just drafts

Originally, I planned this week’s roundup to be specifically about AI/LLM/ChatGPT in research and education, but I pushed these topics back a week in the light of current events. You’ve probably heard by now that Microsoft’s recent Bing AI demo, after some people took a closer look, was a far greater disaster than Google’s Bard AI demo had been a few days earlier.

Dmitri Brereton:

According to this [Bing AI’s] pros and cons list, the “Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Handheld Vacuum” sounds pretty bad. Limited suction power, a short cord, and it’s noisy enough to scare pets? Geez, how is this thing even a best seller?

Oh wait, this is all completely made up information.

It gets worse from there. Predictably, Bing AI also resorts to gaslighting, a topic I touched upon in my recent essay on Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, and Transformational Change over at medium.com.

But hey, people want to believe! Which can be quite innocuous, as exemplified by this Golem article in German language. Shorter version: “On the one hand, Bing AI’s answers to our computer hardware questions were riddled with errors, but on the other, it generated a healthy meal plan for the week that we took at face value, so we have to conclude that Google now has a problem.”

Then, it can be stark, ridiculous nonsense. Which especially flowered in Kevin Roose’s “conversational article” in The New York Times, under the original headline “Bing’s A.I. Chat Reveals Its Feelings: ‘I Want to Be Alive.’”

Emily M. Bender gave it the thrashing it deserved:

And then here: “I had a long conversation with the chatbot” frames this as though the chatbot was somehow engaged and interested in “conversing” with Roose so much so that it stuck with him through a long conversation.

It didn’t. It’s a computer program. This is as absurd as saying: “On Tuesday night, my calculator played math games with me for two hours.”

That paragraph gets worse, though. It doesn’t have any desires, secret or otherwise. It doesn’t have thoughts. It doesn’t “identify” as anything. […] And let’s take a moment to observe the irony (?) that the NYTimes, famous for publishing transphobic trash, is happy to talk about how a computer program supposedly “identifies.”

You can learn more about what journalism currently gets terribly wrong from Bender’s essay On NYT Magazine on AI: Resist the Urge to Be Impressed, again over at medium.com. There, she looks into topics like misguided metaphors and framing; misconceptions about language, language acquisition, and reading comprehension; troublesome training data; and how documentation, transparency, and democratic governance fall prey to the sycophantic exultation (my phrasing) of Silicon Valley techbros and their sociopathic enablers (dito).

Finally, there’s the outright pathetic. Jumping into swirling vertiginous abysses of eschatological delusions particularly on Twitter, many seem to believe or pretend to believe that the erratic behavior of Bing’s “Sydney,” which at times even resembled bizarre emotional breakdowns until Microsoft pulled the plug, is evidence for internal experiences and the impending rise of self-aware AI.

Linguist Mark Liberman:

But since the alliance between OpenAI and Microsoft added (a version of) this LLM to (a version of) Bing, people have been encountering weirder issues. As Mark Frauenfelder pointed out a couple of days ago at BoingBoing, “Bing is having bizarre emotional breakdowns and there’s a subreddit with examples.” One question about these interactions is where the training data came from, since such systems just spin out word sequences that their training estimates to be probable.

After some excerpts from OpenAI’s own page on their training model, he concludes:

So an army of low-paid “AI trainers” created training conversations, and also evaluated such conversations comparatively—which apparently generated enough sad stuff to fuel those “bizarre emotional breakdowns.”

A second question is what this all means, in practical terms. Most of us (anyhow me) have seen this stuff as somewhere between pathetic and ridiculous, but C. M. [Corey McMillan] pointed out to me that there might be really bad effects on naive and psychologically vulnerable people.

As evidenced by classical research as well as Pac-Man’s ghosts, humans are more than eager to anthropomorphize robots’ programmed behavioral patterns as “shy,” “curious,” “aggressive,” and so on. That an equivalent to this would be true for programmed communication patterns shouldn’t come as a surprise.

However, for those who join the I Want to Believe train deliberately, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with a lack of technical knowledge or “intelligence” in general, whatever that is. Not counting those who seize this as a juicy consulting career opportunity, the purported advent of self-aware machines is a dizzyingly large wishful thinking buffet that offers either delicacies or indigestibles for a broad range of sensibilities.

On a final note for today, this doesn’t mean that technical knowledge of how ChatGPT works is purely optional, useless, or snobbish. Adding to the growing number of sources already out there, e.g., Stephen Wolfram last week published a 19,000-word essay on ChatGPT that keeps a reasonable balance between being in-depth and accessible. And even if you don’t agree with his hypotheses or predictions on human and computational language, that’s where all this stuff becomes really interesting. Instead of chasing Pac-Man’s ghosts and seeing faces in toast, we should be thrilled about what we can learn and will learn from LLM research—from move 37 to Sydney and beyond—about decision processes, creativity, language, and other deep aspects of the human condition.

As I wrote more than eight (woah!) years ago in the About section, my secret level/side blog just drafts is one part news ticker with commentary on everything related to games, and one part research-adjacent blog posts about game-based learning and ethics. Discussing current AI models fits that agenda pretty well.

What’s more, I started preparing course materials and practical exercises around AI/LLM/GPT models for the upcoming term in April. These will be balanced topic cocktails for second and sixth term students, revolving around creative assistance (game design, art, coding, and writing), development support (production process and project management), and social ramifications (potentials, risks, economic viability, sustainability, equity/fairness, acceptance, workplace integration, and so on).

Thus, on top of my regular posts, linked list items, or essays, these roundups will serve as food for thought in general, and as a repository for upcoming discussions with my students as well.

Sooooo, let’s go!

1. “Chatbots Could One Day Replace Search Engines. Here’s Why That’s a Terrible Idea.” Will Douglas Heaven in MIT Technology Review, March 29, 2022.

This one’s a bit older. It held up well, but most of the arguments are familiar by now. One aspect, however, is worth exploring. From an interview with Emily M. Bender, one of the coauthors on the paper that led Timnit Gebru to be forced out of Google:

“The Star Trek fantasy—where you have this all-knowing computer that you can ask questions and it just gives you the answer—is not what we can provide and not what we need,” says Bender[.] It isn’t just that today’s technology is not up to the job, she believes. “I think there is something wrong with the vision,” she says. “It is infantilizing to say that the way we get information is to ask an expert and have them just give it to us.”

– – – – –

2. “The Guardian View on ChatGPT Search: Exploiting Wishful Thinking.” The Guardian editorial, Februar 10, 2023.

Since the British Guardian began some time ago to excel in publishing disgustingly transphobic opinion pieces, I all but stopped linking to it. But this one adds an intriguing metaphor to the preceding point of view:

In his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett describes the juvenile sea squirt, which wanders through the sea looking for a “suitable rock or hunk of coral to … make its home for life.” On finding one, the sea squirt no longer needs its brain and eats it. Humanity is unlikely to adopt such culinary habits but there is a worrying metaphorical parallel. The concern is that in the profit-driven competition to insert artificial intelligence into our daily lives, humans are dumbing themselves down by becoming overly reliant on “intelligent” machines—and eroding the practices on which their comprehension depends.

The operative term here is “practices,” mind. That’s the important thing.

– – – – –

3. “We Asked ChatGPT to Write Performance Reviews and They Are Wildly Sexist (and Racist).” Kieran Snyder in Fast Company, February 2, 2023.

Across the board, the feedback ChatGPT writes for these basic prompts isn’t especially helpful. It uses numerous cliches, it doesn’t include examples, and it isn’t especially actionable. […] Given this, it’s borderline amazing how little it takes for ChatGPT to start baking gendered assumptions into this otherwise highly generic feedback.

[O]ne important difference: feedback written for female employees was simply longer—about 15% longer than feedback written for male employees or feedback written in response to prompts with gender-neutral pronouns. In most cases, the extra words added critical feedback [while the feedback written for a male employee] is unilaterally positive.”

To be expected; sexism and racism and similar nasty stuff is always baked into historical data. To keep any AI trained on historical data from developing racist-aunt-or-uncle opinions, with the potential to ruin a lot more than merely your Thanksgiving family dinner, will keep haunting us as one of the biggest challenges in AI.

Now that Ron DeSantis is engineering the birth of the Fourth Reich in Florida in preparation for his nomination for the 2024 presidential election, it is hard not to see the similarities between his all-out war against cultural and educational institutions and the coordinated totalitarian Gleichschaltung perpetrated by the German Nazi party between 1933 and 1935. Yes, you read that right—the Nazis established total control over Germany’s institutions and organizations within the span of two years.

For cultural gleichschaltung, you can use two major strategies: you can ban or you can co-opt. Co-optation takes more effort but in contrast to bans, it is often invisible and can serve as a tool for indoctrination.

Here’s a rather subtle example: a 1943 performance of Robert Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri Op.50, a secular oratorio for soloists, choir, and orchestra completed in 1843. When you take a look at the program—see slides for page 1 and page 2, which I found in a boxed vinyl recording I once bought at a flea market in Germany—and happen to know the libretto, you will immediately see what the Nazis did there.

The libretto is about the Peri, a creature from Persian mythology, who’s been expelled from paradise and tries to regain entrance by bringing a gift that is “most dear to heaven” (here’s a full summary). First, she captures the last drop of blood of a young freedom fighter, which fails. Then, she catches the last breath of a girl who sacrifices herself for her plague-ridden lover; that too fails. Finally, she brings the tear of a criminal, shed in remorse at the sight of a praying child, which finally opens the gates of heaven.

Now look at that program again—the girl who sacrifices herself comes first, which fails; then comes the tear of remorse, which also fails; then the drop of blood of a young freedom fighter—»Denn heilig ist das Blut, / Für die Freiheit verspritzt vom Heldenmut«, which opens the gates of heaven.

That’s how you can twist, easily and with a few strokes of the pen, a piece of your cultural heritage into supporting your fascist agenda.

If you don’t live under a rock, you might have noticed a few remarkable—but not altogether unpredictable—advances in natural language processing and reinforcement learning, prominently text-to-image models and ChatGPT. And now, every concerned pundit comes out of the woodwork, decrying how terrible these developments are for our educational system and for our starving artists.

Is this deluge of AI-generated images and texts terrible? Of course it is. But don’t let them tell you that this is the problem. It’s only the symptom of a problem.

