A few Christmases back, a good friend “helpfully” gifted us with the original Dominion game. I say “helpfully” because Dominion is deck building game, although not in the sense of a collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering. Dominion’s base set includes treasure cards, action cards, and victory cards. You purchase these cards primarily with the treasure coin cards, trying to acquire more victory cards than your opponent. Action cards can act on other players, give you additional spending power, give you more cards, or increase your maximum number of permissible purchases.

With randomness in its favour, Dominion is enjoyable to play repeatedly and quick once you’re familiar with the various action cards. It even plays well with only two players. Numerous expansions are available with different action card themes you can mix and match. We have them all, much to our bank account’s detriment. Thank you, “friend”. (-:

There have been some extremely excellent board game adaptations for Apple’s iPhones and iPads, including Dominion publisher Rio Grande Games’ Carcassonne tile-building game and Days of Wonder’s Small World. Although some of these aren’t too bad for setup time, it’s nice to not need a big table and to start playing immediately. It’s also nice to play whenever you have the urge. I was therefore quite keen to see a Dominion application and finally there was one: Dominion by Donald X. Vaccarino. Hurrah!

Vaccarino’s version is unofficial but released with Rio Grande’s (RGG) approval. They apparently, according to a Board Game Geek posting from an RGG employee , permit this for casual/free versions with the proviso those games be removed when an official version is released. Very nice! As a result, Vaccarino’s version is able to use the name and card artwork. It’s not as polished as Carcassonne for the iPad in terms of user experience but it’s generally OK with some niggly annoyances here and there, like it’s prone to crashing between games.

In addition to a tutorial mode and offline mode to play against your choice of a number of AI opponents, it also features a two-player real-time networked playing mode. You can either invite someone specific to play with you or use the somewhat clunky Game Center-powered matching service to find someone else wanting to play. Once matched, the experience is fairly intuitive. You drag cards you to play onto the “table” and drag cards from the tableaux to buy them. It’s not too dissimilar to playing with real cards, although much quicker, making it somewhat harder to see what’s happened sometimes.

Although the website allows you to retrieve some play history on a given player by name, this isn’t built into the game. Basically, it’s just a listing on matches completed and the final score. Indeed, there aren’t even in-game leaderboards, despite the use of Game Center. This lack of history leads to some very unsporting player behaviour. My play history reveals I’ve lost more games than I’ve won. What it doesn’t show is how many games I’ve started but not finished because I used the “quit game” option to terminate the current match. I’ve lost more games than I’ve won because it’s annoyingly common for players you’re trouncing to quit rather than lose. To be fair, the reverse also happens, where someone beating you decides there’s insufficient challenge and quits, but that feels a lot rarer.

If you’re a player who quits mid-game, I have two words for you: please don’t. Just because I’m not sitting across a real table from you doesn’t make it any less rude or disrespectful to just up and quit because you’re losing. Or are you the kind of person who would kick over the table and take your toy soldiers home too? If you are that person, please don’t ruin my gaming pleasure and waste my time with your snivelly, immature behaviour. Go play in the sewer with the other rats–even if you are winning. That is all.

If you’re interested in any combination of women and gaming, including some games-based learning, then look no further than the latest issue of The International Journal of Gender, Science and Technlology. It features a special issue on women and games, with articles and reviews. From the special issue’s introduction:

In 2004 video games industry veteran Mark Eyles, then working at the University of Portsmouth, recognised the need for an initiative that would increase the representation of women within the gaming industry. The project Mark instigated – Women in Games (WiG) – began with a series of conferences involving an innovative mixture of people from academia and from industry. The aim of these conferences was to generate and promote initiatives and research that focused on narrowing the gap between men and women working in the games industry.

WiG is now an internationally recognised organisation, still with this mixture of people from academia and from industry. In addition to the annual conferences, WiG members are now also involved in smaller events, online discussions and journals. Now, seven years on, WiG continues to grow and develop and we, in our role as members of the Steering Committee, would like to introduce readers to the special issue section of the GST journal.

