My son had a very quick and successful surgey this morning. He was very brave for a 3 year old. Between the surgey and the recovery room, we were in and out in about 4 hours. He's drinking liquids, loving the chocolate shakes, and eager to play some more DS with Mario and the "mean mushrooms."

I've spent the all of today bouncing between reference questions and running through my conference presentations. The game strategies presentation is getting close to ready - the content is all there, now it's just a matter of polishing it up. I should have it posted and available for you by Thursday.

I'll probably be offline tomorrow, since my 3 year is going into surgery for his tonsils and adenoids. Wish him luck and a quick recovery.

I'm working away tonight on my presentation, fleshing out the details and getting slides ready. Sorry for the lack of formatting on the outline, I tried but I'm blaming Blogger.

I wanted to take a moment to reflect back on the experience of using the U.N. Food Force game during the famine this weekend. We used 2 different components from the Food Force game, "energy pack" and "future farming." Both games were followed by discussions on what they thought and learned by playing. I also used the lesson plan materials provided to help lead the discussion. The feedback by all the students was overwhelmingly positive. I got a lot of "ya, it was pretty good." But the real surprise about how they liked it was that they all kept going back to it in order to get a better score. Some even played around with the other missions and explored more content.

Although we all agreed that the fake Asian accent in the game was in poor taste, everyone was engaged in playing (and re-playing) and discussing afterward. The game and discussion turned out to be a great introduction for the guest speaker who focused on world hunger issues. The game gave them more of a context for what the speaker had to say.

Although the games are targeted at Middle and High School, college students could still get some use out of them. Each mission is brief and creates a good jumping off point for classroom discussion.

This Friday I'm presenting at our state ACRL conference, and since I'm getting ready I thought I'd share my outline with you. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Your feedback was helpful the last time and I look forward to your suggestions.

I. Gaming Literacy Test

II. Why games?

a. Who’s playing

i. Nielsen stats

ii. Pew research on college students

b. Educational aspects of games

i. Gee

ii. American Federation of Scientists

iii. Johnson & Prensky

iv. Van Eck

v. Halverson, Richard

II. What Libraries are doing

a. Quiz games – UNC

i. Review activity, instruction benefits

ii. Sample questions

iii. Words of caution – Matt Weise

b. Flash based – AZ State University

i. Objectives

ii. Screen shots

iii. “words of wisdom” from development team

c. University of Cincinnati

i. Online gaming tutorial

ii. Screen Shots

iii. Presenting at ACRL

d. George Washington’s “Muckrackers” game

i. Description

ii. Words of caution – LOEX attendee

iii. Presenting at ACRL

III. Starting Small - University of Dubuque

a. “Think Small” – King, B.R.

b. Website Evaluation

i. Gaming strategies used

ii. ACRL Standards

iii. Classroom activity

iv. Feedback (+/-)

c. Research Review

i. Gaming Strategies used

ii. ACRL Standards

iii. Classroom activity

iv. Student feedback

c. Hotel Dusk

i. Gaming Strategies used

ii. ACRL standards

iii. Feedback

IV. What You Can Do

a. Small Steps

b. ID courses

c. Be creative

d. Have fun

It’s been a productive week here at Research Quest as you can tell from the posts. And the fun doesn’t stop yet. Friday night I’m joining my wife and her senior high youth group at church for a 30 hour famine. Actually the famine starts in just a few minutes at 7:00 am on Friday morning, but we are spending the night and morning together as a group. I’m mentioning this because we will be using the U.N. Hunger Force game as one of our activities, in addition to playing a lot of DDR and Guitar Hero.

The Hunger Force game has a lot of really good hunger and world relief content, but much of the “game” feels tacked onto to an informational video. Because of this, we are only going to use 2 of the 6 units/levels within the game. Unit #2 focuses on providing a balance nutritional ratio for food packets and unit #6 provides long term sustainability planning for relief areas of the world. Most of the other units provide game related mechanics, but they are not central to the experience. Regardless of these critiques, it is still worth checking out U.N. Hunger Force.

