became surgeons.

The gaming world is constantly being assaulted with research that infers causality from correlation, and now we see it in the other direction. Correlation may hint the presence of causality, but does not prove it.

Research reflections

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.

Research educational games, game design, reflections