From Newb to 1337: Expertise and the Learning Experience

A few nights ago, my learning theory class found itself on a brief tangent about the famous psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, known not only for his tremendous work as a researcher, but also for collecting the majority of his data from psychological experiments he conducted on himself (which, for obvious reasons, would probably cause your department head to laugh you out of the psych lab by today’s standards). I couldn’t help but chuckle at the fact that Ebbinghaus’s strategy is more or less the same thing I’m now doing with my World of Schoolcraft project, except (to complicate matters) I already have a boatload of prior experience with the work I’m doing, thus making me a confound within a confound within a confound.

                      

Who knew I'd end up sharing so much in common with a guy who had a beard this rad?

The reason I bring this up is because I've finally started tanking dungeons now that Sententiosus has passed level 15, and, in doing so, I’ve realized that a major conflict in assessing my learning is that I’ve long-since moved beyond what could be considered a novice in the field of gaming. I briefly touched on this during my entry on levels 1 – 5, but because I have so much prior knowledge about games and, more specifically, World of Warcraft, I can’t provide a terribly accurate account of what it’s like to learn from the perspective of a complete “newb." To anyone unfamiliar with the field of educational psychology, we call anyone who cannot see inconsistencies, trends, and information in a given situation a novice and any one who can an expert; in a classroom environment, this might include a master teacher recognizing chatty student groups as being off-task and requiring intervention while an amateur teacher assumes those same groups, because the students are talking to one another, are on task and the project is going well (an especially common misperception by new educators). This expert-novice dichotomy may be best explained if you consider any task in which you could be considered an expert (from skydiving to tying your shoes) and assess how the following fit into your ability to react to novel problems involving that task (borrowed from How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School):

1. Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
2. Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.
3. Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts of propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is “conditionalized” on a set of circumstances.
4. Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.
5. Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.
6. Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.

If you can successfully connect a skill you possess with the above points, I'm sure you can understand how my prior knowledge in the gaming “subject area” has produced an inescapable, underlying impact on my ability to play as a “new” warrior. My six-year, on-and-off again relationship with World of Warcraft has long-since taught me how to recognize patterns of information that would not be recognized by novices (like how to rapidly change my attack strategy when fighting two enemies instead of one) and readily recall gaming experiences that would help me overcome seemingly novel challenges (like protecting my allies in combat). Even though I did not play the warrior class through my WoW learning process, the hours I spent raiding as a warlock and death knight from 2005 through 2009 afforded me many, many opportunities to hone my tanking skills by protecting my "guildies" in combat (often against much more challenging enemies than those Sententiosus is facing at level 20). As a result, I already have a basic understanding of the most fundamental skills and priorities necessary to be an “expert” tank: how to generate threat and keep enemies attacking me instead of my peers, how to group enemies together so my peers can maximize damage, how to use my special abilities like Shield Block to make healing me significantly easier, and how to generate the most damage output while serving my primary purpose of maintaining enemy attention.

No one said our guild logo was emotionally sensitive to those affected by the explosion of the Death Star.

A novice learner would not inherently possess such skills and would much more likely fumble his or her way through half of the game before developing an expert foundation onto which he or she could construct a better understanding of what to do and how to do it. This could, in essence, make or break the player’s ability to successfully navigate content with his or her peers, especially when faced with sudden increases in content difficulty.

                                                                                                                  

For example:

Three days ago, while running through the Wailing Caverns (a dungeon on the Kalimdor continent), my group and I found ourselves in a room with several magic-casting enemies scattered about in a semi-circle. When, in the midst of combat, our party’s warlock feared one of the magic-casting enemies, the mob’s frantic running alerted all twelve of the enemies in the room to our presence, leaving our party with nigh insurmountable odds of survival. Because our healer was ill-prepared for the massive onslaught, she was unable to keep me alive for more than a few seconds, which was barely enough time for me to get the rampaging magic casters under control; I promptly died when I became overrun, leaving the rest of the party to fend for themselves. However, because the healer was a WoW “expert,” she successfully resurrected me in the midst of battle, thus allowing me (as an “expert” tank) to immediately jump back into combat, begin taunting the enemies off of my companions, and help reorganize our battle strategy to save us from a wipe.

Expert knowledge ensured our survival in the bowels of the Wailing Caverns.

Generally speaking, this is not at all how a novice group of learners would or could react under the same conditions; a less-experienced party would most certainly wipe and learn (through the trial and error process) that fearing an enemy magic caster in a crowded room is not a preferable, or safe, option.⁽¹⁾ Had the healer and I not been experts in our respective fields, our group very likely would have taken a much, much longer time to finish the dungeon since we would not have had nearly the stream-lined efficiency of chain-pulling enemies (fighting one after another with little to no break) and would, in all likelihood, have faced many more situations where too many enemies were drawn into combat at once. One could safely assume that our combined expert familiarity with the game (and games in general) saved us a lot of time, energy, and headache in completing what we saw to be a minor exercise in a field we already understood.

For this reason, some of my friends and family have suggested that I conduct this experiment with a game I have no familiarity with (perhaps something like Star Trek Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, or EVE Online); however, I've come to believe that even with different titles, graphics, and quests, my expert familiarity with WoW would ultimately taint any attempt for me to learn and master another MMORPG because, at their basest level, all MMORPGs are constructed with the same framework.

How did I come to this conclusion?

I toyed with the idea of blogging about game-based learning midway through the summer when I played around with a 10-day trial of Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) at the behest of my colleague, Roger Travis. It didn't take long before I found that I was less enamored with the game's narrative than Roger and his Fellowship (meaning that I had no real desire to continue playing), but (rapidly waning interest aside) I quickly recognized  and latched onto the game’s World of Warcraft-like gameplay elements (making me more acutely aware of my expertise with MMORPGs in general). Even though the character class I chose (Runecaster) was vastly different than any I had used in my WoW days, it took me only a few minutes to translate my expert WoW skills into a language appropriate for LOTRO.

