Blog 4 - Politics

The political climate around games is changing. Last year, there was a competition sponsored by the Federal Department of Education encouraging small businesses to make educational games and awarding hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding to the winner. This is fantastic. It shows that some lawmakers are aware that video games can have hugely beneficial effects. In fact, this competition's results showed that many of the winners implemented some of the ideas I presented in the introduction blog post. Specifically, content that automatically adjusts to provide an appropriate amount of difficulty, a way to integrate the game into standard instructional practice, and a way for teachers to receive and analyze data from the students' play sessions.  Other factors that were commonly present were story-based narratives, rewards, and competition, which are all ways that games currently engage players. This allows the transference of what is currently captivating about games to make it still captivating when the experience is educational.

Still, for every positive thing that happens in the realm of games in politics, there are about 5 more negatives. For example, in 2012, our own representative Frank Wolf submitted a bill to congress called the Violence in Video Games Labeling Act, which would require all video games rated E or above by the ESRB to contain a label reading "WARNING: Exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior."

For those unfamiliar with the ESRB, it stands for the Entertainment Software Rating Board and they give all games sold a rating that goes from EC (early childhood), up through E (everyone), E10+ (everyone 10 and older), T (teen, recommended for 13+), M (mature, recommended for 17+), and AO (adults only, only sold to those over 18). Unlike the MPAA, which simply assigns a rating and moves on, the ESRB marks all rated games with content descriptors. For example, the M-rated game Halo 3 is rated M for "Blood and Gore, Mild Language, and Violence," while the M-rated game Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball is rated M for "Gambling, Mature Sexual Themes, and Nudity." This allows parents to make more informed decisions about what games to buy for their children, as many parents are much more comfortable with violence than with sexual themes.*

As you can see, this label would apply to every game except those granted an EC rating. A game rated E is very unlikely to have any content that could be considered violent, so the warning would only serve to confuse consumers about the games they were buying, as seen in this mockup made by the author of this Joystiq article about the act, Jordon Mallory. Additionally, the "link" that the warning describes is a correlation between aggressive behavior and violent video game play. As we all know, correlation does not imply causation, and it makes sense that people who have aggressive dispositions would enjoy violent video games.

When you combine this with the fact that nearly every act of violence committed in this country gets blamed on the shooter's video game playing, it's clear that video games do not have a very positive reputation in politics. Even though I believe efforts like Games for Good are making huge strides toward getting mainstream acceptance of video games' ability to have positive effects, there is clearly a long way to go. The current bright side? It looks like it's going in the right direction

*As a side note, the ESRB was actually only created after the introduction of Mortal Kombat to arcades in 1992. Parents who considered all video games to be "for kids" and therefore kid-friendly were horrified to find that Mortal Kombat included very graphic and violent "fatalities" that players could perform. This led to the need for a ratings board to determine what games were appropriate for which age groups and allowed games to be marketed exclusively to adults, if they so chose.

Blog 3 - Important Scholar

Jane McGonigal is a game designer and games advocate whose number one goal, according to her biography, is to see a game developer win the Nobel Peace Prize. She holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and has contributed to many studies, including ones I've cited in papers this semester! Overall, she's been called one of the 20 most inspiring women in the world in O Magazine, one of the 20 most important women in videogaming by Gamasutra, one of the top ten innovators to watch by Business Week, and one of the 50 most important game developers by Game Developer Magazine.

Her consistent message is that games make the world a better place. They are a place where we are rewarded for how much work we put in, where we can set and achieve goals, and where we can represent our best selves. She also believes that games can change the world for the better. One of her games, Cruel 2 B Kind, is not played on any console but is, in fact, played in the real world. She describes it as “a game of benevolent assassination.” In it, you are given three “weapons,” which are each random acts of kindness. This weapons are things like welcoming people to your city, complimenting a target, offering to help, expressing admiration, and wishing your target a happy made-up holiday. Each player also is weak to one of these weapons. The game is played in a public space, such as a park, and, though there is a point scoring system, the purpose of the game is more about catching innocents in the crossfire of your vicious attacks as you tell them that you really like their shoes.

