Fix 14

 Fix 14 in Jane McGonigal's book (2011) Reality is Broken: Why games make us better and and how they can change the world has a series of fixes that apply to both games and real life.  I have been discussing this for the past few weeks now and fix 1-13 is discussed in previous posts.  This week, I am at the point in McGonical's book (2011) where she is discussing fix 14.

Fix 14: "Massively multiplayer foresight: Reality is stuck in the present.  Games help us imagine and invent the future together" (McGonigal, 2011 p. 302).  Games - the term has an understood theme: fun.  That is why we say fun and games, isn't it?  Games can be a lot more than just entertainment.  They are also educational and have the potential to motivate us to think about real life, and very serious, situations.  One such game is World Without Oil.  McGonical (2011) discusses World Without Oil stating that it is a "life-changing six-week experiment" that shows through simulation "what would happen if the demand for oil did eventually outstrip our supply, and what we could collectively do about it" (p. 303).  This game simulated how the people and the economy would be impacted if this happened.  How would we solve this issue?  A lot of issues get put off until there is a crisis.  Simulating a crisis now can help us plan for what we will do when it happens.  It also may expose a reality so grim that we see how pressing the need is for change. 

This is something that is applicable in our lives and our jobs.  Think about your daily job.  Say you work in a university, like I do.  Well there are a whole series of things that must go well for the university to stay in operation.  We need federal money.  What if that money dries up?  What if there is a recession and there is no more funding?  What if students cannot afford to come?  How do we fund our research?  How do we educate people?  What if we can't educate students?  How do we pay for overhead, such as labs, the lights, heat?  There are so many questions that need to be answered if a crisis like that were to happen.  Simulations can help us determine some of the answers so that if the situation ever happens, we have a plan in place. 

Say your job is in a different field.  You are the manager of a factory.  What if there is a natural disaster?  Can people get to work?  Can the trucks get in?  This doesn't even have to be something that is a worst case scenario.  We use this daily.  We play the game of what if? in most of our major decisions.  What if I have the shipping trucks leave at 5:00 AM instead of 7 AM?  What will the results be?  We use a series of math and simulations to see what the difference might be.  Would that be better?  Worse?  I have a small restaurant.  How many employees do I need?  A simulation of real time events might be the best tool to help you establish all of the what ifs?  Simulations help you look ahead to problems and try to find solutions.  Because of this, simulations are a valuable tool to introduce into the classroom to get students used to thinking about all of the what ifs.  

Now imagine that those what ifs are part of the fight for your life.  Imagine you have cancer.  The diagnosis can leave many feeling that they lack control.  Other than trusting your doctors and trying to do some research, there is little to be done.  A game called Remission 2 is designed to allow individuals to literally fight against cancer.  Remission 2 has a variety of partners, largely children's hospitals.  Playing the game can help to empower them by "provid[ing] cancer support by giving players a sense of power and control and encouraging treatment adherence" (About Remission 2).  Treatment adherence and empowerment can actually help improve the odds of survival and recovery. 

While some children and adolescents are fighting for their lives, others are fighting to learn the importance of geography and history.  Global Conflicts is a game that is designed to help students see their world and work to solve global problems.  You might not be able to physically take your students around the world to help them understand global issues, but games like Global Conflicts are the next best thing. 

I have been playing, over the past semester, The Settler's Online.  My town advancement has continued, although my level advancement has slowed a bit.  I have reached a level plateau that I have been stuck at for a bit now.  Most of the current quests require things I rarely have in plenty, such as defeating a bandit camp with X amount of horsemen or something similar.  That is part of games, just like it is part of life.  Sometimes we stall out a little and need to find a new way to get everything going again.

The Settler's Online is a God game.  A God game basically means that I, as the player, exist outside of the game time and am controlling and shaping the reality of the game world.  In the Settler's Online, I decide how many people live here, where buildings go, send men to their deaths, and shape the future of the world.  Other similar games are the Sims. 