I think the same is essentially true of the way students translate their experiences from one class to another in school: after taking more than one math class, they come to  expect the same kinds of lectures, homework problems, and tests that they’ve seen a hundred times before, even if the content differs from algebra to geometry to calculus. While my experience with LOTRO was nothing to write home about, it did make me wonder whether or not my ability to translate one game's skills to another meant something about how games can affect expert learning in the long-run. If that’s the way schools already work, why don't more students seem to have as much success at shifting their attention from one class to another as gamers do between games? Would “expert” ability in a game-like course transcend the gaming elements and improve a student’s ability to think and answer questions with greater speed and precision in all disciplines? ⁽²⁾

What are the odds that Ferris Bueller found the things he learned in school to be dynamic and applicable across all academic disciplines?

A lack of engaging elements in the courses we teach, or any way for our students to see the relevance of one class to the next, makes it impossible for kids to cognitively switch between biology  and English the same way an expert LOTRO or WoW player cognitively switches between MMORPGs. Consider the way standardized testing has compartmentalized subject matter: math is taught to be exclusively math-y, science science-y, and English English-y, all because government mandated teaching objectives focus on having students meander through the rote memorization of isolated facts rather than adequately spending time on broad conceptual thinking skills. With respect to the CAPT, the transferable skills of scientific observation, persuasive writing, and logical problem solving  are only minimally overlapped in any meaningful way, which discourages students from thinking about their courses as being multi-lateral and dynamic. As a result, we generally do not challenge students to use math skills in their English classes or science skills in their history classes because it's seen as too much of a burden compared to what standardized tests are actually testing.⁽³⁾

In order to overcome this struggle, school districts might consider encouraging pedagogical deviations from the norm that make courses more interdisciplinary (thereby encouraging students to develop more practicable and valuable academic expertise). For instance, a chemistry teacher could develop a class taught with an overarching, MMORPG-like narrative that shapes learning such that becoming an expert at the “game” is equivalent to becoming an expert at mastering laboratory procedures, balancing equations, and analyzing data (which would inevitably improve how students recognize patterns, trends, and problem solutions). Borrowing from World of Warcraft's soon-to-be released Archaeology profession, the students could go on an "expedition" during class to find examples of a given phenomena (ionic bonding, perhaps), log their findings in a journal (which chemicals ionically bond and why they do so), and use their learning to piece together a more complex puzzle (a laboratory experiment) in order to receive a chemistry "artifact" (a chemistry-related prize for successfully completing the lab). Through this lens, the students would be prompted to view the research-observation-experimentation process as a mystery in need of solving instead of just another isolated event in their academic lives, thus forging an element of engagement that supersedes the scariness of chemistry-based math.

Students could keep a log book that includes several categories of chemical phenomena, all of which could be tied to course objectives.

As students uncover new information and add it to their journals, they can refer back to it in order to help them with laboratory experiments focusing on the categories listed in their logs.

Soon, the daunting periodic table becomes a useful mystery-solving tool instead of a boring, uninspiring compilation of numbers and letters.

Though this example is simple, increasing student engagement by using the periodic table in conjunction with dynamic problem-solving also increases the likelihood that students will foster a cross-subject area expertise not dissimilar from that which I used to transfer my MMORPG skills from WoW to LOTRO (particularly in the form of scientific observation and critical thinking). The addition of a game-based layer, as I've argued before, paints the content such that it becomes relevant to disenchanted and already successful students, invariably turning the task of learning something difficult into learning something fun and useful. The expertise developed through logical problem solving can then be transferred to other subject areas, making the process of using a tool like the periodic table seem helpful in untangling all kinds of puzzles.

I can understand how expert familiarity in a game like WoW may seem useless in a non-game context, but when the same degree of critical thinking (for instance, the healer and I working in tandem to salvage our near-wipe) is applied to constructivist assessments in a mathematics, science, and other classes, it becomes much easier to see the value in creating novel problems that bridge all subjects and encourage interdisciplinary, longitudinal thinking. World of Schoolcraft may not be considered scientifically valid given my previous familiarity and expertise with the MMORPG genre, but it's certainly worth evaluating how a gamer's familiarity and expertise with games could be valuable in a classroom setting. If we can get Johnny and Sally interested in knowing why some elements are more electronegative than others by giving them cool mysteries to solve,  I think we'll be much closer to achieving our goal of cultivating more expert, life-long learners.

____________________________________________________________________________

(1)   Incidentally, the novice warlock in our group indirectly received positive reinforcement when all of this happened; we survived the mess he caused and everyone spent a few moments congratulating one another on doing such a good job (thereby conditioning the warlock to think that the same poor gameplay will be acceptable in the future). For the safety of other players, it may have been educationally more valuable if someone had reprimanded him instead!

(2)   A recent study indicates that this is biologically possible. A research group tested several dozen 18 – 25 year old non-gamers and tracked each participant’s ability to problem-solve after playing fast-paced games (Call of Duty) or slow-paced games (The Sims 2) for a number of hours. Gamers who participated in fast-paced, group-oriented games were able to come to faster conclusions with accuracy matching their peers’ because they had increased the efficiency of their auditory and visual information collection processes over the course of playing the game (Green, Pouget, & Bavelier, 2010).

(3)   I'm not advocating that English educators start teaching their courses in terms of addition and subtraction for the sake of using math outside a math course, but instead encouraging them to find ways for students to analyze course content from different, interdisciplinary perspectives (i.e. "After reading Act III, Scene II, how was Hamlet's forensic investigation similar to something you've seen in a movie or television show about criminal investigation? Was his investigation scientifically sound enough for him to reasonably assume Claudius's guilt? Why or why not?"). Teachers need not do this continuously (for obvious reasons), but it would go a long way in prompting multi-lateral student thinking that will lead to much more widely applicable academic expertise.

