Owen

Okay a little out of order, but. . . the DL works now.

Click here to DL the forums timelapse!

This is part A of a maze game system that pits a player controling an avatar in 3d gamestudio versus a maze builder with a plexiglass table and colored blocks.

This article, "The Principlas of Play," from Metropolis September 2006, asks the question: "can game designers reach a generation of students reared on technology and resistant to traditional methods of teaching?" The article is primarly about "Game Designer," a innovative educationally aimed game now in the works. The game provides an engaging and intutive structure for the player to design their own games. The article goes on to make a through argument for good games as essential educational tools. While the popular sentimant that "gaming is the mindless, time-wasting pastime of a nihilistic generation" is in general accurate. The argument is not that video games are good teachers, but that playing video games is often good learning.

From Frieze magazine:

"Machinima, most usefully defined as, "moviemaking within a real-time 3d virtual environment', has its origins in the mid=1990s, when first person shooters such as Quake and Unreal started to include tools that let gamers record live in-game footage as they played."

http://www.machinima.com/films.php?id=275

Sims 2 - User movies

The Awaking: http://youtube.com/watch?v=t_KibtJ6400

The Movies (Preview)
A game that simulates Hollywood movie making in the 1920s.

Components:
Soccer field
2 teams, 11 players each
2 balls
2 referess

Rules:
The gmae is played according to the basic rules of soccer, except for the extra ball.

Object:
To score goals into the opposing team's goal.

Duration:
Two 30-minute halves.

Note:
In this game the player's chances of touching the ball are increased, and his/her movement is faster. He/she quickly abandons all familiar strategies, reacting to the new possibilities.

History:
First played in Lod, Israel, February 1996.

Click here to download my review of Indigo Prophecy!

I took a look at Storytron website before getting ahold of the Chris Crawford article. The websites descriptions are intriguingly vague and how the hell this world builder fuctions is curious. I actually don't understand how it is imagined to literally work. The basic concept sounds like those Choose Your Own Adventure novels where the story gave you options that would affect the outcome. Albiet the options would be constant rather than every 10 pages. It seems that Crawford is trying to imagine an interactive movie where there are latent variables that arise to create a dramatic situtation, embbeded with a certain amount of scripting so the game play is as entertaining as watching a movie. While this still feels psuedo interactive, if a game replicated a real life--however fasinating the acomplishment--would it be worth playing? Movies are always so much more interesting than my life and thus enjoyable to watch. While limiting, the creativitiy and imagination of the story builder channeled into a maliable system could produce results that out strip anything seen or done prior. Perhaps even the expanding the global dramatic vocabulary...

I took a look at the speakers presentations on the web from the Serious Games summit and found myself interested not in a game particularly but the argument for games as a serious learning device. (We must defeat the Chinese!)

I pulled this from Merrilea J. Mayo's powerpoint:
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Preliminary finding of international comparisons (TIMSS, PISA) is that US students learn too much, too superficially, without understanding anything.
From learning theory, we know some attributes assist deep learning

Experiential learning (you do it, you learn it): Active participation; decisions that have consequences. Typical of immersive games.

Inquiry-based learning (what happens when I do this?): exploration in games.

Authenticity (the more like real-life the learning situation, the more easily learners will transfer the information to real life): virtual worlds

Self-efficacy (if you believe you can do it, you will increase your chances of succeeding): rewards & levels in games

Goal setting (you will make more progress if working towards a well-defined goal): game goal

Continuous feedback: student in conventional classroom gets to ask only 0.11 questions/hr. In tutoring, student gets 20-30 questions/hr. (Fletcher, J.D. “Technology, the Columbus Effect, and the Third Revolution in Learning”, Institute for Defense Analysis, 2001. ). Carnegie-Mellon Algebra Tutor increases TIMSS scores by 30%. What result for games???

Cooperation (team learning): Studies of traditional learning show cooperative learning results in about a 50% improvement over either solo or competitive learning (meta-analysis of 122 studies by Johnson et al, Psych. Bull 89 (1981) 47-62. MMOG’s.

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The average time spent by teenagers in video game play is 5-8 hours/week. This is almost exactly equal to the time spent on homework by college-bound high school students.

JetSalom

Partly inspired by the real vs. online player tag game by Blast Theory, this game (so far untitled) would pit a real person armed with colored building blocks and tiles versus an online player piloting an avatar. The real player would build enviroments with the various structural elements in a specified area (like a table top or something). A camera would be trained directly above that area and read the color coded blocks and tiles which would then be translated into a computer simulated 3d virtual enviroment (possibily in real time). The online player must nagoitate the terrian an make it too a exit point as quickly as possible. To recap, the basic structure of the game is: real world construction toys are assembled into a enviorment in a specified area, that enviroment is than translated into a virtual enviroment that a player controlled avatar can travel through. Competetive rules could be applyed. For example, if the computer and real enviroment were in the same space (like a gallery) players could switch roles and try to make the best time in each others enviroments.