This idea of a game tacked on to traditional content is, according to my interview with Matthew Weise tonight, one of the biggest pitfalls of educational games. According to Matt, games are great to teach process. Students learn through the process of doing and understanding why they are taking those actions. But just jumping from one cut scene or dialogue to another is just like putting “medicine in the applesauce.” Hiding dry and dull content within a “fun” game experience will never be successful.

Check out my write up over at Bibliographic Gaming (posting Saturday due to Famine) and make sure to check back in here this weekend for my full transcript of my interview with Matt.

I started my interview with Matt Weise tonight, only to learn that he was still traveling home from work. So, while I'm waiting - which I don't mind doing (although I'm both excited and nervous for the interview) - I'll post up my powerpoint slides from my guest lecture last week at Wartburg Theological Seminary to a class of future pastor's and youth ministers.

Download or view the slideshow... here

I had to create a wordpress.com blog in order to post a file, since Blogger doesn't allow it... So please follow the click through.

Now that GDC is past, some of the content from the sessions is finding it's way onto the web. Here is a link (via Chris Kohler's post at Wired's Game|Life) for a .pdf of the top 10 educational gaming research findings.

The panel included education game developers like Ian Bogost from Water Cooler Games and David Shaffer from the University of Madison and who I've written about before.

Jump to the avantgame.com webpage for the download... here

Image from http://avantgame.com/top10.htm

Here are the list of questions (mine and others) for the interview with Matt Weise Thursday evening. Please feel free to continue to add suggestions or edits.

Design
Matt, you wrote the initial design doc. for the game, how much of it was limited by what the engine could do?
Was the design doc written any differently for a modded engine, compared do writing it for an in-house game?
What limits / restraints did you encounter by modding?
How was character & artistic design impacted through a COTS?
The information and content learned is more import than the gameplay, but how did you structure the game in order to create incentives to progress?

Development
How large was the development team?
How experienced were the team members in development, design or modding?
What were the specific learning objectives designed into the game?
How often did gameplay get sacrificed fro the sake of the learning objectives?
What makes was a COTS engine mod different from licensing another commercial engine?
What challenges did you encounter scripting the NPC?
What limitations of the genre (rpg) did you encounter?
What compromises did you and the team make make?
Did you feel that this compromised their goals beyond what was reasonably acceptable?
Would another genre (or another platform) work better for the content?

Educational Context
How much research was done for the game's story?
What historic licenses were taken?
Unlike commercial game design, where the assessment comes in retail sales, how did you assess the success of the game?
Was the assessment planned and integrated from the beginning or was it tacked on?
Did you assess students' motivation to play the game?
What was known about the target group?
Did those students with previous experience with either the genre or platform, have an easier time 'mastering' the content than those who needed to 'learn' the platform?
How much previous experience playing games at all have any influence on the
students learning the content?

Experience / Recommendations
What would you recommended as potential engines or games to mod?
Which games are the most scalable?
Which have the best support community for modding?
For someone just getting started, what games are the most user-friendly?
Which ones can a newbie work to mod?
What level of experience do you recommend someone enter with?
Which games would be the most affordable?

*****
What else would you want to know about developing educational (library) games?

Can you name the first time you realized that something printed/published was intentionally false? Tonight I’m reminded of the first time I realized the importance of evaluating information.

It was 1992, and I was reading the April issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly in my parents’ mini van traveling home. There was a “secret code" that opened up a character in the SNES game Street Fighter II. It sounded exciting and had recently beaten the final boss. I studied the code all the way home and tried it again and again that night. It was only the next day that I realized the story was an April fools joke. I can distinctly remember the "ah-ha" feeling that I needed to think about where information was coming from.