Works Cited

 

Bransford, J. (Ed.). (1999). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Retrieved September 14, 2010, from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6160

Green, C., Pouget, A., Bavelier, D. (2010). Improved probabilistic inference as a general learning mechanism with action video games. Current Biology, 2010; 20 (17): 1573-1579 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.07.040

Total Newbage: First Impressions at Levels 1 - 5

So far, so good.

After making my post about World of Schoolcraft earlier this week, I finally got the chance to sit down and begin losing myself in WoW as though I'd never played the game before. Perhaps the most challenging part in this process has been purposely forgetting what it's like to be an experienced WoW player (or game player in general) since there are so many fundamental bits of knowledge that we gamers take for granted. If you, like me, grew up in the years where games had minimal in-game tutorial information (for instance, most every Atari, NES, SNES, and SEGA title), then you probably became accustomed to learning through trial and error experimentation, teaching yourself the game's mechanics by mashing buttons until something happened on screen. Sometimes the results were positive and you decided to continue provoking them; sometimes they resulted in  massive explosions that forced you to start over (I'm looking at you, Lemmings). After playing several titles this way, the frequent gamer became readily aware of what to expect from all sorts of games as long as the format was roughly consistent (platformers like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. were generally similar in their controls, as were role-playing games, first-person shooters, and others).

Super Alfred Chicken is just one example of a game that provided the player with no guidance whatsoever.

In an effort to expand upon the self-teaching days of yore, WoW's game designers have combined this long-time, "do-it-yourself" philosophy with a much more detailed pedagogical scaffolding that I refer to as supplemented sandboxing (or, in other words, the inclusion of areas where the player receives helpful, pointed tips while experimenting with the game's controls in a "fail-free" environment). Like digital flight or surgery simulators, there is no discernible risk of "losing" while the player toys with the various key commands that make his or her avatar perform actions within the game. When those commands are too confusing or the player feels ill-equipped to tackle gaming experimentation, the game's built-in tutorial menu provides pop-up descriptions of what to do and how to do it (which for some new players may include tasks as "simple" as running and attacking). From an educational perspective, this is incredibly important in shaping future learning as it encourages the player/student to take academic risks that enable more complex reasoning and experimentation in the future, thus improving the learning process itself.

The game's interface possesses several help settings for new and experienced players.

The game AI provides on-going guidance once the help settings are turned on.

When novel events like killing an enemy or gaining a level occur, short blips inform the player as to what has happened and what the implications of that event are (for instance, how to loot an enemy corpse or find out more about statistical changes due to level progression, respectively). In a way, this makes the first five levels of World of Warcraft mimic open-ended laboratory experiments typically reserved for middle or high school classrooms; all the learning taking place is done through student constructivism with the guidance of a knowledgeable "teacher." The teacher (the game's AI) recognizes when the player is struggling with a given task and adds parameters that simultaneously encourage student-centered experimentation and temper challenge with enough guidance that the game does not become an overwhelming experience. Even though incidents of death are still possible (I encountered that problem myself when I attacked two enemies at once to see if I could defeat them at the same time), the game provides the player with constant feedback about how and why death occurred, thus prompting him or her to try a new method of play without the pressure of following any one path to meet the learning objectives (thereby leaving playstyle completely up to the player). Overall, this  fosters a self-improvement system in which the player can see his or her strengths, troubleshoot weaknesses, and revisit problem areas with an informed perspective on how to do a better job next time.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

In-game assignments, known colloquially as "quests," are structured such that the player receives all necessary information to accomplish his or her goals without being forced to spend hours wandering aimlessly searching for whatever he or she has been tasked to find. Interestingly, the game designers have chosen to simplify the questing process by providing the exact location of the materials or enemies being sought (even going so far as to add shiny sparkles to desired quest items).

Here we see a list of quests, a description of the task at hand, and the location of where said task must be completed.

The quest items being sought are often marked with sparkly visual effects that attract the player's attention.

A few quests in, I began to wonder about whether or not these guidance tools watered down the game's content too much to merit a comparison of WoW with a real classroom environment (in which the teacher's job is to ensure that students are both engaged and learning at an appropriately challenging level). With that in mind, I turned to several other gamers and educators to hash out a reasoning as to why apparent stretches catering to intellectual laziness made sense in the context of the game's embedded pedagogy. After much debate, we concluded that WoW's designers are actually quite clever for having done what they have here: because Blizzard Entertainment is more interested in telling a captivating story than the process the player goes through to complete individual quests (which generally take a simple verb-number-noun format like "Gather 12 Acorns," "Kill 20 Pirates," or "Place 5 Flags"), they have created their own brand of calculator and spell-check-like tools that prevent mindless, redundant tasks from getting in the way of macroscopic theme acquisition. While calculator reliance is an area of debate amongst math teachers and spell-check's effects on long-term student spelling is an area of contention amongst English teachers, both tools (from a "big picture" standpoint) provide a much more efficient way for students to draw conclusions about major learning objectives than do long-hand division and dictionary use. In the beginning of a pre-Algebra course, it may be helpful to have students read and memorize portions of their multiplication tables in order to learn the process by which two numbers are multiplied, but by the time that same student reaches calculus, the multiplication process is worth far less than the time saved by utilizing a calculator to complete basic mathematical steps. Blizzard is essentially shaping this philosophy of education for their own purposes, teaching the player relevant, overarching story elements without worrying about the finite mechanisms involved in each quest. From my standpoint as a "new" player, I've found the system extremely helpful in that it has afforded me the luxury of worrying more about my effectiveness as a fully-immersed Night Elf warrior and less about where I should wander around looking for irradiated crystals, grizzly bears, class trainers, and dragon eggs. To a student, this could mean the difference between understanding how to use the periodic table in complex, problem-solving situations and missing the point because he or she was forced to memorize contextually useless facts about the 118 individual elements instead.

