S.O.S.! Este juego intenta educarme!

Los videojuegos nos obligan a prestarles una gran dosis de atención (haciendo uso de varios sentidos a la vez) desde que presionamos START, lo que no es poco teniendo en cuenta que día a día aumenta el bombardeo de estímulos de distintas fuentes que recibimos. Es por esta capacidad que constituyen una poderosa herramienta para la educación.

Entendiendo lo anterior propongo hacer del uso del alcance de los videojuegos una responsabilidad a la hora de desarrollar nuestros productos. Sin perder el foco en el entretenimiento que deben proveer, porque cuando lo pierdan también lo hará el poder que poseen.

A lo largo de los años 80´s y 90´s cientos de juegos pasaron por nuestras manos, capturaron nuestra atención por horas o días y de una fracción de ellos aprendimos algo sin quererlo. Desde la necesidad de reconocer solo en el afán de jugar nuevas aventuras gráficas que aún no habían sido traducidas al castellano, otros ganaron conciencia de la importancia de la materia prima, lo imprescindible de generar el máximo valor agregado de ellas y el buen manejo de recursos para hacer crecer una organización, cientos de títulos despertaron en millones de jóvenes la curiosidad por la literatura y el arte de la narración, conocimos en detalle los mecanismos que mantienen en vuelo a máquinas de decenas de toneladas, trabajo en equipo y cooperación, etc.

Los que en décadas pasadas aprendimos sin darnos cuenta hoy tenemos la posibilidad de conocer mas a fondo los mecanismos que ayudan al aprendizaje, así como las herramientas para producir juegos que hagan uso de ese poder. Muchos de los títulos que publicamos día a día se olvidan del alcance que tienen, mucho mas allá del entretenimiento.

En el pasado las novelas fueron estigmatizadas como pasatiempos de señoras, una coincidencia con los casual games actuales. Hoy nadie se atrevería a decir que las novelas son entretenimiento para señoras (al menos no todas), quien sabe en que pueden devenir los Casual Games una vez que se eche por tierra la pacatería que los envuelve hoy? Estamos siendo parte activa de un momento clave en la evolución del medio de los videojuegos.

Mi propuesta es que diseñadores, programadores, artistas, músicos, etc, tomemos como una responsabilidad el incluir algún elemento en nuestros productos que provea al jugador, que está otorgándole toda su atención a la acción que se desarrolla en la pantalla, la posibilidad de descubrir algo que vaya mas allá de una sesión de juego entretenida.

Key elements for educative games

Before reading every bullet please insert (in your mind) this:
“In my opinion…”

1.FUN
A game can be a powerful tool for education as long as it remains fun and compelling.

1.EDUCATION NOT INFORMATION
A game for education must be a door to new knowledge, not a pile of information.

1.HUMAN GUIDANCE
No software can replace the human role in education. A teacher must transmit knowledge along with social and human values.

Quote from Chris Crawford

“Ask a child to point toward himself, and he will respond by pointing toward his approximate center of mass – chis chest. Ask an adult the same question and you´ll see a finger pointing at a face – the face we present to the world.”

Chris Crawford on Game Design

“Braaaain wants, learn”

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale.

It´s amazing how the brain craves learning. Game devs have  an open door to people attention every time each one plays a game, a door to the need for learning of humans.

Serious games still need to be fun

Reading about Serious Games i´ve come across with the idea that Sim games are categorized as Educative games, which is not quite accurate. A 3d Dentist Simulator about removing caries from a thooth is not a game, it´s a 3d Simulator. A game has many elements in it´s core: challenges, learning through gameplay, win lose conditions, and fun.

It´s fun and it matters

Did you ever text a sms while driving? Do you know the dangers of distracting driving? Maybeou do, maybe you don´t, maybe you think you do. Well, luckly we have games today. Not to play on the cell while driving, but to teach us things.
The New York Times created a game to test multitasking skills. It´s very interesting to try out and see what happens. You are driving a car and need to change lanes in order to cross open gates in the road while texting on your cellphone.

A good example of games that are fun and important to play at the same time. Here´s the link to Gauging Your Distraction.

Seen in vgresearcher.

Documentary Games

I´m working on a proposal for developing the educative game KOKORI (a very interesting project being made by the university of Santo Tomás in Chile). As I got more and more into educative games I started playing with the idea of documentary games. It seems reasonable to have documentaries in games as in every other form of media (tv, paper, film).
Researching about it was how I got to Shinyspinning.com. Cindy Poremba is a documentary videogame maker and she is doing an extensive research on the subject. Chek it out.

Mind Games

As I said in recent posts I´m becoming more and more interested in education and games, and their connections. I´ve been doing some research and I´ve found out that fun in games resides, more deeply than I thought, in the process of learning. We´ve been using games for education and therapy for decades now, but still I need to make my own experiment about how it works, and if I can succeed at my attempt to make a game that teaches logic better than a paragraph of text.

I was thinking about making an experiment where I present a subject with two tests. The only difference in each one is on the first step. In the first one I explain in theory a logic system, in the second one I try to make the subject learn this system without speaking about it.

FIRST TEST:

1- A brief explanation about a logic system. IE: “(Picture of a chess board with numbers for rows and letters for columns) Object A can go from B1 to B8 in one motion, but it can´t do it if another object is on the way.”
2- A conceptualization of the system. IE: “In chess the Tower can go from A1 to A8 in one move, but if a pawn is on any tile from A2 to A7, the Tower it can´t pass it”
3- Three questions about the conceptualization. IE “If a Tower is at C1. Can I move it to C6 if I have a pawn on C3?”, “If a Tower in at D8. Can I move it to D1 if I have a pawn on C3?”, “If a Tower is at G2. Can I move it to A2 if I have a pawn on G5?”

SECOND TEST:

1- A small game where a car can move in straight lines over a grid. The further you take it in one move, more points you earn. If an obstacle is on the way, the car will stop.
2- idem FIRST TEST
3- idem FIRST TEST

After a few hundred people takes the test I will know:

1- Games teaches better than text.
2- Text teaches better than games.
3- Games teaches better than text, but the one I made was poorly designed.
4- Text teaches better than games, but the one I wrote in the test was confusing.
5- I need to make at leas 100 of this tests to find out something valuable.
6- It´s all pointless, “Yes, games are better, but we can´t make children play with cars to learn everything”.
7- It´s all pointless, “Yes, games are better, but we woun´t make children play with cars to learn everything”.
8- It´s all pointless.
9- This actually may be interesting.
10- I´ve made the experiment and in the process learned many things. Luckily I did it without paying attention to the endless reasons why it was pointless.

Mind the game

I´ve been thinking for a while about the correlations between how we play our games and how we live our lives. I´ve known lazy people who would spend 8 hours trying to find a serial or crack for a game, or somebody with the shortest span of attention imaginable that can play a shooter for 20 straight hours without loosing a point of concentration.
I have rather basic theories about it, but I would like to go on and try to make a game that helps me find the answer to it.
Maybe collecting data about how the players interacts with the game for a few minutes, I´m still thinking about this whole thing.