The potential of games and simulations as training tools for leaders has proven increasingly promising in recent years, but what are the actual leadership skills that these tools will prove most effective at teaching? Furthermore, how can games serve to train educational leaders in specific for both the generic tasks of leading an organization, and the specific requirements needed for effective instructional leadership and school improvement? Finally, what are the designed features of virtual environments that can most effectively facilitate learning leadership skills? These are the types of questions we will be addressing in this session. This panel brings together educational and videogames researchers, and simulation and game designers from both the education field and the videogames industry to address these issues, and begin defining an agenda for future design and research in the field of games and leadership.

While research on many aspects of games and learning continues to progress rapidly, there are so many vital questions that remain unanswered. At the same time, few models exist for the successful collaboration of academics, designers, educators, and others. This is one of a two-part session that addresses these questions through a playful and somewhat improvisational investigation of what it means to do games research.

In the first “Starting” session, attendees will collaboratively design one or more research experiments that will take place at GLS itself. Hosts of the session will introduce the goals of the activity and review the structure, constraints, and resources participants will have at their disposal. Participants will work in small groups to brainstorm speed-research ideas, present those ideas to the group, and then collectively decide which idea(s) to pursue throughout the next 30 hours. The remainder of the starting session will focus on preparing any research materials needed and delegating out the next phase…

… when over the remaining day and a half of the conference, we will work as a crack team of ninjas to both collect and partially analyze data for our study.

In the second and final “Concluding” session, participants will review the collected data and dive into deeper analysis where needed, discussing the merits and drawbacks of the methods used for each. Hosts will then facilitate a wrap-up and debrief of the experience, focusing on lessons learned and war wounds earned.

With only a day and a half to conceive, execute, and analyze an experiment, the expectations of Real-Time Research is not to make groundbreaking scholarly advancements in the field. Instead, the intent of these sessions is to explore the ways that scholars, designers, and educators might collaborate, as we not only discuss but enact new forms of and questions for research. And who knows? We might actually uncover something genuinely new.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has partnered with MIT’s Education Arcade to consolidate and disseminate current research on the use of games for learning. This initiative looks broadly at the field, but with particular attention to promoting open source learning, and games for foreign languages. This panel will discuss the Education Arcade’s findings, as presented in a series of three papers.

The case for authentic learning games. The current discussion of games for learning tends to pit those who believe students can get everything they need from commercial, off-the-shelf games against those who promote “skill-building” games that are little better than automated tests, as if having fun and learning school-relevant content and processes were antithetical. We present examples of games that do meet students academic needs while retaining the playfulness of entertainment products, and we discuss new ways these games can be deployed both in and out of classrooms
A business case for learning games. Any discussion of business models for learning games must take into account the earlier collapse of the market for “edutainment”. We foresee an entirely different landscape that leverages Internet delivery, open source models, the independent game movement, and Web 2.0 activities such as social networking and user generated content.
The future of interactive language learning. Language learning software has tended to emphasize vocabulary building. Not only is this an activity that doesn’t gain much in moving from print to digital media, it is a practice which, in isolation, has dubious value for meaningful language learning. The power of game-based language learning lies in the possibility of enhancing verbal and aural skills, and in opportunity to motivate learners to apply problem-solving skills to the act of language acquisition. Successful language learners use strategies to mediate the process, and games have great potential for helping students learn those strategies.
In this session we will outline some of the issues within each of these strands and spend time discussing the themes that have emerged from looking across these issues, including:

What models can we develop that simultaneously support creative use of games for learning, with sustainable business/development opportunities?
How can open resources and communities grow and sustain the field of learning games?
What unique opportunities do language learning games present that can be studied and disseminated to other content areas?
Can and should “learning games” be compelling enough games that they can be sold for fun and learning?
What distinguishes learning games from serious games, or other emerging fields of games not solely for entertainment, and what does this mean for their use and dissemination?

Pwnage, zerging, phat lewts — gaming has bequeathed upon the new century a rich vocabulary of terms and concepts, but none, perhaps, is so deserving of the century’s attention as the notion of the griefer. For Johan Huizinga, there were just two significant types of pathological player, the cheater and the spoilsport, but the griefer is neither quite one nor the other. Griefers generally enjoy the games they play, but by definition what they enjoy even more is robbing other players of their enjoyment. They are corpse-campers, noob-baiters, virtual rapists, whatever it takes, depending on the nature of the game at hand, to annoy their fellow players the point of logging off in a huff. By definition also, then, griefers are no fun. But that’s not to say they’re not having fun themselves. And what’s interesting about their brand of fun is that it almost inherently depends on locating that elusive edge of gaming where it bleeds over into very real life. From the days of Mr. Bungle in the living room of LambdaMOO to the armies of self-proclaimed Goons at loose in Second Life and EVE Online, the actions of griefers have provoked the rest of us into deeper examinations of the complex alchemy of seriousness and play, of levity and weight, that make online worlds so compelling. And as those worlds begin to interact with real-world economies in more and more significant ways, the role of the griefer in helping us understand them becomes more important than ever.

