Games in Education

[…] a group of articles exploring the topic, called  Games in Education.  Yours truly authored this one on using games to glimpse the future of education, but I commend each of them to […]

with “that” minigames?

I hope you’re right, but even with a new generation, games have some serious obstacles that other technologies have not had.  Because games come with content, it’s either necessary to find a game that matches the goals of the course, modify a game, or create it from scratch. This makes it different from say digital storytelling or social media which are content agnostic.  It also takes significant time to evaluate games for inclusion in a course.  For our courses that used Civ IV, the professors easily spent 20 hours playing the game themselves before including it in the course.

Stock market games and battlefield simulations are somewhat unique in the sense that the “game” is in effect the reality for which the learner is preparing.  The game Nephrotex that I mentioned in the article is a similar example.  You can see though how it’s more challenging for a game designer to create a sim on being an engineer versus a general in war.

Finally, depending on which methodology is used, the average gamer age is around 35.   The 2012 study by EA (which because of an adjusted methodology dropped the average age to 30) still said that 37%  of all gamers are older than 36.  That’s a very large number of people in the “old enough to be a professor” range and certainly larger than the number of people who blog for at least one hour per week.

Thank you very much for contributing comments.  It’s very much appreciated.

Todd

Good point.  Done.

Ed, I wonder if it would be helpful to at some point spell out just what you mean by ‘liberal arts educational context’? What do you mean when you say liberal arts? The useful list of positive attributes of games backed by citations is great, and I wonder if that opening salvo could be even more powerful with a juicy definition of liberal education?

One question that always bothers me about prediction markets, and that you may want to address up front is: what sorts of people are involved in these markets? In the same way that there are biases in survey in terms of who responds, it seems to me that there are also self-selection problems. Do the people playing in prediction markets accurately represent the larger population?

It might be helpful to try to bring this back to the larger theme of this issue: how can the use of games , or in this case prediction markets, be useful in the context of a liberal education agenda? It feels to me like you need to close the loop on this.

One of the obvious reasons for this short-coming might be that these are workshops, not courses. One virtue of a semester-long course is that the cohort is together, for better and worse, for a full 15 or so weeks.

The author doesn’t clearly distinguish between scenarios and role-play. In the latter, students must play a “role” rather than simply comment on the scenario in their own voice with their own opinions. See “Reacting to the Past” games for examples of role-play in education.

Good catch.

Good question, Nancy.  Traders can buy/sell with or without analyzing comments.  The visual design elevates choice above prior feedback.

Good points.

Where should I start with Sheldon?

I don’t think there is a general genus of prediction market players.  Instead, specific market frameworks shape participation.  It would be useful to see some ethnographic studies of different markets.

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Thanks – looks like a good project. Will include a note on it in the final version of the paper.

I thought such a definition might appear in the introduction to this collection of essays, no? I can certainly put something in here. When you say “juicy” do you mean provocative, or something likely to be widely acceptable? I can go either way.

I’m going to include a note. But unfortunately that site is now 404.

Maybe you could add a reference to my article here? It addresses these difficulties and advocates the group play element with which you end the paragraph.

If people read through the whole issue, they’ll have seen it. But if they come straight to this one, they might not realize that there’s a longer treatment of the issues next door.

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Sorry, that should have been “argument” (not “augment”). And I was explicitly referring to the opening section of the paragraph that ascribes the view that “learning is supposed to be dry and tedious and painful and awful” to higher education professionals. (First time using the comment feature here–apologies if the previous post was unreadable). Overall, like the other reviewer who has posted, I think there are two potential articles here–one about game collections in libraries and one on games in library instruction. I’d recommend dropping the former, as it currently lacks discussion on difficulties with compatibility and upkeep (old consoles, old operating systems, old discs and cartridges) and with digital delivery (iPad apps, DLC, account-based gaming), which are two gigantic challenges in building a usable game collection today. Dropping this section would give you more time to expand and beef up the section on library instruction, ideally by bringing in educational theorists or scholars of digital literacy. Better grounded in educational theory, this could be a really useful contribution to the literature.

