a game research and development blog
As part of our design research for Lit, we’re exploring what game features make people feel “rushed” (excited/stimulated) and relaxed. We’ve put together two brief surveys, one for each emotional state.
Take the rush survey.
Take the relax survey.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Advance! Main Screen
Advance! Job Detail
Advance! Character Detail
Come by and see our talk at 11am today, or check out our twitter feed (games4research) where we’ll be answering questions live!
Assumption: we have insufficient capacity of understanding to be able to act in a complex and global environment. We must count on skilled teams that are committed and self-organized to react at a local level in a global strategy. Strategic positioning requires people free of prejudice and a positive attitude committed to change. So, the ability to learn dynamically at both individual and organizational levels is essential with a focus on being able to apply the changes to facilitate adaptation to this environment. Games and simulations are capable of permitting this type of learning through an experiential form, which facilitates the understanding and integration of complex systems.
A system is defined as a set of interdependent and interrelated elements. Systemic thinking provides us a way to visualize these relationships. Games help us understand complex dynamics and are ideal for learning systemic skills. It permits an environment that breaks the social forms of organization, and provides a safe zone for players to explore a replica of a real-time environment. This is because a game can be used as a representation or an abstraction of a much larger system.
How can a game change our mental models to create a shared model that goes beyond our individual value systems and ideas? Some features of games that enable behavioral change:
Check this article out!
It’s an interesting, if brief, piece about getting gaming experiences to the BRIC countries (that’s Brazil, Russia, India and China for those who don’t read The Economist regularly). I’m particularly curious about the development of serious games for this audience. That’s an unspoken part of why I’m committed to exploring the casual and mobile genres for serious games – because high-end PC games, virtual worlds and console games just aren’t going to reach this audience anytime soon.
As we are developing the Advance! game and research study, we are also getting busy with writing and presenting papers, posters and creative game design workshops. In such events we are happy to meet interested people, receive constructive feedback and form strategic relationships. Following are some of the recent and upcoming presentation engagement:
* Jessica Hammer, the lead designer and founder of the Advance! project presented at Dr. John Black’s practicum for the second time this year. Faculty and fellow students were pleased with the progress, with the game and the research design. Jessica, expecting to be shredded to pieces was delighted with the supportive reaction to the two-hour presentation.
* Nisha created a colorful poster for the Advance! project, which was presented by Jessica Hammer at the Teachers College, Columbia University’s Dean’s Grant event.
* On May 11th at 10:30am the team will present (and publish the paper in the proceeding) at the Teachers College Educational Technology Conference at Columbia University.
* We just received notification that on June 10-12 our submission entitled “Reaching Racists: Discrimination Education Through Play” was accepted for inclusion in the Games, Learning and Society Conference 5.0 (in Madison, Wisconsin) as a micro presentation session. We are thrilled to be included in such a relevant conference and interact with esteemed experts from the fields of game design, emerging technology, education, culture and new media. I can’t wait to finally meet James Paul Gee!
In his paper Emergent Entities and Emergent Processes: Constructing Emergence through Multi-Agent Programming, Uri Wilensky gives the following definition for an emerging entity: “As the components of a system interact, they can form a pattern that is stable over time. We call such patterns emergent objects or entities… They emerge from the interactions of objects at a lower level or scale” (pp. 3). According to Wilensky an emergent entity has the following characteristics:
- Stable for some period of time (pp 3)
- Composite- “… almost all entities can be see as emergent, it is a matter of adopting the emergent perspective and seeing the entity as a composite-an ensemble of interacting components. From this perspective, all entities can be seen as special cases of process- processes that are maintained in a dynamic equilibrium” (pp 3).
- Dynamic (pp 3)
- Parallel- “[emergent entities] arise out of the interactions of many components all moving at the same time- that is, they act in parallel” (pp3). Wilendky also explains that “in order to make sense of the systems of interactions that comprise a complex system, we need to better understand how multiple processes executing simultaneously can coordinate and result is a composite pattern” (pp 3-4)
- Random- “…randomness can be quite constructive – generating many of the beautiful patterns we see in nature” (pp 4) “All of these patterns emerge fro the interactions of many tiny components governed by the laws of chance” (pp 4)
Further, Wilensky explains that research shows that people have difficulties in thinking about the details of how parallel processes can interact (pp 3) and reasoning about randomness and probability (pp 4). And, he proposes that such accumulated difficulties result in an emergent entity which he calls the “deterministic/centralized mindset” (pp 4) “This mindset causes people to see worldly phenomena as orchestrated and determined instead of as emergent. It focuses our attention at a single level of description rather than pointing us to the connections amongst levels” (pp 4)
Wilensky also points out that “because of our experiences as agents and our inability to attend to large numbers of factors for long periods of time, we do not have significant opportunities to develop robust intuitions about how emergent phenomena arise and maintain themselves” (pp 4)
Although in his paper Wilensky is more concerned about the emergenet entities in nature, we can use the same line of argument about the patterns and systems that emerge from interactions of human agents. Examples of such emergent systems are traffic, revolution, or systemic bias. Can Advance bring the opportunity for the players to develop an understanding about how systemic bias as an emergent phenomena arise?