The articles included in this special issue reflect the multiple and overlapping aims of the Women in Games initiative. Each of these aims requires the interweaving of academic enquiry with industry engagement and dialogue, which has been an extraordinary strength of the WiG initiative.

by Marian Carr and Helen Kennedy

This is an open journal, so all the articles can be freely downloaded from the contents page for Vol 3 (1).  Articles include:

• Editorial: Special Issue Section
  Marian Carr, Helen Kennedy

• The Sims as a Catalyst for Girls’ IT learning
  Elisabeth Hayes

• Disrupting the Gender Order: Leveling Up and Claiming Space in an After-School Video Game Club
  Jennifer Jenson, Stephanie Fisher, Suzanne de Castell

• Constituting the Player: Feminist Technoscience, Gender, and Digital Play
  Alison Harvey

• Designing Gendered Toys
  Els Rommes, Maartje Bos, Josine Oude Geerdink

• Segregation in a Male-Dominated Industry: Women Working in the Computer Games Industry
  Julie Prescott, Jan Bogg

• Play Globally, Act Locally: The Standardization of Pro Halo 3 Gaming
  Nicholas T Taylor

• CASE STUDY: Advancing Elementary-School Girls’ Programming through Game Design
  Ahmet Baytak, Susan M Land

• PERSPECTIVES ARTICLE: A Woman in Games: A Personal Perspective, 1993 – 2010
  Kim Blake

• A Review of ‘A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players’. Author: Jesper Juul
  Kaye Elling

• CONFERENCE REVIEW: Women in Games at Develop 2010
  Jamie Adams

• A Review of ‘Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning’. Authors: James Paul Gee and Elizabeth R. Hayes
  Marian Carr

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.

Jo Iacovides  distributed an e-mail containing a list of contact details and descriptions from all of the people who expressed an interest.  I didn’t see it before I arrived in Milton Keynes, but I’m surprised at some of the people on it.  Ian Martin, from the T320 course team and the TT380 chair, is here across from me.  Several people from my Twitter stream, like Doug Clow, are here.  Some people I see on the PlanetOU blogs, like Ray Corrigan and Colin Chambers, are also here.  Not all of the 36 people who expressed an interest are here.  There are 24 people here.  There’s a disparate number of women present.  The two organizers are female and then there are three other women physically present, plus Rita Tingle via Elluminate.  That’s not very many!

Quite a number of people are interested in motivation and engagement.  Some people, like Jo and the guy next me (who is it again?), are interested in methodology.  The guy next me is particularly interested in assessing learning in games and the methodology for that.

There will be a wiki for the people in this group.  One of the first things they want to create a page for is an inventory of where and what games are used at The Open University.  One of the problems at the OU is that it’s so compartmentalized.  There are all kinds of neat people and projects, but it’s so difficult to find out about them, so one of the goals is to introduce us all and harvest our shared knowledge, whether that’s for “blue skies” research or applied use.

What do I want?  I’m very firmly embedded in an the OU’s distance education context.  My love of teaching is one of the three pillars in my life, along with building communities, and playing games.  It’s not just about World of Warcraft, but about the game theory and metaphorical aspects that both motivate and encourage people to persist.  As Tony Nixon mentioned, there’s a lot of boring stuff in games, but players still persist.  Some people have called World of Warcraft “World of Workcraft”.  I think one of the reasons they persist is because of community and peer pressure.  So I’m also interested in the mechanisms in games that encourage and support them in forming their own communities of practice for learning and inquiry.  My end goal is to trans to transfer these successful (in gaming) methodologies into online pedagogies.  I want to encourage students to become more “Susans” than being satisfied with being “Roberts”, particularly in online courses, where it’s difficult to maintain motivation and persist when you, as a student, are basically alone.

This involves both qualitative and quantitative research.  I know my contexts, but some of the methodological bits—connective ethnography and analysis—I’d love to discuss.  Plus I just love hearing ideas and thinking about things.  And, if it involves playing and doing things along the way with real students, all the better!   I’m therefore keen to make connections and find like-minded people with whom to collaborate on those topics within the community in which I, however, tenuously, belong.

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Image: A recent guild meeting where Irana (left) was initiated into The One. As always, there was dancing, but things got a little “hot.”

