Part 2 of my review of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival. Part 1 here.
Overview of the morning from the last day of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, where I attended two talks in the main panel on MMOs and caught the end of the Gaming in Education session. Rambling starts below…
I was torn in the morning between the game based learning session and the virtual worlds talks from the main program. Virtual worlds won…
First up was Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson of CCP – the company behind Eve Online – the intergalactic game of space trading, combat and strategic alliances and backstabbing. His job title is ‘Lead Economist’. Note, the use of the word ‘Lead’ there – he has another economist working with him! It was an excellent presentation on how CCP tries not to manage the complexity that has emerged in Eve Online, but to understand it and to simply try to ensure that players have the best possible experience. As he mentioned later, the game is far too complex for anyone in the company to have a complete view of the game. He also indicated that CCP view themselves more as janitors of their virtual universe, doing their best to keep it running – rather than gods dictating how it should run.
One of his many examples related to the first Titan ship to be built by a player corporation – 1,700 man months of effort (or was it years?) – 3 months in game before it was destroyed! He also showed some (player created) graphics which visually demonstrated how different alliances have grown, shrunk, broken, disappeared, reappeared, grown again, and so on. If you are interested in a game of diplomacy, strategy and deception, then EVE may be the one for you!
The following talk was titled “3 MMOs – From Content to Communities”. The name implied that the session might present three takes on how the work of an MMO developer ranges from creating a world to supporting the communities that visit it, a natural successor to Eyjólfur’s talk. What we had instead was a little more like three sales pitches – one selling a virtual world, two selling the ability to create MMO virtual worlds for clients. One speaker was making a big deal of his company’s software development method which allowed them to add content while the world was running – talking in grand terms about how they turned to nature for inspiration. The gist what he was describing did not sound too dissimilar to some of the work of Alan Kay and Xerox PARC with Smalltalk that now lives on in a whole range of different development environments and approaches… and reminded me of how easy it was to add content to the text-based LPMUD (at run-time) back when I was young. Given that that run-time editing was originally to be a feature of the very first MUD (one that was cut) and that downstairs people were happily editing levels in Little Big Planet on the PS3 while playing the game, I definitely felt the speaker was inflating their own degree of innovation.
Most agreeable of the three presenters was Kerry Fraser-Robinson, who talked a little about the development of Roma-Victor. RV is a small scale MMO (a few thousand players) set in Imperial Rome, and has been designed to be as authentic and detailed as possible. It also appears to have attracted a lot of players who are deeply interested in an accurate role-play in just such a setting. I’m sure that there is some potential for using Roma in a school. For comparison, there are a number of communities in Second Life (such as Renaissence Island) who go to some effort to create environments relating to a particular period in time, and who are interested in the educational potential of these.
How the game elements would complement or interfere with such classes, and how schools would budget for this are open questions, however. Playing Roma-Victor is free, but the in game currency needs bought with real-life money. Chatting with Kerry he seemed open to discussing arrangements for academic use, but I’d recommend downloading the client and playing the game for a while to get a taste of it first – so you have a good idea of what you want or need in terms of support.
After coffee I skipped back down to the Gaming in Education session, and caught most of Susan Yeoman’s presentation on Game Based Learning in Action. At Woodhill Primary School, teachers (led by Susan) have been using a spectacular range of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games and specially developed educational games across the curriculum and throughout the school. And with fantastic results. The first story that stuck with me the most was with the success in using Guitar Hero to help improve the behaviour of a particularly troublesome group of boys. As well as a class project based on the game (creating imaginary bands, t-shirts for the bands and a range of activities), the game was available at an after-school club. But to play the game, the children needed tokens. The guitar-shaped tokens were given out as rewards in class – for performance and good behaviour. Immediate rewards with a physical presence. Within a short period of time, formerly troublemaking boys were competing to be the best behaved. Also mentioned was the use of Myst, blogs, video-blogs, Nintendogs, Beijing Olympics game, EasiLearn: The Island, Eye-Toy, …. phew. Dizzying.
The other story that I recall was about children setting up a Wii arcade at the school fund raising Christmas and summer fairs – charging a pound a play on Guitar Hero and Mario Kart. Mario Kart was chosen as up to four can play at once, and so more money could be raised faster! While a fund-raiser for the school, the children ran their arcade as a business enterprise – a cross-curricular activity much in favour.
This was followed with a presentation on Inanimate Alice and iStories. The former is a beautifully rendered interactive story delivered online with flash – which also has accompanying materials for use in classroom. iStories is a story creation tool, allowing pictures, text and sounds to be easily put together by children to tell their own stories.
Finally, a panel discussion featured all the presenters of the day plus Judy Robertson, Matt Seeney, Eaun MacKenzie and Alan Mills. The panel rivalled the audience in size! Can’t remember a thing that was asked or said. I have a cryptic note about semiotic domains, but suspect that was from a different train of thought, rather than anything said at that point.
This ended the EIF programme, and we had a break for a drink and chat before DIS:E – the Digital Interactive Symposium: Edinburgh. More on that next.
Quick name check of some people I know (at least vaguely) but met for the first time at EIF but generally did not have nearly enough time to chat to: Ren Reynolds, Graham Brown-Martin of HandheldLearning, Ewan McIntosh (sadly no more than time for an introduction) and slightly more time to chat with Austin Tate (Second Life’s Ai Austin).
