Image: I can just imagine this Blood Furnace boss exhorting people “L2P!” as he kills them over and over.

It is day two of the writing regime. Today’s plan is writing 750 words, writing CMA feedback, and working on the paper. I was musing last night about the approach to the paper, thinking that having an abstract or an introduction actually makes it easier to write because it provides a focus for the paper’s direction. I have heard other people say that it makes sense to leave the introduction to the last because then you know what you’ve written. I think the former approach might be more sensible for me. I can always go back and revise the introduction if it does not reflect what I end up doing. Focus, however, is priceless.

In addition to an introduction or an abstract, a title might also help. I was experimenting with variants of “L2P! Learn To Play Or…”. I thought that was clever, as it’s something you often see more experienced, impatient players saying to players who they think are not living up to their expectations in terms of expertise or speed. In the context of my work, however, it probably makes more sense to say “P2L! Play To Learn”, but I’m not sure how many people will get that. Nevertheless, a title is a starting point. I had both before I started my keynote writing and that turned out well. Perhaps I can incorporate the factoid into the abstract.

Abstract:

“L2P! L2P!” This is the exhortation you might encounter in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) when other players around you believe your skill or speed in playing is inadequate. It means “learn to play”. In this paper, we demonstrate how L2P has been turned on its axis to yoke the trials of play to the game of learning. 39 World of Warcraft players primarily playing in Europe submitted essays answering the question “Why do you play World of Warcraft?” in a 2010 study.

Using a grounded theory approach and discourse analysis, the essays were analyzed to ascertain the contributors’ motivations for playing and their reasons for persisting in playing. Yee’s player motivational framework subcomponents (Yee 2005; Yee 2006) were applied to each essay and contrasted with Bartle’s original player typology (Bartle 1996; Bartle 2003) in aggregate to determine overall, general motives these players had. While participants were not asked to write explicitly about learning and many did not provide any examples, several contributions are examined here as case studies of mundane and unusual examples, illustrating what these adults are playing to learn–a learning that goes beyond dungeons, dragons, and dwarves.

That does not seem too bad as a first go. I need to check on the discourse analysis; it might not be completely true. I also have no idea how I am going to write up the grounded theory bit appropriately, but at least that is accurate. I definitely followed that kind of approach in tagging the essays. I need to find some time to pore through the James Paul Gee’s book on discourse analysis. I just saw someone else in #phdchat mention it again yesterday. It keeps cropping up and I keep not reading it, even after I went to buy it and then realized I already had. That is trying to tell me something, if I would only listen. I also need to check on what to call Yee’s framework.

References:

Bartle, R. (1996) ‘Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs’, Journal of MUD Research, 1 (1). Also available from: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm (Accessed April 22, 2011).

Bartle, R. (2003) Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Publishing.

Yee, N. (2005) A Model of Player Motivations, [online] Daedalus Project. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001298.php?page=1 (Accessed March 31, 2011).

Yee, N. (2006) ‘Motivations for Play in Online Games’, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9 (6), pp:772-775. Also available from: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772 (Accessed March 31, 2011).

Image: Photograph of 1923 “Happy-Land Drawing and Painting” book cover showing two children painting together.

I was recently talking to someone about multiplayer games because she was in the process of developing a game that she initially thought could just as well be done as a single player educational game.  However, the real issue was what multiplayer really meant.  I have previously put forth the idea of Big OER versus little oer.  There is similarly multiplayer and Multiplayer.  Some incredibly popular games are really multiplayer.  In a multiplayer game, multiple people occupy the same space simultaneously, but the environment or the game does not foster cooperation or teamwork.  It may even be the case that what those other players do does not affect you at all directly.  A good example of this is Zynga’s Farmville. In Farmville, you have your farm, you plant your crops, and you buy whatever the nifty thing of the day is.  You can interact with your neighbours or your friends, but it is not required or necessary to progress through all the content of the game.  Another example that came to mind was GuildWars.  It sounds like you should be forming guilds and interacting with other people, but for many people it was initially very much a solo game.  The game even supported solo play by allowing you to hire NPC mercenaries to go on missions with you.

Contrast this with true Multiplayer games where you do significantly better if you cooperate and group with other people or where the entire premise of the game is based around small communities of people.  For example, in World of Warcraft, most of the content is not accessible to solo players.  Solo players can complete independent quests, but good rewards, in the form of better gear, are available from five-, ten-, or twenty-five player instances.  In those scenarios, what you do does affect other people and they are often not afraid to let you know it.  If you fail to play well or appropriately, if you are in a random group of people—called a “pick up group” or PUG—they may kick you out of the group or verbally abuse you or both. Extremely difficult content is hard to play in a pick-up group.  It has been developed for cohesive groups of people, where the people are used to playing together either because they are all in a community together, like a guild, or because they are a regular cohort of players in a raiding group. Each player in a group in one of these larger adventures is important.  Each person has a role to play.  Each person can contribute to deciding how the encounters are going to turn out by their skill or their tactics.

What does true Multiplayer have to offer over multiplayer or single player experiences in an educational game? True Multiplayer brings a lot. Where one person’s activities and behaviour can impact the play of another means that an awareness of other people is required.  In addition to this being a real-world necessary skill for teamwork and relationships in general, it means you need to consider how your actions impact others, both positively and negatively.  It also means you have the opportunity to enter into a dialogue with those other people about the best way to accomplish similar goals.  Similar goals are one of the lynchpins of communities and shared learning goals facilitate forming communities of practice and the dissemination of information and practice, whether that is skills, game goods, or knowledge.  These are all fostered by a true Multiplayer game but much, much more difficult to achieve in multiplayer games where participants merely occupy the same space simultaneously without impacting each other’s activities.  It is probably almost impossible in a single player game.