Let’s start with all those people suddenly feeling deeply concerned about the death of the college essay. Education, if you think of it, should do three things: make children and students curious about as many subjects as possible; give them the tools to develop interests around these subjects; and facilitate the acquisition of skills, knowledge, and understanding along these interests. For these ends, virtually every new technology would be useful one way or another. Our educational systems’ priority, however, is feeding children and students standardizable packets of information—a lot with very short best-before dates stamped on them—for evaluation needs and immediate workplace fitness. Just think of it: the world wide web became accessible for general use around 1994! During all that time, almost thirty years, the bulk of written and oral exams didn’t adapt to integrate the internet, but has been kept isolated from it meticulously. Nor, for that matter, has the underlying system changed of keeping information expensive and disinformation free, an infrastructure into which AI-generated nonsense can be fed now with abandon. And all this gate-keeping for what: when there’s a potential majority in any given country to elect or keep electing fascists into high office, the survival of the college essay probably isn’t the most pressing thing on our plate with regard to education.

Then, the exploitation of artists. Could these fucking techbros have trained their fucking models on work that artists consented to or whose work is in the public domain? That’s what they should’ve done and of course didn’t, but please spare me your pundity tears. While it is thoroughly reprehensible, it’s only possible because at that intersection where the tech and creative industries meet, a towering exploitation machine has stood all along—co-opting or replacing or straightaway ripping off the work of artists and freelance artists, and practically everybody who doesn’t own an army of copyright lawyers, the moment their work becomes even marginally successful.

AI will advance, and everything it can do will be done. Nexus-6 models aren’t right around the corner, but they’re an excellent metaphor. We could try and legislate all those leash-evading applications to death, chasing after them, always a few steps behind and a few years too late, trying to prevent new ways of exploitation while reinforcing old ways of exploitation. Or we could try and change our educational and creative economies in ways that make these applications actually useful and welcome, for educators and artists in particular and humanity and this planet in general.

In my first post in this series, I wrote about in-game photography for memorable moments, and about the detrimental effects photos can have on our memories by highlighting these recorded moment over all other moments that might be of equal, or even higher, biographical value for us. And I wrote about how digital photography might alleviate this effect. It enables us not only to record an unprecedented amount of moments of our lives, but record them at almost any given point in time. Our phone cameras are always with us, ready to record.

Originally, I planned to proceed to aspects of player memory and game-based learning, but I’m still processing these topics. Then, last week, an article in the New Yorker by Kyle Chayka on “Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart?” has triggered another artillery exchange in the digital photo quality wars that is worth mentioning in the context of these posts.

Chayka’s argument boils down to this: in contrast to the iPhone 7 camera, later models—iPhone 11–13—digitally manipulate shots so “aggressively and unsolicited” that they often don’t look “natural” but weird, or overprocessed and “over-real,” with glaring editing errors on top.

Backlash was swift, naturally. John Nack (h/t Daring Fireball) put up a gallery on Twitter that juxtaposes iPhone 7 and iPhone 12 shots from the same objects at the same location. Or, John Gruber argued that the problem “is not that iPhone cameras have gotten too smart. It’s that they haven’t gotten smart enough.”

It doesn’t help that Chayka’s article is not supported by evidence, like, well, photos. Not of editing glitches, we all know how they look—but examples of iPhone 7 shots that look better, or more natural, or more interesting, than corresponding shots from an iPhone 11 or later. For an article that makes such a deep, sweeping argument about digital photography, one could expect some examples to go with it? Perhaps it’s just me.

Also, it doesn’t help that the article’s arguments aren’t well structured and throw wildly different things into the mix, particularly the hypothesis (or assumption) that modern digital photography has a “destabilizing effect on the status of the camera and the photographer” (with reference to Benjamin, of course). That iPhones create “a shallow copy of photographic technique that undermines the impact of the original” and “mimics artistry without ever getting there”—now that’s a tune we’ve heard before.

First of all, for the overwhelming majority of iPhone users, iPhone photography is perfectly fine. And for them, later iPhone models serve these people’s purposes a lot better than the camera and software package of the iPhone 7 did.

Then, if the iPhone’s editing process is too aggressive for what you want to achieve, which is indeed a concern for many professional photographers and artists, you can and should switch to third-party photo apps, up to and especially Halide that allows you to shoot RAW and, from iPhone 12 models on, also Apple’s ProRAW. (Chayka even mentions Halide, but somehow that doesn’t lead anywhere.) And it goes without saying that later iPhones will provide you with better RAW or ProRAW data to work with than an iPhone 7.

Seen in this light, the argument that digital photography is not really “professional photography” and is lacking in “artistry” is at least partly based on the hidden, quite bizarre, and most likely unreflected assumption that the “shot” that came out of the camera is what makes or breaks a professional photo or art. Just like photos from non-digital cameras, the editing process is a substantial part of it, despite all their differences.

Adding everything up, Chayka’s article is not well-structured; it doesn’t provide evidence for its arguments; and it contains hidden assumptions that are dubious at least, and outright untenable at worst.

And I’m not even a fan of iPhone photography! Early on over at Glass, I followed a good number of accounts who shot with iPhone 11+ models. Photographers, that is, who are very good and know what they’re doing. Some are a blast, and I keep enjoying them very much. But with time, I felt the majority of photos from pure iPhone accounts were just not interesting enough to stick around. At the same time, I began to follow more and more photographers who shoot film, and not just professionals. (Most of my older photos on Glass are shot with an iPhone 5s, so please ignore these curious sounds of breaking glass that you hear from the back of the house.)

Thus, there are two different, but perfectly compatible takeaways.

On one side, following Gruber, iPhone cameras haven’t gotten smart enough yet for the overwhelming majority of iPhone users who aren’t professional photographers or artists. On the other side, newer and smarter iPhone cameras keep providing professional photographers and artists with more, better, and richer “raw” data to work with.

Bonus recommendation: if you want to dive into the nitty-gritty details of photo processing software on the iPhone 13 Pro, this post by Halide designer Sebastiaan de With on “iPhone 13 Pro: The Edge of Intelligent Photography” is what you want to read.

Today, I made some changes to just drafts.

To begin with, I switched the background color from its original daringfireball-flavored grayish-blue to a more maritime-flavored grayish-green. (It’s called “Dark Slate Gray,” but never mind.) If it’s still grayish-blue, hit CMD-R on Mac or CTRL-R on PC a few times to reload the cached style sheet.

Then, I installed a lightbox plugin and added a “slide” icon to the link class; it will display the post’s Open Graph/Twitter Card image in an overlay if you click on it. (That’s the image you see when the post appears on social media.) I might throw in a few other pictures as well.

Finally, I remembered that I created this side blog back in 2014 not merely for research-adjacent blog posts about game-based learning and game-related ethics; I also created it to link to, and to briefly comment on, external content related to games in general. (Whereby, in linked list–fashion, the post’s headline links to the source, not to the post.) This will recommence soon.

Also, I fixed a few bugs.

That’s it.

Last week, I wrapped up two undergraduate-level game design courses with final workshop sessions, and I wanted them to be an enjoyable experience for everyone.

If there’s one thing teaching should accomplish, it’s this: show students a field, its tools, and its biggest challenges in inspiring ways and help them find and solve challenges which a) they find interesting and b) are manageable at their current level of expertise in terms of skill, knowledge, understanding, and attitude. With that, you provide everything that’s needed: autonomy, mastery, purpose, and also—as solving interesting problems almost always demands collaboration—relatedness.

When I was a student, working together existed mostly as group work or team papers, and I hated both. So I always try to set up my workshop sessions in ways even my freshman self would appreciate. As you might have guessed already, the learning theory I’m trying to follow, to these ends and in general, is constructivism, not cognitivism.

Cognitivism is more or less what you experienced in school. It’s about communicating simplified and standardized knowledge to the students in the most efficient and effective manner, who are supposed to memorize this knowledge in a first step, and then memorize the use of that knowledge in a second step by solving simplified and standardized problems. Sounds familiar, right? Cognitivism is all about memory and mental states and knowledge transfer. It’s not at all about creating curiosity, facilitating exploration, or providing purpose. Cognitivism doesn’t foster and stimulate mastery goals and personal growth (getting really good at something), it focuses instead on performance goals (getting better grades, and getting better grades than others). There’s no autonomy to speak of, only strict curricula and nailed-down syllabi and standardized testing. And there’s no relatedness to speak of either, because there’s no collaboration or cocreation beyond the aforementioned occasional group work or team paper. Because real collaboration and cocreation would mess up standardized testing and individual grading.

Constructivist learning theory, in contrast, is about everything cognitivism ignores: interests, exploration, autonomy, mastery goals, purpose, and relatedness through collaborative and cocreative problem-solving. Certainly, constructivism has its own tough challenges to navigate, but that’s no different from any other learning theory, like cognitivism or behaviorism. According to constructivism, students learn through experiences—along which they create internal representations of the things in the world, and attach meaning to these internal representations. Thus, it’s not about learning facts and procedures but developing concepts and contexts—by exploring a field’s authentic problem space, picking a challenge, and then exploring the field’s current knowledge space and its tool boxes to solve that challenge. The critical role of the teacher is to provide assistance and turn unknown unknowns into known unknowns, so that students can develop a better understanding of the scope, the scale, and the difficulties involved. Without the latter, learning and problem-solving can easily become a frustrating experience instead of an enjoyable one.

And that’s what I mean by enjoyable. In practice, in my final workshop sessions, everybody can pick a problem they’re burning to solve, gather like-minded fellow students, and try to solve that problem together in a breakout room by applying the knowledge and the tools we’ve explored and collected along the course. Or, alternatively, they can stay in the “main track” and tackle a challenge whose rough outlines I set up in advance, moderated by me. In the end, every group presents their findings and shares their most interesting insights.

That’s a setup even my younger self would have appreciated! Everyone can, but by no means has to, shoulder the burden of responsibility by adopting a challenge. Everyone can, but by no means has to, win over other students for a challenge, or join an individual group. Everyone can decide to stay in the main track, which is perfectly fine.

The problem with cognitivism is not that it doesn’t want to die, it’s that is hasn’t noticed it’s already dead. Just think about it: almost everybody can tell, or knows somebody who can tell, an uplifting story about that one outstanding teacher who inspired them despite everything else going down in school. But the very foundation of our educational system is that it’s supposed to work independently of any specific individual, of any specific outstanding teaching performance.

Should we ever design a framework to accomplish this, which might or might not happen in the future, that makes our educational system truly work on the system level, cognitivism certainly isn’t it. Cognitivism is a shambling zombie that, over time, has gradually slipped into its second career as a political fetish.