Short blurbs about objectives save the player time and effort that would have otherwise been wasted wandering around often substantial land areas.

Using the tools afforded to me by the game's designers, Sententiosus can get his training without getting lost in a sea of buildings and non-player characters.

Because I've run into so few individuals in the Teldrassil starting zone (where my Night Elf began his journey), there have been equally few opportunities for me to assess the social implications of playing a game like WoW thus far. Luckily, I found one other player killing the same woodland spiders I needed to for a quest and got to chatting a little bit about how long he'd been playing and what had kept him doing so since WoW's release in February 2005. He, like a few others I've interviewed since then, indicated that the game has retained its potency due to the fact that there are always new, unexplored areas of play that he has not yet tried or mastered, leaving him wanting for more. I strongly believe that this speaks to the unique nature of games in fostering player intrinsic motivation, compelling them to continue learning more and more even after doing so for days, months, or years. Even though the same tools and game elements are being utilized over extended periods of time, the game's narrative format keeps it potent enough to ensure players are logging in day after day. Perhaps, then, this reinforces the message from my last entry in which I highlighted how the ability of teachers and school districts to incorporate more game-like elements may indeed help keep students hungering for learning in the way players like the gentleman I spoke with hunger for more epic gear, bosses, and  refining of his in-game skills.

Non-player characters are awfully trusting with their goods. Why would you give the elements of your livelihood to a complete stranger?

Even though this post mostly refers to learning affordances up to and including level 5, my experiences up to level 14 (where Sententiosus now rests) have included more of the same. My proficiency with the rage resource system has grown rapidly, and I already feel much more competent than I did when I started this journey on Wednesday (a great benefit since in one level I will be able to tank dungeons for other players using WoW's Looking For Group system). Once the process of defending others begins, I anticipate I'll be asking them a number of questions about my effectiveness as a group leader and warrior, as well as how they believe WoW's learning affordances have affected them with regard to the tools I've mentioned above, social interactions (in pick-up groups, raids, guilds, and trade), and other gaming elements I have not yet considered. I can only hope that their responses will yield consistent trends that enable me to better shape my research and seamlessly implement stronger, more effective game-like courses for the benefit of 21st century learners.

Again, if any readers wish to come on-board and join the experiment, I'd be happy to have you! I appreciate your ongoing support and look forward to your future responses as Sententiosus marches down the path to victory!

For the Light of Elune!

Of Algebra, Physics, and Zombies: How We Can Get Math Skills Into Students’ Braaaiiinsss

Scary noises.

Hand guns.

Flesh-eating monsters.

Poorly lit hallways.

Survival-horror games are probably the last thing any parent, teacher, or administrator wants associated with a public school classroom. The oft bizarre plotlines and highly visceral visual effects make the grisly coating of blood on the inner side of our television screens and computer monitors come to life, causing grave discomfort for those warily playing at 3:00 AM and praying that nothing is going to grab them from the underside of the couch. Generally speaking, these violent ghoul-fests are games in which the player is expected to outlive hordes of brain-craving zombies and overcome objectives similar to those of protagonists in a number of horror films. Also true to horror films, when the main character fails his or her objective, there tends to be a particularly gruesome result: violent decapitation, monsters ravaging the character’s body, and innards being carelessly strewn across the virtual environment.

"Violent decapitation"

I’m not ashamed to admit that it took me until halfway through my undergraduate college career to stomach a survival-horror game, and even then, I was uneasy about playing whenever I was home alone. My first experience with the genre came from watching my best friend fight his way through the Raccoon City police station in Resident Evil 2, and I can still recall the terror I felt seeing a so-called “Licker,” one of the more disturbing monsters in the game, burst through an air vent in the ceiling of the virtual building (I may or may not have jumped out of my seat from shock… Don’t judge). When Resident Evil 4 was released on January 11, 2005, I decided it was time to ‘man-up’ and play through one of these horrifying games despite my concerns that the winter brought early darkness and I was going to be forced to spend most of the game playing through without the company of friends. Overcoming my deep-seated fear of things that go bump in the night, I successfully managed to beat the game in about fifteen hours with no major pants-wetting episodes to speak of.

"I can still recall the terror I felt seeing a so-called 'Licker'."

To my surprise, the experience left me wanting more.

Eventually, I found myself going back and playing through the entire Resident Evil catalogue; then came the popular titles Eternal Darkness (Gamecube) and Dead Space (Playstation 3). For some reason, I couldn’t get enough of the genre that once had me cowering in the corner. There came a point where I began questioning what was so gripping about these games that they could keep me playing even though I shuddered at the prospect of sitting through a single, gory horror movie.

Why were they so adept at keeping me engaged regardless of my distaste for blood and guts?

And what does this have to do with education?

It turns out these two questions share the same answer.

There’s no denying that survival-horror games carry a great deal of baggage with them since their degree of violence makes the act of brutally murdering drug dealers in Grand Theft Auto look like a playground game of cops and robbers, but there is something inherently different about them that causes them to stand out as intellectually useful with regards to the learning process. Even though there is a waging war over the effects of violence in video games (which I won’t get into here), survival-horror – at least, some survival-horror – brings an element of strategy to the table that is not included in other violent games. The real beauty of a game like Resident Evil 1, Resident Evil 2, or Dead Space is that your resources are incredibly limited, meaning that violence is generally not the best way to get out of the sticky situations the game designers drop the player into. As one might expect in a zombie apocalypse, there’s only so much ammunition laying around and with swarms of the living dead in the way, the player can’t afford to use up all of his or her bullets on enemies that are not posing an immediate threat. Compounded with difficult combat controls (particularly in the original Resident Evil games), it’s not prudent to go around shooting up anything that looks at you cross-eyed (which, if you think about it, is probably the vast number of enemies in these sorts of games).