A view of a town in the Sims

A family tree in the sims

The town in the Sims starts empty.  The player creates the world by building town buildings, such as work places or shopping.  The homes are created by players, often very elaborate homes with custom items created outside of the game and brought in, and the people are created.  Above is a sample town and a sample family tree.  The player creates the people, finds them a mate, decides if they are going to have children, and repeats to create elaborate towns filled with their creations.  It is actually really really really addictive, for me at least.  I have lost 10s of thousands of hours to this game.  I used to come home from school and play most of the evening.  My friends played and we would compare towns, share items, and even have Sim sleepovers where we played together, sometimes on the same machine or each on our own laptops.

McGonical (2011) discusses a the three skills that are needed in this kind of game (p. 297-298).   The first concept is "taking a long view" (McGonigal, 2011 p. 297).  This means that small actions have long term impacts.  In the settlers, some stuff might not matter, like one well, but then again it might.  Is the placement wrong?  Is there enough?  Too many?  Each action has a reaction, but it might not be immediate.  Taking a long view means considering the long term impact of my actions, not just the immediate or an impact that would happen soon. 

"Ecosystem thinking" is the second skill (McGonigal, 2011 p. 297).  That means seeing how everything inter connects.  When I place a mine, I am not just placing a mine.  I am funneling resources to dozens of different parts of my city.  That mine is crucial, not just to having that resource, but to the success of dozens of areas of the city.  For some, the entirety of the city may rely on that one mine. 

The third skill that McGonigal (2011) describes is to take a "pilot experimentation" (p. 298).  This is scenarios within scenarios.  If I do this, what happens?  You do it at a small scale first, to see the larger impact.  I recently did this by seeing if a good way to get coins was funneling production into something that I knew I could do well - water and fishing.  I started price watching water and fish and found that I could sell these effectively to get a fairly substantial amount of coins - better than with gold mines.  I started small to ensure that I was not paying more in the long run, through the chain.  To fish, you need a fisherman.  That is a one time cost.  Then you need the water - which is preexisting.  The fish are not limitless.  Resources must be spent to stock the ponds.  The total cost was far below the actual coin cost.  So I poured resources into that.  I repeated the process for wells and water, now flour and bread.  I am making more than enough to fund my city, to get the resources I might be lacking, and I am generally leaving each day with a profit, even after funding expenses. 

All of these skills are important to learn.  The long view and the ecosystem thinking helps to show that actions have consequences and that everything is interrelated, even something simple like a new job.  Do I take the job?  What are the impacts today, tomorrow, in a month, in a year, in 5 years, in 15 years, in 50 years?  What is the impact for my future children?  Their children?  My actions now impact them too.  How does taking the job impact my family, my current workplace and coworkers, my neighborhood, and everything else?  I am a piece of each of them, leaving that might upset some part of the structure - for some things it might not.  Can I sample it first through pilot experimentation?  Can I try independent contracting on the side to make sure that I like it before I commit? 

As far as our students, these skills are important now in their education, but also in their future lives.  Someday they will be the ones deciding about the job.  Then their job might have them shaping a workplace, city, or something even larger.  Skills such as collaboration, working on something on an epic scale, or doing their work with wholehearted participation can be taught through games.  All of these are concepts discussed in McGonigal's book (2011) and over the last several weeks of this blog. 