Another one of Jane's games is a website called SuperBetter. This website is essentially the gamification of the healing process. Whether one is healing from a broken leg, chronic pain, or a major depressive episode, SuperBetter exists to expedite the healing process and help the user get, not just better, but SuperBetter. The game first came to her in the form of Jane the Concussion Slayer when, in 2010, she had a concussion that wasn't healing properly. She identified anything that triggered her symptoms (such as bright lights and crowded spaces) as enemies, and anything that made her feel just a bit better (such as cuddling her dog or walking around the block) as power-ups. She developed a secret identity and gathered her sister and husband to help as her allies. Prior to this, she had been overwhelmed with suicidal ideation. Because she had to rest to help heal her concussion, she was severely limited in the kinds of things she could do, including no video games, no work, and no caffeine. Compounding this with constant headaches and pain, there wasn't much that made her life worth living. After she started playing Jane the Concussion Slayer, her symptoms were still there, but, as she puts it, she stopped suffering. When she started to post about her experiences, she attempted to generalize the game and renamed it SuperBetter.

As more people began to participate, it became clear that there was something behind this. More people were feeling happier and more connected to their friends and family. Jane attributes this to something called post-traumatic growth, which is a type of reaction that certain people have after traumatic experiences to reevaluate their life priorities and reconnect with friends and family. In her TED Talk, The game that can give you 10 extra years of life, she talks about the types of resilience that influence whether a person is likely to experience post-traumatic growth and how to build those types of resilience, so that people can gain the benefits without the prerequisite of trauma.

I personally was lucky enough to see her speak at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco in 2013 and also have had my life personally improved by SuperBetter. I'll admit that this is a bit of a stretch from games in education, but Jane McGonigal is a powerful voice for games as good.

If you did watch her TED Talk, what did you think? If you didn't, it's worth it.

Bonus: here are the results from a study examining whether SuperBetter actually helped improve symptoms of depression. Spoiler alert: it does.

Blog 2 - Current Event

Recently, I saw an article posted on io9 titled Try Your Hand At This Ridiculously Addictive Geometry Game. The title wasn't very descriptive and, in fact, seemed like clickbait, but the preview image was one of Euclid's geometric proofs, so I decided to give it a shot.

It turns out this article was about a game called Euclid The Game, which was written by second-year mathematics student, Kasper Peulen. In this post on Stack Exchange, he explains that he was inspired to create the game by watching a video about Euclid's Elements. The way he describes it, in a video game, you start off with a few basic abilities, but as time goes on, you unlock bigger and more powerful ones that allow you to do cooler and flashier things. As he was learning about Euclid's Elements, he couldn't help but feel like it was the same thing happening.

Elements is a collection of geometric proofs compiled by the Greek mathematician Euclid. It starts off with a series of definitions (things like "An acute angle is an angle less than a right angle."), postulates (things like "you can draw a circle given its centerpoint and radius"), and common notions (things like "Things which equal the same thing also equal one another."). Given these, he then describes a series of propositions (things like "you can construct an equilateral triangle with a side of any given line segment". The propositions are accompanied by geometric proofs that show how you can complete the action with only the given postulates and common notions. In Euclid The Game, these postulates provide the moveset and the propositions provide the levels.

If that sounds a bit complicated, let's take an example. Level 1 of Euclid The Game uses the proposition I mentioned above, constructing an equilateral triangle. In Elements, the proof that accompanies this proposition looks like the image to the right. You start with line segment AB and have to create triangle ABC. We know that any point on a circle is the same distance away from the center as any other point on the circle. We can use this to find an equilateral triangle because if we make a circle starting at A with radius AB and another starting at B with radius AB, we know that when they intersect, that point is just as far away from B as it is from A, and that that distance is how far apart A and B are from each other. Now, this description is very wordy and kind of hard to follow even if you know the mathematical principles behind it. I could easily describe it to a mathematician using formal proofs, but those aren't very interesting to read even to mathematicians, let alone to students. However, looking at the geometric proof presented, the concept is pretty clear. When you play Euclid The Game, you get to play around with these postulates and really explore how they hold true. You create the geometric proofs instead of just reading about them and, honestly, if you're anything like me, you'll have a lot of fun trying to solve the puzzle.

There are 20 levels to the game, so give it a try. Let me know what you think! Did you have fun? What levels did you think were hard? Do you feel more interested in geometry than you did beforehand? I got stuck at level 19, so let me know how far you got in the comments!

