Report with pedagogical methodology based on game learning

Serious Games and Game-based Learning: An Introduction

• GAME: “a physical or mental contest, played according to specific rules, with the goal of amusing or rewarding the participant.”

• GAME: “a mental contest, played with a computer according to certain rules for amusement, recreation, or winning a stake.”

• SERIOUS GAME: “a mental contest, played with a computer in accordance with specific rules that uses entertainment to further government or corporate training, education, health, public policy, and strategic communication objectives.”

- Mike Zyda

"From Visual Simulation to Virtual Reality to Games"

For many educators a discussion about games often begins with some level of discomfort. The term game conjures up an image of something superficial, or shallow. Yet today’s games are complex, take up to or even more than 100 hours, require collaboration with others, and involve developing values, insights, and new knowledge. They are immersive virtual worlds that are augmented by a more complex external environment that involves communities of practice, the buying and selling of game items, blogs, and developer communities. In many ways, games have become complex learning systems. It is hard to understand something without direct experience. Yet that is how many approach games in education. Most educators are neither game players nor game developers. How much of our skepticism about the educational value of games is tied to experience (or lack of experience)? If we had the same experience base as a 15-year-old game enthusiast, might we view games differently? If we were discussing “virtual worlds,” “synthetic worlds,” or “immersive multiuser environments,” would our mind set be different? Our own biases and experiences can influence the exploration of games in education.

Serious games have been in existence for thousands of years in one form or another. Typically the earliest forms were military simulations played with miniature pieces and (often) abstract and complex rules. The stunning victory of the Prussian Army in the second Franco-Prussian war has often been partly attributed to the popularity of the game ‘Kriegspiel’ amongst the Prussian officers. The term ‘serious games’ itself probably originates from Clark Abt’s book of 1970 named ‘Serious Games’, a review of his research of military simulation using card- and dice-based rules systems and other forms of educational simulation. Yet since the coining of the term, no one has really been able to come up with a universal definition of what is meant by ‘serious game’. A review of some of the attempts to provide definitions quickly highlights the complexity of the question – what is the role of pedagogy in the definition? Is technology or delivery mechanism a factor? Does a game have to be fun? Is a simulation a serious game, or is a virtual world? Must a serious game have pre-planned learning elements? Does this learning element need to be explicit? Should assessment of learning take place within the game, or through mediation around the game?

A large body of work has been produced by the research community and other commentators addressing what it is about digital games that make them interesting tools for learning from and with, and in what situations they might best be used. There are as many, if not more, sides to this debate as there are definitions of serious games, and once again no single reason is satisfactory to all stakeholders. Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen goes so far as to suggest that there is a risk of restricting the influence of serious games if one tries to define their areas of application too precisely.

On the one hand, games are seen as aiding learning because they are immersive, engaging media which a generation of learners find draws on familiar leisure experiences. This is the so called ‘digital natives’ effect, and it has been claimed makes games more attractive to a range of learning styles. It is postulated that games have the potential to reach hard to reach target groups (NEETS, etc.) and that they aid motivation and interest in learning, but they are typically not considered to be good modes for knowledge transfer. For this reason alone they are commonly proposed as forming part of a blended learning approach, which raises the question of the role of the teacher or mentor in the use of serious games. They might also be used in other learning modalities, for example, raising awareness of the importance of knowledge which the learner already has by reinforcing the importance of that knowledge in certain situations (such as Ward Off Infection, a serious game for medical personnel used to reinforce hygiene procedures). Roger D. Smith has described in two papers 5 factors which influence the adoption of game technology for learning ranging from disruptive technologies to cultural acceptance. Games are seen as being good assessment engines, but what they are good at assessing is not necessarily the same thing as the content of most curricula. Games are suited to various pedagogic approaches, but the type of pedagogy embedded has a dramatic effect on the type of game produced and its usefulness, which Egenfeldt-Nielsen has described as ‘3 generations of learning games’. Not only that, but developers must consider carefully how to tailor the pedagogy to the audience, the context of the learning, and the technology as it determines how the learner interacts with the game itself. If learners approach games as leisure they have a tendency to try to ‘beat the game’ which is almost always equivalent to avoiding the learning objectives. Serious games can also serve as anchors to communities, an oft-overlooked phenomena in learning contexts, but one very well known in leisure gaming and the MMO community. The vast majority of leisure titles support active communities where players support each other, share experiences and strategies, develop third party tools and add-ons, modify (“mod”) the content, and a whole host of other social interaction outside the game world itself.

