The Appropriate Level of Challenge

Finding the appropriate level of challenge in a game -- especially educational games -- can be quite difficult.

Math Blaster: Rated 'M' for Math (to view the complete comic)

Indie Game Documentary

For those of you not one of the chosen, here's an awesome little documentary about Markus 'Notch' Persson and the development of Minecraft into the cure for cancer an Independent Game phenomenon.

Minecraft Documentary



Enjoy!

-Russell

The Birth of GTA

Just read an interesting article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun about Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

Mike Dailly (one of the designers) just posted the design document for "Race N' Chase", or as we all know and love it, "GTA".



An interesting read, especially the specifications and gameplay sections. It's straightforward and thorough, and it took 2 years to develop. One day, one day perhaps I'll be able to say I worked on a game with a similar scope.

Cheers,
Russell

Pokemon as an "Educational" Game

Russell presented a few game-related blogs and websites at this week's Games Meeting.

Thanks to Digg, I stumbled across this article on a different game blog called Joystick Division.

"Five Things We Learned from Pokemon" - Aaron Matteson, March 15th, 2011.

Maybe any game can be educational?

Actually, if you follow the Pokemon franchise at all, it has a surprising amount of moral development built-in. It really pushes the ideas of personal responsibility, ethics, compassion, etc. Of course, you're also capturing wild creatures and then making them fight duels until they faint.

More educational games (courtesy of my sister, Jessica)

My sister just passed along a site she found with several educational games. I haven't played through them yet, but it looks like there is a variety of both topics and quality.

http://www.mrnussbaum.com/index.html

Enjoy!

Thanks, Jess.

When can something be called a "Game"

So I still have a lingering problem from some of our initial, unresolved discussions. Here's the deal:

We all agree that nearly any activity can be "turned into" a game. I can take boring house chores and then try to complete them within a given time (competing against myself) or before someone else complete's their task (competing against someone else). We can even award points and I can try to get the highest number of points. Regardless, I can still recognize it as a "game". It is easily identifiable, and does not conflict with other concepts, meaning that it does not have to be mutually exclusive (i.e., it can be a chore AND a game, but the game aspect is recognizable in its own right).

So, this leads me to the question of "When does an activity become recognizable as a game?" For example, in iSTART, there is coached practice where students write in self-explanations and receive feedback from animated agents, and the back and forth interaction can change what occurs next (i.e., it can change if they move to the next sentence, if they have to revise, or it could change the feedback from the system). Feedback, animated characters, and interactions that can change the system state are all also features common to games. However, coached practice, on it's own, is definitely NOT a game, and no one would be deluded into thinking that it was.  Then we take that same environment and add points to it, so that students earn point values corresponding to the quality of their actions. Points are another feature common to games. Does the simple addition of points technically classify it as a game? It sure doesn't feel like a game, but could it still be a game by definition? If not, what else is needed to make it constitute a game? Does it require an overarching goal, end-point, or metric of comparison? If the students were told to try and earn 300 points, then it could more easily be described as a game. Or if the point values were used to earn a type of trophy (which the system does), then can it be called game?

So when does the task transition from "just a task" into a "game and task"? Is it a particular feature (i.e., having a goal - either internal or external)? No, it can't just be that, because when I drive to work each day I have the goal of getting to the building, but that doesn't, in itself, make it a game. Is it a combination of features (i.e., goal + enjoyment)? No, it can't be that, because some parts of games are excruciatingly painful and frustrating, yet they are still clearly "games". Could it be goal+affect/emotion? No, because I can get excited, angry, frustrated, sad, or bored about accomplishing a task at work, and that does NOT make it a "game". Are there specific features that inherently make something into a "game", like competition? No, or at least competition, because I can be very competitive about performing better than you, and getting better grades, or getting an article published, but that doesn't necessarily make it into a "game".

So how is it that we can so easily recognize something as a "game"? I think that it has to do with intent. Or possibly attributing intent onto a goal/end-point/metric (either internally or externally). Some games can be created by the intent of developers. Then the players can either follow the developers original intent, or they can create their own. So a player can go outside of the rules to accomplish their own intent. Thereby, any activity can be classified as a game if someone attributes intent onto it (regardless of any features present). This also allows differing opinions on when a task can be described as a "game" or not, though it doesn't provide any a priori, objective measures to do so, but truthfully I'm not sure that any such measures exist.

Turning Work Into Play

This article appeared in February 28th, 2011, on the Wired Magazine website. In brief, the UK Guardian newspaper wanted to process an enormous number of receipts, to investigate potential government fraud or misuse of funds. They turned it into a simple online game that was open to the public... and were able to process a massive amount of data very quickly. The game was simple and competitive.

"How Games Make Work Seem Like Play" - Clive Thompson, Wired Magazine

Further into the article, they discuss Jane McGonigal (not the Hogwarts Professor, but still awesome) and her book, "Reality is Broken." She has developed a game called World Without Oil that pushes users/gamers to explore alternative energy solutions. A similar game, Lost Joules, is another environment-friendly game by Adaptive Meter.

Some of you may also be familiar with Fold It, a game where people "contribute to science" by helping solve protein-folding problems. Turns out, humans are much better than computers at making intuitive leaps involving dramatic or unlikely folds - then computers can take over from there to work out the kinks (pun intended).

I think that the addition of a pro-social or "change the world for the better" aspect to games is an interesting way to attract and motivate players.

Statistics from the SeriousGames mailing list

This popped up on the SeriousGames mailing list.

"With a few of my colleagues we have been working on a project to reference and classify as many serious games as possible. For now, we have a total of 2225 Serious Games. For those of you interested in some quantitative data on this large corpus (e.g. what topics are Serious Games dealing with), we created a small report available here:
http://serious.gameclassification.com/files/articles/sgc_report_03-11.pdf

Our long term research goal would be to reference *every* (or close to) serious game released on a online collaborative database, to create a site like "Mobygames" dedicated to Serious Games. So the 2225 Serious Games we analyzed for the report are available here:
http://serious.gameclassification.com/

As you may have noticed, 2225 is far from being *every* serious games released. So, if you find a serious game we are missing, please help us by referencing it on this collaborative website:
http://serious.gameclassification.com/EN/games/edit.html
(You don't need to create an account to add new serious games, only to edit available games)

This is our first report, so feel free to ask if you would like to see more statistics, or have any comment/suggestion.

Hoping you'll find this kind of report useful,

Best Regards,
Damien Djaouti."

Braid on PC/Mac

It's only $3.00 on Steam! Click the picture for great fun!



Also, Steam is a great digital distribution platform made and maintained by those awesome people at Valve (Half-Life series, Team Fortress 1&2).

If you haven't played it you should definitely check it out and share the happy!