This work discusses the relationship between computer digital games and the construction of the reasoning and historical knowledge by young people 14–17 years old. Our hypothesis is that individuals who have access to different media create new knowledge relations, new ways of interpreting world, and new forms of learning and reasoning about history.

Corroborating with some authors, we agreed that young people with access to different digital media create new knowledge relations, new ways of interpreting the world and, why not, new forms of learning and reasoning about history. Electronic and digital media present themselves as technological advances able to change our behavior, with a speech that materializes itself in new conditions of possibility, in new spaces, and in new forms that it takes over.

This research touches on four important theoretical areas: the concept of historical empathy, technological and gamer culture, youth culture, and learning. We are assuming that the digital game, independent of being played online or offline, involves cooperation, interpersonal relationships, media knowledge, and knowledge of their rules.

From previous work, there remained to be done an intensive analysis of communication mechanisms in the game of Age of Empires III, both within the game (chat) and external mechanisms used by player groups called clans (forums, in-game communication systems, communities in Orkut, etc.).

We have observed that this game, regardless of being played online (over the Internet) or offline (between subject and machine), involves cooperation, interpersonal relationships, and knowledge of the media and their rules. The action and mediation digitalization promotes a replacement of interactions between individuals, mediated by the physical body, with interactions mediated by intangible “virtual” bodies — we see avatars emerging in this new configuration of learning.

The research is in progress and, currently, we have developed procedures to promote a more elaborate construction of the object of our research.

The Virtual World Exploratorium Project (VWE) is an NSF-funded program designed to use data from MMOs to answer questions of interest to social scientists and humanist scholars. In association with Sony Online Entertainment and its flagship game, EverQuest 2, the VWE project has collected a novel combination of unobtrusive behavioral data from the game world and survey results from that same population. The result is a large (3 terabytes) trove of data that cover both what kinds of people play (demographics, psychology, social networks, etc.) and what they actually do. This allows for a range of basic descriptive analyses plus a series of theoretically driven research results.

The GLS presentation will be the first public sharing of the initial results of the VWE. We will share a brief project history, including the challenges of hosting and operationalizing a data set too large to sit on any desktop computer. Next, we will present the results of four research areas that have received scholarly attention, but have never been able to be addressed with behavioral data:

First, who plays, how much, and why? Building on Nick Yee’s survey work, this lays out the simple demographic patterns, but also explores the motivations of players and how they differ by group. Along the way, it uncovers surprising findings about mental and physical health, playing time, and age groups. Second, do the genders play differently and for different reasons? In short, this set of results shows large gender differences in behaviors and motivations extending from within the game to differences in romantic relationships outside the game. Third, which populations are subject to problematic use patterns, and how do they compare with the general US population? Are MMO players actually the lonely, addicted, compulsive users portrayed in media? We will provide the answers by showing actual behaviors and comparing players with a non-game playing control group with surprising results. Fourth, who role plays, why, and with what outcomes? Drawing on Sherry Turkle’s work on MUDs, we explored the offline differences between those who described themselves as true role players and those who did not. Then, moving past basic description, we employed an ethnographic interview project to talk with these players, investigating whether their role play was destructive escapism, or therapeutic exploration and moratorium.

Lastly, the presentation will outline the next steps for this interdisciplinary research project. As of now, we have identified ten major areas for future exploration, ranging from economics to social network analysis. We look forward to insights and commentary from the GLS community.

Augmented Reality (AR) games equip players with handheld computers capable of sensing their real-world location (e.g., via GPS), providing users with location-specific information (interviews with virtual characters, simulated data, interactions with virtual objects, etc.). As players move around the game’s real-world setting, they are tasked with integrating real, observable information from the physical environment with the virtual overlay of information provided by their handheld device. AR games are frequently designed to be collaborative, role-playing activities designed around the investigation of a particular theme or topic.

Educational researchers have been building a better understanding of the value and limitations of incorporating Augmented Reality games in formal (e.g., school-based) and informal (field trip or after-school, based in a zoo, nature center, etc.) learning settings. When students play AR games, these experiences can be powerful tools to motivate, engage, and help learners investigate and learn collaboratively. Moreover, AR games prompt learners to consider the significance of specific real-world places and their relationship to data, narratives and other information.

A comparatively smaller amount of research has gone into understanding the potential benefits of students designing and authoring their own AR games. For the past several years, MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program has been developing AR authoring toolkits which allow non-programmers to create their own AR games. As part of the NSF-funded LIONS project (Local Investigations of Natural Science), the Missouri Botanical Garden and MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program are collaborating on developing an after-school curriculum in which middle school students not only play, but create their own AR games around local science issues for their peers to play.