Ben Williamson of Futurelab summarises the most common reasons put forward in support of using games for learning as follows:

• Computer games are ‘good for the brain’. Games directly engage and possibly enhance the brain’s decision making capacities because they constantly force the player to weigh decisions with available evidence, and to make choices about priorities. See also: ‘Brain Trainer’ programmes.

• Computer games prepare people ‘to be successful’. Games enhance the cognitive abilities of players through the act of playing, equipping them with a modern skillset of multi-tasking, decision making, and data analysis as required by a high-tech economy. Furthermore, the benefits of games playing will eventually filter through to mainstream economic activity and change ways of working as the habits of games players become embedded into business and economic activity.

• Computer games support learning through problem solving and social construction of ideas. Computer games are ideal platforms for trying out new ideas and approaches, and allow the derivation of new practices and understandings in social contexts. According to this view of learning, the greatest benefit derives from learning activities which are constructive and social rather than individual and passive.

• Computer games have the potential to engage learners with varying learning styles. Computer games come in many different styles, and are often complex systems, which provide a wide spectrum of routes to engaging the different types of learners.

• Computer games are persuasive. Computer games are powerful media which have the potential to influence the way that learners see the world around them. This means that media companies are able to use games to sell products, and the military use games for recruitment purposes, but also it supports the idea that games have the potential to make powerful social arguments and educate people about contemporary issues and topics.

• Computer games can be designed for serious purposes. The term ‘serious games’ denotes those which are designed with a purpose other than entertainment in mind. Examples include training for surgical procedures, to manage disease outbreaks, or military simulations.

• Using computer games enhances media literacy. The use of games in educational settings can lead to investigation into how games are designed and produced, the ways in which they represent the world, how audiences are targeted and receive games, and the types of companies involved in the process. Thus learners better understand how media are produced and marketed, and the ways in which they respond and use those media.

• Computer games privilege certain cultural attitudes. Computer games have a tendency to present certain themes and attitudes – conflict and conquest, military aggressiveness, female submissiveness and sexuality – which can reinforce cultural stereotyping and seem at odds with the ethics of learning.

• Computer games are a manipulative cultural form. As products of a multinational corporate industry, games are designed to manipulate and exploit the interests and ambitions of users. It may also reinforce the idea that the corporate world represents the most harmonious expression of the users’ interests, and that consumerism is a virtue.

• Computer games compete with education. The slickness of computer games produces a corporate curriculum of pleasures and challenges that compete with and are more sophisticated than the challenges set by educational establishments.

This list reflects the diverse nature of gaming applications, and not every category is relevant to each of the multifaceted approaches to educational gaming. The later arguments outlined above for example, apply more to the use of ‘off-the-shelf’ commercial games titles in learning situations, as opposed to titles and releases designed purely for learning purposes, although they are nonetheless indicative of the kind of systemic resistance to the use of gaming in education.

But games are still evolving. Rather than their simpler predecessors, today’s games are coming to represent “distributed authentic professionalism,” meaning that players are learning how to be a professional—a solider, a crisis manager, an entrepreneur, and so on. Knowledge and skills are built into the virtual characters, objects, and environments; the players must master the skills they don’t have as well as integrate their skills with those of the virtual characters and other players. These types of games distribute expertise among the virtual characters and the real-world players. More than just a game, they are networked communication systems with interactive chat, internal e-mail, and messaging. They also require the player to adopt a certain set of values and a particular world view which is connected to performing activities within a specific domain of knowledge. By the end of the game, the player has essentially experienced a profession. It is important to emphasize that games and play may be effective learning environments, not because they are “fun” but because they are immersive, require the player to make frequent, important decisions, have clear goals, adapt to each player individually, and involve a social network. Games have many attributes detailed below that are associated with how people learn:

• Social. Games are often social environments, sometimes involving large distributed communities. “It is not the gameplay per se but the social life around the edge of the game that carries much of the richness in terms of the game’s meaning, its value, and its social and cultural impact.”