Over the weekend I saw a story about the new EGM breaking news about a new Kingdom Hearts game on the Wii featuring Mario. I was interested to know more
but few other sites picked up the story. Joystiq did here, and covered it as another April fool's story. There's even a Wikipedia entry for all of EGM's jokes, including the Sheng Long article that fooled me.

So tonight as I looked through the most recent issue, I did it with my librarian hat on. "What were the signs that the article was faked?" "Where is the additional evidence?" "Why does the image look doctored?"

Gaming was shaping my information literacy skills long before I even knew what the words to describe it.

Do you have any questions that you answered about modding commercial games for education?
If so, please let me know.

I'm thankful to Matthew Weise for agreeing to do a phone interview later this week.

Here's the link again to the GDC session. The idea of modding an existing game engine for some information literacy skills is appealing to me. Information about benefits & pitfalls that Matthew and his team ran into with Revolution will be very useful to anyone thinking about modding for educational games.

Even though Steffen's Walz's Playbe's Playce didn't win the "People's Choice" award over at SXSW, I'm still excited he was considered. I blogged about his website back in December and had a traded emails with him over the Holidays. I really think his site design has a lot of interesting applications for navigating subject guides through games.

If you haven't checked out Walz's work, please do so here. The idea of navigating through content via games is a novel way to reach students in what traditionally can be pretty dry content.

I had some really good conversations with Andrew over at Gamerdad on Thursday and Friday. Gamerdad post his reading list last week and we had some back and forth about our research areas. I greatly respect Andrew's work over at Gamerdad and continue to recommend it to any parents with kids and video games. That being said, I was happy to be able to suggest some additional resources for his research. Who knows, maybe I'll end up with the title "Gamerdad's Librarian."

Our conversation got me thinking about my own gaming research. This weekend I took a break from strictly educational applications of games in order to dig a little into gaming theory and other issues. Here's what I've been reading this weekend. I'll post some thoughts and annotations early this week.

Caillois, R. (2001). Man, play, and games (M.Barash, Trans.). University of Illinois Press:Urbana. (Original work published 1958).

Juul, J. (2005). Half-Real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Koster, R. (2005). A theory of fun for game design. Scottsdale, AZ: Paraglyph Press.

Schechter, H. (2005). Savage pastimes: A cultural history of violent entertainment. New York: St. Martin's Press.


edit: I started this post late last night, but I fell asleep on the floor of my boy's room trying to get one back to sleep without waking the other.

The Game Developers Conference has been going on all week. I've been keeping up on the news stories, but haven't had a chance to blog about them. Here are some of the stories and coverage I've read this week that fit nicely with game based learning and using games in education. The first two days of GDC were set aside for a Mobile games summit and a Serious Games Summit. The Serious Games Summit produced some good data, but not as much coverage as I hoped.

- Serious Game Summit Reflections - These posts are off Henry Jenkins’ MIT blog, but they are not written by Henry. The author is at GDC and provides some of the more detailed coverage I’ve read this week

- Bartman’s blogging his experience at GDC. He’s written reflections on each session he attended – all with a focus on serious games and game based learning. There are some I found more useful, but all are interesting.

- Colonial Williamsburg: Revolution Postmortem - How Commercial Game Engines Affect Pedagogical Design

The creators of the Neverwinter Nights : Revolution mod gave a GDC presentation on Monday afternoon, but I haven’t found any news or posts about it. I was really looking forward to hearing about this session since I’ve been reading more and more about their educational game and the idea of modding commercial games for educational purposes. The closest I’ve posts I’ve found come of the Education Arcade site but they are not directly about the session. Has anyone read anything about their session?

- Next-gen.biz has a story on how laptops for 3^rd world countries opens the door for educational gaming and learning.

-The team over at Wired’s Game|Life are blogging all week long. They have a few key stories that fit in here:

How to make games that appeal to non hardcore gamers (or the other 90% of people who play)... article here

Here is Kohler's reactions to Sony announcement of the "Home" social networking features for the PS3.