One thing I do is consulting in the political arena with research, reports, and recommendations to combat racism, misogyny, LGBTQ+ hate, and antisemitism in video games, gaming communities, and on gaming platforms. And, specifically, the instrumentalization of such tendencies by the far-right.

The case can be made that #GamerGate, the neofascist/white-supremacist utilization and amplification of male resentment against women in general and women in gaming in particular, was a test run that eventually paved the way for full-blown Trumpism in the U.S. In Germany, luckily, #GamerGate was never able to establish a comparably powerful foothold among its gaming communities. But, as we all know, Germany has a massive Nazi problem of its own, and lawmakers want to make sure that these people don’t radicalize players and recruit even more Nazis on game-related channels and platforms.

Alas, efforts and measures that make sense are wanting.

There are two major reasons for that. The German legislative body is, on the one hand, way more influenced by authoritarian power fantasies of its executive branch than they should be, for a healthy democracy. And on the other hand, they have a hard time differentiating between substantially different types of challenges that call for different types of actions and different types of actors.

For this post, let’s put aside the executive branch’s power fantasies—banning end-to-end encryption, for starters—and focus on highlighting the different types of challenges instead.

The first challenge is specific far-right-communication channels like Telegram or Gab, where extremists meet, plan, and coordinate their activities, from illegal to lethal. Here, the primary actors should be the executive branch, i.e., law enforcement. It’s certainly not a simple task, but there are many powerful traditional and digital investigation methods law enforcement agencies have at their disposal—if they just stopped complaining about how difficult everything is without unlimited authoritarian snooping power, and got to work instead.

The second challenge is mainstream social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook in particular, where far-right talking points—wrapped up in ready-to-eat bundles of racism, misogyny, LGBTQ+ hate, and antisemitism—are prominently injected into the public discourse. Here, the primary actor should be the legislative branch, i.e., lawmakers. They should pass laws and policies with severe fines and damage claim options. This should make it impossible for these platform holders to earn money through vacuuming up the personal data of entire populations, and then let third parties turn the nozzle around and target these populations algorithmically with radicalizing content. Basically, these should be the same kind of laws and fines that make it unattractive for companies to release toxic waste into our water systems.

The third challenge is specific gaming platforms and media channels like Twitch, Discord, Steam, in-game chat channels, and so on with their traditionally high amplitude of racism and misogyny. The more normalized these behaviors become among players, the more vulnerable they become to be nudged toward ever more extremist ideas. Here, the primary actor should be educational, informational, and cultural institutions to promote and rehearse non-discriminatory behavior for individuals and groups, in cooperation with platform holders and game-related media.

Of course, the primary actors for all three challenges could and should coordinate, and they should set up programs with clear goals and timeframes. That way, outcomes could be monitored and evaluated and the programs and goals revised if need be.

Alas, this is Germany! So what’s likely to continue instead to meet these three challenges is a never-ending stream of efforts to make end-to-end encryption illegal; make life hard in terms of data protection for everybody except Facebook, Google, or Amazon; and sprinkle gaming platform holders from time to time with complaints about some random dude’s swastika in their profile picture.

2020 went by in a daze. For the first time since 2015, I didn’t publish anything, neither a paper nor a book, and I practically stopped blogging. I did write, but I’m months behind my self-set schedule. It wasn’t just the Corona crisis—it were developments in Hong Kong, the U.S., and Israel too that put me into a negative mental state that continually drained my energy.

Now, things have improved in the U.S., but the situation in Hong Kong becomes more terrifying by the minute, and from Israel come the most alarming news. Moreover, I live in Germany—where politicians, propagandists, mercenary scientists, and dangerous alliances of Covid-19 denialists alike torpedo every sensible solution that real scientists and a handful of public figures come up with to fight the virus and keep people safe.

Among the most disastrous measures, in every respect, is the premature opening of schools. This has no rational explanation. Schools in Germany are notoriously underfunded and have no digital infrastructure to speak of. Teachers are bogged down by administrative work. The integration of technologies in the classroom very rarely exceeds the use of calculators and overhead projectors. And, countless political statements of intent notwithstanding, no one ever really gave a shit, and nothing ever changed.

Now, during times of plague, education is suddenly the most terribly precious thing, and to send children back into crowded classrooms is more important than all the people this might kill in the process, or damage for life.

Of course, there are economic reasons to get children out of the way as fast as political decorum allows, going hand in hand with the ministerial refusal to make home office work, where possible, mandatory. Dying for the GDP is something we all understand.

But, considering the tremendous scope of suffering inflicted by Covid-19, that’s too rational an explanation for the consistently irrational demeanor and decision-making, where the state-level secretaries of education push toward opening the schools to strengthen the next pandemic wave each time like clockwork. What’s really going on, and that took me forever to understand, is that “school” is not, or no longer, structured like a place of education & learning. Instead, school is structured like a fetish, forever pointing toward education as a lost referent that can no longer be retrieved.

As such, it is hyper-resistant to any kind of change or reform; to scientific and technological progress; to social and psychological and pedagogical insights.

As such, it wastes twelve or thirteen years of everyone’s life on memorizing swiftly perishable facts instead of teaching curiosity; focuses on tests and grades instead of fostering skill, creativity, and understanding; insists on following the curriculum instead of inspiring students with the love, and thirst, for knowledge and for lifelong learning.

As such, it demands that everyone suffer. And now, true to its nature as a fetish, it demands the willingness to sacrifice your loved ones in times of plague as well.

Today, on the last day of Hanukkah, we will do three things: wrap everything up, briefly; talk about the three missing elements period style, game type, and game loop; and draft a task list with items that would be needed to advance our conceptual sketch toward something pitchable, i.e., a game treatment.

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During the fourth, fifth, and sixth day of Hanukkah, we sketched a number of design decisions for the Interactivity, Plurimediality, and Narrativity territories.

Today, we will engage the fourth and final design territory of the Ludotronics paradigm, Architectonics.

Instead of merely covering “story” or “narrative,” Architectonics denotes the design and arrangement of a game’s dramatic structure in terms of both its narrative structure and its game mechanics and rule dynamics.

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Yesterday’s design territory, Plurimediality, was about “compelling aesthetics,” seen from the viewpoint of functional aesthetics and working toward a game’s consistent look-and-feel for a holistic user experience.

Narrativity, our design territory for today, is about “emotional appeal,” seen from the viewpoint of narrative qualities or properties that work toward conveying specific meaning in a specific dramatic unit for a memorable gameplay moment.

For the latter, the Ludotronics paradigm works with four content domains: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and mythological. Obviously, to be able to plan specific narrative qualities or properties for memorable gameplay moments, we need to know a lot more about our Hanukkah game than we know at the moment. All we can do right now is sketch a few general principles that we can apply in each domain.

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While yesterday’s Interactivity territory with its game mechanics, rule dynamics, and player interactions has the “just-right amount of challenge” at its motivational core, Plurimediality is associated with “compelling aesthetics.”

Which, in a game, comprises not only graphics, sound, music, writing, voice acting, and the game’s look-and-feel in general, but also usability in its many forms including player controls. That’s because aesthetics and usability are two sides of the same coin, united by function. Accordingly, Plurimediality integrates design thinking from the perspective of functional aesthetics (informed by the Ludology dimension) and the perspective of aesthetic experience (informed by the Cinematology dimension). One can’t be great without the other, and every element in turn must connect with the theme.

To recap our prospective Hanukkah game’s concept so far, we’re considering a game with intergenerational cooperative gameplay for Jewish and non-Jewish children and Jewish parents/relatives with a core experience in the ludological dimension, the general theme of “hope,” and a strong focus on the motifs “anticipation,” “ambition,” and “trust” in the Interactivity design territory.

So what’s the aesthetic experience of our Hanukkah game going to be? To answer this question, tentatively, we will look at the game’s style and sound.

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To recapitulate our insights from the first three days of Hanukkah, our Hanukkah game’s theme will be “hope”; its core will fall into the ludological dimension; it will have a complex primary and secondary target audience of Jewish and non-Jewish children and Jewish parents and relatives; and its USP will be intergenerational cooperative gameplay.

Today, we will explore the first design territory for our Hanukkah game, Interactivity. Within the Ludotronics paradigm, Interactivity is informed by game mechanical aspects, i.e., the mechanics and rules of the game, and ludological aspects, i.e., how players interact with the game and with other players. (The other three design territories besides Interactivity, to be visited in the following days, are Plurimediality, Narrativity, and Architectonics.)

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From the research we did on the first and the second day of Hanukkah, we collected a number of design parameters for our Hanukkah game. These are:

• it’s not well suited for a (pseudo-)historical combat or strategy game;
• it must be playable for non-Jewish players without having to “play-act” Jewish rituals;
• “hope” is a suitable theme for design decisions across all four design territories;
• the best fit for the core playing experience is the ludological dimension.

Today, on the third day of Hanukkah, we will explore possible target audiences and the game’s unique selling proposition, or USP.

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Yesterday, on the first day of Hanukkah, we sounded out the historical context of the Hanukkah story, thereby eliminating a historical combat or strategy game. Now we will turn to the meaning or meanings that Hanukkah has acquired over time, from the Talmud until today, to find our game’s theme and its core experience in one of the four dimensions, i.e., Game Mechanics, Ludology, Cinematology, or Narratology.

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Usually, everything starts with a game idea. From there, you can proceed, step for step, maybe along the Ludotronics paradigm, until you have a pitchable concept—no matter whether it’s a publisher pitch, an in-house pitch, or a war cry to assemble a crackerjack team for your indie title. Now what if someone—a customer, a publisher—approaches you not with an idea, but with a topic?

Along the eight days of Hanukkah, of which today is the first, let’s sketch a game concept about Hanukkah as an exercise.

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Game-based learning comes in many different shapes and styles that encompass everything from dedicated educational content in serious games to training simulations to communicating knowledge about historical eras or events and questions of ethnicity or gender in AAA action-adventure games. Yet, as always, well-meant isn’t necessarily well-done. In the case of AAA and high-quality independent games, it is often the lack of “native informants” during the development process that turn good intentions into public meltdowns.

“Native informant” is a term from post-colonial discourse, particularly as developed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It indicates the voice of the “other” which always runs the risk of being overwritten by, or coopted and absorbed into, a dominant public discourse. Even the term itself always runs this risk.

There are three topics of the “other” I’d like to touch upon in three consecutive posts: gender, ethnicity, and madness. For this post on gender, let’s look at some well-known examples.

