A couple of posts ago I wrote about game walk-throughs after a conversation with a fellow MSc-er suggested that they thought they constituted cheating. I'm quite a fan of them and it got me thinking about the true value of these documents in a learning context.

So, Bloom. He and his committee mates wrote themselves a taxonomy. This is the revised 2001 version which most of us are familiar with, it is worth going back and looking at the original too. As always wikipedia a good start point.

And, this is the WOWwiki. It's a community created guide to the game spanning over 90,000 pages, after Wikipedia it's the 2nd largest community authored document on the Internet. There are loads of examples of game walkthroughs out there, but the really interesting ones are those that involve this level of collaboration. 

Here are some ideas about how each of the skill levels in the diagram are demonstrated by the wiki users:

Knowledge: Do I need to explain this one? I've been to the wiki and read up on a particular quest, remembered what I needed to do, job done.

Understand: At a basic level of ability in the game I can read the wiki to fill in any blanks, and have successfully broken down complex tasks into simple individual stages I can share with others.

Apply: I can take something I read in one quest, and see where a particular skill would work in another. This is also where the benefits of writing the walkthrough rather than just reading it start to come in. I take something I discovered in the game, write it down to share for others.

Analyse: Writing the walkthrough forces this. Look back at how you got through a particular stage, was it similar to something else you have done? Are there other possible outcomes? As an individual player you may do some of this in passing naturally, but the act of authorship brings it to the foreground.

Evaluate: This is the real high order part of the walkthrough. If you look in any detail at a quest page in the WOWWiki it's really obvious. This page is discussing a single task in a huge game, but it looks at the best method to complete with each particular race, strategies for approaching it in a group, and places it in context with other things Warcraft related both past and present.

Create: Beyond the obvious here, how the users structure and link throughout the wiki is an interesting aspect of the creation process.

So, what is interesting here is that while we can apply these skills to gameplay itself (I probably should have written a post on that too..), what the walkthrough achieves is to extend these. The cognitive abilities involved in this process are certainly something that justify it more attention from educators than simply labeling it as cheating.

Image source- Signpost by JMC Photos

Although they are going to sound pretty similar this is two questions really. Firstly, how do I know if I'm good at a game? And, the extension of that is what makes me feel I am good at a game?

See, they kind of overlap.

Scores would be the obvious answer. The higher my score gets at any particular game, the better I am at it. Simple. My previous post about Pac-man shows my score nicely improving, I'm getting better at it. But, while I may be improving am I actually any good?

Game Center on iOS is a good example of how we can answer this. I can put my own score into context, see how good I am compared to the rest of the world. There are examples of this in most games now, league tables give us a way to rank ourselves against others.

In absolutely every game I have on my iPhone I am not even close to being near the top of these tables, so I'm suggesting I'm not good. But, there is more to it than that because I don't feel particularly bad at them.

We develop our own internal rules and assumptions to deal with it. If I'm in the top 40% of the world I might be happy, others pick a different number. Maybe if I'm higher than 50% does it count as a pass?

To take it one stage further than that I want to return to Pac-man again. When I started playing Pac-man I began noting down my scores. I also asked each of my team to play one attempt at the game and let me know what score they got. I can now score 5 times their best score, so I consider myself good at it.

But here's the restriction- they were only given one attempt. I haven't asked again if any of them are still playing, if they'd got any better. My measure of good against them isn't a fair measure. I know it isn't, it doesn't bother me.

On Assessment

Can we use these ideas to make some sweeping generalisations about the assessment system?

I can easily compare my assessed work to classmates, benchmark myself against the league table that it creates. Probably why it's better to be the top of the middle set rather than bottom of the top set. There's definitely something about motivation in there that I'll need to come back to. Are we encouraging students to find themselves little bubbles where they feel they are doing well? Is that safer than really challenging myself?

There is also a thought here about predicted grades too. Can you think of an example of a game that tells you how well it thinks you'll do before you try it? 'Based on your ham-fisted (thumbed?) attempts at Osmos you should clearly start Skyrim on easy mode'...

Image source- Winner's Circle by reallyboring

I want to say that I spent lots of time in this game. Due to the fact that I was a big fan of SIMS computer-based version, I want to discover more about the difference between game devices which contains diversity.