I heard about the Sony's social networking ideas through 1up.com's podcast on Wednesday night. If you haven't heard about it, read Kohler's thoughts and then head over to Jenny Levine's theshiftedlibrarian to read her comments. Jenny's post is on the mark about the growing importance of social networking and the commercial success it could see.

What are you reading about GDC?

Here is part of the video game literacy quiz that I gave the class today. Each slide provided us with a variety of talking points about the games / systems featured and the culture around them. Each image is clickable if you want a closer look. Also any % on responses are what the class answered... what would you answer?



























There were a few other questions... but I've hit Bloggers limit... I'll put the full quiz in the notes tonight.

I just got back from my class guest lecture. It went pretty well. I wish I had more time at the end for questions, but we had some discussion during the class. I'm throwing a few quick comments and reflections up now, but I'll post more later including: gaming literacy quiz, content notes, and a bibliography.

There were 3 goals to my session with these future pastors and youth ministers:
1) Build their personal awareness of video games and gaming culture
2) Discover educational uses and positive applications for games in their churches
3) Increase their awareness of both the positive and negatives of games - in order to engage parents

Their assignment was to play a video game. One second career student sat down with his 5th grader to play together for the first time. They had a blast together and he's now looking at ways of bringing gaming into their confirmation classes. As a parent and educator, I love that.

Gaming at church? Yes.
Youth group gaming nights? Yes.
Video games can teach? Of course.
Games as immoral and wasteful? Not on our watch.

A few months ago I was asked by the Library Director of a local seminary to be a guest lecturer. She was teaching a course on technology in ministry and wanted to include video games. I jumped at the chance and now I'm putting the finishing touches on the class session. The purpose is to build awareness and provide possibilities for these future pastors to use and discuss video games in their congregations.

Here is my outline for my class - any feedback would be great:

I. Gaming Literacy Test

a. Awareness builder / Conversation starter

c. Reaching players where they are at

II. Video Game statistics – “Explore the world”

a. Who’s playing

i. Nielsen household data

ii. Pew internet research

iii. Video game report card

iv. Adults playing too

III. What games teach us – “Recruiting your Party”

a. Learning

i. Prensky, Gee, and a host of others

ii. American Federation of Scientists

b. Social Play

i. Man, Play, and Games

ii. Focus on social interaction

IV. Gaming applications in Ministry – “Conquer your World”

a. Youth Group

i. Gaming nights

ii. Social outreach

iii. Opening a dialog

b. Generational Gaps

i. Youth / Mentor

ii. Parent / Child

c. Serious Games

i. Darfur is Dying

ii. UN Disater Game

iii. Educational games

V. Christian games – “Leveling Up”

a. The right path – why Christian games are worthwhile

b. The hidden path – Failings of Christian games

c. The shadow opponent – violence in Christian games

VI. Violence in video – “The Final Boss”

a. Parent perceptions

b. Research data

c. Parental involvement

d. Awareness and Education

VII. End Credits…Too be Continued…

a. Additional sources

b. Further exploration

After spending the last 42 hours searching for my wedding ring... I found it. After 5 years of marriage I've never misplaced my ring for longer than 2 minutes. Our family (3 year-old included) spent our free time (hence no new blog posts) searching every corner, crack, drawer, trash can, and vent possible.

Thankfully, it's found and I'm not taking it off any time soon.

Now I can leave my guilt behind and focus on something other than scourging my house and surrounding area.

It's been a busy week here, over the past 5 days our Info Lit team of 4 librarians conducted 35 research class sessions. Not a bad run and overall pretty successful. We used Turning Point for some of our sessions to gain additional feedback from the students, and created more open ended workshops, but really didn't focus on tying in gaming strategies. As much as I would have loved to play around with the structure, with up to 11 sessions in one day just keeping the logistics of multiple classrooms flowing smoothly eat up most of my time.