With a native informant, the original portrayal of Hainly Abrams wouldn’t have failed as abysmally as it did in Mass Effect: Andromeda. BioWare’s reaction was laudable, certainly—they reached out to the transgender community and made the appropriate changes. But why didn’t they reach out in the first place? Who, on the team, was comfortable with writing the “other” without listening to their voices? Another egregious example were RimWorld’s early gender algorithms—where, in contrast, the developers’ reaction was anything but laudable. (I might be going out on a limb here, but I don’t think OkCupid data qualifies as a native informant.)

Calling in native informants as consultants is exceptionally useful in more than one respect.

First, obviously, they prevent your team from making outrageous mistakes. In the case of Mass Effect: Andromeda, it was a particular mistake that could be fixed with a patch. But when a character’s actions or even whole chunks of the plot are based on faulty premises, that’s not easily fixed at all. Enter Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’s DLC “Legacy of the First Blade: Shadow Heritage,” where Cassandra was “hetconned,” i.e., forced into a heterosexual relationship to become a parent.

Then, why would you want to stop at merely not getting it wrong? Native informants will provide you with involving details that will turn cliche attitudes into motivated actions & emotions and transform your cardboard characters into engaging personalities.

Finally, hiring native informants as consultants adds diversity to your team, enriches your game, and broadens your reach beyond your mainstream audience. Toward people, that is, who would gladly buy your game if they see themselves represented in it—in the contexts of visibility, of acceptance, and of role models as drivers of empowerment.

Among the great advantages of game-based learning is, in well-designed games, that players are “tested” exclusively on skills, knowledge, understanding, or attitude that they have learned, or should have learned, while playing the game. Certainly, there are exceptions. Games can be badly designed. Or, problems of familiarity might arise, as discussed in Ludotronics, when conventions of a certain class of games (misleadingly called “genre”) raise the Skill Threshold for players who are not familiar with them and might also interfere later in test situations. Most of the time, though, players are indeed tested on what the game has taught them, and well-designed “term finals” like level bosses do not simply test the player’s proficiency, but push them even further.

This rhymes beautifully with the rule “you should not grade what you don’t teach” and its extension “if you do teach it, grade it only after you taught it.” While this sounds like a no-brainer, there are areas in general education that have a strong tendency toward breaking this rule, with grammar as a well-known example. And then there’s the problem of bad or insufficient teaching. When students, through no fault of their own, failed to acquire a critical skill or piece of knowledge demanded by the advanced task at hand, how would you grade them? Is it okay, metaphorically speaking, to send students on bicycles to a car race and then punish them for poor lap time performances? But if you don’t grade them on the basis of what they should have learned, doesn’t that mean lowering the standards? As for the students, they can’t just up and leave badly designed education like they can stop playing a badly designed game.

Another aspect, already mentioned, is that tests in games not only test what has been taught, but are designed to push player proficiency even further. This is possible, and possible only, because the player is allowed to fail, and generally also allowed to fail as often as necessary. Such tests, moreover, can become very sophisticated, very well-designed. In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, you might be able to take down a boss with what you’ve already learned instead of what you’re supposed to be learning while fighting that boss, but you’ll be punished for it later when you desperately need the skill you had been invited to learn. You can read all about this example in Patrick Klepek’s “15 Hours In, Sekiro Gave Me a Midterm Exam That Exposed My Whole Ass,” which is recommended reading.

The second reverse question I love to discuss in my lecture on media psychology/media didactics for game designers is to ask, instead of what games can bring to the classroom, what the classroom brings to the table compared to games. Again, it’s about non-specialized public gymnasien in Germany, so the results are not expected to be particularly invigorating.

What about motor skills, dexterity, agility, hand-eye coordination, reaction times, and so on? What about endurance, persistence, ambition (not in terms of grades), or patience? Here, the classroom has little to offer. Possible contributions are expected to come from physical education, certainly. But—with the exception of specialized boarding schools, or sportgymnasien—physical education is almost universally despised by students for a whole raft of reasons, and it is not renowned for advancing any of the qualities enumerated above in systematic ways.

What about »Kombinationsfähigkeit« in terms of logical thinking, deduction, and reasoning? What about strategy, tactics, anticipatory thinking (which actions will trigger which events), algorithmic thinking (what will happen in what order or sequence), and similar? Again, the classroom in non-vocational or non-specialized schools has little to offer here, if anything at all.

Finally, what about creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, imagination, improvisation, and similar? Some, the lucky ones, have fond memories of art lessons that fostered creativity. But even then: on this palette, creativity is just one color among others. Music lessons have potential too, but—barring specialized schools again—it’s rare to hear students reminisce lovingly about music lessons that systematically fostered any of these qualities.

Now, the curious thing is that serious games and game-based learning projects have a tendency to try and compete precisely with what the classroom does bring to the table for the cognitive domain, notably in its traditional knowledge silos that we call subjects. This, not to mince words, is fairly useless. Serious games, in careful studies against control groups, almost never beat the classroom significantly in terms of learning events, learning time, depths of knowledge, or even knowledge retention—but they come with a long time to market, a stiff price tag, and tend to burn content like a wildfire. Instead, game-based learning should focus on the psychomotor domain, the affective domain, those parts of the cognitive domain that the classroom notoriously neglects, and rigorously unsiloed knowledge from every domain. And if all that can’t be integrated into the classroom because the classroom can’t change or adapt and integrate games and new technologies in general, then let’s build our own classroom, maybe as a massively multilearner online game-based learning environment. The century’s still young.

In my lecture on media psychology/media didactics for game designers, reverse-questioning how school lessons and school curricula relate to technology and games counts among my favorite exercises. For example, instead of asking what technology in general and games in particular can do for the classroom, we ask which technological advances schools have actually adopted since the middle of the twentieth century.

Now, as I am teaching in Germany, and most of my students come from non-specialized public gymnasien, you can probably guess where this is going. With the rare exception of interactive whiteboard use (roughly one student out of fifteen), the two technological advances properly integrated into regular classroom use in seven decades are [check notes] the pocket calculator and [check notes again] the overhead projector.

Historically, all technological advances that have been proposed for classroom use in Germany, including pocket calculators and TV/VCR sets and computers and cell phones and tablets, and so on, were viciously opposed by teachers, parents, administrators, and politicians alike with an inexhaustible reservoir of claims ranging from the decline of educational integrity (»Kulturverfall«) to wi-fi radiation panic (»Strahlenesoterik«). Today, the copy & paste function especially is viewed as a creeping horror that must never be allowed to make it past the hallowed doorstep of higher education.

Add to that an often desolate financial situation. There are cases where schools can’t afford a decent wi-fi infrastructure, desktop or mobile hardware, software licenses, or, especially, teacher training. But all these problems could be surmounted in principle if it wasn’t for the one titanic challenge: the curriculum. Cognitivism has brought us this far, and we certainly shouldn’t abandon it. But it should become part of something new, a curriculum based on what and how we should teach and what and how we should learn in the 21st century. This requires motivational models that are up to the task; we can start with Connectivism and with models like flow and self-determination, both of which feed the Ludotronics motivational model, and advance from there. Technological, social, and other kinds of advances should become deeply integrated into this new curriculum. To turn our information society into a true knowledge society, we must leave the era of age cohorts, classes, repeated years, and silo teaching behind and embrace learning and teaching as a thrilling and, before all else, shared quest of lifelong exploration.

For my very first set of university courses, to navigate monster schedules and sleep deprivation, I employed the time-honored strategy of putting everything that seemed remotely relevant on a load of slides that would bring down an eighteen-wheeler, and then wing it from there. Eventually, of course, one has to find the time to rework and restructure and make every single lecture shine.

Game levels, basically, are very much like lectures. For each, you should ask yourself three basic questions:

• What will the players (or students) have learned by the end of the level (or lecture)?
• How can you make that an enjoyable experience?
• How can achieving their learning goals feel rewarding to them?

Here, to keep it brief, let’s focus on the first question, the learning outcome, which you should structure in ways that make sense. The Ludotronics paradigm applies a substantially modified KSA model with four ingredients: skill (repeatable, observable performance); knowledge (recognizable or recallable facts & procedures); understanding (grasping complex processes & applying knowledge in new and different contexts); and attitude (adapted behavior courtesy of freshly acquired skills, knowledge, or understanding).

You don’t have to stuff all four into every level or lecture, far from it. But you need to keep an eye on all four so you can motivate and inspire through variety toward a dazzling holistic payoff. Along these lines, you can then create fitting experiences and rewards. Motivation to play equals motivation to learn, after all! And the quality of a level or a lecture has nothing to do with the number of assets or the number of slides; it has everything to do with a joyful and rewarding learning experience.

Recently, I asked about the possible effects of “one-size-fits-all educational methodology with predetermined curricula and standardized testing” and, especially, “conditioned learning of siloed educational subjects detached from personal experience in large classes solely determined by year of birth.” That, of course, was purely a rhetorical question as these effects are clearly visible to everybody. Rarely do schools instill in us a deep and abiding love for learning and for the subjects taught, the historical events envisioned, the works of literature read, the math problems solved. Rarely do we fondly remember our school days and sentimentalize them into nostalgic yearnings for a lost pleasure. In my 2013 inaugural lecture “Knowledge Attacks!: Storyfication, Gamification, and Futurification for Learning Experiences and Experiential Learning in the 21st Century” which, alas, I still haven’t managed to put online, I developed two sample scenarios to break down educational silos in our schools.

The first sample scenario took off from the topic of “calculus,” typically siloed and restricted to “math” courses. Why don’t we confront students instead with the exact same problems Newton and Leibniz faced and connect the invention of calculus with learning content from its historical context: Newton’s Principia and the Great Plague of London; the English civil war and the Bill of Rights; the baby and toddler years of the Scientific Method and the principles of rational inquiry; the Great Fire of London and modern city planning; the formation of the United Kingdom and colonial power struggles; the journalist, author, and spy Daniel Defoe and Protestant work ethic; the transition from Baroque to Rococo in painting and music; the Newtonian telescope and Newton’s laws of motion; the dissociation of physics and metaphysics. Interim summary: math, physics, philosophy, religion, English language, history, geography, music, art, literature, astronomy. Oh, and sports: the evolution of cricket during this time in post-restoration England as the origin of professional team sport.

