"Everything I need to know I learnt from World of Warcraft”

Why we might need to start asking better questions

about games, simulations and virtual worlds

Martin Oliver

Interactive poll!

“Do people learn better from games than in a conventional classroom?”

1. Great question! I’ll go with that.

2. Meh, it’s ok, but could do better.

3. That question just doesn’t work.

So what’s the problem?

Good stories don’t necessarily make good research– Yes, we need to know this stuff can happen,

but… who cares? What does this let us do?

Let’s just step back a second… How are games supposed to make a difference?

“Technology has the potential to help reinvent the education process, and excite and inspire young learners to embrace science, math and technology,” Mundie said. “The Games for Learning Institute at NYU is a great example of how technology can change how students learn, making it far more natural and intuitive.” […] Video games, with their popularity and singular ability to engage young people, are showing promise as a way to excite and prepare the Net generation.

One of the ideological premises of much research on digital games and learning is the belief that education institutions are failing - failing to adequately prepare students for the demands of the digital age, failing to engage students in the curriculum, and failing to make best use of the digital technologies now available. […] In the education and games debate, the presupposition of failure has tended to frame games as a kind of remedy, which can be brought into either education institutions themselves or the domain of educational theory to help understand and address the shortcomings of current educational practice.

A consequence of this is that games and game play tend to be treated as “out there,” beyond the school gate, in some better, more authentic, more democratic, more meaningful place, other than the current and failing educational regime. By bringing games into educational practice and theory, the hope is, it often seems, that the diseased, geriatric body of education can be treated through the rejuvenating, botox-like effect of educational game play.

Cracked article: 5 creepy ways video games are trying to get you addicted– Putting you in a Skinner Box– Creating virtual food pellets for you to eat– Making you press the lever– Keep you pressing it… forever– Getting you to call the Skinner box home

As shocking as this sounds, a whole lot of the "guy who failed all of his classes because he was playing WoW all the time" horror stories are really just about a dude who simply didn't like his classes very much. This was never some dystopian mind control scheme by Blizzard. The games just filled a void. Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to everything expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don't even have two of them: Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day); Complexity (so it's not mind-numbing repetition); Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

Are games really fun, anyhow?

The professional chess player competing in a tournament game does not have the carefree, leisurely attitude sometimes implied by the term “playing”: she is performing massive amounts of cognitive work. […] Because it has rules, a game is never just a game but also a system of coercion, freely entered into. […] But videogames seem more and more to resemble work in a different sense: working for the Man. They hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the structures of real-world employment.

“When we think of games, we think of fun. When we think of learning we think of work. Games show us this is wrong. They trigger deep learning that is itself part and parcel of the fun. It is what makes good games deep.”

…so what is it people learn when playing games?

Here’s what people are learning

1. Move through the space until something happens.

2. Stay behind cover until you shoot.

3. If in combat, fall back to find cover.

4. If progress fails, explore earlier areas to find more resources.

5. If you see an enemy, hide until they have passed.

6. If you see a body, search it.

7. After a noisy combat, check and see if anyone else is coming.

8. If no one around, then run.

9. If challenge too difficult, try another route.

10. If stealth approach fails, try shooting from cover.

11. If guards running away, shoot them (later this changed to letting guards run away)

12. When you have got past something difficult, save the game.

What didn’t they learn?

• It took 35 minutes before the player realised their avatar could pick things up

• They never learnt to crouch (vital for a stealth game)

• They tried to pick up ammunition by walking on crates (a convention in other games), not breaking them open, and so always ran out

• They forgot stuff (e.g. how to perform certain tasks)

Interactive poll!

“Video game, TV violence ‘causes aggression’”– NZ Herald, 19th Oct, 2010

“Video gaming leads to surge in rickets”– Metro newspaper, 22nd Jan, 2010

“Can a video game lead to murder?”– 60 Minutes, CBS News, 2005

What’s the most violent place in Azeroth?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55s60uvPMrE (6.30)

Violence?

• Dill & Dill (1998) “While in real life, murder is a crime, in a violent video game, murder is the reinforced behaviour.”

• Goldstein (2005) “There is neither an intent to injure nor a living victim in a video game” (but many scholars seem unable to draw this distinction…)

Is violence an effect of video games?

“The clear consensus is that there is no consensus” (Goldstein, 2005)

The belief that games teach the skills that they represent or simulate (such as managing a theme park) equates the appearance of games with their symbolic meaning. However, when enemies are killed or theme parks managed in a game, it is dubious whether the player’s identification is with the act of killing or managing theme parks, but rather, for example, with gaining points and beating a friend’s score. (Pelletier, 2009)

Why don’t violent video games increase aggression amongst the researchers who study them? Because they have a higher purpose – understanding violent video games – that transcends the contents of the game. The focus is on something other than the mock aggression taking place on the screen. Young people may also have other goals in mind when they play violent video games, including trying to improve their score, distraction, emotional and physiological self-regulation, and to have common experiences to share with friends.

Back to the Gulch

Aggression takes two main forms. There is the clubbing, axing, freezing, stabbing, exploding, trapping and poisoning that takes place on the field between opposing teams. These are the actions on screen that look like violence. Then there is the arguing and name-calling that happens within teams using chat. […] For the sake of this discussion what I want to look at is the idea that consent is a key constituent of play as a voluntary activity […] and that violence as a concept does not co-exist easily with consent.