Playing Advance, the player could have a broad perspective of the system (company) and reason in terms of the macrobehavior of the system and no longer focus only on the microbehavior of its agents. The player is not concerned about the bias of a specific agent, whereas she/he is concerned about the systemic bias (bias that emerge from the whole system). At the same time, the player experiences the perspective of single agents during the face off of the game, and realizes how the systemic bias could emerge from the enactment of these independent parallel processes. Each hiring process is independent and may occur simultaneously and hence in parallel, however, systemic bias emerges as the result of these parallel processes. Therefore, the game rules and mechanism forces the player to step back and think in system, the player is in charge of dealing with a bias system in order to succeed in the game.
Moreover, playing Advance player also have the opporunity to think about random processes and rules of chance. If the system is bias aganst a specific trait or gender it does not mean that no character with such gender or trait can be hired, but the chances are lower comparing to rest. It is more probable that somebody with a different trait or gender be more successful in earning the job. Also, the bias could be random even if the agents of the sysytem are rational. Each time the player tries to put a character in a job, during the face off the character may or may not earn the job and the bias factor could be randomly distibuted for these hiring processes.
1. Controls should be customizable. (Always let players remap controller buttons to suit their preferences)
2. Controls should be intuitive.
3. Minimize control options (Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers have 17 depressible buttons including direction pads and analog sticks. That’s more than 65% of the 26-letter English alphabet!).
4. The interface should be as non-intrusive as possible. (Don’t ask whether the player wants to save their game. Just save).
5. For PC games, consider hiding the main computer interface during game play.
6. A player should always be able to identify their score/status in the game.
7. Interfaces should be consistent in control, color, typography, and dialog design.
8. Minimize the menu layers of an interface.
9. Use sound to provide meaningful feedback.
10. Do not expect the user to read a manual.
11. Prevent error and and provide ways to recover game through the use of warning messages.
12. Players should be able to save games in different states.
Information is great. Finding it sucks. Using what you’ve found – even worse. (Anonymous)
“And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good – need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” (Plato)
Quality is a perceptual, conditional and somewhat subjective attribute means different things to different people. In common use, quality may be defined as a degree of excellence related to either subjective feelings or objective facts. So the Quality of something depends on the criteria applied to it. It may have a concrete and functional value (objective view), or it may be an ideal (subjective), or it is the sum of these attributes.
So what is quality (what is good)?
Something might be good because it is useful, it is beautiful, or because it is. So an understanding of use, beauty and existence is essential to determine quality. Of these three attributes, usefulness is an aspect that is commonly understood (and can be objectively measured). Usefulness is a measure of satisfaction from the consumption of a good or service.
So how do we measure the usefulness of a thing?
To be continued…
One of the hardest things about this project, for me, has been balancing its many threads: reading, research, coding, writing, design. Each of these could easily be a full-time job, so how do I balance them? Not only do I have to figure out how to allocate my own time, I also have to provide leadership for the other people on the project. No two of us have the same skills, nor the same amount of time to commit, nor the same things we want to get out of the project. This makes it an even harder problem.
This is not something I’m particularly good at, and it’s been a big challenge so far. While I’ve done a good job of setting aside lots of time to work on this project – I do something for it every single day, come hell or high water! – I tend to get very focused on one aspect of it at a time. When I’m doing development, I just want to keep developing. Same if I’m doing design, or reading articles, or writing. This is not great for making sure all the parts of the project move ahead together!
To address this, I’ve decided to start evaluating each area of the project in the context of our upcoming deadlines. For example, I’m giving a talk in research practicum next month. I sat down to make an outline and realized that, while we’ve got a lot of design and development progress to report, we don’t have as many new articles to discuss as I’d like.
Okay, so I’d identified a challenge, but I wasn’t sure how to address it. Doing more reading and research is crucial for us, but we can’t afford to take time away from design and development if we want to be able to run a pilot this summer.
Pazit, however, is an experienced project manager, and she had some really good suggestions about how to handle this. ”Do more research” isn’t exactly an actionable goal – but I have a big list of references I want to read and I know how I want to incorporate them into the project. She suggested that we each agree to read one article a week from now until next month’s presentation, and discuss how they fit our work during our group meetings. That’s something we can totally do alongside our existing commitments to the project! I think the discussion is also going to be key, because I think a lot of good ideas (and an even longer reading list!) will come out of our conversations.
This is my first time leading a research team, so I’m always on the alert for learning experiences like this one. I’m really excited about the research progress we’ll be making over the next few weeks, and about my new techniques for managing a multi-threaded project as well!