Or “democracy,” aspects of which are usually siloed in history courses and/or a variety of elective courses like “politics” or “citizenship.” What if students were given the task, perhaps in a time-travel setup, to convince the Athenian assembly in 482 B.C.E. via political maneuvering to distribute the new-found silver seam’s wealth among the Athenian citizens instead of following Themistocles’s proposal to build a naval fleet? So that the Battle of Salamis would never happen, the Greek city states swallowed by the Persian empire, neither the Roman republic nor large parts of the world become hellenized, and the European Renaissance as we know it would never happen? The potential in terms of learning content: the dynamics of democracy and political maneuvering; the history of classical antiquity; general economics, trade, and the economics of coins and currencies; the structure and ramifications of democratic systems built on slave economies; Greek language; rhetoric; comedy and tragedy; myth; Herodotus and the beginnings and nature of historical writing; geometry; the turn from pre-Socratic to Socratic philosophy; sculpture and architecture; ship building; astronomy; geography; the Olympic Games. Strategy, probably—especially naval strategy if the plan to change history fails to succeed: Salamis from the point of view of Themistocles on the side of the Greeks and from the point of view of Artemisia—the skillful and clear-sighted commander of a contingent of allied forces in Xerxes’s fleet—on the side of the Persians. Infinite possibilities.

Now, what’s being introduced in Finland right now as “cross-subject topics” and “phenomenon-based teaching” looks quite similar in principle to my developing concept of “scenario learning.” As the Independent's headline puts it, “Subjects Scrapped and Replaced with ‘Topics’ as Country Reforms Its Education System”:

Finland is about to embark on one of the most radical education reform programmes ever undertaken by a nation state—scrapping traditional “teaching by subject” in favour of “teaching by topic.” […] Subject-specific lessons—an hour of history in the morning, an hour of geography in the afternoon—are already being phased out for 16-year-olds in the city’s upper schools. They are being replaced by what the Finns call “phenomenon” teaching—or teaching by topic. For instance, a teenager studying a vocational course might take “cafeteria services” lessons, which would include elements of maths, languages (to help serve foreign customers), writing skills and communication skills.

More academic pupils would be taught cross-subject topics such as the European Union—which would merge elements of economics, history (of the countries involved), languages and geography.

This sounds exciting already, but there’s more:

There are other changes too, not least to the traditional format that sees rows of pupils sitting passively in front of their teacher, listening to lessons or waiting to be questioned. Instead there will be a more collaborative approach, with pupils working in smaller groups to solve problems while improving their communication skills.

Many teachers, of course, aren’t exactly thrilled. But a “co-teaching” approach to lesson planning with input from more than one subject specialist has also been introduced; participating teachers receive a “small top-up in salary,” and, most importantly, “about 70 per cent of the city’s high school teachers have now been trained in adopting the new approach.”

And even that’s not the end of it. A game-based learning approach, upon which my scenario learning concept is largely built, will also be introduced to Finland’s schools (emphases mine):

Meanwhile, the pre-school sector is also embracing change through an innovative project, the Playful Learning Centre, which is engaged in discussions with the computer games industry about how it could help introduce a more “playful” learning approach to younger children.

“We would like to make Finland the leading country in terms of playful solutions to children’s learning,” said Olavi Mentanen, director of the PLC project.

Finally, from the case studies:

We come across children playing chess in a corridor and a game being played whereby children rush around the corridors collecting information about different parts of Africa. Ms. Jaatinen describes what is going on as “joyful learning.” She wants more collaboration and communication between pupils to allow them to develop their creative thinking skills.

What I feel now is a powerful urge to immediately move to Finland.

(h/t @JohnDanaher)

The first #ECGBL2014 presentation I attended was “Experimenting on How to Create a Sustainable Gamified Learning Design That Supports Adult Students When Learning Through Designing Learning Games” (Source) by Charlotte Lærke Weitze, PhD Fellow, Department of Education, Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark.

Weitze’s paper relates to a double challenge so crucial for designing game-based learning solutions that you’ll see me coming back to it on this blog time and again. One side of this challenge is students burning through content way faster than educators and game designers are able to produce; you just can’t keep up. The other side is the challenge of practicing complex, non-siloed learning content within game-based learning environments that are incompatible with practices such as rote learning, flash cards, repeat training, or standardized testing.

In other words, it’s non-educational games’ “replay value” challenge on screaming steroids. Among the most promising solutions is mapping the “learning by teaching” approach to designing content, i. e., having students design fresh game content as a learning-by-teaching exercise. Obviously, both effectiveness and efficiency of this approach depend on the number of students that are part of the system, where output will exponentially take off only after a certain threshold has been reached, both numerically and by way of network effects.

Of course there are pitfalls. One obvious pitfall is that students—with the exception of game design students, of course—are students, not game designers. And while, along more reasonable approaches, they don’t have to design fully functional games by themselves with game mechanics, rules, and everything, it’s still hard to design entertaining, i. e., “playable” content for games without at least some game design knowledge from various fields—prominently balancing, guidance strategies for player actions, or interactive storytelling. This was one of the reasons why, regrettably, Weitze’s experiment, where students also had to build the content with software, fell short.

As for the experimental setup (which employs the terminology of James Paul Gee’s more interaction-/discourse-oriented differentiation between little “g” games and big “G” Games), students design and build little “g” games for a digital platform within the framework of a “gamified learning experience,” the big “G” Game, which includes embedding learning goals and evaluating learning success. The little “g” games in this case are built for other students around cross-disciplinary learning content from the fields of history, religion, and social studies in a three-step process consisting of “concept development, introduction and experiments with the digital game design software (GameSalad), and digital game design” (4). Moreover, this whole development process (within the big “G” Game) had to be designed in such a way as to be motivating and engaging for the students on the one hand, and to yield evaluable data as to its motivational impact on individual learning successes on the other.

Experiences from this experiment, unsurprisingly, were described in the presentation as “mixed”—which is academic parlance for “did not fucking work as planned at all.” The problems with this setup are of course manifold and among these, “focus” is the elephant in the room.

There are far too many layers, especially for an experiment: the gamification of game design processes for learning purposes (the big “G” Game) and the design thereof with in-built learning goals and evaluation strategies; below that, then, the game design processes for the little “g” games including, again, learning goals and evaluation strategies. In other words, the students were supposed to be learning inside the big “G” Game by designing little “g” games in groups with which other students in turn would be able to “learn from playing the games and thus gain knowledge, skills and competence while playing” (3)—all that for cross-disciplinary content and executed in a competitive manner (the big “G” Game) by 17 students and three teachers none of which had sufficient game design experience to start with, and under severe time constraints of three workshop sessions of four hours each.

Besides “focus,” the second elephant in the room is “ambition,” which the paper acknowledges as such:

In the current experiment the overall game continued over the course of three four‐hour‐long workshops. Though this was a long time to spend on an experiment, curriculum‐wise, for the upper‐secondary students, it is very little time when both teachers and students are novices in game‐design. (3)

Plus:

This is an ambitious goal, since a good learning‐game‐play is difficult to achieve even for trained learning game designers and instructors. (3)

And the nail in the coffin, again unsurprisingly:

At this point [the second workshop] they were asked to start considering how to create their game concept in a digital version. These tasks were overwhelming and off‐putting for some of the students to such a degree that they almost refused to continue. This was a big change in their motivation to continue in the big Game and thereby the students learning process was hindered as well. (7)

Finally, what also generated palpable problems during this experiment was the competitive nature of the big “G” Game. While the paper goes to some lengths to defend this setup (competition between groups vs. collaboration within groups), I don’t find this approach to game-based learning convincing. Indeed I think that for game-based learning this approach—competition on the macro-level, collaboration on the micro- or group-level—has it upside down: that’s what we already have, everywhere. Progress, in contrast, would be to collaborate on the macro-level with stimulating, non-vital competitive elements on the micro- or group level.

Game-based learning can provide us the tools to learn and create collaboratively, and to teach us to learn and create collaboratively, for sustained lifelong learning-experiences. Competition can and should be involved, but as a stimulating part for a much greater experience, not the other way round. The other way round—where collaboration has to give way to competition as soon as things threaten to become important—is exactly what game-based learning has the potential to overturn and transcend in the long run.

Last year’s ECGBL 2014 (8th European Conference for Game-Based Learning), October 9–10, in Berlin, which included the satellite conference SGDA 2014 (5th International Conference on Serious Games Development & Applications), was located at Campus Wilhelminenhof in Berlin Oberschöneweide and hosted by the University of Applied Sciences for Engineering and Economics HTW Berlin. The conference was opened by Dr.-Ing. Carsten Busch, program chair and professor of media economics/media information technology, followed by an introduction to the HTW Berlin by Dr.-Ing. Helen Leemhuis, faculty dean and professor of engineering management.

Then, the keynote. Oh well.

How to put this politely. To be sure, there are occasions and circumstances where it is a good idea to engage with stakeholders outside academia by inviting industry representatives to academic conferences as keynote speakers, but in this case it rather wasn’t.

The invited speaker was Dr. jur. Maximilian Schenk, formerly “Director Operations and member of the management team” of the German VZ network (which has gone down in history for, among other things, setting the bar for future copy-&-paste operations spectacularly high by copying Facebook literally wholesale, down to style sheets and code files named fbook.css or poke.php), at present managing director of the BIU (Bundesverband interaktive Unterhaltungssoftware / German Trade Association of Interactive Entertainment Software). He addressed his audience of highly qualified postgraduate, postdoc, and tenured veteran researchers from the fields of game-based learning and serious games across a wide range of disciplines verbatim with:

You are the specialists so I won’t go into your terrain, so instead I will tell you something about the fundamentals of serious games that you have to understand to know what making serious games is all about.

During the stupefied silence that followed, Maximilian Schenk acquainted the audience with the BIU and its sundry activities, explained how the traditionally bad image of gaming in Germany, including serious games, was changing as it had been found out that “games make people smarter” (evidence: Spiegel), pontificated about “games as a medium” from “tent fires, maybe 10,000 years from now” to today’s video games, and ended his thankfully brief keynote with an enthusiastic barrage of growth forecasts relating to game-based learning/serious games industries whose outrageously optimistic numbers were inversely proportional to the amount of actual evidence corroborating these numbers.

While appreciated in general, it was rather obvious that the keynote’s briefness had taken the organizers by surprise, and Carsten Busch jumped in to introduce, with all the little tell-tale signs of hurried improvisation, the Swedish Condom08 gamification project. This presentation—its general drift into inappropriately didactic terrain notwithstanding (“What did you learn?”; “What technologies were used?”)—turned out to be enjoyable and stimulating.

