Archive for February, 2008

There were two good blog posts on virtual words for kids that caught my eye this week. 360 Kid’s Scott Traylor reports the 2008 New York Toy Fair was one of the best in recent years, with “…at least twelve new or relaunched social networking / virtual world destinations for children. Some have an offline component, like a stuffed toy complete with a code to unlock an online destination. Others had a device that would connect to your computer via the USB port.”

I’m sure not all of these are stand-outs by any means but one, the ME2, really does appear to break new ground. Though the ME2 website only offers a tantalizing glimpse (”Coming Spring 2008″ and a few unremarkable screen shots) the video demonstration made it clear why Scott describes this as a “giant leap forward.”

In a nutshell, kids becomes Me2 citizens not by dinging mom or dad’s credit card each month, but through a one-time purchase ($36) of a GPS device. Yep, that’s right, GPS. This pocket-sized gizmo allows you to earn points to spend in-world by moving. What a radical concept! Need a new stereo for your virtual crib? Time for a few trips up and down the stairs. Want to pimp your virtual ride? Better get the bike and head out for a lap or two around the neighborhood. How cool is that?

Meanwhile, Lee Wilson of Headway Strategies and the Education Business Blog wrote an excellent update on virtual worlds and learning in the March issue of Cable in the Classroom magazine. In Virtual Worlds = Real Learning he reports “There have always been scientific concepts our children should experience that are too dangerous, too expensive, or too time-consuming for school. For these activities - some of the most thought provoking in science - we have had to settle for lectures and reading. Virtual worlds change this equation.”

I couldn’t agree more. Though virtual worlds — or any game genre — is not a panacea for all students, subjects or situations, in the right hands they can be used to offer an experiential learning environment that is difficult to provide any other way.

Given the amount of time it takes to design, develop and go to market, it’s rare for current issues or events to find their way into a game. ICED, a new issue-oriented learning game that takes on the hot-button topic of immigration, is an exception to that rule and also shows how new development tools may make current events games more feasible.

ICED was developed by MFA students Heidi Boisvert (Hunter College) and Natalia Rodriguez (Brooklyn College) with the input of more than 100 New York City high school students, while working with Breakthrough, an international non-governmental organization, with offices in New York and New Delhi, that uses media, education and pop culture to promote human rights, equality and justice, ICED uses Garage Games Torque engine to put a FPS perspective on the immigrant experience.

After a brief assessment before entering the game space, the player chooses the persona of one of five immigrant teens, each of a different ethnicity and immigration status. While navigating the game’s urban landscape, a players actions determine their fate, accurately simulating how immigration laws are unevenly enforced, often denying due process and violating human rights of all immigrant in the process.

Though sure to make CNN’s resident anti-immigrant spokes-pundit Lou Dobbs rant-and-rave, ICED gives teachers and students a powerful and provocative tool to stimulate discussion, learning and understanding of the immigrant experience. ICED may also be a harbinger of a new approach to development for all game genres, serious and otherwise, that dramatically reduces time-to-market, making it possible to build a game that reflects current — or at least recent — issues and events.

Several companies including Making History developer Muzzy Lane are building web-based game-building services that promise to “…bridge the gap between those who want to make games and the ability to create them. With our service…virtually anyone or any company will be able to make or mod their own games ranging, from a casual card game to a sophisticated 3-D video game, on the web, in real time.”

Essentially what this means is that like digital publishing, graphics, photography and video, the tools of game development that once were once rare, remote and difficult to use are rapidly being democratized. In the context of serious games, this has profound implications for empowering curriculum planners and individual teachers to customize games — or even create new ones — to meet the needs of their schools and students. For entertainment games this could be an even more disruptive trend by introducing a social aspect to modding, sharing and playing games, changing the players experience in subtle and dramatic ways.

According to Ben Sawyer (Digital Mill) and Peter Smith (University of Central Florida), “Everyone has their own name for what serious games should be called. When they’re using these terms, they’re still talking about serious games… It’s not that these words are wrong. It’s just, they’re trying to categorize things. And there’s nothing categorical about any of these names.” Addressing this problem, Sawyer and Smith have developed a taxonomy of games — actually a number of interlocking, market-segmented taxonomies — which they presented at the Game Developers Conference this week. The slides (38mb .pdf file) can be downloaded here and are a big step forward from the unofficial draft that I reported on here last May, offering much clearer definitions and categorizations of the field. Further reporting on Sawyer and Smith’s GDC session can be found in Gamasutra and elsewhere if you Google “serious games taxonomy“.

In one of the most anticipated product announcements in years, Will Wright said this week that his new game, Spore, will be released worldwide on September 7th. I’ve seen so many previews I’ll be glad to get my hands on it (though I don’t look forward to the Cloverfield-esque movie sequel where “Spore Eats New York”). Seriously, though, from all reports like the following ones in Wired and BitTech, Spore is going to be a massive hit and a step forward in sophistication for game design.

Designer Will Wright Walks Us Through Spore
By Chris Kohler | Wired | 02.13.08

It’s been a long wait, but Spore is nearly here. Will Wright, one of the game industry’s most fertile minds and the creator of the groundbreaking SimCity and The Sims, said Tuesday that his biggest project yet will be released worldwide Sept. 7.

Wired.com got an extensive first look at the latest version of Spore, a grandiose simulation of every stage of life, from the primordial soup to space exploration.

Even though the premise sounds daunting (the game was originally called SimEverything), Wright said that it is first and foremost a casual game that everyone can enjoy. “From the outset, I wanted to make something that Sims gamers wouldn’t be freaked out by,” he said. “People who play for creativity and expression, I think, are the largest untapped part of the market.”

The Wired story and pictures continue here, they published a pre-release review is here, and BitTech’s “hands-on preview” is here.

In two recent interviews Raph Koster shares his early thinking about user-generated content and MMOGs, and reveals more details about Metaplace, his virtual world platform that encourages users to modify and create their own virtual worlds, much the way services like Kerpoof and Scratch allow users to create and mod pictures, movies, animations, and programs.

RockPaperShotgun interviews Koster on MMOGs in general, while The Escapist Interview with Koster dives deep into Metaplace with the most specific info yet on the public beta release. Together they illuminate the accelerating convergence of games, social media and the web which appears poised to impact everything from entertainment to networking to educational technology in 2008. >>> Update: here’s Raph’s post on the public “sneak peak” of Metaplace with links to other coverage and photos.

Henry Jenkins post about Educause Learning Initiative conference last week references the 2008 Horizon Report “…that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expressions within learning-focused organizations.” According to the report emerging technologies with the greatest likely impact include:

• Grassroots Video — “virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software.”
• Collaboration Webs — “collaboration no longer calls for expensive equipment and specialized expertise. The newest tools for collaborative work are small, flexible, and free, and require no installation.”
• Mobile Broadband — “each year, more than a billion new mobile devices are manufactured — or a new phone for every six people on the planet….New displays and interfaces make it possible to use mobiles to access almost any Internet content — content that can be delivered over either a broadband cellular network or a local wireless network.”
• Data Mashups — “mashups– custom applications where combinations of data from different sources are ‘mashed up’ into a single tool — offer new ways to look at and interact with datasets.”
• Collective Intelligence — “the kind of knowledge and understanding that emerges from large groups of people is collective intelligence.”
• Social Operating Systems — “the essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content…Social operating systems will support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know.”

No mention of games and virtual worlds? Jenkins notes that “…the presenters, and some of the attendees, signaled some disappointment that Virtual Worlds did not make the final cut this year, suggesting that there is still some disagreement about their viability and long-term impact on education.” His post, which includes a link to his white paper for the MacArthur Foundation, continues here…