What I am discussing here is the development and scaffolding of critical thinking-based reasoning skills through puzzles and logic problems. Though survival-horror games may not share many superficial qualities with your run-of-the-mill Sudoku, I would argue that both contain the elements of strategy needed to successfully complete a Rubik’s cube or foster the skills needed to understand (in a general sense) mathematics and scientific investigation. While there is research indicating that broad skill development of perceptual and cognitive abilities is not inherent in playing any one game, there is reason to believe that video games designed as individual training interventions with specific learning objectives may be extremely helpful in isolating complex skill deficits for students with problems in those areas of understanding (Kearney & Pivec, 2007; Boot, 2007). It seems reasonable, then, to assume that a game that regularly assesses the player’s ability to conserve resources and avoid combat (i.e. stay out of harm’s way via stealth) would be a useful tool in honing and testing a student’s ability to solve real-world problems relating to resource management and clever thinking (a reflection of how a geometry teacher may use several individual proofs to illustrate the more general rules of symmetry or corresponding angles).

The key to successful skill acquisition lies within the instructor’s ability to guide learning through the linking of several different experiences, meaning that a teacher attempting to illustrate principles of logical problem-solving would be best served to have his or her students play a game like Resident Evil and tie together all of the various events in which they had to deduce a “best” solution (thereby identifying a common thread: namely, the skill being learned). The game, in this sense, becomes a learning-powered vehicle that carries many different evaluation and synthesis-based activities, all of which are guided by the embedded narrative and “boss” assessments that model one or more important, underlying concepts.

However, parents, teachers, and administrators typically agree with the frequent (and, from an educational standpoint, often justified) concern that violent games do nothing but teach players how to be violent, making the survival-horror genre appear to be a poor source for the derivation of any academically valuable knowledge or skill. Fortunately, though, this is remedied by the fact that the typical survival-horror game is not constructed as a disjointed series of baddies to be dodged, parried, and shot in the head, but rather as a maze containing challenging puzzles that need to be overcome before moving onward. Zombies, aliens, and other monsters are usually more of an obstacle meant to interfere with the game’s more important learning objectives (overcoming resource depletion, resolving a series of brain teasers, and identifying when and where is the best application of a given strategy). Resident Evil 4, for instance, features a puzzle that requires the player to shift groups of blocks to form a specific pattern while being chased by marauding suits of armor wielding deadly axes. In this case, the player is forced to synthesize several different skills, including knowing how and when to move around the room, evaluating when it is safe to shift the blocks such that he or she will not face a macabre beheading, and understanding how to move the blocks to form the correct symbol and successfully unlock the door.

Slide tiles similar to the sliding blocks in Resident Evil 4.

The superficial elements of Resident Evil, such as the lumbering suits of armor and the daring, block-moving police officer in the above example, delicately add a layer of story telling that masks the nuts and bolts of several math, science, and logic problems commonly taught through the use of worksheets and other, more traditional, classroom materials. Providing students with the opportunity to explore a fictitious world in this way encompasses what I have come to call artificial relevance, or the addition of a compelling, engaging narrative that gives seemingly irrelevant tasks a degree of importance relative to the story being told. This concept serves to explain why I found myself enamored with playing and beating Resident Evil 4: the storyline made outwardly boring puzzles (like moving blocks) interesting and important by binding them to my goal (saving the president’s daughter from crazed cultists), which inherently led me to utilize the provided tools (the main character, the controller, and their combined ability to make my avatar run and push) to build upon and practice my critical thinking skills (how to logically move the blocks into the required formation to escape). In the end, the game’s numerous opportunities to follow this line of problem solving shaped my understanding and play of all survival-horror games in addition to providing me with a means to practice logic skills I had not used in quite some time.

The blood and violence, incidentally, were only tangential artifacts of the story and ultimately proved insubstantial when considering the game in its entirety, perhaps explaining why the carnage did not become the misery I expected it to. Unlike the vast majority of horror movies I’ve seen, each survival-horror game I’ve played has afforded me enough ways to test my thinking skills that I have never spent much time worrying about how scared I am or how disturbing the images on the screen are. Overall, the engaging nature of the genre indicates that survival-horror designers are incredibly effective at creating instructional tools that have evaded educators for decades; by thinly veiling critical thinking elements with the flashy gore that has proven to be a consumer favorite, the genre has led gamers to unwittingly exercise their fundamental skills in math and science.

Nevertheless, we are still faced with the argument that aside from the violence, there is little that games like Resident Evil and Dead Space do to further the skills assessed via state-mandated examinations like the CAPT. Why would a math teacher who needs his or her students to succeed at specific types of math problems devote the time and energy necessary to break-down and rebuild the very general thinking processes embedded in a game like Resident Evil? While game designers do a fantastic job including critical thinking opportunities in their software, there is indeed very little of what could be considered academic content (multiplication, division, fractions, and so on). However, we need not view this as a fundamental flaw in the use of such games: just because such content is not present does not mean that it can never be made present. The lack of a specific task or series of tasks provides educators with the profound opportunity to create their own survival-horror, educational games in which the puzzles are not simply a collection of logic problems, but also assessments of mathematical and scientific knowledge.