McGonigal's book (2011) was interesting to read.  Overall, the concepts that I found most interesting were that games are so vital to how we learn, that anything can be a game to help keep you motivated, and that on top of motivation - games can make work fun.  I've always loved games, but part of me felt like maybe at some point I should eventually grow up and put the game aside.  I've been resisting that because there is still something really awesome about entering a world so different from my daily own.  Turns out, according to McGonigal, that is part of what makes games so effective for learning.  We are in a world that is not our own, willing to take risks, to learn, and that we are learning important skills like collaboration while doing it.  Games can be playful or serious, but no matter what, they are offering us skills ranging from hand eye coordination to getting out housework done to pondering the solutions to very real and very serious world issues.  Playing games like the Settler's Online helps to show that every part of the city is important and each small part plays a huge role in the larger success.  Pairing that with McGonigal's book helps illustrate the parallels between that and the real world.  Just like that one water well is vital to the success of the civilization, we all have our roles and are vital to the success of our own worlds.  Our daily interactions and lessons learned have a far greater reach than any of us realize.  We could all benefit by taking a moment to reflect on what our part is and how we are impacting the people and world around us for many years to come.  It is out mission to share that with our students as we engage and inspire them to learn and to change the world around them.

Interested in learning about more ways to teach through games?  Remember, your decision to integrate that game could be the spark that inspires someone to choose a career, which leads to an advance in knowledge or new product, which influences someone who finds solution to the oil crisis.  Terry Heick offers some advice on ways to get games into the classroom.

I want my students to feel this excited when learning because the lesson I provided is engaging. 

Fix 13

Over the past few weeks, I have been wrapping up the book by Jane McGonigal (2011) Reality is Broken: why games make us better and how they can change the world.  The book describes a variety of games and behaviors or actions learned in games that can be applied to real life.

Fix 13 (see previous posts for 1-12) is "Ten thousand hours collaborating: compared with games, reality is disorganized and divided.  Games help us make a more concerted effort - and over time, they give us collaboration superpowers" (McGonigal, 2011 p. 277). 

Other games are largely played alone, however some collaboration is required for success.  Spore, a game created by Will Wright, who created the SIMS.  I was terribly excited for this game when it first came out.  I spent more hours than I can count playing the SIMS growing up.  I LOVED the SIMS.  I had all of the expansion packs for all of the SIMS.  I had elaborate cities with large family trees.  So when I heard that game genius Will Wright had a new game, I was thrilled.  I pre-ordered the special collector edition.  I got it, and kind of hated it.  Maybe hated isn't quite right - but it was no SIMS. The who game is creating and evolving little creatures and creating a shared universe.  The image below shows one of the evolution options, where the player can choose how this creature evolves.  How this creature evolves impacts other creatures.  The concept and idea of the game was better than what it ended up being, for me at least.  Many other players continue to enjoy this game.

Coop is one of the best ways to play games.  For the last week or two, my husband and I have been playing Rayman Origins on Wii U.  We are mostly done with the game, and so far it has been one of the best games in a while.  Games rarely have same machine coop.  Same machine coop just means that you are both playing on the same TV and with the same gaming console.  The vast majority of games that allow coop are different machine coop.  There is a validity to both, because the screen size is diminished in split screen or you are both restricted to the same space. 

Here is one of the levels that we beat last night.  It is at the end of the game.  The style changes throughout and the music/theme of these levels are 8-bit. 

 

 Rayman Livid Dead 8-bit Grannies

To play this game in coop, both players run side by side in the same window.  Another game that is like that is Fable, which is a sandbox game, not a platformer like Rayman.  Other games, such as Halo.  The video below shows split-screen same machine gameplay.  One player is the top, one is the bottom.  The two players work together, collaborating.  (Note: there is a little bit of explicit language in the video.  Many, although not all gamers talk like this while playing.)

Halo split screen.  Two players on the same

machine playing online with others online.

If you listen to the video, the players are collaborating.  Although their conversation is casual and they are having fun, they are cooperating and coordinating their attacks.  You have to collaborate to survive.  They often don't survive long.  This is a death match, with two teams pitted against each other in a large arena.  Most kills wins.  You fight, you die, you respawn, you repeat.  These two are playing in the same room, however this conversation could just as easily be happening over chatspeak.  Both players wear headphones, such as these:

Game headphones

The players would collaborate just the same and the conversation would likely not be changed by the distance.  The players came together to complete a task.  They must work together of fail.  They might know each other in real life, they might not.  I've played with people across the world.  Sometimes we are communicating in broken sentences with what little we know of each others languages.  I know enough German and Japanese to poorly communicate our plans.  Others speak to me in broken (although sometimes exceptional) English.  We manage and get by.  The main problem is everyone things I am a little boy, instead of a girl.  Once we get past that, we manage to work together to succeed. 