Blog 1 - Introduction

Public education has always been lambasted for its heavy use of memorization, its reliance on standardized tests as evaluation, and the lack of building student interest. No teacher I've ever had has wanted to "teach to the test" or only focus on memorizing the basics, because the basics aren't the end goal. The end goal of education is to give students the tools to go forth and do something with the knowledge they've gained. Whether this is direct, such as teaching a chemistry student to be able to take more advanced chemistry classes, or indirect, such as allowing a math student to quickly and easily calculate a tip, teachers want their students to be inspired by their subject and go out and do more.

One of the hardest things about this is that public education, by its nature, is mandatory. Anytime you tell a student they have to take a class, they are less likely to enjoy it than if they made that choice themselves. This lack of agency causes students to disengage. The current method of assessment, where you take a test, get a grade, and then move on to the next thing, teaches students to be afraid of failure. To get a question wrong is to have failed, and now your choices are to desperately work on your own to catch up, or fall behind. This is especially true in subjects like math, where subjects constantly build upon each other. In history, if you don't understand all of the motivations behind the Crimean War, just wait and we'll move onto World War One. In math, if you don't understand factorization, then the subject of graphing polynomials is going to be nigh-impossible.

On the other hand, there is already a medium where people are finding agency, where they aren't afraid of failure, and where they are building on basic skills to enrich their own knowledge: gaming.

After you get a grade on a homework assignment, that homework assignment is over. Every student knows the terror of awaiting a bad grade on a project or exam. The worst thing a class can be is "too hard." On the other hand, in games, you are constantly failing. You miss a jump and fall in a pit or get shot by the enemy sniper. In each case, you reload the game, go back, and try a different tactic. Maybe you get a running start before taking the jump or you take a different route through the map, but either way, the response isn't to turn the game off forever. You end up succeeding, not because success was handed to you, but because you kept trying until you did. If everything you tried succeeded, you'd never have any challenge, no reason to go back and try again. In a lot of ways, the worst thing a game can be is "too easy."

There is a lot of knowledge required to play games, and a lot of knowledge the game has to impart. Games are already teaching kids a lot, so what's important is making games that teach them the right thing. A year ago, I was desperately hunting for a shiny Litwick in Pokemon Black. For those of you who are unaware, a "shiny" Pokemon (one with an alternate color scheme) has a 1/8192 chance of showing up in place of a regular Pokemon encounter. A Litwick is a Pokemon.

This can obviously take a very long time, so I got to occupying myself with calculating the probability that I'd encounter it. Obviously, the chance of any given encounter being the shiny Pokemon was still 1/8192, but what if I ran into 100 Pokemon? What about 1000? 8000? I thought about it. If I were to run into two shiny Pokemon in a row, that would be 1/8192 * 1/8192, but that wasn't what I was calculating. What I really wanted to know was the chance that I hadn't run into it yet, and then find the opposite of that. The chance that any given Pokemon would not be shiny was 8191/8192, so the chance that 1000 wouldn't be was (8191/8192) ^ 1000, or about 88.5%. This means that I had a 11.5% chance of running into one in that time.

Later, upon taking a statistics class, I realized that this was binomial distribution, which is a form of probability I still call "Shiny Litwick math."

This kind of tangential learning is very powerful, but can't really be predicted. I can't promise you that every person who played Pokemon got a solid understanding of probability and statistics. What I can promise you is that if you build games around requiring those skills that are compelling enough to make students want to play them, they can overcome any challenge you throw at them. Games provide instantaneous feedback that teachers simply can't, allowing teachers to spend time on students that need extra help or a refresher on a certain topic. Games can also collect data about what portions of the game students are understanding and what portion students are struggling with, allowing the teacher to observe greater trends in the gaps in their teaching. Games eliminate a fear of failure and allow students to focus on exploring a subject and finding the cool ways you can use the things they are learning.

Play is the most natural way to learn, and the most powerful. Figuring out how to incorporate it into our education system is the path toward creating students who loved learning.

For further research, I highly recommend Extra Credits, a YouTube channel dedicated to analyzing games and what they mean for us as a whole. They have an excellent video series on games in education that I particularly recommend.

So what about you? Have you ever learned something playing a video game that came up later in life or in school? Do you think you'd learn better or teach better with games in the classrooms? Let me know!