Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

August is finally here, and it was about time I had a vacation!

Last year I was in Boston and that pretty much prevented me from taking a proper long vacation. Although I will not disconnect entirely, this year I’m planning to take the month easy and get some rest, preparing for a very intense start of the course in September (both professionally and personally).

This means that I will not be posting (and probably not tweeting) again until September. In anticipation of this blank period, just a quick reflection on the experiment about increasing my posting rate. Early June I decided to try to publish around a post per week and a tweet per day. That post was 8 weeks ago (and 38 work-days ago). Counting the experiment post and this specific one, I have published 9 posts since then (and 39 tweets).

As I said, I don’t mind whether any of the posts was relevant or any the tweets was read by anyone. the good news is that it seems like I can keep the pace. Let’s just hope I don’t loose the habit after the summer break.

In any case, for anyone reading, have a nice summer and see you in September!

General blogging, reflections

Yes, with a 7-month delay. In January 2009 I published a post summarizing my research activity in 2008. It ended with a question to myself: Would I be able to pull out another year as intense as 2008?

Well, let’s see…

• The growth of the <e-Adventure> platform continued at an even higher pace. The incorporation of brilliant programmers like Eugenio or Ángel (and Javier, who had already been working with the platform) accelerated our development speed. We published version 0.9 with a ton of changes and then finally 1.0. During the year we reached an average of 150 downloads per month (with more than 300 in November and December).
• After some key publications, <e-Adventure> was well very well received by the local media and we were interviewed a few times.
• I completed my first year of full-teaching duties, and used it to play some educational games in the classroom and to promote game programming among my students.
• We finished a first iteration porting the <e-Adventure> engine to Java-based mobile devices, and started a second iteration focusing on the Android platform.
• We collaborated a lot with the school of medicine at UCM, creating educational simulations with <e-Adventure> to complement practical exercises, performing tests with students and publishing the results. Summary: Playing provided a better understanding of the practical exercises and better grades.
• We opened new lines of research within <e-Adventure>, focusing on accessibility, new game-writing methodologies and new software and plugins for version 2.0 (more on this on a later post).
• I went to the Lab of Computer Science in Boston again. This time I went there for six months thanks to a grant from Real Colegio Complutense. I worked with Carl in new types of game-based learning, including a rather interesting game about how to properly package hazardous materials for shipping.
• I participated in 14 research publications (including journals, conferences and workshops)
• I attended only one conference: MatDidac 2010. I was invited to give one of the keynote sessions.
• Most importantly: I secured a tenured Associate Professor position at Complutense University.

Again, a pretty intense year. 2010 is also looking good so far, with my tenured position and increasing involvement in different projects. The diversification of e-Adventure as a test-bed for different lines of research is exciting and seems to be yielding interesting results.

I will let you know once the year finishes. I just hope I will remember to do my yearly report in January this time.

Research reflections

Dear blog,

It has (again) been months between posts, and in these months I have been thinking about blogging, tweeting, facebooking and other forms of online presence.

I am registered in most web-based social forms of communication, but I am not really committed to any of them, all for different reasons.

For instance, I started this blog as a way of putting my research on the web, giving it some exposure, and keeping a log of our research activities (mostly focused on the e-Adventure project). However, maintaining this blog has a curious psychological effect: even though I do not have a lot of readers, I do feel a pressure to write witty and interesting posts. Unfortunately, I rarely find the time (or the mood) to write elaborate posts, and as soon as my workload increases, I leave the blog unattended for months.

I also write in another blog, in which we share stories of all flavors, usually with a geeky perspective. Write? Wrote. My last post there was more than a year ago.

On the other hand, there is twitter. I opened my twitter account a few months ago, because it is another important form of online presence and because I was interested in following twitter content. I do follow a lot of interesting sources of tweets from friends, researchers and media, but I rarely contribute content.

The case with twitter is different: it is not that I do not have the time (140 chars!). The point is that when I do something interesting, it just doesn’t occur to me to tweet about it.

So, if I were to maintain an online presence to expose my research activities, I should develop a tweeting habit and find the time and energy to post on the blog. Or I could just quit both activities, and focus on my articles and classes, which are the activities that they actually pay me to do.

I have been thinking about those two options. Archiving the blog and forgetting about twitter is obviously easier, and will give me more time and less pressure for my other activities. On the other hand, I think I could have fun maintaining an online presence if I could reduce self-imposed pressure.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to do a little experiment on myself. I’m going to try to commit to at least one blog post per week and a tweet per day. I’m going to pretend that no one reads them (let’s be honest, few people actually read them) and just focus on getting the posts and tweets published, without a pressure for quality.

Once I slip back into one of these non-writing lapses (it will happen), I will check back and try to reflect on whether I’m happy with what I posted and rethink what it means to maintain an online presence.

Personal blogging, reflections

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