And so the conference began. Follow-up posts are in the pipeline.

#GamerGate isn’t over. Actually, GamerGate might never be over. Or at least won’t be for a very long time. And it can’t, because institutionalized misogyny—very much like its sibling institutionalized racism the consequences of which are as visible and as lethal as ever—is, indeed, about institutions and institutionalized practices. GamerGate is not about “issues.” Neither legitimate issues nor pseudo issues—instead, the whole GamerGate edifice is built upon maintaining systemic privilege within our predominant power structures, structures that are completely transparent and therefore invisible for those who enjoy these privileges, but starkly reflecting and often painfully visible for those who don’t.

This asymmetry, in turn, engenders very different flavors of “ideology,” which complicates things considerably.

Everything that’s enmeshed in these transparent, invisible power structures will be perceived by those endowed with privilege as “natural”—race relations, gender relations, how we are educated, how we work, how we love, how we fight, how we die. In contrast, every voice that tries to question or change these invisible power structures—toward visibility, respect, equal opportunity, whatever it is—will be instantly “marked” and highly visible and therefore inevitably be perceived as “ideological” against an otherwise “natural” background, much like a cloud on a spotless, blue sky.

This perceived naturalness, however, is a kind of “deep ideology”—I’m loosely following Michel Foucault here, and Judith Butler—which is glaringly obvious as such for the non-privileged and disenfranchised. And this “deep ideology” in turn—now loosely following Niklas Luhmann here (I told you it’ll complicate things!)—serves recursively as both cause and effect with respect to the underlying power structures in that autopoietic system (i.e, a system where the functional product of its cooperating parts is the organization that creates these parts) we call “society.”

So if you enjoy white, straight, male, cis, able-bodied, or mentally unimpaired privilege, you need to develop a “systemic awareness” which lowers the transparency and makes the invisible visible, and then we’all might be able to actually talk. It’s certainly not easy to develop this awareness all by yourself from scratch, but you don’t need to—there are people who walk amongst you who, if you ask in good faith, are sincerely willing to help! So especially if you’re a straight white dude who prefers to remain ignorant about the relative privileges you enjoy, and there is always a point where remaining ignorant becomes an active decision indeed, pardon me that henceforth your name will be known as Douchebag.

Let’s translate all this into gaming terms. John Scalzi once put it like this: for the privileged, life is like playing an MMORPG on the lowest difficulty setting and remaining blissfully unaware of it.

Still too abstract? Here then, let me help you out with this one:

“25 Invisible Benefits of Gaming While Male” by Feminist Frequency

That’s why GamerGate is not an “issue” we can “solve”—it’s a systemic problem we’re confronted with every day on countless occasions. Systemic problems take many forms, in the games industry and society at large as well. Whether, in the case of misogyny, it’s death, rape, and terror threats against female developers and critics and cosplayers and every female voice that’s raised in traditionally male-dominated contexts, whether, in the case of racism, it’s the constant terror you experience as a person of color even if you’re not getting shot six times with your hands up and unarmed or strangled to death on camera by law enforcement officers who act with impunity. Systemic problems have many faces, and they’re usually much uglier than you think they are.

And that brings me to Cultural Criticism, the very purpose of which is to lower the system’s transparency, to denaturalize what appears natural, to make the invisible visible, to expose structural privilege. What Anita Sarkeesian does is cultural criticism, and the mind-boggling amount of threats and invectives directed at her from within the “gaming community,” enriched with massive amounts of hate-filled misogyny and a generous helping of antisemitism, was—and is—terrifying. If you’ve followed her Twitter mentions—or those from Leigh Alexander or Brianna Wu—you couldn’t but stare in utter disbelief at the misogynist hordes that popped out of the ground like spawned from dragon’s teeth. And for all of us who self-identified as male “gamers” up to this point in time, in a way this also meant that, suddenly, these misogynist hordes were us.

But not only “us gamers”—from early on, I noticed many familiar names from the “atheist community” joining GamerGate’s ranks—actually, the same assholes who want to keep atheism “pure” without contaminating it with social issues, who hurl Social Justice Warrior at you as an insult, and who call cultural critics pointing at their straight white male privileges “bullies.” Sounds familiar? Exactly.

And it’s the same familiar idiots who accuse you of misandry—“How does being a misandrist make you better than a misogynist?” blah blah—while a) taking ironic misandry literally (taking things literally where you shouldn’t is a well-oiled rhetorical ploy) and b) pretending to not see that all this is not at all about individual likes and dislikes, but about a huge systemic imbalance where misogyny is baked right into the distribution and availability of resources while misandry is not. In society, “misandry” does not wield any perceptible power, and it’s a non-issue if there ever was one. But, as a reminder, misogyny isn’t an “issue” either—it’s part of the systemic problem I outlined above, and these kinds of problems are not solvable without changing the underlying structure, sometimes wholesale.

Now Ethics in Journalism, in contrast, is indeed an “issue.” And that’s why GamerGate supporters are profoundly disinterested in it at the end of the day. Does anybody really have to point out the great number of problems endemic to video game journalism? I think not. These problems have been bugging us for years and years and not a week goes by without something happening that reminds us. Since when, then, are Ethics in Video Game Journalism’s biggest problems female indie developers working or not working on Call of Duty clones and/or having a video game journalist boyfriend who never wrote a single line about her games, or Kickstarter-backed female critics, or Patreon-supported female artists?

Are these really our problems in video game journalism?

Witch King: "No man can kill me."
Eowyn: "I am no man." [Stabs him]
Witch King: [Shrieks] "GAMERGATE IS ABOUT JOURNALISTIC ETHICS!" [Dies]

— Jason Sweeney (@sween) October 20, 2014

Witch King: “No man can kill me.”
Eowyn: “I am no man.” [Stabs him]
Witch King: [Shrieks] “GAMERGATE IS ABOUT JOURNALISTIC ETHICS!” [Dies]
@sween 4:08 PM – 20 Oct 2014

But! wouldn’t it be possible, however remotely, that GamerGate—which, to remind you, was kicked from 4chan, of all places; whose merry members laughed it off when confronted with their endemic combination of death threats and doxxing because “nobody’s been killed yet!”; and whose leading figures are really quite endearing characters—be rescued by funneling it into the collecting tank of their own pretense, into a true consumer movement?

No. Here’s why:

The entire movement is like dragging a net through sewage, picking up every vile sexist/homophobic consumer. It's unsalvageable.

— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) November 15, 2014

The entire movement is like dragging a net through sewage, picking up every vile sexist/homophobic consumer. It’s unsalvageable.
@Spacekatgal 4:21 PM – 15 Nov 2014

GamerGate is about as salvageable as the MRA camp or those who take their political and aesthetic inspirations from tinfoil agendas and Stürmer illustrations. Talking of which: it was breathtaking to see how GamerGate acolytes shamelessly deployed Nazi imagery, especially against Anita Sarkeesian, while at the same time insulting feminists as “femiNazis” on a regular basis, all without the slightest cognitive dissonance. But there’s more—and this is a feeling I truly share with Elizabeth Simins: despite many holocaust comparisons floating around, it was GamerGate’s illustrated self-image (in several variations) of intrepidly resisting the “media conspiracy” tanks on Tiananmen Square that really knocked me off my feet.

Finally, are there “two sides” to this story? Well, yes—in the very sense that there are “two sides” to the story when it comes to the dangers of tobacco use or to climate change. Exactly like in the latter cases, GamerGate’s spin is a true “manufactroversy,” a manufactured controversy.

Which this tweet illustrates best:

Should women be allowed to create and play video games without fear of being murdered in real life? Let's hear both sides of the story.

— Gavia Baker-Whitelaw (@Hello_Tailor) October 15, 2014

Should women be allowed to create and play video games without fear of being murdered in real life? Let’s hear both sides of the story.
@Hello_Tailor 5:12 AM – 15 Oct 2014

And yes of course that tweet is sarcastic, bitterly so. But at that point things had literally advanced to a state where at least some people were confused enough and read and reacted to it literally.

Which raises the question: if #GamerGate isn’t over, might never be over, or at least won’t be for a very long time because it isn’t about “issues” but about invisible systemic privilege, what should we be doing next?

Well—I think we should keep our defenses up, collectively protect vulnerable colleagues and friends, and strike back swiftly and decisively if need be, but we should not let this toxic masculinity-fueled GamerGate nonsense eat up our time and energy any longer. Instead, let’s put our time and energy into more valuable endeavors that might, in the long run, make a difference.

For us, actually, now is a better time than ever for developing great games that can make a difference.

The game “Actually, It’s About Ethics in Journalism!” pitches the player against hordes of badly coded Turing bots set up to propagate a fictitious media conspiracy.

The challenge is how long the player can either argue against, or ignore, an unrelenting onslaught of non-sequiturs and escalating threats and invective before her brain melts or she is driven from home.

This game has been released on Twitter, and you can play it for free!

It’s still in beta so here’s your invite: sign up with the key phrase #GamerGate and you’re good to go. Please note: especially if you are a woman, you might not be able to sign out again. Ever.

Enjoy!

After attending the European Conference on Game-Based Learning in Berlin last week, I was looking forward to writing about exciting papers and newly-won friends (and a few scientific lemons, to be sure). But with what’s still going on, unabated, under the false flag of the #GamerGate hashtag, business as usual isn’t an option. Chattering away unperturbed about how games make you smarter, drive innovation, are great educational tools, have a bright economic future, and whatnot, while ignoring the disgusting reality and real-life consequences of a spectacularly vicious misogynist attack on our co-gamers makes you nothing less than an accomplice—just ask your history teacher, or possibly your (grand-)parents, how these mechanisms work. And I’m especially looking at you, Intel. [Annotation: Intel made good for it big time.]

And lo and behold, it isn’t just the “gaming community” where this kind of hate cancer has erupted in our midst lately, so I can take two paragraphs from PZ’s “Sunday Sacrilege” post and apply it here by changing four words, marked in italics:

There’s also a really low bar set here. Valuing diversity—the idea that the gaming community should be equally welcoming to all races and sexes—and valuing equality—that everyone in that community should have the same status—are such basic ideas that it’s shocking that anyone could regard their promotion as a sign of a corrupting conspiracy by Social Justice Warriors. Who the fuck would argue with those ideas? Virtually no one. Definitely no one that we would want to accommodate in the gaming community.