 

The similarity:

- There are five main occupations you can choose from, and I have completed all of them to the highest degree.(Chef, teacher, sport man, fire man, artist)

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- The task of occupation is set up with different levels and the requirements of skills and qualification should be met in order to achieve highest honor.

- You can give birth and build up a family with your partner.

- There are some random tasks and personal desires can be achieved as part of the overall goals

 

The difference:

- Mobile device provide easier access to the game, no need to turn on the computer and connect to internet

- The game control in the version is quite loose which means the goal can be easily achieved compared with computer-based version. For example, you don’t need to maintain the friendship with other citizens, and they will always consider you as friends no matter about if you contact them frequently or not. You can even develop your relationship with every citizen to be your partner. (I try to do so, and it really works!)

- The main player (sim) in this game does not have free will to take actions unless their emergent needs need to be satisfied.(ex: hungry, tired)

- No new game content is added

In other words, there won’t be any new citizen for you to discover, only 12 persons are available.

 

At very first beginning, I am keen on playing this version due to the loose design of the game. I am thinking I can achieve something I can’t do it on the computer version. Well, after all, I must admit that I feel bored soon when I complete every single task. It is very interesting to note that when the difficulty is eliminated, the fun decreased. However, if the goal is not attainable, the fun will no more exist.

 

This came up in discussion this week, I can save you a read if you like, the answer is no. There's more to it than that though. It's about where we draw the line, what the line actually is, and who has the chalk in their hand.

Breaking down cheating

In my usual spirit of oversimplification, I see there as being a few different levels of cheating:

Level	Description	Example
1	Direct breach of the rules	Rosie Ruiz- Boston Marathon, Thierry Henry - France vs. Ireland
2	Interpretation of the rules to gain an advantage	Red Bull- blown diffusers, MIT blackjack team- Card counting
3	Getting outside help or support	Tour de France- team radio ban, Sponsorship in F1 (not the best link, sorry..)
4	Working entirely independently

 

Which gives us some kind of scale of things. Ignoring the extremes of this scale the middle ground certainly leaves some room for discussion. Certainly educators we would position themselves as encouraging the behaviour at level 2 and 3 in the classroom. Both Bloom and Dreyfus have things to say about adapting, modifying, and the influence of mentors that we've all encountered many times before. It would be bold to suggest that these things should be allowed in sport, but certainly it brings into question what we would consider cheating.

Applying this kind of logic to the walk-through game guide we have to argue that it fits in at level 3. It's no different to having an experienced tennis coach showing you what to do, or getting to practice a Grand Prix circuit in the simulator before you get to the track.

Who are we cheating?

The second question this brings up is about who exactly we are cheating. Ignoring the high profile national sporting examples, we can say this is a question of motivation.

Everybody has different personal goals, and that impacts on our definition of cheating. If my aim is to get to Level X in Warcraft figuring out every stage without reading a manual or asking for help clearly the walk-through is. If my goal is to get to Level Y in the same game faster than anybody else I started playing with at the same time perhaps it isn't.

Again we can look to education parallels for this. In order to pass my science exam I am advised to buy the correct book from the exam board. If I remember that stuff I'll more than likely pass. This is the expected behaviour, not a way to cheat to the GCSE. I might feel personally that I have memorised the content rather than actually learnt it, but in terms of the actual rules of the science game I'm all good.

Potentially more of a comment on the assessment system, but it highlights how our perception of the activity colours our judgement.

The impact of rewards

his is a wider topic to come back to in a later post in more general form. Are the rewards available having positive impacts on motivation, and my desire to cheat?  

n the sporting world we have plenty of examples where the desire for the reward was enough to push people into the wrong side of our chalk line. In the gaming world does the status of being a Level Z player motivate us to use methods that we might not consider to be entirely solo efforts? In the education sector we all have our own opinions on when influence becomes copying becomes cheating. How much are the systems we use to reward contributing to this?

Other aspects

To follow in extension posts- what is the value of writing a walk-through? What can we learn from the social networks growing up alongside games to act as guides and walk-throughs?