• Research. When a new player enters a game, he or she must immediately recall prior learning, decide what new information is needed, and apply it to the new situation. Those who play digital games are often required to read and seek out new information to master the game.

• Problem solving. Knowing what information or techniques to apply in which situations enables greater success, specifically, problem solving. This often involves collective action through communities of practice.

• Transfer. Games require transfer of learning from other areas of life and other games. Being able to see the connection and transfer existing learning to a unique situation is part of gameplay.

• Experiential. Games are inherently experiential. Those who play games engage multiple senses. For each action, there is a reaction. Feedback is swift, and occurs often. Hypotheses are tested, and users learn from the results.

This last point is worth expanding upon, as the subject of games participants’ experiences have several dimensions.

• The experiences are purposeful, i.e. they are something more than ‘fun’ or ‘passing the time’.

• The process is purposeful for both the learning facilitator/designer and the learner themselves, or in the case of ‘hidden learning’, just for the supplier.

• The experiences are personalised, even in the context of participating with others. They are not just ‘hearing how others have done things’.

• The experiences may be route driven or process driven, and the journey-like aspect which emerges when learners participate in the construction of the flow of the journey should be considered an important aspect of the system.

A serious game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. The "serious" adjective is generally appended to refer to products used by industries like defence, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, religion, and politics. Serious games might have a purpose falling anywhere from advertising, to military training.

Serious games are computer applications that combine a substantial aspect of computer or video gaming while also attempting to facilitate some kind of "serious” learning. Sometimes serious games are contrasted with "edutainment", an older tradition that, for some commentators, got the balance wrong between the games and the learning, adding game elements to educational material rather than looking for the learning potential in games. The continued failure of the edutainment space to prove profitable, plus the growing technical abilities of games to provide realistic settings, led to a re-examination of the concept of serious games in the late 1990s. During this time, a number of scholars began to examine the utility of games for other purposes, contributed to the growing interest in applying games to new purposes. Additionally, the ability of games to contribute to training expanded at the same time with the development of multi-player gaming.

Gaming technology has matured significantly while the stigma around ‘games only as toys’ has worn off, and therefore games have great potential as disruptive technology, that is, to deliver powerful solutions at lower costs than existing practices. Games face the same barriers as previous technologies, such as the use of computers as business tools, and the uptake of the Internet as primary communication channel.

• Hardware cost advantage: by-and-large, computer games are designed to be used on existing consumer-grade hardware in order to minimise the barriers to players, and because of this they have becomes impressively efficient at maximising the performance of mainstream computers. The result of this is that the cost for the system to use the games in serious applications can often be an order of magnitude less than that required to run previously existing solutions such as custom made simulations. This trend seems set to continue, with consoles similarly seeing a significant price drop from desktop computers, and handheld devices will likely continue this downward cost to access trend.
• Software power: game technologies have found some solutions to problems which exist across industries such as the need to develop intuitive user interfaces that can be easily understood by employees or consumers. Games have also developed ways to deliver realistic 3D ‘real physics’ virtual worlds, intelligent in game agents, and scripting languages which facilitate relatively simple modification of system behaviour, all through consumer-grade hardware.
• Social acceptance: games have largely overcome the stigma which they once suffered from, that they were merely toys which could not be applied to serious applications. From a technological standpoint the technology has proven itself. Those who have grown up with computer games are becoming the decision makers in organisations, and with that the acceptance level has increased significantly. Most people have also become used to seeing game-like technologies in serious settings – 3D imaging in hospitals, museums, graphics in TV news, and so on. Indeed, as well as becoming socially acceptable, it can be argued that games are also becoming socially desirable, and this is important when one considers the role of culture in driving normal practices.
• Other industry success: the positive results obtained in sectors such as the military, healthcare, and television help to raise awareness of the potential of games in other industries, and encourage experimentation and uptake. The lack of commercially successful serious games titles has long been considered a hindrance to the serious games field, but to a certain extent that situation is improving. Whilst there is yet to emerge a broad application commercially successful serious game, there are more and more examples of high quality serious games emerging which is building confidence that the field is worth more investment.
• Innovative internal experimentation: use of games and game like technologies is often first encountered in the more innovative departments of organisations. When these departments demonstrate success they encourage other organisational areas to also experiment, and understand how game technologies can improve existing products and processes.