Demanding that part of the responsibility of being a gamer should also mean being a decent human being who wants to build functional, useful communities doesn’t sound like a particularly onerous expectation to me. Of course, what that also means is that the games industry needs to broaden its goals to serve a larger proportion of the population.

So that’s what we have to demand and defend now? In the one-and-twenty? This is just incredible.

I expect everybody from the scientific community to take a stand against #GamerGate, to not look away. I expect important gaming sites and gaming news sites to resist getting bullied into silence, and I most certainly expect the big players in the video game industry to set course toward diversity and equality, both for their companies and for their products. Because, as I already quoted in a previous post, if you’re a big player in the games industry you are very probably, and that applies to #GamerGate as well, part of the problem: “When your leadership isn’t gender-balanced, it’s tough to have a balanced customer base.”

* I like to thank Elizabeth Simins for providing this article’s headline for free.

In most video games most of the time, non-player characters are the meat in the player character’s power fantasy sandwich. It might taste great and satisfyingly fire up the player’s neural tastebuds, but there’s something fundamentally wrong with it: what should be virtual human beings are pure objects instead, designed for a comprehensive toolbox for emotional and cognitive manipulation. “Good” NPCs suffer horrible fates to provide the player character anger and motivation, “bad” NPCs suffer horrible fates to provide the player character entertainment and moral exemption.

Of course, this is not at all native to video games. It’s rampant in every other media, including literature—from lowly entertainment thrillers the like of Peter Benchley’s Jaws, skillfully dissected by Wayne C. Booth in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, to the lofty heights of highbrow prose.

To quote myself:

When Sindbad tells the tale of his next-to-last voyage to his guests in Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, the narrator paraphrases Sindbad’s exposition in a rather revealing way: “He makes it to shore, as always, this time with a handful of others, whose next job in his story is to die and leave him the sole survivor. (11)” A treatment which confirms the old adage that it is always a good thing to be the protagonist in one’s story—a motif Barth also plays on in the embedded “Story of Jaydā the Jewel of Cairo” or in his second novel The End of the Road. Barth, all things considered, does not seem particularly perturbed by casting aside his supporting cast in general and his cast­aways in particular, an assumption supported by his opinions on the sub­ject articulated in his essay “A Body of Words” from Further Fridays[.]

Killing off or otherwise utilizing purely fictional characters for the sake of the story or the sake of one’s argument might, after all, not be a completely innocent endeavor.

How we handle NPCs in games is at the core of Austin Walker’s terrific post “Real Human Beings: Shadow of Mordor, Watch Dogs and the New NPC” at Paste magazine. But it’s much deeper than that. Walker’s post touches on how a “new generation” of NPCs as a promising possible remedy exacerbates the problem instead through mainstream story patterns; on the seemingly ineradicable use of binary oppositions which still tailor stories to be experienced from the “natural” default perspective of the White Western Male; and on the absurd, disheartening lopsidedness of the player character’s agency arsenal:

I can’t touch anyone.

This has been bugging me since I started playing Watch Dogs. When I see the man playing trumpet at the park, I can’t tip him. When I hear that someone’s father has cancer, I can’t transfer money into their account—though I can drain their already meager savings further.

And now, these crying people, I can’t hug them. Not that I should—not that Aiden Pearce should be in this space at all. But I am, and I want to hug them. I want that so much more than the ability to do harm, but it’s all I can do.

But what about educational games? Surely, these must be different! After all, NPCs in educational games are rarely designed to be killed but to be talked to, to be helped out, to be cooperated with. Yet, I would argue that most educational games suffer from the exact same problem—when virtual people are means to an end, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an admirable end or a reprehensible end. As long as these virtual people’s only function is to provide students with a learning environment and behavioral incentives, educational games are only superficially different from Shadow of Mordor or Watch Dogs.

Surely, though, the “cultural” perspective is vastly improved in educational games? Well, we’ve come a long way, but—no, not necessarily. Case in point: The Radix Endeavor, a STEM MMO in development from MIT’s Education Arcade and Filament Games, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The players enter the land, or island, of “Ysola” and become part of an underground movement to secretly conduct scientific research, which is forbidden, to free Ysola from the tyranny of the “evil Obfuscati.”

Predictably, this premise is labeled strong storytelling:

The key to making a game engaging to students is a strong narrative. “What’s important is to take that engaging narrative and that incentive system and put some stakes into the world to keep it feeling like an engaging environment and a place that students really want to be,” said Susannah Gordon-Messer, education content manager for MIT’s Education Arcade. In Radix, the player’s task is to help citizens of a fictional earth-like world gain knowledge about math and science, a privilege denied by the land’s rulers.

You can certainly see where this is going.

And indeed, while the player characters might or might not be native inhabitants of Ysola (the descriptions aren’t too clear on this point), it’s easy to figure out from above’s marketing shtick and—unmistakably, no prior deconstruction experience required—from the Radix Trailer voice-over descriptions such as “interact with Ysola natives and see how you can help them on their quest to knowledge” (00:28), “make use of every resource to help the natives better understand their world” (01:04), or “You are not alone on this endeavor! Join with many other players to help Ysola natives!” (01:40) that the game stumbles flailingly into the familiar trap of a cultural perspective where nobody understands and solves the problems of an exotic people better than the Western visitors.

To wind it up, a tentative forecast from Austin Walker’s post—you should go and read it now in full—of how NPCs could be designed instead:

In a recent episode of the podcast Three Moves Ahead, guest Chris Remo opines about how Jordan Mechner’s The Last Express communicated the lives of its NPCs, who went about their own schedules, had their own conversations, and paid little attention to the player’s motivations. He says that the game gave “glimpses of other people’s interior lives without regard for how they may relate to the player’s.”

This is a beautiful thing that we often forget that games can do.

This week, I’m off to the ECGBL 2014 in Berlin, including the SGDA 2014 satellite conference.

Not sure if I will have time for blogging but if not, bear with me—there’ll be no shortage of posts about conference papers soon.

If anyone reading this blog also happens to attend this year’s ECGBL and wants to connect, check betweendrafts.com/hello-world for every possible channel to get in touch.

The negative motivational potential of programming textbooks and tutorials is second only to the motivational potential of how we teach math. And while visual “learning by doing” systems like Khan Academy’s Computer Programming online course seem like progress, they’re sugarcoating the problem instead of providing a solution.

Bret Victor, two years ago, in his eye-opening essay “Learnable Programming”:

We often think of a programming environment or language in terms of its features—this one “has code folding”, that one “has type inference”. This is like thinking about a book in terms of its words—this book has a “fortuitous”, that one has a “munificent”. What matters is not individual words, but how the words together convey a message.

Everything else—a must-read—follows from there toward building a mental model. The concept of building a mental model is based on an interesting premise: “A programming system has two parts. The programming ‘environment’ is the part that’s installed on the computer. The programming “language” is the part that’s installed in the programmer’s head.” The inspiration to build on this premise, as Victor remarks, came from Will Wright’s thoughts on interactive design in “Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God and Go: A Conversation with Will Wright” by Celia Pearce:

So what we’re trying to as designers is build up these mental models in the player. The computer is just an incremental step, an intermediate model to the model in the player’s head. The player has to be able to bootstrap themselves into understanding that model. You’ve got this elaborate system with thousands of variables, and you can’t just dump it on the user or else they’re totally lost. So we usually try to think in terms of, what’s a simpler metaphor that somebody can approach this with? What’s the simplest mental model that you can walk up to one of these games and start playing it, and at least understand the basics? Now it might be the wrong model, but it still has to bootstrap into your learning process. So for most of our games, there’s some overt metaphor that allows you approach the simulation. (Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research Vol.2 Issue 1, July 2002)

That, of course, holds important implications for game-based learning design—not just for teaching programming, but that’s a particularly obvious example. In game-based learning design, bootstrapping must take place both at the system level and the content level: the GBL model must be designed in such a way that you “can walk up to it and start playing,” and the same thing applies to how the learning content is designed so that the player ”can walk up to it and start learning.” (A fine example of Hayden White’s The Content of the Form principle at work, incidentally.)

As of now, there is no shortage of games that try to teach programming to kids, but just browsing the blurbs opens jar after jar crawling with inadequacies, to put it mildly. Games aimed at teens tend to float belly up the next time you check (yes I’m looking at you, CodeHero), or remain perpetually promising but unfinished like Dre’s Detox. And you won’t find anything remotely suitable for adults or seniors.

Obviously, if we managed to create games that teach how to code along the lines imagined by Bret Victor, we’d create new generations of coders who could put to good use not only the principles they’ve learned, but the principles with which they’ve learned what they’ve learned, to create great game-based learning designs and experiences for the future.

Whenever you watch the rare event of big chunks of money flying in the direction of serious GBL development like wild geese in winter, you can bet your tenure on it that it’ll be all about STEM. But education isn’t just Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math—it’s about a zillion other things too! And that includes Social Sciences and the Humanities.

The humanities, despite being ridiculously underfunded, are doing fine in principle. And if we care at all about what kind of society, political system, historical self-image, or perspective on justice should be shaping our future, or what public and individual capacities of critical and self-critical thinking, introspection, and levels of general knowledge to make informed decisions about anything and everything we want future generations to have at their disposal, then we should be as deeply interested in bringing the humanities and social sciences into game-based learning than we are already with respect to STEM.

Because if you aren’t interested in such things or can’t motivate yourself to take them seriously, then you’d better prepare for a near-future society best represented right now by FOX News and talk radio programs, comment sections of online newspapers, and tech dudebro social media wankfests.

That said, there are at least two fatal mistakes the humanities must avoid at all costs: neither should they put themselves on the defensive about their own self-worth, nor should they position themselves conveniently in the “training” camp.

Jeffrey T. Nealon in Post-Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012):

The other obvious way to articulate the humanities’ future value is to play up the commitment to communication skills that one sees throughout the humanities. For example, Cathy Davidson writes in the Associated Departments of English Bulletin (2000), “If we spend too much of our energy lamenting the decline in the number of positions for our doctoral students, … we are giving up the single most compelling argument we have for our existence”: the fact that we “teach sophisticated techniques for reading, writing, and sorting information into a coherent argument.” “Reading, writing, evaluating and organizing information have probably never been more central to everyday life,” Davidson points out, so—by analogy—the humanities have never been so central to the curriculum and the society at large. This seems a compelling enough line of reasoning—and donors, politicians, students, and administrators love anything that smacks of a training program.