Image source- Hand of God courtesy of Paolo Camera, 

        I would like to take some notes about the definition of play in one of our readings, ’The ambiguity of play’. According to Sutton-Smith (1997), play is a paradox, and there are so many forms of play. In very specific and general definition of play, we usually concern ‘contests’, such as games or sports, as the one and only form of play. However, regarding the wider definition of play, in my opinion, it refers to any form of activities which aim to ‘HAVE FUN’. As a result, even the daydreams can be considered as a private form of play. (This point of view really attracts me a lot, which means we are actually playing all the time.)

 

Turing back to my personal experience, I have an unforgettable experience of ‘Sky Diving’ in Lake Taupo (New Zealand) five years ago when I went there for a long-term backpacker travelling. This can be considered as a ‘risky play’. The scenario is located in the air. I am the player and the coach must play with me at my back in order to guarantee my safety. The playing equipment is so essential to keep me alive and all I need to do is to jump out of the plane into 12,000 feet of sky. To be honest, when I jumped into the air, I have a true feeling of committing suicide. And I am also convinced that I will never do it again in my entire life. However, I realise that kind of excitement (or maybe less would be better for me) is one of the main factors of any various form of play.

 

By looking deeper to the true natural of play, I think it will benefit us to carry out game design in the following session. For example, not only the competition form of play is involved but also different form of individual or social events should be taken into consideration when designing or reviewing a game design.

 

Reference

Sutton-Smith B. (1997) The ambiguity of play, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

 

Clifford Nass knows about multi-tasking. Quite simply, his message is that we're no good at it. And, the more we try to multi-task the worse we get at each of the tasks we're attempting.

Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) is with him. While it seems that the popular interpretation of Miller's Magic Number 7 that we can store up to 7 things in working memory at once was not entirely what he meant in 1950's, Carr goes on to tell us that this number is actually more like 2, maximum 4. The idea of cognitive overload is that if we put more in than we can take, something else has to come out. Keep pouring into that glass and it overflows.

So, brutally summarising their work in one sentence Nass tells us we need to focus on one task at a time to be most successful, Carr that if we need more than a couple of things in our working memory that'll start to go wrong. We can't multi-task.

The good news is years of research into cognitive science are backing up my Pac-man strategy. Nass and Carr wouldn't be watching the ghosts at the same time as planning their route round the maze, with the television on in the background and their phone ringing. They would have a strategy in place, complete a section, pause to watch the movement of the ghosts and then carry on, focus on each particular skill as required.

Pac-man is a beautiful model for something that I'm certain I'll return to in later posts. As both men allude to in the clips above, the skill here is not trying to process many parallel streams at once, but in learning which to filter out, how to prioritise the many sources of information coming in.

If you're wondering what it is that Pac-man is teaching us as educators, and why I'm still writing about it after 2 weeks, that's it right there. Pac-man makes us better uni-taskers.

Image sources (and apologies to all concerned for what might be the worst piece of Photoshop I've ever done) - Wired, Atari Age.

Mission to Timocharis region on the Moon.

• Ai Austin - Team Captain
• KaronMcB - Explorer
• indrimagri - Explorer
• Kimberley Pascal - Explorer

MoonWorld Virtual Field Work: http://moonworld.cet.edu/ and http://www.avatrian.com/moonworld/

Mission Data

• Team Pythagoras Journal and Logs
• Teleport to Moon Orbit Station
• Rock Sample Analysis (as this is not currently working in Second Life)
• Mission Images Folder 

 

 

 

Surveys for Team Members

• http://atate.org/mscel/gbl/MoonWorld/moonworld-gee-survey.html

• Please also complete the MoonWorld project questionnaire for NASA (Teacher/Adult version) at https://oedc.nasa.gov/dc/anonymous.jsp?a=1065378030737543106513231896

In the previous post I discussed how I got myself back in to Pac-man, and the little set of tactics I came up with that I thought made me good at it. Here I want to look at why I appear to be rubbish at Pac-man on iPad, or at least worse.

The iPad version of the game (well, iOS) introduces some new control options. Playing on the computer I simply use the arrow keys to move the little chap around, I'd even got as far as discovering that I could hold down an arrow key in advance of the turn I needed to make so he turned as soon as possible.

Moving to iPad gives some different options. There's a joystick control at the bottom of the screen, or I can take advantage of some of the other tablet input methods and control Pac-man by swiping the screen or tilting the entire device.