Quite apart from educational innovation based on emerging media, people’s daily use of new devices is shifting their lifestyles toward frequent mediated immersion, which in turn is shaping their learning styles toward neomillennial characteristics. Prognosticators such as Howard Rheingold [12] and William Mitchell [13] speculated about the impacts on individuals and civilization as new digital media pervade every aspect of life. For example, Rheingold depicted a future based on distrib­uted networks of information, communication, and activity - as contrasted to the historic pattern of lifestyles centred on face-to-face groups interacting with local resources. Members of the same physical group may have very different personal communities as their major sources of sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity. He sees these distributed communities, created through mediated immersion, as far-flung, loosely bounded, sparsely knit, and fragmentary. Rheingold’s forecasts draw on lifestyles seen at present among young people who are high-end users of new media, as well as the visions of researchers and businesses developing products and services based on virtual environments and ubiquitous computing. In a world composed of these high-end users with access to these new products and services, the following types of experiences will pervade people’s lifestyles:

• Mobile wireless devices (MWDs), such as gaming devices, cell phones, digital music players, and PDAs access media that are virtually connected to locations (such as street signs linked to online maps), objects (such as books linked to online reviews), and services (such as restaurants linked to ratings by their customers).
• MWDs will access every type of data service anywhere (such as bank­ing and stock market information, weather, tickets and reservations, and transport schedules).
• MWDs will locate strangers nearby who have identified themselves as having common interests (such as people interested in dating and matched on desired attributes; friends of friends; fellow gamers; fans of a certain team, actor, or author).
• Rather than having core identities defined through a primarily local set of roles and relationships, people will express varied aspects of their multifaceted identities through alternate extended experiences in distributed virtual envi­ronments and augmented realities.

Even since these speculations were written the technology has advanced considerably.

• Serious games are here to stay. The arguments in their favour are convincing, and their adoption is spreading slowly but surely, following the typical pattern of new technologies breaking into the market. At the same time the body of research is also growing and our understanding of how, why and when serious games are of use is becoming more advanced. As our thinking about learning evolves to the lifelong perspective so too expands the role played by games in that learning. Game4Manager is a promising step in the direction of a bright future.

• http://www.educause.edu/upload/presentations/ELI061/GS01/Prensky%20-%2006-01-Educause-02.pdf
• Oblinger, D (2006) Simulations, Games and Learning (available online: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI3004.pdf
• Futurelabs interviews http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/lit_reviews/Serious-Games_Interviews.pdf
• Becker, K. (2006) Pedagogy in Games
• Smith, R. (2007) Game Impact Theory: The Five Forced That Are Driving the Adoption of Game Technologies within Multiple Established Industries, available at http://www.modelbenders.com/papers/Smith_Game_Impact_Theory.pdf
• Gee, J.P. & Shaffer, D. W. (2010) Looking Where the Light is Bad: Video Games and the Future of Assessment (epistemic games group working white paper)
• Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S. (2007) Third generation educational use of computer games. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 16(3), 263
• Games and Learning Policy Recommendations report, November 2008: http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/project_reports/
  becta/Games_and_Learning_policy_report.pdf
• See: Barnam, M (2004) Disconnected: Why your kids are turning their backs on everything we thought we knew (London, Ebury Press); Johnson, S (2005) Everything bad is good for you (London, Penguin); and Prensky, M (2006) “Don’t bother me Mom – I’m learning!”: How computer and video games are preparing your kids for 21st century success – and how you can help! (St Paul Minnesota: Paragon).
• Veen, W and Vrakking, B (2006) Homo Zappiens: Growing up in the digital age (London, Network Continuum Education); Beck, JC and Wade, M (2003) Got Game: How the gamer generation is reshaping business forever (Cambridge MA, Harvard Univ. Press).
• See Gee, J. P (2005) What Would a State of the Art Instructional Video Game Look Like? (available online at: http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol1_issue6/
  What_Would_a_State_of_the_Art_Instructional_Video_Game_Look_Like_.pdf - see especially the section on ‘Full Spectrum Warrior’)
• Rheingold, H (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, Mass. Perseus Publishing
• Mitchell, W (2003) Me ++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, Mass. MIT