Take this example of a potential math-based survival-horror game:

Alternate Exterior Angles

The primary protagonist (a debonair, young doctoral student) stands on one side of a steel bridge separating him from a grotesque mutant on the opposing side. Though the player knows it is only a matter of time before the mutant crosses the bridge, he or she has access to a control panel that changes the placement of the steel beams composing the bridge’s path. Instead of developing the scene in a very broad, non-academic way (i.e. without any math-based foci), the game producers have designed the control panel such that it mimics the creation of a geometric proof illustrating the rules governing alternate exterior angles. The game prompts the player to use his or her knowledge of standards-based skills (like calculating angle size using available information) to change the position of the beams, forcing the mutant to walk the greatest possible distance to get across (allowing the protagonist plenty of time to escape). The control panel layout allows the skill being assessed to range from knowledge (having the player choose from a multiple choice list of theorems explaining the best course of action) to application and evaluation (allowing the player to analyze and design a solution based on a combination of experience with alternate exterior angles, variables, and numerical data). This way, the educator responsible for the classroom ensures that the students fulfilling the objective are doing so in a way that is appropriate for their level of understanding and ability. Should these elements alone not be challenging enough, the teacher can employ a timer to accelerate student problem solving or allow many monsters to cross many bridges at once, forcing the player to synthesize many different theorems in order to accomplish his or her goal before he or she becomes zombie food. Once the instructor drops additional puzzles into the mix, some involving spatial skills and some involving the number of bullets left to pump into zombies, he or she will find him or herself with a very entertaining survival-horror geometry class.

While parents and administrators may not share my openness and understanding of using survival-horror video games in an academic setting, their tailor-made consumer appeal makes them an ideal tool to reach out to the next wave of technologically minded students. Math educators can potentially learn a lot from mimicking the work of survival-horror game designers who have illustrated how a succinct approach to learning can be both valuable and compelling. Science departments finding themselves short on solutions to the daunting problem of getting more kids into engineering, physics, and chemistry can utilize the Resident Evil method to better help students enjoy the subject matter and develop a healthy intrinsic motivation to continue studying it outside of the classroom. It falls to us, as teachers, to be more open about how we can meet that end and how willing we are to push the envelope in grabbing their attention like so many undead hands grabbing at our tattered, blood-soaked jeans.

With that, I hereby declare the decades of fear and cowering in the corner of the educational community over. It’s high time for game designers and educators to get together, pool our professional resources, and make a difference for the next generation by combining our strengths into a cocktail of epic learning.

In the very appropriate words of a favorite auspicious zombie hunter: “I know you're scared; we're all scared, but that doesn't mean we’re cowards. We can take these [Deadites], every last one of them. We can do it… With science!”

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Boot, W. (2007). The effects of video game playing on perceptual and cognitive abilities. Dissertation Abstracts International, 68, Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

Kearney, P., & Pivec, M. (2007). Sex, lies and video games. British Journal of Educational Technology,38(3), 489-501. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00712.x.

Gaming and Learning: A Match Made in Awesome

It may strike many of you as odd that I am pursuing a doctoral degree by studying the use of gaming in education (or I suppose not, depending on how well you've known me over the course of the last fifteen years), but as a high school teacher, rarely did I see moments of higher engagement than when I had my students participate in games of my or others' creation during class. I suspect that there is something inherently useful about gaming in this context, not necessarily from the vantage point of being "fun" or "cool," but moreso from a human desire to learn through play. This is not a trend isolated to mankind alone, but we seem to be the best at illustrating it (consider the fact that wild animals like cats learn and practice their hunting skills through play with siblings, which is not dissimilar from learning social skills by "playing nice" with our siblings). In a way, we thrive when we are given the opportunity to practice doing things in a way we find entertaining. This notion of "work doesn't have to feel like work" is an extremely important principle when trying to shape classroom pedagogy, especially when the instructor is able to merge learning objectives with gaming objectives in a way that masks the "not fun-ness" of being a typical, disengaged student in an uninteresting class.

As a bit of anecdotal evidence, I point to the value of using hands-on experiments in a science classroom compared to direct instruction: yes, the same concepts can be taught through both pedagogical means, but the latter tends to be fairly understimulating in comparison to constructed, inquiry-based learning. If, as a 16-year old, I am expected to apply the skills learned in my biology class on a high-stakes test like the CAPT (creating an action plan to protect sea life from an oil spill, for example), it would behoove me to have had experience hypothesizing, forming an experimental procedure, collecting data, and coming to a conclusion about whether or not my ideas were valid solutions to the problem. Can this be done through direct instruction? Possibly, but the ownership of material in that case primarily belongs to the instructor rather than the student: the student is a passive element because he or she cannot A) test the procedures being presented by the teacher or B) easily deviate from the procedures being presented by the teacher in the event that he or she sees an alternative solution to the problem. A lack of ownership only serves to distance the student from the material and, more unfortunately, the skill he or she may have acquired through experiencing the learning on his or her own.

However, this is not to say that students should have unbridled freedom to experiment as they please. While there are some cases in which it may be valuable to allow free-form "play" in a classroom (for instance, allowing children to create novel ways to support the weight of several textbooks using only an index card and a strip of tape), laboratories are often dangerous places with many potentially hazardous materials. In this case, "sandbox" learning would be a huge detriment; not only can the students accidentally or purposefully put themselves in harm's way, but with little guidance, it is unlikely that they will ever reach the conclusion they need to in order to show skill acquisition. While a few students may reach the objective on their own, there is a distinct possibility that most of them will float through the ether until they give up, time runs out, or they reach an incorrect conclusion, thereby teaching them an incorrect or incomplete skill. If you begin a roadtrip in Maine and are told you need to drive to San Diego with no map or compass, that you can just "figure it out through experimentation," you may eventually reach your destination, but it could take weeks, months, or years (if you get there at all, assuming you have any previous knowledge as to where San Diego is relative to Maine to begin with). For obvious reasons, this sort of inquiry-based, constructivist learning is inappropriate for a learning environment in which there are severe time and resource constraints set by school hours, budgets, and standardized tests.

