Player Centered Design for Instructional Games

This session was hard to decide where to go. I picked the speaker over the papers, as I can read the papers at a later time. (tonight while I'm watching TV?)

The paper presentations are:

Games to Change Brains

• The Challenge of Challenge: Avoiding and Embracing Difficulty in a Memory Game
  By: Carrie Heeter, Brian Winn, Jillian Winn and Andrea Bozoki
• Video Games Change Your Brain
  By: Jing Feng and Ian Spence
• A Hard Day's Night: The Recovery Potential of Video and Computer Games
  By: Leonard Reinecki

Alternative platforms for learning games

• Diminutive Subjects, Design Strategy, and Driving Sales: Preschoolers and the Nintendo DS
  By: J. Alison Bryant, Anna Akerman and Jordana Drell
• Learning via Gaming: An Immersive Environment for Teaching Kids Handwriting
  By: Bruce Maxim and Nicholas Martineau
• $12 TV-Computers as an Ultra-Affordable Platform for Computer-Aided Education
  By: James Lomas

So, now, on to the speaker:

Player Centered Design for Instructional Games

Presented by:
Robert Appelman, Indiana University
Sonny Kirkley, Information in Place, Inc.

Paths to Player-Centered Design
There are two tracks:

• ISD Path (Instructional Systems Design)
• the Game Design Path.

Considerations for the ISD Path

• The world starts with the content, then leads to the objectives for that content, and finally the delivery of that content.
• Drivers: Entry level of player, and the changes of the player witin and after game play (cognition (learning) & Affective (Attitude toward the Content[Engagement]))

Cosiderations for the Game Design Path

• The world starts with the story or context of the game, develops through the environment of the game play, and the functionality within the game.
• Drivers: Efficiency of development, experience of the player (Affective (Attitude toward the Game[Fun])) (Was it enough to drive me back and by the new release?)

How do you bring these two cultures together?

Process Mangment is the key.

• Scope (Conent Density, Objectives & Didelity/?functionality)
• communication/Collaboration (Mutual respect building among multiple disciplines)
• Stakeholders (Participants in the collaboration - the "need definers")

Traditional Methods do not work: Single track mentality for each, but we need a broader collaborative design approach.

Games that involve learning require a much broader approach than ever before - both in integraiton of mulitle craetie ideas & coupling these ideas to impact on learning. In the buisiness world, we must associate and bring in multiple players & corporations that have never worked together.

Cases:

• Virtual Astronaut Learning Platform (STEM; health)
• Virtual Congress/Oceana (civics)
• Hazmat Games (safety)
• Others not addressed
• --unmanned vehicles (Army)
• --Kauffmann Prototypes (STEM)
• --Casual games
• --Realms of Logos-Khyalia (Foreign language MMO)
• --and other more simulation-like environments

During development of Virtual Astronaut Learning Platform, they asked kids if they should take out the educational components. The kids actually said no, because that was the challenging part and is what made the game fun.

Tieing back to school: reading graphs, velocity, among other things.

Project is a National Science Foundation project, and used Unreal 2.5 and Adobe Flash.

Results:

• Learning gains in limited testing
• Student compare to Halo, Oblivion and other games

Much of the lessons discussed focused more on production aspects and pulling together of stakeholders to complete project, and affect on project.

Lessons learned from Oceana

• listen to your audience
• Listen to your game designers, differentiate roles and value those perpsective
• Avoid design by Committee, manage stakeholders
  
• Don't be afraid to scratch and go back to the beginning if need be.

Hazman games: Lesson Learned:

• non-game audiences are hard to gage in terms of interface complexity
• "level" player with different games (simple to complex)
• Design job is much easier with focused content (instructional designers...)

General Lessons

• Need well defined game world, mechanics, narrative to drive later decisions (consistent & shared vision)
• Issues with students own perceptions of what a game is (THIS is what's fun)
• Letting stakeholders drive the design may be problem (take the fun out?)
• Some content may been to be separated from core game play (areas in game, separate games, Web 2.0)
• Don't make the learning hard to get to or you may take away from instruction.
• Need to define learning objectives early and align with game play (iterative)
• In principle, there need not be conflict between learning (what?) and game play (why?)
• Your learning "theory" and "game design" theory always drives your decisions so make it explicit
• Funding, especially iterative funding, can force problematic processes
  
• good dsigns availabe eith any budget
• map game design to audience expecations and needs (available time (classrooms?)

Lessons learned on Process:

• Defined process and roles is critical (everyone undersatnd thir roles, tasks, and outcomes of work of all team members)
• Seat of the pants work intitially ok, but have to become disciiplined as project matures
• End users mast be part of review process throughout

Collaborative Design

• A way of Thinking
• A context based strategy (taht supports the content)
• A decisions-based strategy (focuses on Player decisions)
• Tools for facilitating decisions that inform more thn just those making or using that tool
• Impact of one decision affects the linkages within others using other tools--SYNERGY.

Adopt a Design focus

• Design of Conent & Objectives
• Design of Player's Path through Content
• Design of Problem Scope and Sequence
• Design of Pipeline flow
• Design of Collaborative Interactions
• How does the Academy promote Collaborative Design?

The speakers then entered into a discussion of similarities and differences between film school, game studies, and design school approaches to learning and development and how they apply to game design and production.

Mapping ID Processes to Game Desing

Need defined processes to map good instruction to good game design
Debastes on what ID processes map to game design (Its generally more like software project than a PPT)

Example: cognitive Task analysis. This is the kind of problems an expert deals with, here is the process he/she uses to deal with the process, and map that back to the game. It's a lot of work, and very iterative.

Not pushing for sale, but they started working on a Pipeline Life cycle Managment tool. Wisdom tools Interactive Learning Community & marketplace. I looked up "WisdomTools" as listed in the presentation, but can't tell if the tool is the same as they were saying. NOTE: I checked with the speakers, "WisdomTools" is the same company as Information in Place...sort of. Information in Place is in the process of acquiring WisdomTools. Both got their starts as outgrowth from Indiana University projects.

Player centered design

• Focus on learniner in context of being a gamer
• Engagement, menaing and fun
• Align processes to ocus on the player (learner)
• Help stakeholders maintain focus on the playr
• Requires colaboration and multiple perspectives.

Consistent throughout the presentation was the emphasis on stake holders (designers, SME's, producers, managers, coders, EVERYONE) is in the same place. All the perspectives are needed, and connection/collaboration between all these stakeholders is paramount.