Details for Games and Learning at UF Libraries
Games & Learning Day
August 14, 9-11am and 2-4pm
Library West, Room 211
What is Games and Learning Day? These sessions will begin with a quick overview of games: what they do well and how they work and why they are so popular. Included will be a discussion of where games are going; terminology, genres and titles. The remainder of the session will be spent playing games with a view towards understanding the connections to existing work and existing needs.
Objective: This introductory session on games will help establish a critical literacy for games and gaming to show how games connect to existing knowledge.
Games to Open:
- Overview and current news
- ILOVEBEES
- Lonelygirl15
- Don't Click the Red Dot!
- Machinima
- Virtual-U
- Bacteria Salad
- Airport Insecurity
- Serious games in general
- Educational games
- shockwave.com
- popcapgames.com
General Overview
Introduction
News stories about games often hyperbolically claim that games will bring the next revolution in the way we think about ideas and technology. This is true in the sense that games offer more limited and defined worlds, so games can make certain connections clearer, and easier. However, games are still based on systems already in use in all aspects of everyday life. The difference is that games offer easier ways to see, test, and use the same variables. This ease of use makes games great for training, simulation, and hands-on learning. Games' fun factor helps entice people to play, learning while doing so.
What games do well/how games work:
Core Functions
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Methods:
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Modular, Defined, Contextual, Explicit Connections, Build from Existing Knowledge
- Games operate on confined systems with defined variables. The goal is clearly defined (often acquistion, land, money, information) and game play rules are clearly defined.
- This leads to the popularity of simple puzzle games (Tetris, Bejeweled) and mystery games or games where player is a detective of some sort.
- Mystery games are like procedural TV shows (Law and Order, CSI, House). Games often follow the same closed narrative and physical space, limited characters, and strong driving force of the mystery so that characters become clues and all components fit together (as with Last Express - player is on a train and can't be caught with using a false identity and must solve the mystery of his friend's murder; Law and Order games; like board games, Clue, Mystery of the Abbey).
- Most games have puzzle solving and detective elements (aquistion again, acquiring information), but they are found most heavily in the Adventure game genre. Adventuregamers.com is an excellent source of information for these. Adventure games are often the most book-like (sometimes divided into chapters, strong literary allusions, often based on books).
- Difficulty begins low and builds, while also teaching players new skills. This is called "leveling up" as characters gain new levels, like gaining new skills in the work place. Players can also set difficulty levels, so skilled players can still enjoy a challenge.
- Allowing players/users to set difficulty level, skipping areas "too easy" or unskilled players having more tutorial time means that players are less likely to be bored or to be overwhelmed and to give up, thus allowing players to achieve an optimum stress/interest level for learning.
- User training often builds this way as well, as with library training for students.
- Simple searches: Google, then teaching boolean which applies to Google and to Library, then teaching advanced searching in Google and Library Catalog - all small steps that build on each other; then journal databases, like Google and MSN searches, different, yet some commonalities. Students know Google well enough, just as players understand basics of a game genre, like a fighter or an MMO, and these form a core knowledge and expectation set. These can't be violated without showing the user the expected system first, and then showing why/how to change it.
Allow Safe Space for Experimentation/Testing with Explicit Results
Allows players to learn by doing, and teaches them along the way. Minor penalties (relatively speaking) for failure. Results are clear in failure: players know they failed and why they failed. Imagine typing a letter and Word encounters and unexpected problem and loses your work. What if it told you why it died and you could then avoid it later on. Clarity with more complex systems is more difficult, but it's extremely rewarding for users.
Simulated World Allows for Full Testing of World
Normally systems of any sort don't explain why they function that way. Games allow players to test all boundaries to see both how and why the system functions as it does, allowing players to better use the system by having user and designer style information.
Why does the library catalog function the way it does? I've learned a lot more in the past few months working with the catalog's components (and only minimally) than I ever understood before.
Capitalize on Oddities (Show Personality)
Augmented/alternative Reality Games (ARGs), in some ways, can capitalize on being weird. ARGs and other game-related forms like machinima can be especially useful for teaching and training.
- ARGs
- Ungame Games
- Mobile games
- Geocaching and others will soon boom, technology in US just needs to get there and then stabilize enough
- Map library and mapping concepts will become very, very important.
Use oddities to teach:
- Baldwin Library books with only 20,000 of the 80,000 books fully cataloged - put in Gator Times and start with "The Card Catalog, Hiding Many Secrets" and explain how the full information is in the card catalog. Use to stimulate interest in paper resources.
- Digital Library Resources - take photos of all equipment and explain the process in Gator Times to show how long it may take to get everything digitized. Use to stimulate interest and curiosity about online and paper resources.
Popular Game Genres
- Action-adventure and platformer: often lumped together, but think Mario, Alice.
- Fighting, Racing: opponents are weighted and there are secret areas (normally), winning is based on choosing/designing avatar and then the space.
- MMO, cooperative games: very complicated, cooperative and competitive, wide spaces, many tasks. See WoW, Everquest.
- Adventure: often very connected to literary tradition, see Jules Verne games
- Strategy: Age of Empires, Civilization, Board games like Chess and Go. Almost all games have strategy elements, the degree of strategy places it within the strategy genre. A great deal of overlap with simulations. For higher ed, see Virtual-U.
- Simulation: See the Sims, SimCity.
- Casual: Downloadable or online play, often simple and fun. Used to pass the time, but can still teach many concepts.
- Serious: New initiatives in gaming to make games explicitly for purposes of education, health care, politics, and so forth. Games often embed this information, so making it explicit takes advantage of the gaming's best components. Learn about more.
Educational games; Social/Political games like Bacteria Salad and Airport Insecurity - Oddities: ARGs, Books-as-games. See Book of Lulu and ILOVEBEES.
- Mobile games: not really a genre, but a technical designation. Can still be related to particular genres (often cell phone games are casual games because they are meant to be played quickly and stopped easily; games tied to physical locations are often based on mobile platforms because the form follows the function).
How Games can Help the Library
We're already doing these, but we would benefit from being more explicit in these connections.
- Make our operations more transparent (How does our catalog work exactly? What's the difference between MARC and the library catalog? What journal databases do most people use, why? What books are most popular overall? For my major?)
- Make the system grow with the users, which it does, but it's a hard learning curve if a student doesn't get a library orientation.
Perhaps a "Start Here" from Library home page and then questions to lead students to best help documentation, orientation materials or databases or whatever. - Simulations: students can already "test" the systems without coming in, and that's helpful. Maybe add a real/fake blog (or video blog) on "Ask a Librarian" questions that are helpful or funny so students can see how others are using the systems. This could also be used for promotion of the library (fake questions on books and resources we think are neat).
- Make the fun of the library more explicit and show more "libraries are cool" personality.
- Think about needs as simulations: how will the users use what we supply, what do they want? What should be presented textually, visually, spatially? When will simulations help us? The Rome project build a 3D version of Rome and, in doing so, required some scholars to think of building interiors and exteriors together in ways they hadn't before. When can simulations help test ideas and thought.
Games
- Alice
- Last Express
- Titanic
- Book of Lulu
- Sims
- Neverwinter Nights
- Grim Fandango
- Serious games in general
- Educational games
- Bacteria Salad
- Airport Insecurity
- Casual games: shockwave.com and popcapgames.com
- Board games, card games
- Mobile games: Nintendo DS, Gameboy Advance, PSP, Cell phone games
- Wii games
- Xbox 360