My light at the end of the tunnel came today while working with a couple Public Speaking classes. The class assignment is to locate and create a persuasive speech arguing for a current bill in Congress. I love this assignment and my background (2 years working in the MN House of Representatives, 00-01) gives me a lot to talk about with our students. At the end of the day today, I had an enjoyable interaction with two students doing Senator Brownback's "Truth in Video Game Ratings" bill, S.568.

We had a good discussion about both sides of the issue and what the "real" intent of the legislation. It was interesting to hear the student's perspective on requiring the ESRB to play through all game content before issuing a rating. There were students on both sides of the issue and we ended up having a discussion about games as an entertainment media. The students were able find a variety of quality sources, including gamepolitics.com.

Gamepolitics.com has a good intro on the bill here.


photo by pianoforte, via Flickr.com

On Monday, Jenny Levine's theshiftedlibrarian.com featured a story that Chris covered over at Bibliographic Gaming. Great exposure for the blog and hopefully opens up the discussion for others.

Chris, Christy and I have had an ongoing discussion about the use of mods and other video game engines , like Half-Life,for educational uses. Neverwinter Nights is one popular video game that contains a powerful toolset in order to mod the game.

The creator's of the "Revolution" mod for Neverwinter Nights will actually be presenting next week at GDC (Game Developers Conference). GDC is still focused on commercial games, but they've added a serious games summit this year. Check back for any coverage of the event.

I've been reading and throughly enjoying the newest issue of The Gamer's Quarter. It was just released this week and like the previous seven issues is full of enjoyable essays. The Gamer's Quarter is about as close as I've seen to a creative writing anthology for video games. As librarians and others in education, it's worth your time to check it out and see how games transcend the activity of play and settle into our memories and emotions.

Here are some of the articles I've enjoyed from previous issues as well (all of which are available for download)...

Issue #7:
Faith & Fantasy - Heather Campbell
Use Your Illusion - Amandeep Jutla
Mushroom Hunting in Heels - Matthew Collier

Issue #6:
Console Identity - Heather Campbell
A Brief Note on Pacing in Videogames - J.R. Freeman

Issue #5:
I Shoot Therefore I AM - Francesco-Allesio "Randorama" Ursini
Shadows - Brian N. "Antitype" Wood
Why Game? - M. "dhex" O'Connor

Issue #4:
Shadows of an Art Form - Mr. Mechanical
Shadow of the Colossus - PS2
The Hero and the Sleeping Woman - JMG114
Myth and Good Storytelling in Video Games
Controller (R)Evolution - dessgeega
Wall-Jumping for Kicks - Swimmy
The Happiest Time of My Life - Pat the Great

As my students are forming a thesis to show that video games increase short-term aggression, a new study comes out from Texas A&M International University which conducted a meta-analysis of research into violent video games. The results of the study match what our students found. Here are a few comments from the author of the study from the story in gamepolitics.com:

"Overall results of the study found that although violent video games appear to increase people’s aggressive thoughts (which it would not be surprising that people are still thinking about what they were just playing), violent games do not appear to increase aggressive behavior. "

"Thus it was concluded that there is little evidence from the current body of literature on violent video games that playing violent video games is either causally or correlationally associated with increases in aggressive behavior. "

There is an interesting and worthwhile discussion about what players do with the increases in aggression. If we can prove increases in aggression, the question is what do we, as gamers, do with that aggression? Does it result in action? If gamers are aware of this emotional reaction can they prevent violent action? I started this discussion with the English students and I would be interested to know your opinions as well.

I say yes, increases in aggression levels does not need to result in violent action. What do you think?

Find the full story on gamepolitics.com here...

Over the last two weeks another librarian and I worked through 3 different scholarly articles about violent video games and aggression with two sections of English composition. The goals of the assignment are to construct and prove a thesis based on proven evidence and to read and dissect a peer reviewed journal article. While forming and proving a thesis is vital, getting the students over the "fear" of a scholarly article is one of the key benefits that helps prepare them for research in other classes. Here is the common thesis the students' developed:

The short-term effects of college students playing violent video games are aggressive thinking and behavior.


