Learning for games or games for Learning?
8th December, 2007Academics are flocking to use virtual worlds and multiplayer games as ways to research everything from economics to epidemiology, and to turn these environments into educational tools. But one such highly anticipated effort — a multiplayer game about Shakespeare meant to teach people about the world of the bard while serving as a place for social-science experiments — is becoming its own tragedy.
The game, called Arden, the World of Shakespeare, was a project out of Indiana University funded with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant. Its creator, Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at the university, wanted to use the world to test economic theories: by manipulating the rules of the game, he hoped to find insights into the way that money works in the real world. Players can enter the game and explore a town called Ilminster, where they encounter characters from Shakespeare, along with many plots and quotations. They can answer trivia questions to improve their characters and play card games with other players. Coming from Castronova, a pioneer in the field, the game was expected by many to show the power of virtual-world-based research.
But Castronova says that there’s a problem with the game: “It’s no fun.” While focusing on including references to the bard, he says, his team ended up sidelining some of the fundamental features of a game. “You need puzzles and monsters,” he says, “or people won’t want to play … Since what I really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments on, I decided I needed a completely different approach.”
Castronova has abandoned active development of Arden; he released it last week to the public as is, rather than starting up the experiments he had planned. Part of the problem: it costs a lot to build a new multiplayer game. While his grant was large for the field of humanities, it was a drop in the bucket compared with the roughly $75 million that he says goes into developing something on the scale of the popular game World of Warcraft. “I was talking to people like it was going to be Shakespeare: World of Warcraft, but the money you need for that is so much more,” he says. Castronova also says that he was taking on too much by attempting to combine education and research. He believes that his experience should serve as a warning for other academics.
Ian Bogost, a video-game researcher and assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, agrees. “It’s very, very hard to make games in the best of circumstances, and a university is never the best of circumstances,” he says. “I have serious doubts about not just the potential for success but even the appropriateness of pursuing development work of this kind in the context of the university.” If researchers are going to build games for the purposes of research, Bogost says, he thinks it’s important to look at the process realistically, and with a scientific eye. “In most disciplines, it’s okay to fess up to what worked and what didn’t. In laboratory work, you do this all the time … If this is really research and not just production, then of course there are going to be these kinds of surprises.”
What do you think?
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Bob Harrison
Dan Sutch
Richard Sandford
Leon Cych
Martin Owen
Tim Reader
December 10th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
All production is preceded by research in commercial companies as much as in universities.
I worked a few years for a software company making educational simulations using game-style software development techniques. This took years of experimentation before anything remotely market-able was produced and we went up a lot of blind allies. The trouble with doing this in a commercial company is that you generally have to make the customer pay for all your research, mistakes and dead-ends. The product they get in the end only contains a small fraction of the actual work that was done, so it looks expensive.
And the real benefit of all that foundation-laying research - the insites gained by the people doing it - might not be realised in the products to which it directly led. It might be difficult to identify where they spring up.
For this reason, I think that the university type of environment may not be the best environment to make commercial products but it’s the only place where the research foundations can be laid for the next generation of products.
(By “university type of environment” I mean any development environment in which immediate short term commercial success is not the primary driving force.)
December 14th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
We at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston have some experience with the creation of games to enhance the teaching and learning of economics. We do not spend anything like the numbers discussed in the article and find that we can produce a product that is fun, attractive, engaging and a valuable instructional tool. Agreed it will never compete with SIMS, but it will be played/used by teachers and students.
Our approach is to be the ultimate arbitor of the intellectual content and then work with a vendor who is experienced with game play, flow and creation.
In summary the point I wish to make is that it is in the partnership and collaboration between organizations or institutions that make use of their comparative advantage that
can reap rewards unobtainable by either on their own.
December 19th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Thanks George and Steve…really interesting insights and experiences….partnership and collaboration seem to be important for george and Steve is not sure about the University-Commercial interface. What do you think?
January 9th, 2008 at 10:58 am
A small point, but one which exercises me a lot, is the diagnosis of ‘no fun’ is if, somehow, if it had been ‘fun’ it would have worked. A lot of things motivate us to complete many tasks and next to personal achievement, better levels of understanding, discovery of meaning and purpose, an enthusiasm for knowledge etc., fun seems a poor relation. For several thousand years we have learning without the aid of puzzles and monsters (mostly) and, while they can often brighten up some dull repetitive learning tasks, there’s got to be more to learning design than that.
January 9th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
[...] Lessons from Arden Posted on January 9, 2008 by Daniel Livingstone I wrote some time ago about the possibility of failure in attempting to develop serious games to teach academic subjects (Failures in GBL). The FutureLab Flux blog has a comment from Ted Castranova on another key issue - that developing good fun games, whether educational or not, may be several orders of magnitude more expensive than Universities can afford. The context here is his Arden: World of Shakespeare project which had to be scaled back from its original goals. Still a project well worth a look, however. [...]