So what is the best answer?

Truly "good" teaching (if any form of teaching can be boiled down to such a fine point) falls somewhere in between these two examples. Master teachers are those that are able to blend their personal knowledge and skills into a refined instructional methodology where students are provided with just enough guidance to reach the learning objectives while still having the ability to veer off course and learn something through error. In the travel example, this may include pointing the driver in the right direction and telling him or her that he or she will need to continue to the state of California along the west coast of the United States, possibly with a compass and appropriate angle of approach but no specific roadmap to get there. This can be very tricky for anyone ill-experienced with lesson design because it relies on several key factors: creativity, adaptability, patience, and an extremely thorough knowledge of your subject area (imagine needing to know virtually all routes from Maine to California in order to provide additional guidance when needed). The real burden, though, is knowing that lessons like these take a great deal of time to scaffold and differentiate so that all students are equally engaged with the material and challenged by what they are learning (including the gifted students on one end of the spectrum and the learning disabled on the other). As any teacher will tell you, a strong, differentiated lesson can take as much as a month (or more) to prepare, meaning that it might take a single educator five or six years to create a wholly differentiated class (and that assumes an unlikely situation in which the curriculum does not change in that time).

Games, I firmly believe, fill in this gap with near-surgical precision. I am not necessarily referring to video games, per se, but I would argue that many of the affordances granted by something like the popular Playstation 3 title Demon's Souls are inaccessible through board or tabletop games (which may seem hypocritical as my research is directly related to a tabletop, roleplaying-based version of a Latin I language course; however, there are distinct pros and cons to both types of games, and I think there are definitive benefits to the use of video games in a classroom, especially when applied in tandem with tabletop games). The reason why I have chosen to highlight Demon's Souls in my first post is because of its unforgivingly high level of difficulty, comparable to other extraordinarily difficult games like Super Ghouls and Ghosts (SNES) and Ikaruga (Gamecube). Why is this important? Because, for whatever reason, a game that by all rights should be cast into the pits of Hell for the frustration it causes has still managed to find a substantial fan base that not only tolerates how hard it is, but derives pleasure from it. Consider how many people feel that way about their math or science courses, and imagine the power of successfully transferring that same near-masochistic degree of pleasure from completing derivatives, integrals, lab experiments, or other less-than-desirable activities. With scientists and mathematicians in short supply, it would seem incredibly prudent to start searching for ways to make those content areas a little more Demon's Souls-like.

For those of you who are not experienced with this particular game, I will provide a short summary: you, the player, take on the role of a champion in the far-off kingdom of Boletaria and are forced to exterminate an ancient, demonic evil that has spread over the land. There are several different environments to explore, including a castle, swamp, ancient ruins, a massive tower, and an underground cave system, each with its own selection of "baddies" standing between you and your goal of banishing the demonic threat back to wherever it came from (the game's narrative is a little thin, but there's an underlying good vs. evil theme). The game is divided into several "levels" within each environment, providing you with a way to teleport to each zone after completing your objective in the previous one (almost always involving a "boss" of the area). As you progress, you are rewarded with souls that you may use to teach your character new spells or upgrade your weapons and armor in what may be the most confusing, convoluted item management system ever created (though the system in Monster Hunter Tri may give it a run for its money). Upon completing the game, the player is able to begin anew, retaining all of the items, souls, and skills he or she acquired on the first playthrough; this can continue in an infinite loop, or until the player decides to stop playing altogether.

What makes this particular game so useful in discussing learning is the affordances it makes to the player despite its obscene difficulty. While the designers ensured that reaching the end would be no simple task (by brutally reprimanding you for your failure to properly complete an objective), they managed to include some very subtle, but important, features that keep the game balanced for the skilled and unskilled alike. The most glaring relationship between Demon's Souls and educational psychology comes when the player is killed in any one of the game's 20 or so levels: not only are you forced to begin the level again, but the game attempts to conduct behavioral modification through punishment. This includes halving your maximum health pool (meaning you have half as much time to get hit by enemies before you die), repopulating the level with the enemies you killed before dying yourself, damaging your armor and weapons (which you will have to pay to get repaired), and taking a substantial percentage of the souls you have acquired in your journeys (your currency for upgrading and improving your character).

In the loving words of one critic, this quickly becomes the game's First Law of "F$#& YOU, THAT'S WHY!"

Conversely, as you succeed in the game (by completing your boss-killing objectives without dying), you are positively rewarded: the game provides you with additional souls, a Demon Soul (that will allow you to retrieve a major piece of armor or a powerful magic spell), and (if you were in the "ghost," or half-health, state) you regain your full, maximum health bar. This is, in a very simplistic sense, a form of classical conditioning in which the player is taught what to do and what not to do with a reward and punishment system (much like those established to teach other skills in school; if you don't study for the test, you get punished with an F, but when you do study for the test, you get rewarded with an A). Positive and negative reinforcement end up going a long way early in the game to teach the player a few basic, but important, foundational skills:

1. Never put yourself in harm's way if you don't have to, or risk losing everything.

2. Do not engage enemies without properly positioning and preparing yourself for combat.

3. You will receive a reward for being patient and cautious throughout the game.

In other words, you learn early on that haste makes waste.