Sorry–that lost comment was for paragraph 25. This interface seems to work rather poorly with Safari.

This is a straw man augment. No one in higher education believes this–and in the past two decades numerous procedures (such as accessible course reviews, internal teaching awards, etc.) have been adopted at the institutional level to ensure that professors who did hold this view would be punished in the form of reduced enrollment, reduced internal funding, and diminished likelihood of tenure and promotion.

In what ways are prediction market analogous to games re: the ability to help people think differently about tech trends? You’ve addressed aspects of motivation through competition as well as through enjoyment. Are there other ways in which prediction markets help to affect/shape attitudes? Can you give an example of this gameful approach to prediction?

Agree with Mike–I’m unclear how this gets back to your opening thesis: “Can we use gaming to improve our ability to think through these challenging times?” How does this particular game-based approach to prediction ‘fit in’ to the landscape? And for what audience? Most of the discourse around GBL in higher ed focuses on benefit for students in the classroom, yet this seems mainly geared for GBL to support better decision-making for faculty/admins, which is just as needed. Would recommend addressing this diff.

Small quibble, but there are those who would note that role-play and games are overlap but can exist independently. Role-plays are sometimes gameful but not always. There are of course lots of examples about game-based roleplay in higher ed. Would recommend a reference to Lee Sheldon’s work here if you pursue that path.

That said, I keep coming back to the issue of audience here–are we talking about benefits to students (for which we have lots of examples) or are we talking about something else–role-play as a way to help foster better leadership? There are examples of both, and given the focus of this piece is prediction markets, I think it’d be good to clarify the context for which role-play is most relevant here.

So, here you narrow the topic to ‘game-based futuring efforts’, but you started this piece talking about games in a more general sense. I would recommend clarifying your scope from the start as this topic–“game-based futuring” is unique and is more easily understood in terms of scope.

At the risk of becoming disc0uraging, I’d like to see a bit more discussion of the problems librarians face when designing games for use by students who are accustomed to playing commercial games. I don’t think the major problem is educators thinking “learning is supposed to be dry & tedious,” though it’s possible to get that idea when you run up against colleagues who are totally resistant to the idea of using games in the classroom. I think the major problem is trying to create something that won’t seem totally lame to students who’ve grown up playing World Of Warcraft and Call of Duty. Professional games have a staff of paid experts designing and constantly improving them. Librarian game designers are probably working at home at night with a few students who are doing this as a course project.

This article is an excellent overview of the two different aspects of “games in libraries.” Either aspect could easily be the subject of a much longer article.

History Game Canada (Axworthy and Gunn, 2007) may also be a relevant antecedent: http://www.historycanadagame.com/

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Is there any way to tell how much/if the discussions and visualization of trading activity influence later traders? Or do they have to trade before seeing what others are doing?

You can record videoconferences more easily than a face-to-face meeting, but how many people would watch them after the fact? At the least you would have a record for archiving and possible a way to launch continuing discussion later.

Even first-person shooter games develop skills: hand-eye coordination, spatial positioning, and fast reflexes. Certainly the military has found incoming service members with shooter game skills have an advantage in acquiring specific skills for their military career. Simulations also help them develop and practice urban warfare, for example.

Would inter-library loan programs apply? Could libraries form a consortium to buy games? And what about web-based games — could libraries purchase/lease group access for the campus using funding from departments that planned to use the games for their instruction?

What a great idea! Learn about the library and meet new friends to follow clues. I hope first-year students wouldn’t be too blasé to enjoy this.

Valid points and useful pointers throughout. The title might be somewhat misleading, as the next generation (the gaming generation) will be more open to using games in class both as students and instructors. Whether gaming becomes a significant pedagogical tool depends on its impact on learning. Certainly simulations of the stock market and battlefields have helped advanced business students and military staff, and simple games benefit K-12 students. I expect the influence of games in education to extend as young students advance and older students become teachers.

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