Colleagues from the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) and Maths, Computing and Technology at The Open University (OU) are inviting other OU staff interested in gaming research to a meeting next week in Milton Keynes. Here’s part of the blurb from the DigiLab post describing the event:

On Thursday, 21st October, Jo Iacovides (IET) and Marian Petre (Computing) are hosting an informal discussion on gaming research, with the aim of getting people from the OU who are interested in the area to meet up. Whether it’s using games for learning, considering game design, using gaming as a medium for understanding strategy or interaction, or anything else game-related, it would be great to hear from you.

As I’m interested in motivation, learning, and communities of practice formation within World of Warcraft, this is right up my alley. I know Jo Iacovides, one of the organizers, is also interested in some similar topics, as we’ve corresponded previously, but I’m eager to make some other connections.  I doubt it will get as “heated” as some of my guild meetings, but it should be interesting.

PS: If anyone knows of cheap ways to get from Milton Keynes Central to The Open University, please let me know! I currently use the Raffles taxi service and it’s about £5.00 each way; the taxi fare is almost as much as my rail fare from London. Thanks.

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/

Elsheindra (me)

Hello, my name is Michelle Hoyle. By day, I’m a respectable Open University course author, associate lecturer, and course presentation chair. At night, I assume my secret identity: Elsheindra, night elf guild mistress of The One on a European World of Warcraft (WoW) server. You’re probably thinking that massively multiple online role playing games (MMORPGs), like WoW, are just for kids. In fact, according to research (Lenhart et al, 2008; Yee, 2008), only about 20% of WoW players are between the ages of 12 to 19. That means some 80% of players are solid, upstanding citizens of the world. They could be your tutors. They could be your next door neighbours. They could be that person you see walking down the street or buying beef at the butcher’s. World of Warcraft, as of May 2009, was holding steady at 11.5 million active subscribers (Blandeburgo, 2009; Chuang, 2009). That’s over 60% of the online gaming market. It’s the most successful personal computer game ever to be released.

What is it that compels these people to spend around 20 to 24 hours a week (Hagel and Brown, 2009; Yee, 2005) in a virtual world? Is it the killing? Is it the girls? Is it the beautiful scenery? Is it the fantastic fashions? People’s motivations vary, so I can’t give you a universal motivation, but I can reveal something about why I play. I play for three reasons: because I’m a community builder, because I’m a teacher, and because I love to help people. They’re all a bit related. I have spent my life bringing people together and helping them form cohesive, long-lasting communities. It started back in the 1980s with electronic bulletin boards and continues today with World of Warcraft. That’s why I run a guild and co-lead an alliance of guilds.

A guild in World of Warcraft is a collection of people who share things in common. The game gives them some tools for sharing, like a shared chat area, calendar, and a bank in which to store money or items for common use. They usually share a philosophy. My guild, for example, is a social guild with a philosophy of doing random acts of kindness. An allied guild is composed of people together for friendship or fun. When my guild members aren’t out being kind to the other 4000 people on the server, they have each other to group with on small tasks, called quests, like curing sick deer or ridding an area of nasty rabid bears. A guild is also a pool of people with which to go on longer adventures in groups of five for rewards like armour and gold in mazelike environments where there are obstacles to overcome and difficult, large monsters to kill—so-called dungeons. The alliance of guilds I help lead allows smaller social-minded guilds like mine to be able to participate in even larger, more complex adventures that require 10, 25, or 40 people at a time. It is very rewarding to be in a position to enable people to have fun, but at the same time promote learning of important social interaction and problem solving skills.

Where does the learning come from? The learning is, in fact, everywhere in the game. Those 5-person dungeon groups or the larger 25-person groups require leaders to decide on strategy and direct the other people with varied motivations. Some people go to these dungeons only to get better gear. That’s their motivation. Other people go for the feeling of accomplishment in participating in something difficult. When people are there for gear, there can be clashes over who should get it, which requires good interpersonal relationship skills and diplomacy on the part of the group leader. In our guild alliance, we’ve had leaders good at strategy and telling people what to do but with terrible interpersonal skills. That made their adventures not very fun, so people were reluctant to participate. Likewise, running a successful guild over a long period of time requires all manner of leadership and diplomacy skills. WoW is a safe, low-risk environment in which to learn these things and they can transfer into real-world rewards (Brown and Thomas, 2006).