2006 saw the launch of the Wii, and with that came the popularity in far more physically involved methods of controlling games. As a culture we got pretty excited about this, suddenly computer games could be an activity as part of a healthy lifestyle. We even have a couple of Nintendo Wii's in our PE department now.

However, it's ruining my score.

It's about inefficiency. With my arrow keys underneath my finger tips, the time required from brain to Pac-man is significantly smaller than if I have to tilt an iPad a certain degree to make the same activity happen. It's also a far more practiced activity- my body is already set up well to make these subtle movements very quickly. This can't be said for swiping or tilting.

Obviously if I'd started playing the game using the other control methods it wouldn't have been a problem, I wouldn't have noticed. But it is interesting how the input method changes the nature of the challenge and the experience of the game as a whole.

Returning just briefly to the Wii again I want to pick up on a wider issue around this idea of inefficiency. After a fairly small amount of time playing Wii Tennis or similar you realise that you don't have to mimic the exact on court actions of Andy Murray to become a skilled player. Far more subtle motions with the controller will achieve the desired result. We refine our motions to speed up reaction time, maximum reward for minimum effort. There is some question as to whether this could be marked up as cheating- would using a more simple on/off type device connected to the Wii make me so much better at tennis that it's an unfair advantage? But that's a whole new post.

I've been reintroducing myself to Pac-man this week. Seems poetic in many ways that my starting point to look more seriously at games and what they have to contribute to learning is with one of the first games I played as a child. There's a nice free web version of the game here- it might be good to go and have a quick attempt at it before reading on. Having devoted a few hours of my week to it, I'm at a point where I think I understand the game & what is required to be 'good' at it. Exactly how I would define being good at Pac-man is somewhat up for debate, but I'm going for simply labelling it as achieving high scores. And, my benchmark for good has been made by taking an average of the score each of my colleagues got playing a single game (5200). I'm aware this isn't exactly scientific, and probably suggests something about my personality by identifying that 'good' for me basically means 'better than those around me'... It's not the best way to present the data, but the graph attempts to show my score progression over the week. The easier way to look at this is that the average of each of my main playing sessions moved from 4500 - 8500 - 9500. More interesting is how my attitude and approach to the game changed over the week. I'll return in a later post to how and why I think we get hooked on certain games, but for me once I was involved Pac-man became an exercise in reflection, in developing a strategy and adapting it. For what is on the face of it a simple arcade game the methods involved are more complex than they seem. My approach moved from 'eat as many dots before dying as possible' to the following set of rules:

1. Clear one corner at a time, using the energy pill at the latest possible moment & then moving to the next.
2. Watch the movement of the ghosts as much as Pac-man himself, stop sometimes to watch/wait.
3. Don't waste time eating blue ghosts.
4. Ignore the fruit bonuses.

From a wider perspective on the game, and my experience of it as a whole whether these rules are correct or not is largely irrelevant. My score improved which demonstrates I improved. More interestingly, particularly as I expect we can see the same pattern in more complex game setups, is that effectively what I did was create my own set of rules to go alongside the ones established by the game designer. Rules is possibly not the correct word- but, as highlighted by a fellow student what this simple little game is doing is not just reflection/adaptation, but demonstrates the very natural human need to make and form patterns with our knowledge.

Since this game is such a historical one, I won’t believe that if anyone tell me he/she has no idea what it is. However, it is really difficult for me  to play this game seriously. At the very first time when I was a kid, I don’t like to play it because I always lose. Compared with my friends, they can get higher scores than me, as a result, I feel frustrated and reduce the motivation to play this’ Pacmana’. Now, even if I try hard to play it as part of my assignment, I still can’t enjoy playing it.

 

What I want to know is why I can’t enjoy playing it. Does it just because it is part of my assignment? Not really, I think I am a slow decision-maker. I don’t like the games which are designed to complete with other from the speed, such as ‘Age of Empires’(see website below), real time game to be more precise.

 

In the ‘Pacman’, if you can go faster in the beginning, you will be more likely to gain high scores since all the monsters are not released together at the beginning. How to organise a strategy is also the key. Later, I try to not focus on the spots but how to eat the monsters instead, and then in my fifth try, the scores are higher and finally reach the second level. (And then I am satisfied. :p)

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Reference:

http://www.freepacman.org/welcome.html ‘Pacman’

http://www.ageofempires3.com/ ‘Age of Empires’