But, precisely because of that fact, I think there’s reason to be suspicious of teaching critical-thinking skills as the humanities’ primary reason for being. The last thing you want to be in the new economy is an anachronism, but the second-to-last thing you want to be is the “training” wing of an organization. And not because training is unnecessary or old line, far from it; rather, you want to avoid becoming a training facility because training is as outsourceable as the day is long: English department “writing” courses, along with many other introductory skills courses throughout the humanities, are already taught on a mass scale through distance education, bypassing the bricks-and-mortar university’s (not-for-profit) futures altogether, and becoming a funding stream for distance ed’s (for-profit) virtual futures. Tying our future exclusively to skills training is tantamount to admitting that the humanities are a series of service departments—confirming our future status as corporate trainers. And, given the fact that student writing and communication skills are second only to the weather as a perennial source of complaint among those who employ our graduates, I don’t think we want to wager our futures solely on that. (187–88)

Everybody who’s involved in a rare GBL game pitch for the humanities or social sciences that travels down this road should turn the wheel hard and fast in a different direction—or get out and run.

According to a 2011 metastudy by Traci Sitzmann in Personnel Psychology, declarative and procedural knowledge and retention were observed to be higher in groups taught with computer-based simulation games than in groups taught without, and even self-efficacy was observed to be substantially higher—surprisingly high, I might say. But that isn’t the whole story.

Common knowledge, and often among the main rationales for developing computer-based simulation games, is that wrapping entertainment around course materials will boost motivation. Motivation, hopefully, for learning new skills and not merely for playing the simulation game.

But do we know for sure that this works?

Two key simulation game theories propose that the primary benefit of using simulation games in training is their motivational potential. Thus, it is ironic that a dearth of research has compared posttraining motivation for trainees taught with simulation games to a comparison group. A number of studies have compared changes in motivation and other affective outcomes from pre- to posttraining for trainees taught with simulation games, but this research design suffers from numerous internal validity threats, including history, selection, and maturation. Also, the use of pre-to-post comparisons may result in an upward bias in effect sizes, leading researchers to overestimate the effect of simulation games on motivational processes.

Sounds bad enough. But there’s more! In a corporate environment, motivation is intimately linked to work-motivation—think of it as a special case of transfer of learning—but which, it turns out, hasn’t so far been tested in any meaningful manner at all:

However, the instructional benefits of simulation games would be maximized if trainees were also motivated to utilize the knowledge and skills taught in simulation games on the job. Confirming that simulation games enhance work-related motivation is a critical area for future research.

Also, there’s something else. How well declarative and procedural knowledge, retention, and self-efficacy are raised depends, according to this meta analysis, on several factors. The best results were observed for games where work-related competencies were actively rather than passively learned during game play; when the game could be played as often as desired; and when the simulation game was embedded in an instructional program rather than a stand-alone device.

Lots of implications there. And ample opportunity to turn your corporate simulation game into a veritable shit sandwich: when the game is merely the digital version of your textbooks, training handbooks, or field guides; when the replay value is low; and when you think you can cut down on your programs, trainers, and field exercises.

In other words: a good simulation game will cost you, and you can’t recover these costs by cutting down on your training environment. Instead, a simulation game is a substantial investment in your internal market, and you better make sure to get the right team on board so that motivation will translate into training success and training success into work-motivation.

Paper cited: Sitzmann, Tracy. “A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Instruction Effectiveness of Computer-Based Simulation Games.” Personnel Psychology. Vol.64, Issue 2 (Summer 2011). 489–528.

How serious games are developed has changed quite a bit since Gunter et al.’s paper “A Case for a Formal Design Paradigm for Serious Games” (link to PDF) from 2006, but that doesn’t invalidate its point of departure in principle:

We are witnessing a mad rush to pour educational content into games or to use games in the classroom in an inappropriate manner and in an ad hoc manner in hopes that players are motivated to learn simply because the content is housed inside a game.

While this paper is neither a rigorously written research study nor exactly informed by deep knowledge about the psychology of learning (all three authors have their backgrounds in the technology of learning), and the concluding “method for creating designed choices” falls flat on its nose as this paper regrettably fails to define “choice” in this context, we can still extract its basic idea, strip off its naïve linearity, and expand on it.

In brief:

The basic design process for educational games should occur within a three-dimensional space whose three conceptual axes are: Game Mechanics, Dramatic Structure, and the Psychology of Learning. To simply try and “map” these parameters onto each other in a largely linear approach that, among other things, is destined to lose sight of participatory elements and agenticity rather quickly will run into problems and lead to bad games. And the best approach to build such a matrix for a given objective is to create a collaborative team with top-notch professionals from all three areas, i. e., game design, narrative design, and the psychology of learning and motivation.

Paper cited: Gunter, Glenda A., Robert F. Kenny, & Erik Henry Vick. “A Case for a Formal Design Paradigm for Serious Games.” The Journal of the International Digital Media and Arts Association. Vol.3 No.1 (2006). 1-19.

From a 2013 Research Roundup on Game-Based Learning:

While serious games have been embraced by educators in and out of the classroom, many questions remain. What are the possible effects of digital gaming, connectivity and multitasking for younger learners, whose bodies and brains are still maturing?

Let me rephrase this just a bit:

While 20th century-style classroom learning has been embraced by educators all over the world, many questions remain. What are the possible effects of one-size-fits-all educational methodology with predetermined curricula and standardized testing, conditioned learning of siloed educational subjects detached from personal experience, and large class sizes solely determined by year of birth, for younger learners whose bodies and brains are still maturing?

What this comes down to is this. With their defensive positions reflected by arguments as well as study designs, game-based learning proponents often paint themselves into a corner. You just can’t conclusively identify (let alone “prove”) the effects and effect sizes of a particular teaching method for all times, ages, and contexts. Moreover, it’s proponents of that archaic industrial processing of learning and learners that we, somewhat misleadingly, call our “modern educational system” who should scramble to legitimite their adherence to outdated structures and methods, not the other way round.

Another thing that’s screwed, of course, is that from twenty studies on game based-learning listed by this particular research roundup mentioned above, only three are freely available — “Video Game–Based Learning: An Emerging Paradigm for Instruction” (Link); “Gamification in a Social Learning Environment” (Link to PDF); “A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Instructional Effectiveness of Computer-Based Simulation Games” (Link). And from the other seventeen arcticles’ overall ten sources even the excellently-equipped university and state library I’m privileged to enjoy research access to does subscribe, again, to three.

A circulating story about a grey parrot performing unexpectedly well in a setup of the classic 1972 Stanford Marshmallow Experiment reminded me of a related study from 2012, “Rational Snacking: Young Children’s Decision-Making on the Marshmallow Task Is Moderated by Beliefs About Environmental Reliability” (paywall). Takeaways from the latter were: the original test’s setup didn’t control for trust (and probably other factors as well), and the dependent variable of self-control is at least “moderated” by the perceived reliability of the environment—trust—in personal delay-of-gratification success or failure. (About the parrot, alas, I have nothing useful to say.)

One can be reasonably sure that both factors, i.e., trust and self-control, are indeed highly correlated in real-world settings. From there we can assume another confounding factor pertaining to both the original and the follow-up study that hasn’t been controlled for, namely, social background. Reliability isn’t just a matter of character, but also a matter of circumstances: people can be unreliable und untrustworthy not because they are unreliable and untrustworthy, but also because their personal environment and circumstances force them to be. For a taste of how this works, play the terrific Papers, Please!.

In fact, your unreliability and untrustworthiness in real-world settings can be a function of naked necessity, and the more precarious your personal circumstances are, the less you can afford being reliable and trustworthy. It can start with the promise of a birthday present you couldn’t keep because you needed to have the refrigerator repaired that just broke down, or for a visit to the zoo or your daughter’s all-important afternoon baseball game because you finally didn’t dare leave early from work even though you had asked for permission.

Now think again about the results of the original Marshmallow Experiment’s follow-up studies:

In follow-up studies, Mischel found unexpected correlations between the results of the marshmallow test and the success of the children many years later. The first follow-up study, in 1988, showed that “preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm, were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent.”

What needs to be done, actually, is factoring in the participants real-life environment reliability which, stunningly, hasn’t been controlled for throughout these studies.

Now, learning to trust or not to trust is a bit more complicated than “learning whom to trust or not” as an educational objective. “Trust” has a context, often a dynamic one. If children don’t understand this, they will have no clue what to do or what’s happening, e. g., when it comes to intermittent trustworthiness because circumstances compel a basically trustworthy person to be trustworthy most of the time, but not all of the time. And we know from Behaviorism that intermittent rewards (i.e, reinforcements) trigger certain classes of hormones that are not only highly addictive, but change behavior in unexpected and overwhelmingly socially negative ways.

When “Trust” as an educational objective has to take dynamically changing contexts into account, many of the game mechanics used in educational games are not even close to being useful, and that applies to corporate trainings as well. But how can we create dynamic contexts?

Well, Storification! A dramatic structure, turning points, ever higher stakes, unforeseen predicaments, and a “story world” where every action has its consequences, though not necessarily the expected ones. Obviously, in an interactive, participative game where the player can expect to have agency it’s neither possible nor desirable to “script” all these elements beforehand. As of now, the single best way to experience such situations, and experience them in perfect safety!, are still old-fashioned pen-and-paper roleplaying games—true, authentic “co-op” games through-and-through.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to have to create in the field of game-based learning: a plot-driven, context-rich co-op game that dynamically evolves through interactions between players who enjoy true agency. Which would be almost too easy with Strong AI as a “game master,” but as long as we can’t have that, we must work with what we have. Which, actually, is quite a lot—with MMORPG mechanics and mixed AI/Tutor systems leading the way.

just drafts is one part news ticker with commentary and one part real-time research about game-based learning and game-based education, game design, and game-related media ethics. Other game-related topics (storytelling, branding & marketing, copyleft wars, gadgetry, and so on) you’ll find at my flagship blog between drafts in various categories.

News ticker posts will feature a quote like this one from an external source, only longer.

To that I will add a commentary, preferrably not much longer than the quote. The post’s headline will link not to the post itself as expected, but—indicated by an arrow at the end of the post title—directly to the source of the quote (a principle I picked up from John Gruber’s site and fell in love with over the years along with #4a525a). A permalink for the post itself will be provided at the end of the post; see below, in blue. Research posts titles, in contrast, will have no arrow and behave like good, old-fashioned blogposts.

Yee-haw! See y’all soon.