Elsheindra as a healing tree

In order to contribute to a team effectively, people need to learn to play their characters well. Each character has specific abilities. Elsheindra, my character, is a druid healer. She cures people of diseases and poisons and heal their bodies of damage they have taken while fighting. I’ve specialized in being a healer for over four years. I’ve become really, really good at healing by dint of lots of practice and much analysis of how things work. I have pride in my abilities and I love being able to help people in the game in a non-violent fashion, because I was not much interested in hacking and slashing at things. Other people are extremely interested in effectively killing things and devote hours outside of the game to reading about their character’s role and how to improve on it, often in very tiny increments. I’m very willing to share my knowledge and experience with other people and often other very good players are too.

I’ve told you a lot about what kinds of things I do in World of Warcraft and my initial motivations. What I haven’t told you are the things I’ve gained: love, acceptance, friendship, and a Ph.D. project, in order of importance. I’m currently researching what elements in games like WoW contribute to motivation and whether or not that can be transferred effectively into distance learning (Hoyle, 2009a; 2009b). Both feature activities that are a lot of work and, let’s face it, aren’t fun. In World of Warcraft, though, people persist with these difficult, not-fun tasks. I know I’ve persisted in some things because of the friends I’ve made. Those friendships have even transcended the virtual world, with people helping me move from apartment to apartment multiple times, even though they live in a different city.

Basil, my partner

The alliance of guilds I co-run just had a real-life adventure at Bletchley Park and a BBQ at my house afterwards, one of several such successful large-scale events over the years. It’s also not uncommon for some of my guild mates to just come and visit from other parts of the UK or from other countries. One of my guild mates even came along from Denmark to Canada for the summer. Are we just strange misfits? That’s a common perception of gamers. I don’t fit in lots of places but in WoW there’s a place for me, as there is for them, and it’s not just because “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog”. Finally, “Basil”, my real-life partner, is someone I met in WoW because he was helping me co-lead the alliance of guilds. We’ve been together for over two and a half years. We still play WoW together on a regular basis, although not 20 some hours a week. There’s nothing like a romantic date night with your beloved and 23 other friends.

WoW is like a fairy tale: magic, dragons, true love, fashion, elves, and orcs; but it’s also what I’ve made of it: a place to be myself and to do the things I love to do.

References

Blandeburgo, B. (2009) ‘Activision “WoWs,” But Where’s Wireless?’, The Game Trade Journal, blog entry posted March 4, 2009. Available from: http://www.gametradejournal.com/2009/03/activision-wows-but-wheres-wireless.html (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Brown, J.S. & Thomas, D. (2006) ‘You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!’ Wired, 14.04 [Online] Available from: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Chuang, T. (2009) ‘WoW Stuck at 11.5 Million Subscribers; Blizz Focused on StarCraft, Diablo’, OCRegister Blizzard Blog, blog entry posted May 7, 2009. Available from: http://gaming.freedomblogging.com/2009/05/07/wow-stuck-at-115-million-subscribers-blizz-focused-on-starcraft-diablo/2201/ (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Hagel, J. & Brown, J.S. (2009) ‘How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation’ Business Week Online, January 14 [Online] Available from: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2009/id20090114_362962.htm (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Hoyle, M.A. (2009a) ‘Levelling Lifelong Learning: Annual Progress Review’, E1n1verse, blog entry posted June 7, 2009. Available from: http://einiverse.eingang.org/archives/2009/06/levelling_lifel.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Hoyle, M. (2009b) WoW! Roberts & Susans Game Learning, [online] Slide presentation. Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/Eingang/wow-roberts-and-susans-game-learning-a-look-at-world-of-warcraft-higher-education-learning-and-motivation (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Lenhart, A. et al. (2008) Teens, Video Games, and Civics, Pew Internet & American Life Project. Available from: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Teens-Video-Games-and-Civics.aspx (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Yee, N. (2005) ‘MMORPG Hours vs. TV Hours’, The Daedalus Project, blog entry posted January 11, 2005. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000891.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Yee, N. (2008) The Daedulus Project, [online]. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/docs/shared-data.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

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