Here are some of the student's findings from two of the articles:

Carnagey, Nicholas L. and Anderson. Craig A. “The Effects of Reward and Punishment in Violent Video Games on Aggressive Affect, Cognition, and Behavior.” Psychological Science, 16.11 (2005): 882-889.

· - “Violence in a video game, regardless of whether it is rewarded or punished, can increase hostile affect” (Carnagey and Anderson, p.885).

- “Rewarding violence in video games can increase aggressive affect, aggressive cognition, and aggressive behavior” (887).

Kirsh, Steven J., Olczak, Paul V., and Mounts, Jeffery R. W. “Violent Video Games Induce on Affect Processing Bias” Media Psychology 7: (2005): 239-250.

- Findings show violent video games play brings forth more obvious aggressive behavior in players (p. 247).

- A non-hostile person was brought to the level of a hostile person by playing a violent video game (p. 248). - In short term, aggression with violent video games is a proven fact while in the long term it isn’t proven (p. 248).

The discussion about playing video games and violent games was interesting. The students were able to come up with many "ifs" or "buts" for violent games and aggression. This was very instructive because the students then were able to discover how the research tried to account for these "ifs."

In addition, the students made the important distinction between speculation of violent games creating violent personalities and the evidence that showed only short term increases in aggression levels. The literature stressed the evidence in a variety of studies about the short term, but only could hypothesis about any long term increases in aggression.


photos provided via Flickr.com by:
seizethedave
RichardAM

This past weekend my relatives came for a visit. This was the first time they had come since the death of their son (link here). I love their entire family and was very glad to spend time with them, but I couldn’t help but feel the shadow of my godson Luke. He was so filled with life and joy that his light is sorely missed. If felt this way, I can’t even begin to imagine what his parents feel on a daily basis.

I am glad to know that all of the things we did together were what Luke would have enjoyed as well. Our main activity for most of the weekend was playing video games. As I sat with my son and Luke’s sister playing our DS and Gameboys, I could clearly feel Luke with us watching over our shoulders and playing right along. I miss him.

Luke’s dad and I had good conversations about games, what he likes to play and what Luke played. We talked about the strategy games Luke played and all the logic and skills he used playing. His dad was impressed with Luke’s ability to successful manage resources and run small medieval villages in Stronghold or conduct attacks from three theaters in other RTS games.

I’m thankful for the love and spirit Luke shared with me during his life and I grateful for his continued inspiration.

At the end of January, I taught an instruction session for an upper level Communication class where the assignment was relatively straightforward (find scholarly articles/works to write a response paper on), with a few additional requirements.

I wanted to do something different from what the students "felt" they already knew, while still allowing us to focus and pull out some targeted search strategies and higher level information literacy skills... And thus, I created "Library Dusk" which was inspired by the DS game Hotel Dusk: Room 215

The new Nintendo DS game, "Hotel Dusk," is an interactive graphic novel / adventure game. You play as a former police officer trying to solve a murder through the use of clues and investigation. A lot of the progress is depended on what sources of information you follow (people, clues, evidence) and what the quality of those sources are.

Sources of information, quality evaluation...

It sounded like a nice parallel to some information literacy skills. And so I wanted to try something similar as a review/walkthrough on locating sources for the Communication class. Using the Turning Point technology, I created a multiple path, point & click adventure. Or at least, a multiple path, click & vote research process. The diagram shows the paths the students could take. The objective was to find two sources that could be used for the assignment. The 1st choice was between books, articles, or the web. The 2nd choice was a database/website/catalog decision. Choices 3 and 4 were on search terms and narrowing results. Any dead end paths brought the students back to the nearest choice or "fork" in order to choose again.