• ffs if all u do is def [defend] how the hell do u expect to win?

• dude, where are you running? • goddamit, rogue you‟ve got !@%$ stuns…

use them on the healer • Don‟t sheep him you noob mother%$£&£!

Does this mean that the chat-based aggression could be considered as “more violent” than the graphically rendered combat? Does this mean, in turn, that there might be more violence on the game’s forums than in its battlegrounds – or that virtual worlds such as Second Life could be experienced as more violent than games like World of Warcraft?

“Video game, TV violence ‘causes aggression’”– NZ Herald, 19th Oct, 2010

“Video gaming leads to surge in rickets”– Metro newspaper, 22nd Jan, 2010

“Can a video game lead to murder?”– 60 Minutes, CBS News, 2005

“Video game, TV education ‘causes learning’”

“Video gaming leads to surge in exam performance”

“Can a video game lead to career advancement?”

But we know what learning is… don’t we?

It is possible to view these differing perspectives as analysing learning at different levels of aggregation. A behaviourist analysis analyses the overt activities […]. A cognitive analysis […] describes the detailed structures and processes that underlie individual performance. The situative perspective aggregates at the level of groups of learners, describing activity systems in which individuals participate as members of communities. (Mayes & de Freitas)

…and so on.

…and there’s evidence about learning, right…?

• Tom’s keynote and the comment about media comparisons

• http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/

• From print-based correspondence to courses taught via radio, television, and the Web, the use of new media in each case was not found to result in a statistically significant improvement in educational efficiency.

Now, a brief detour into simulations…

• Cf. Ron’ skiing example• An excursion in to clinical education

– Patient safety concerns– “See one, do one, teach one”– Simulations as a site for learning

• Conversations about fidelity, realism, validity, authenticity (and some about context and transfer)– So what’s the problem here? Surely, that’s all

good, right?

Why and how can a gynaecological simulator that has been ‘validated’ in one context, that is, accepted by experts as a functional and realistic model of the body on which to teach gynaecological exams, not be considered functional when it changes contexts and is used in another country?

• How do people come to know the body that needs to be represented?– From freezing, slicing and photographing

actual bodies– Enacting procedures on a patient– Being a patient and having this procedure

performed on you• Knowledge as constructed through

practice

“The authenticity of the environment is not the same as the authenticity of the task”

Yes, but …

How do we get to know the environment without carrying out ‘tasks’…?

When knowledge about the body that has been gleaned through practice is reified into a simulator, that specific phenomenon of knowing the body is simulated, not the ontologically independent body as such.

• Undermining the idea of the view from nowhere– Partial perspectives: who is in a position to

see everything?– Coordination of practices of knowing

• The need to study and understand the practice we’re representing

• Evaluating the experience: is this what it’s like to do it for real?

Anyhow, is it always such a good thing to emulate conventional experience…?

And finally, to virtual worlds…

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Making sense of virtual environments

• The ‘pain barrier’

I hated it! […] All I saw was walls! I had no idea what was where, it was totally disorientating! […] I just couldn’t get used to it. It was only when one of the guys I came here to be with from the old chat [room] asked me to come in for another’s birthday that I did and it just clicked, it was then, in March, I felt ‘right’, it all came together.

This ambiguity should not be assumed to be a problem in a teaching context. On the contrary […] ambiguity has the potential to unsettle or de-naturalise aspects of our roles (as teacher, learner or researcher) – which could be considered one of the most interesting aspects of a virtual world for educators.

But if it’s so hard to make sense of, how can we represent something like a learning design in Second Life?

So how did they/we learn to participate?

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‘Affordance’ is problematic– Highly ambiguous (thanks, Don Norman etc)– Arguably inappropriate outside of ecological

psychology– Theory fails to explain learning or culture– Technically, it’s relational, but usually used as,

“what technology permits or constraints”

…and usually unnecessary– They used the affordances of technology to…– They used technology to…

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• So what are we supposed say…?– Do rugs cause/permit/afford structured conversation?– Do virtual rugs afford structured conversation?– Do red virtual rugs afford structured conversation?– Does Second Life afford structured conversation?– Do virtual worlds afford structured conversation?– Do soft furnishings afford structured conversation?

– And what about talking sticks, lecterns, putting your hand up…? Or – in fact – anything we can agree some turn-taking rules about?

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• Technology as a site for structuring practices– Not ‘found’ or ‘natural’, but created for a purpose– A negotiated, meaningful resource– An invitation to behave in particular ways (not a

cause)– Something that people can mis-read, ignore, walk

over…

• A very tentative, performed account of learning design

Some parting thoughts

• Stories are great, but we need to move beyond hearsay

• Study the things you want to intervene in– We can’t just focus on uses of new toys tools

• Focus on practices rather than technology – Cf. Tom Reeve’s “common lies we tell about

technology”• Recognise the partiality of every viewpoint

So back to the question:

“Do people learn better from games than in a conventional classroom?”

1. Great question! I’ll go with that.

2. Meh, it’s ok, but could do better.

3. That question just doesn’t work.

MooseBad