As the player progresses, some of the game's more interesting learning features build upon this foundational knowledge, providing great fodder for classroom teachers and school districts trying desperately to balance the needs of all their students. While the reward/punishment conditioning system is fairly black and white, there are several other, less obvious parameters set by the game designers to facilitate the learning necessary to complete the game in its entirety. Though the player is forced to face a series of additional challenges whenever he or she fails (read: dies), the Demon's Souls universe was constructed with a dynamic difficulty algorithm embedded in its programming to make sure it never became too hard or too easy for any one person. While the player suffers some very tangible side effects whenever he or she dies, the game is capable of recognizing that it is too challenging for the given player and adjusts itself accordingly, not dissimilar from the way the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) modifies its questioning based on the performance of the test taker. Each time the player character loses to a dragon, archer, or any of the thousands of pitfalls in the game, Demon's Souls will adjust its own artificial intelligence to reduce enemy health and damage done such that it becomes slightly easier for the player to kill what has ably been killing him or her. Likewise, as a player displays a high level of skill proficiency, the game's artificial intelligence will note the length of time he or she has gone without dying and will dynamically increase enemy health and damage done to have the opposite effect, thereby making itself more of a challenge. To prevent abuse of the system (ensuring that skilled players do not purposely die to get an advantage), the rewards garnered by fully exploring and completing each zone are tied to the dynamic difficulty algorithm, meaning the harder the enemies are when the player defeats them, the better the reward they leave behind.

From an educational perspective, an instantaneous feedback system like this would go far in aiding teachers who struggle to ensure that each of their students is being appropriately challenged rather than gliding through the content or facing a brick wall each time they open their textbooks. Imagine if chemistry, a content area I struggled with in college, was designed in such a way that every student in the class could receive continual assessment and feedback that would keep them engaged and learning at an appropriate difficulty level. Tracking systems in schools (i.e. remedial, college prep, honors, and advanced placement (AP)) have long attempted to accomplish this goal, but even within each level there is not a great enough degree of flexibility to properly accommodate all students across all units (an AP student who is excellent at all graphical, visual elements of calculus but struggles with the "math-ness" of complex derivatives, for example). While such a dynamic system may seem unattainable, it appears that in at least two cases (one game-driven, another required for graduate student admissions) there are tools available to make this a reality for public school students trapped in an antiquated and unmanageable system of skill measurement.

Surprisingly, the learning affordances in Demon's Souls do not end at ability measurement and difficulty adjustment. One of the other most influential elements of the game comes from the peer-to-peer interactions between players, which are not only controlled, but successfully incorporate tools usually isolated to on-line forums and first-person shooter games (both to aid one another cooperatively and through direct competition). Unlike many on-line video games, Demon's Souls does not allow players to write or say whatever they choose; there are very strict parameters for what information can be conveyed through the game, moderated via the use of text blips that contain information such as "Watch your step!" or "Use fire on the enemy ahead!" Players have the option to select bits of text from a master list and leave complete messages on the ground for others to see as they pass through the area. Furthermore, whenever a player dies, his or her death is recorded in the form of a blood splatter that others may click on to witness what led to the unlucky character's untimely end. From an educational standpoint, the simplicity of this peer-to-peer system is brilliant not only because it prevents players from harassing one another, but allows them the opportunity to take the reins as peer teachers, educating others on how to avoid many common problems and overcome challenges they may face as they progress through the game. If we were to frame this through the lens of the aforementioned Maine to San Diego roadtrip, the driver might find him or herself lost when a good friend suddenly sends a text message that says, "Take exit 76 to Utah!" Not only does this empower the player receiving the message, but it enables him or her to convey that same message to other players, thereby giving him or her ownership of the knowledge (and making it feel more important to retain that knowledge).

Along those lines, players having extreme difficulty with a boss may call in an allied player to lend a hand in the fight, supporting cooperative learning where strategy can be shared to achieve a common goal; conversely, players who find the game too easy may call in enemy players to add an element of human-versus-human combat (which is rewarded with additional souls, weapons, and armor). This ingenious peer education system helps players meet the learning objectives set within the immersive game environment as well as explore the metacognitive applications of their continued learning through play. Essentially, those playing Demon's Souls are not only thinking about how to meet the game's objectives, but also sharing what they have learned with others and, through cooperation, illustrating their chosen process of skill acquisition (which might be comparable to forming a math study group and showing your work to your peers as you all progress toward the same goal). In all, the game affords players several avenues through which they may share their learning with one another and highlight their specific strengths and weaknesses (especially in player-versus-player combat where one individual chooses to fight with melee weapons and another magic spells), creating a varied, interactive world of learning within the game's own context.

While these are but a taste of the learning affordances made through Demon's Souls, I believe they do the most to highlight how it stands out as a superior example of game design and, in many ways, acts as a pinnacle of game-based learning. Though it also features a great degree of character customization in the form of armor, weapon, and skill choices (for example, choosing to utilize swords, magic wands, or knives, thereby greatly altering gameplay) and allows for players to make educated choices when increasing their most desired traits (stamina for running and jumping, mana for casting magic spells, or health to take a greater beating from enemies), its biggest strengths lay within its simple, but efficient, means of encouraging ongoing learning despite the difficulty it presents to its audience. Overall, the player feels a great degree of satisfaction upon completing each zone even after receiving many figurative kicks to the chest since the learning process is so well-designed; it keeps the game feeling adequately challenging but never so overwhelming that it becomes a chore to play.

Schools, then, can learn a lot from a video game like Demon's Souls; we need not continue the ongoing trend of allowing students to feel defeated by algebra when we have the tools, innovation, and ability to blend game-like elements with already-established instructional pedagogy. One of the most important thoughts that has occurred to me up to this point in my career is that games not only have to be fun and well-scaffolded but have the added task of being so engaging that they compel consumers to spend money to do the learning designers are asking them to do. Would you have spent money on your high school math or science classes? Were they engaging enough to make you feel like you had ownership over the material? Gaming and learning are really two ways of looking at the same idea: one sees learning as play, and the other sees learning as a job. Perhaps if we, as teachers of the gamer generation, dedicate ourselves to adding a little more Demon's Souls to our instructional methodology, we will one day fulfill our professional objective of creating work for students and ourselves that doesn't feel like work at all; it will instead be a rewarding, engaging form of challenging fun.