You can probably more easily visualize the difference if you consider two five year-olds who are not friends in the same room colouring.  They occupy the same space but each child has his or her own page on which they colour.  After some time passes, you might notice that each kid is talking aloud.  It sounds like self talk: “Now I’m going to colour the sky blue.”  The utterance is really aimed at the other child but it has no impact.  ”multiplayer” games are the same.  You can talk about what you are doing, but what you are doing does not much power to affect what a second person is doing.  Notice that I said “much”.  That is because if you can converse, you can exchange knowledge, even if the goal shared is not identical or even if their activity does not impact your own.  The colouring children, however, have the option to slowly, over time, drift into a shared activity, working together on the same drawing.  That is the opportunity unavailable in multiplayer but fostered and encouraged by true Multiplayer games.

Image: The blurred boundary between the Stranglethorn Vale, Duskwood, and Deadwind Pass zones in World of Warcraft.

I posted this entry originally early in November, but somehow an entire paragraph disappeared, so I’ve re-posted it with a new date. — Michelle

_arien:
games based learning, i think has potential but learners struggle with transferring the learning & dealing with blurred boundaries #fote10

Eingang:
@_arien I think you’re right that learners have trouble with learning when boundaries blurred like in GBL, because of context. #fote10

_arien:  
@Eingang exactly, our minds still work in boxes and takes practice to cross between formal and informal contexts

Eingang:
@_arien Blurred boundaries & different contexts are particularly problematic for, eg, people w autistic spectrum disorders. #h810 #fote10

Eingang:
@_arien AR can help overcome the context issue/blurred boundaries of learning we were just discussing, because RL there too. #fote10

The above is an extract from a Twitter conversation I had on October 1st during the Future of Technology in Education conference (#fote10) with @_arien.   Arien was attending the conference, watching Ollie Bray’s talk, while I was following the conference on Twitter.  Arien, as it happens, is one of my Open University H810 students.  Ollie Bray (@olliebray), of Learning & Teaching Scotland, was discussing the use of computer games in education.

I think Arien’s hit the nail on the head: it is about context.  One of the reasons game skills don’t transfer to learning well is because learners/players do not see something in a game as being applicable to something academic.  Much learning we do is completely context-based.  Without the context of the “subject”, we do not necessarily think to apply something we have learned or maybe even realize that it is applicable.

That is, of course, only true when you are dealing with games intended to be games, and not necessarily with products developed or intended to be educational games.   Let me clarify that with some examples.  Ollie Bray talked about a handheld brain training game.  One of the brain training game exercises has you complete as many math problems as you can within a certain time span.  The math problems are usually simple addition or subtraction.  While the object is to do as many as possible to achieve the highest score, the context of doing math problems is familiar and immediately recognizable.  This particular “game” helps encourage the practice effect that is necessary for so much learning.  The practice effect is also present in World of Warcraft, where someone may be doing complex comparisons of one set of gear statistics versus another.  That also requires mathematical skills, but it is not obvious to the learner that they are practicing a math skill.

The gear statistics example from World of Warcraft is not, I admit, a good example, because it does not illustrate learning.  Actually, technically speaking, neither example so far does.  They are both about practicing skills.  You have already learned how to do the math somewhere else.   In the brain training example, the domain it is applied in is the same as how you likely learned the skill.  In the World of Warcraft example, the domain is completely different and not so obviously related.

I think there is something here to explore about blurred boundaries and learning and I would like to return to it at a later point.  Thank you, Arien, for starting me thinking about it.

In the last five years, the twin concepts of the personal learning environment (PLE) and personal learning network (PLN) have been offered as alternatives to more traditional environments such as the learning management system (LMS) and institutionally-based courses.

During that time, a substantial body of research has been produced by thinkers, technologists and practitioners in the field. Dozens of studies, reviews, conference presentations, concept papers and diagrams are now available.

The purpose of this course will be to clarify and substantiate, from the context of this new research, the concepts of personal learning environments and networks. Course facilitators and participants will analyze the research literature and evaluate it against their own experience with the intent of developing a comprehensive understanding of personal learning environments and networks.
Downes, Siemens, and Cormier (2010)

The course just kicked off this week and the first topic involves social networks, personal learning networks, and personal learning environments.  While I was reading through some of the postings on PLEs versus PLNs, it suddenly occurred to me that a massively online open course, especially one with this kind of structure, is not too dissimilar to the learning that occurs in MMORPGs.  In fact, I’d argue that good game players need to construct their own personal learning networks in order to understand the game and improve their playing. They’re both about social construction of knowledge.

I think a great idea for a paper is contrasting the formal and informal learning networks people build in an MOOC like PLENK2010 and in  MMORPGs.  It could even be fleshed out with some interviews with 4 or 5 players about how/what they use during the course of game playing.  I envision it should be possible to construct some GPLN (game player learning network) diagrams similar to the PLN diagrams that Scott Leslie collected.  Here, for example, is Martin Weller’s PLN:

I could make a similar diagram for myself, but with a specific game-playing focus.  I’m sure I could easily entice some other, more hard-core players, to make similar diagrams, if not as actual graphics at least as a list.  I really think there is something here.  The key point though is, even if there is, what does it mean if there is a similarity?  That I don’t know.  Any ideas?

Downes, S., Siemens, G. & Cormier, D. (2010) Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge ~ PLENK 2010, [online] web site. Available from: http://connect.downes.ca/