As gamers, we work together a lot better than most of the collaborations in work or class.  We each have a role.  If the other fails in their role, we both die.  The stakes might not sound that high, but when you are both fighting to get through after the 5th hour, losing and starting over is kind of huge.  The Rayman game that my husband and I are playing is kind of like that.  Although most of the levels are not very difficult, some are tougher.  There was quite a bit of screaming in my house last night when we died and them quite a bit of dancing when we finally finished the level that we were struggling to beat. 

Taking those lessons and applying them to the classroom are beneficial.  We each have our role and we depend on each other to succeed.  Gamers just have a lot more practice collaborating. 

Ten Thousand Hours Collaborating - How this applies to the Settler's Online

I have also been continuing with the game The Settler's Online.  Collaboration in the Settler's Online largely takes place through resource trading.  We are sharing our goods.  I need iron ore and this guy needs water.  We swap.  I need something that my clan mates have a ton of, they might give it to me for one fish (you have to trade something).  McGonigal (2011) discusses Ping Quotient (PQ) which is reaching out to others (p. 277).  By reaching out, we are establishing a line of communication and collaboration.  This can be done in the global chat, clan chat, or private messages (PM). 

Regardless of what game your are playing, most are getting more social.  In the past, playing a game socially meant handing the remote to your friend in the room for their turn.  Now, sometimes people play with people around the world collaborating.  Of course, where are always those playing different machine coop like this:  matching his and hers gaming stations.

Fix 11-12

In the previous weeks, I have been reading the book by Jane McGonigal (2011) Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World and I have been applying it to the game that I have played now for the past few months, the Settlers Online.  In her book, McGonigal discusses the various "fixes" that are in both games and life, how games influence life, and how we use what we have learned in life in the games and what we have learned in games in life.

Fix 11: "A sustainable engagement economy: compared with games, reality is unsustainable.  The gratifications we get from playing games are an infinitely renewable resource" (McGonical, 2011 p. 244).  This means that as a player, you are getting something out of the game that real life doesn't often give you - rewards and a purpose.  Today I cleaned my house.  There was purpose in the fact that my house is less gross now and I didn't want bugs moving in because I keep putting off cleaning.  Later on, my "reward" for cleaning is that I can play a game.  I'm playing The Elder Scrolls Online, which is having another beta weekend to stress test the serves to get ready for the official launch.  In the game, I will do all sorts of little odd tasks with a character that I am invested in.  My husband also plays, and I have the same investment in his character.  I will go out of of my way or do specific tasks to get his character something that he needs.  McGonical (2011) writes that players become invested in the game world and the character, have long-term goals, and are rewarded (p. 245).  I am getting all of those things from the game. 

Fishing in The Elder Scrolls Online

My husband and I in The Elder Scrolls Online

 In the Settlers Online, fix 11 works to keep me as a player invested and involved in the game.  The game world offers continual tasks and maintenance that requires the player to keep coming back and investing time and energy into the world.  This is an attempt to keep players engaged and progessing forward.  Other things that the settlers does to create a good game world is to inspire a player to explore through treasure hunts and missions, to expand their world, and to collaborate with clans or other players to keep their world succeeding.  To create good game mechanics, the Settlers Online are given clear results.  As soon as a quest finishes, the player is rewarded with a series or XP, goods, or in-game currency.  The Settlers Online creates a good game community by providing a variety of chat boxes, including global, help, and clan, email options, and PMs to let players communicate for both fun and collaboration. 

