The Art of Contested Spaces

In the Contested Spaces article from Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire, games are viewed as a spacial art in contrast to seeing them through the lens of narrative art or interactive cinema.

Looking at games such as Deux Ex and Grim Fandago, the space inside games is explored, then a series of parallels are drawn between art and game design:

Romanticism – Example:Sacrifice

Many game designers are recruited from art schools and many
continue to paint and to scan through art books searching for
inspiration. As a consequence, a close consideration of game space
reveals a broad range of aesthetic influences, including
expressionism (which maps emotions onto physical space) and
romanticism (which endows landscapes with moral qualities). As
game designers dig deeper into these artistic traditions, they may
develop more emotionally evocative and meaningful spaces.

Surrealism – Example:American McGee’s Alice

Surrealism is another modern art movement that has influenced
game design. The surrealists created dream-like images which
nevertheless followed many conventions of representational art, often
deploying familiar stories (such as those in the Bible) as a basis for
psychologically complex, symbolically-laden environments. Game
designers, similarly, exploit the graphic possibilities of 3d modeling to
create immersive environments that are vivid and tangible and yet
totally imaginary.

Atmospheric Design – Examples:Shenmue, Myst

Game designers increasingly focus on the overall “mood” or
emotional color of their projects. Hoping to produce games which can
provide a broader range of emotional experiences, they are drawing
inspiration from classic melodrama, where elements of mise-en-
scene become emotional correlatives for their protagonist’s woes.

Social Spaces – Example: Star Wars Galaxies

Multiplayer games, such as
Asheron’sCall, are borrowing lessons from urban planners to create
opportunities for sociability, becoming the center of vast “virtual
communities” and other news games, such as the Sims, are
encouraging players to actively create content and share it amongst
the fan community, designing clothes, objects, and buildings that
constitute these virtual worlds.

In each of these styles of art, it seems that this new high fidelity media allows us to push the limits of the previous authors and discover what happens when interaction is given to these fundamental aesthetics.

Media, Schema, and learning though emotional manipulation?

Richard Clark and Robert Kozma have had a long standing debate over the whether different forms of media have effect on pedagogical outcomes. In brief, Clark has published a series of articles such as Clark – Media will never influence learning that state that the teaching method is always the reason for learning to take place, distinct from the media used to employ those methods. Kozma, on the other hand, replies with articles such as Kozma – Will media influence learning which state that different medias have affordances that other do not. While Clark states that the role of the instructional designer is to use the most economic method of teaching methodology, Kozma defends that paticular medias are unique in their abilities.

That said, the question of the definition of learning needs to be addressed. This is where most of the research on the Clark/Kozma debate becomes too challenging to execute. To “know” a paticular fact or piece of content might be different than to “know how” to apply that content to a paticular context. One thing that many people agree on however, is that “knowing” has something to do with the formation of Widmayer – Schema Theory in our brains. Cognitive learning theory would then say that one role of instruction is to create the connection of new material into the existing schema. I am curious about other documented methods for the formation of new schema.

Today I found an interesting article, Cognitive neuroscience of emotional memory, that studies why emotional events often “attain a privileged status in memory.” From a behaviorist standpoint, instruction can solicit positive or negative feedback in order to cement requested behavior into memory. My question continues here because I believe that well designed game experiences have a paticular ability to create an emotional response and therefore create a teachable moment.

Is there any evidence for this theory? I am not sure and I have been unable to find any research that would begin to ask the right questions. However, I have seen a number of references [1][2] [3] that study the emotional responses during play to various types of games. Most of these studies were done from the perspective of self-assessment, though some did various neuroimagining tests to monitor brain activity. Here are some of the interesting summary points:

Games are able to solicit motional responses

Different games invoked different emotions (James Bond 007 invokes fear and anger, Monkey ball invoked “fun”)

Games with Narrative seemed to invoke the most memorable experience

That said, the next thing to look at is what kinds of emotions may benefit learning and how effictive are games at packaging a learning event with an emotional one.

PS3 Home

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Move over Second Life. It looks like the PS3 is going to be rolling out a new interface to a virtual world.

Web 3.0

For the last few months, I have been part of a grant program with the University of Wisconsin to explore the uses and application of video games and simulations to learning. In addition, I am also studying with Kurt Squire, a participant in the discussion as well as one of the organizers for the GLS (Games Learning Society).

During this time exploring educational environments, a great interest has been formed around the Second Life environment. To explain it simply, Second Life looks like a 3-d video game, except everyone is a real person, also connected to Second Life. Unlike a game, there is not a narrative or a reason for participating. Instead, the purpose of spending time in second life is based more around the community. Communication takes place by walking up to another person in Second Life and typing. This creates a text based chat session with anyone within a close distance. Objects in the world can be edited collaboratively as well, so a number of people could work on a document or a building. Video and Audio streaming is also possible which has led to the popularity of live music events inside of Second life where you watch a virtual character or band on the screen while hearing the live audio from their performance somewhere completely different.

There was something about seeing a hundred people gathered around the stage, moving around and talking to one another that made the show seem more “real” and personal than a simple web-cast.

Now what makes second life different that some of the online multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft is that the players also are the creators of the world. Other than a few specific places, everywhere you go has been created by another user. This leads to a virtual economy.

Since users can build and own things such as buildings, environments, vehicles, dance move programs, clothing, etc, clever ideas create a demand and therefore a price. Virtual goods in Second Life can be bought and sold for Linden Dollars (L$) with an exchange rate to US$ at about 270 L$ to 1 US $. The market is large. Millions of real dollars change hands each year in a currency that is virtual but can be exchanged for real money.

Instead of concentrating on the economy however, many of us are interested in the way a 3-d social space like Second Life may influence the field of Education. I thought these two videos would explain what some people are working on:

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This video is from Ohio Universtiy

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The New Media Center Campus

The University of Wisconsin is interested in creating a Second Life island, which will be a private space where researchers and teachers can build their own educational environments and a number of professors are already building spaces on their own.

Personally, I think Second Life is interesting because it is a shadow of a world to come. It is the Virtual Reality that we read about in the 80’s starting to take on a real life. SL as it is right now is an infant, but the same way Web 2.0 brought a voice to the people to birth to things like wikipedia and flickr, The 3-d web will allow people to communicate and create even more amazing things.