Every path was hyperlinked within the Power Point slides, so that any decision the students made could be followed seamlessly. We used turning point to vote on each path and choice as a class. Voting on a class level was beneficial since it allowed for more discussion than if voting was done either in groups or individually.

Overall, it was a pretty successful review. Most of the students stayed engaged in voting, reacting to the results, and discussing the choices. In fact, the students even discussed Boolean searching on their own.

I'll post some more thoughts on it later, after more of the evaluations are back. But I'd love to know if anyone is doing something similar and how it's worked out.

Research isn't that different than a traditional adventure game... we've just got to create the adventure to draw them in.



The game photo is from Ign.com

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent time with a literature review on the issue of violent video games and aggression. I started the literature review in order to find a number of focused articles for a small thesis paper. The goal of the assignment is to help first year students use facts to prove a thesis through scholarly articles. There are a series of posts coming about my literature review, but also on my experience using it as a research topic for two English composition classes.

The students entered the topic with a variety of personal opinions and biases. But part of the challenge of doing the literature review was to recognize and move beyond the personal opinions of the researchers. Published statements like, “the hit Grand Theft Auto for the Sony GameBoy Color,” raise eyebrows and suspicions from students. (Fact #1: Sony produces the Playstation 2(PS2), Playstation Portable(PSP); Fact #2: Nintendo produced the GameBoy Color). Students know these facts through experience and pop culture education. And to give them an article with what they consider an obvious fact incorrect in the first sentence, does not bode well for their acceptance and belief of the remaining research. This inaccuracy not only discredits the research findings in the students’ view, but also leads them to the conclusion that for the writer video games are not even a serious enough topic to make checking a few widely held facts a priority. “They just want to find something to blame,” were the words of one student.

This discovery not only helped me to be more aware of my own fact checking (and those peer reviewing research), but it served as an example for my students as well. If they would discredit a researcher based of incorrect facts – what would (should) their professor do to their work if they use and site facts incorrectly.

I just finished listening to David Warlick's podcast Connect Learning from back on January 8th. David interviews his college aged son while playing Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

While I've never played (two small children and two master's degree's put a stop to the time commitment) I'm familiar with the game and have heard a variety of podcasts on the game. David's interview really shows the complexities and vocabulary of the game. I take a lot of the gameplay and terms for granted, but listening to the podcast gave me the perspective from those outside the game.

There's been a lot written about WOW and the literacy skills involved. But a lot of what I've been reading digs deep into the game. But for anyone just getting started David's podcast is a nice start.

The conversation between father and son and between gamer and non-gamer, isn't all that far off from a reference transaction. "Why are you going that way?" "How come you clicked there?" "What does that label mean?" It's all a matter of perspective.

Image provided by Kingfox via Flickr.com

I’ve been in a blogging drought as of late, with only one post last week. Maybe it’s too cold, maybe I’m lazy and even though I’ve had stuff going (LOEX) and ideas running around, but I just couldn’t get them out. Part of the reason for the drought was my single minded determination to complete Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo DS.

I had started the game at the end of December, but was just picking away at it. Last week I got to the final section and died making my way through the final castle. I first I was frustrated since I was able to handle most other enemies, but the dragons killed me (granted I’ve since found out that they are as powerful as some of the final boss battles). While the game through up high levels of challenge every now and again, I really asked myself if it was worth continuing playing. While I enjoyed the gameplay (it’s a classic turn-based RolePlaying Game), the narrative is incredibly weak. But I enjoyed playing and felt enough of a connection to my characters to spend the next few days leveling up my party. After finally winning a battle against one dragon, I felt ready to tackle the end game. The final areas in the game were easy compared to my “dragon hurdle” and I breezed through the remainder of the game.