Fix 12: "More epic wins: compared with games, reality is unambitious.  Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together" (McGonigal, 2011 p. 252).  Social participation of the masses is where social powers are harnessed instead of just intellect or human labor, such as adding closed-captioning or digitizing print media (McGonigal, 2011).  In the Settlers Online, my clan has a method that is a small scale of what McGonigal (2011) discusses on pages 253-254 where individuals send positive messages to children who need support as they take important exams worldwide.  My clan has a mentorship program where newbs are mentored by those who are further along in the game and have mastered it.  It is a much smaller scale, but something that provides social interaction and feeback that is personalized to help a player succeed. 

There are other gaming methods to help improve peoples lives on a large scale.  One site compiles them together, as well as like-minded individuals.  The site actually has my favorite PSA currently trending in the main window of what people are playing, "Dumb ways to die" which was intended to keep people acting smart and safe around trains.  It's actually really fun, goofy, and the music video is fantastic. 

Crowdsourcing
Never heard of it?  Not to worry.  Many people are unfamiliar with the concept of crowd-sourcing, or at least the term.  Basically, you are getting a crowd of people together to help you with a project or goal.  So, how does one go about crowd-sourcing?  You go to the place where there are billions of people connected, millions of whom have similar interests, passions, and ideals - the internet.

Crowdsourcing is kind of like a MMORPG, such as World of Warcraft (WOW) or the Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) according to McGonigal (2011 p. 229).  Crowdsourcing can provide a "good game world", "good game mechanics", and a "good game community" (McGonical, 2011 p. 229-230).  She goes on to use Wikipedia as an example of crowdsourcing, where the site effectively does all three things.

If you are unfamiliar with Wikipedia (hated by most educators, beloved by most students) it is an encyclopedia that allows individuals to create, edit, and contribute to pages.  I've even made a few pages of my own, such as this one about the Tom S. Cooperrider Kent Bog State Nature Preserve in Kent, Ohio.  I wrote the text, those are my pictures from a walk a few years ago now, and I am the primary contributor of that page.  There are in-pages on here, often authored by experts in the field or topic, and it is an amazing and invaluable resource that is accessible to anyone with internet access.  It is the kind of thing that I dreamed about as a kid reading through the encyclopedias that my mom and dad purchased one at a time from the grocery store.  The criticisms of Wikipedia and other similar sites is part of what makes it both feasible and amazing - the fact that anyone can contribute information.  Some pages are falsely edited, often religious or political figures are targeted.  Others are pranked with jokes.

Aside from information, crowdsourcing can have some very real, serious, and important applications.  These can range from the progression of science to search and rescue.  The government has realized the potential that people have to contribute when all working together, technology in hand.  The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has created a website and an app that allow individuals to report in information to help compile a database that helps disaster victims and rescuers/responders.  This is something that is applicable to both health and geography, the disciplines that my background is in.  Often, in times of serious disaster, such as hurricane Sandy or Katrina, universities are called upon to help manage GIS information or to create maps for rescuers/responders.  What roads are closed off?  What routes can the crews take?  What hazards are there for the people in the area and for rescuers/responders?  How was infrastructure systems impacted?  One previous problem was that there was no streaming data for this.  Satellite images only come in so often.  Although you can do a lot with that, some of what is happening on the surface might not be caught.  Crowdsourcing, where the individuals on the ground both disaster victims and rescue/responders can contribute.  A quick picture or a few lines of text can make a large difference in saving lives.

Hurricane Sandy was crowdsourced in New York through water samples and measurements collected by volunteers.  People can together who had an interest in the storm, the area, safety, or for a variety of other reasons.  They worked together to help create a picture of what was happening in that area.  Weather crowdsourcing is not uncommon.  I participate in a crowdsourcing group that contributes accurate measurements, photographs, and information to the local meteorologists at a Toledo news station.  The information shared by myself and other weather nerds can help during times of severe weather.  I'm a trained spotter, as are many other members of the group.  In addition to contributing information to the local station, we report to the National Weather Service who can issue watches or warnings based on what is seen at a specific location by a trained spotter.