Research questions for the LIONS project include: To what degree are middle school students capable of the complex, non-linear thinking necessary to design an AR game? What scaffolds (digital and conceptual) are required to enable middle school students to create their own AR games? How do students manage the challenges of researching and organizing information about local science issues, designing a coherent narrative, and iteratively piloting and revising game designs? Do student enjoy the task of creating an AR game? What can we learn about leveraging “game design” as a tool with which students demonstrate deep understanding of domain-specific content as well as more general “21st century skills”?

This presentation will describe the process by which the LIONS AR curriculum was developed and early outcomes from pilot implementations.

In this presentation, I’ll be presenting a practical model for games and simulations that allows for critical evaluation and separation of interactive media, using two separate metrics of rewards and identity (“Roles and Goals”).

Roles represent the combination of profession and personal identity that a player inhabits in order to play the game. It also represents the constraints that define the player’s capabilities inside the simulation model.

Goals represent the cyclical structures of tasks and rewards that games layer on top of a simulation model to suggest a particular guided progression. These goals and rewards often reveal new layers of complexity in the simulation model, or enhance the players identity, or sometimes simply allow for new goals.

After defining Roles and Goals, I’ll demonstrate outliers along each aspect, which will help define the landscape. After that, I will discuss some other games such as World of Warcraft, Second Life, Team Fortress 2, and Okami.

Finally, I’ll talk about how Filament Games uses this metric when discussing game models, in terms of taking an educational simulation model and making it more gamelike.

Afterwards, I’d like to open up for discussion both for taking educational concepts and adding Roles and Goals metrics and to talk further about other existing games and how they fit into the model.

This workshop introduces participants to Grow-A-Game cards, a creative tool developed by the Values at Play (VAP) project for activist and socially conscious game design. Currently, the Grow-A-Game cards are being used in graduate game design programs (e.g., Georgia Tech; Rochester Institute of Technology; University of California, San Diego; University of Southern California), undergraduate games-focused classes (e.g., Hunter College), by people in commercial game design companies (e.g., Gamelab, NCsoft, area/code), by games studies academics (e.g., New York University), and by interested newcomers to design (e.g., events hosted by VAP). Our experience is that using the cards has been an (extremely) enjoyable and sometimes paradigm-shifting experience for participants.

We will begin by briefly discussing what our team considers to be a vital principle of activist game design, that is, that each design decision can potentially have social, moral, and political implications, and that each design feature can potentially convey social, moral, and political content.

Then we will segue into an exercise using the Grow-a-Game cards, with all audience members participating in small groups. In the exercise, participants will be given an activist game design task in which some goals and constraints are randomly provided by the Grow-A-Game cards. More specifically, each group will draw one card that specifies the “values theme” of the game they will create (e.g., environmentalism), and one card that specifies their game’s primary mechanic (e.g., harassing). In the example given here, the team would be tasked with designing an environmentalism game whose primary mechanic is harassing. In our experience, given these prompts, both designers and non-designers become deeply involved in the design task, meaningfully engaging with the gritty details that make activist design so challenging (and rewarding)!

After the exercise, we will hold a debriefing session, in which participants can share their game ideas, as well as the insights that have emerged our of their experiences. Finally, the members of our team will briefly discuss how they have applied the exercise in various contexts (e.g., undergraduate and graduate education, actual design work), so that members of the audience who wish to use the Grow-A-Game cards may benefit from our experiences. Decks of Grow-A-Game cards will be distributed to all audience members.

Experience our quest for designing simulations and games for higher education. This interactive presentation uses the game structure of a quest to involve the audience in our journey. Join us for The Call to Adventure, The Road of Trials, and A Return to the Ordinary World. Participants will learn how to simultaneously make instructional, game, and software design decisions through the interactive presentation of our lessons learned.

Computer games and simulations have the potential to broadly transform teaching and learning. As learners can interact with simulations in a scaffolded, game-based manner, real-world application and teacher-student exchanges can be enhanced. Existing research on these technologies has been driven by military and K–12 educational needs; now research is also emerging on the use of games and simulations within higher education. Within this context our university-based program (Engage, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison) is currently creating thirteen computer games and simulations for course topics ranging from cryogenics to music theory.

This interactive workshop uses a quest-based role-playing game (GameQuest) based on Engage’s experience with designing games and simulations for higher education. In this session, participants will attempt to grow a concept into a product by negotiating the co-existence of software design, instructional design, and game design. In the game, participants will create educational games in a grassroots manner with collaborative teams including faculty, instructional designers, programmers, and evaluators. The game will move participants through the design phases of addressing a curriculum, creating a simulation, and choosing game elements — all within budget and deadline constraints. Following gameplay, the GameQuest experience and design processes will be discussed.