While I’d love to ramble on about the old-school RPG fun I had, I’m telling this story for a reason… my frustration, determination and success were not that different to what I see students go through on research projects. The overwhelming hurdles, the idea to give up and call it “good enough” and the rewarding feeling of success fall right in line with a challenging paper. The more I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that the reasons I stuck with the game could be useful in helping us get students to stick with assignments.

What kept me coming back…

- Intuitive interface: Not only knowing how to navigate, but wanting to navigate as well; if only students would say the same about our catalogs and databases; I felt I could be successful because I knew the overall game system, without that sense of confidence giving up would have come easier

- Personal investment: I cared about these characters, not enough to actually create an emotional connection, but enough to want to know what happens; The game used a customizable character system that made me more involved with each character since I spent time developing their skill sets; Customization, plain and simple; A piece of the game/project/search was mine since I was able to customize it; Systems with customization could provide some of that same sense of attachment

- Determination & Accomplishment: My personal resolve to see it through, might be because I'm stubborn, but it's also because I wanted that sense of accomplishment; our students are not any different - I've spent time at reference coaching students through a tough paper and helping convince them that they could do it and that it is worth pushing through; A little coaching now and again is needed, we all need some help with our egos now and again; If we can not only help foster that determination, but encourage it along the way our students will be better off

Images from IGN.com

I was surprised yesterday to read that the LOEX conference had filled within a few minutes of opening up. Andrew over at library+instruction+technology blogged about the frantic pace of registration as well.

I felt lucky last week when I found out my poster presentation was accepted at LOEX, now I feel incredibly lucky… and nervous. This will be my first national offering and I’ve got a nagging ego. But I do believe in my content and believe that many people can be successful integrating gaming strategies without years of game development. I’ve had success and I hope that sharing my work will help others (Which is also part of the reason I blog).

Here is my initial poster presentation proposal, feel free to give me feedback:

“Grand Theft Information Literacy: Teaching with Video Game Strategies”

Video games do teach. The challenging question is not if they teach, but how. Gee (2003), Prensky (2006) Shaffer (2006), Van Eck (2006) and many others are part of a growing body of research devoted to answering how video games teach. But how can librarians integrate games and game strategies into the classroom? And how do these strategies change library instruction? The answers do not need to be complicated. This presentation examines how the Charles C. Myers Library at the University of Dubuque integrated gaming strategies into the existing instruction program and witnessed increases in student creativity and productivity.

Regardless of if the students are gamers or not, gaming strategies are rooted in educational theory and can create a new classroom experience. Since getting started can be intimidating, the University of Dubuque took small steps. The goal of the program was to integrate the educational benefits of games, without the complex creation of original games.

Through the 2006 report by the Federation of American Scientists and a review of the literature, the instruction program identified 10 specific video game strategies. Over the course of two semesters, the instruction program used these strategies in two sections of a world music course and eight sections of a research writing course. These sessions focused specifically on the research process and website evaluation.

The presentation describes how the instruction program mapped game strategies to ACRL outcomes, created activities based on game strategies, assessed the success and modified the instruction sessions. The program used both qualitative and quantitative assessments to evaluate the gaming instruction sessions. Through these strategies the students were more engaged in discussion, more willing to ask questions and performed more authentic demonstrations of information literacy skills.

This research found that students benefited from these strategies, regardless if they identified themselves as gamers or non-gamers. The how to integrate games and what they teach does not need to be complicated. The poster presentation provides a starting point for librarians wondering how to get started incorporating video games and strategies into library instruction. Starting small, understanding the concepts, and being willing to explore and stumble along with the students resulted in rewarding experiences for both the students and the librarians.

At the DICE (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain) Summit today, the out-going ESA President Doug Lowenstein had this to say about the educational importance of video games:

I also hope the industry, writ large, will take the games as education movement more seriously. Very serious people in government, politics, and academia see serious potential in games. It's a huge opportunity for this industry…

(via Chris Kohler’s live blog coverage at Wired’s Game|Life)

Read Lowenstein’s comments gaming’s educational uses and the rest of the industry here