This research examined relationships between children’s information technology (IT) use and their creativity. Four types of information technology were considered: computer use, Internet use, videogame playing and cell phone use. A multidimensional measure of creativity was developed based on Torrance’s (1987, 1995) test of creative thinking. Participants were 491 12-year olds; 53% were female, 34% were African American and 66% were Caucasian American. Results indicated that videogame playing predicted of all measures of creativity. Regardless of gender or race, greater videogame playing was associated with greater creativity. Type of videogame (e.g., violent, interpersonal) was unrelated to videogame effects on creativity. Gender but not race differences were obtained in the amount and type of videogame playing, but not in creativity. Implications of the findings for future research to test the causal relationship between videogame playing and creativity and to identify mediator and moderator variables are discussed.

The paper can be downloaded here. The MSU press release is here. The paper is in press, and will be published in an upcoming issue of Computers in Human Behavior.

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Meanwhile, A. Scott Cunningham, an assistant professor of economics over at Baylor, along with Benjamin Engelstätter at the Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (Center for European Economic Research) and Michael R. Ward at University of Texas Arlington, released a working paper on the Social Science Research Network entitled “Understanding the Effects of Violent Video Games on Violent Crime.”

Researchers have long been able to measure physiological arousal in participants engaging in violent media. This physiological measurement is seen regardless of the media. Violent TV shows, movies, music, and videogames will elicit the measured arousal as study after study has shown. But, more tenuous are assertions this arousal leads to violence elsewhere once participants are away from the media. This study seeks to empirically link violent videogame sales with decreases in reports of violence. Here is the abstract:

Psychological studies invariably find a positive relationship between violent video game play and aggression. However, these studies cannot account for either aggressive effects of alternative activities video game playing substitutes for or the possible selection of relatively violent people into playing violent video games. That is, they lack external validity. We investigate the relationship between the prevalence of violent video games and violent crimes. Our results are consistent with two opposing effects. First, they support the behavioral effects as in the psychological studies. Second, they suggest a larger voluntary incapacitation effect in which playing either violent or non-violent games decrease crimes. Overall, violent video games lead to decreases in violent crime.

The paper can be accessed here. Some good articles discussing it in the media are here and here.

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Finally, work on videogames to assist children in coping with medical problems continues in earnest. A recent example involves the University of Utah’s Engineering Arts and Entertainment (EAE) program, which brings in students from the school’s Dept. of Film and Media Arts and School of Computing to design interactive entertainment. Together with physical therapists and councilors, EAE students created a series of videogames designed to help children stricken with cancer. The unnamed minigames written for the PlayStation3 are currently being beta tested by patients in the pediatric ward at the Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City, with possible retail release in the near future. Articles on the games can be found here and here.

This formula has been very successful for the company. Although only about five percent of Zynga’s player base spends serious money in their games, so many millions of people play that the company rakes in millions. They rake in even more by figuring out what the players want through data analysis.

Zynga is transforming the game industry. Traditional videogame companies create games they think players will like, then sell them. Zynga offers free games through Facebook Inc.’s social network, then studies data on how its audience plays them. It uses its findings to fiddle with the games to get people to play longer, tell more Facebook friends about them and buy more “virtual goods.” At the heart of the whole process is Zynga’s ability to analyze reams of data on how players are reacting to its games.

“We’re an analytics company masquerading as a games company,” said Ken Rudin, a Zynga vice president in charge of its data-analysis team, in one of a series of interviews with Zynga executives prior to the company’s July filing for an initial public offering.

This formula for financial success has other companies following Zynga’s lead. Rather than spending millions developing a title with a short shelf life, companies are turning to free games with extras that cost money. The primitive graphics Zynga uses are generally derided by serious gamers, but Zynga aims for the mass market, much the way American beer brewers produce bland beverages that appeal to the most palates.

All of Zynga’s games go through what amounts to a giant ongoing lab experiment involving players. Zynga conducts hundreds of “A-B tests” within its games, in which two sets of players see virtual goods on sale with, say, subtle color differences to see which color sells better…

Sizhao Yang, a former Zynga executive who helped create its virtual farming hit “FarmVille,” says his development team figured out by analyzing virtual-goods-sales data that “people buy animals a lot more than tractors and other inanimate objects.” The findings led the “FarmVille” team to more prominently feature animals in its online store, he says.

Interestingly, Wingfield reports there is considerable tension in the company between the data jockeys and the game designers. The game designers have a certain idea of how a game should look and function. The analysts drive the direction of game development based on the data, leading to tension. Some designers have quit the company in protest. Still, data remains the keystone in Zynga’s game plan for the foreseeable future.

The Zynga story on data analysis comes on the heels of the recent International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games in Bordeaux this summer (fdg2011.org). There, Brent Harrison and David L. Roberts over at North Carolina State delivered an interesting paper, Using sequential observations to model and predict player behavior. Here’s their abstract:

In this paper, we present a data-driven technique for designing models of user behavior. Previously, player models were designed using user surveys, small-scale observation experiments, or knowledge engineering. These methods generally produced semantically meaningful models that were limited in their applicability. To address this, we have developed a purely data-driven methodology for generating player models based on past observations of other players. Our underlying assumption is that we can accurately predict what a player will do in a given situation if we examine enough data from former players that were in similar situations. We have chosen to test our method on achievement data from the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Experiments show that our method greatly outperforms a baseline algorithm in both precision and recall, proving that this method can create accurate player models based solely on observation data.

While not fixating on the profit motives that Zynga has in mind, Harrison and Roberts offer clues to game designers in guiding player behavior in-game. Educational games could become more engaging:

The ability to accurately predict a player’s behavior in a game has a number of applications. While these applications are beyond the scope of this paper, we discuss two of them briefly here to better situate and motivate our approach. With a model of player behavior, we can create an experience that is unique to a user’s tendencies or preferences. For example, if we predict that the user will choose to fight a certain non-player character (NPC) rather than talk to it, that NPC can be made more willing to fight. Another application involves guiding players to parts of games that they may enjoy. Modern games often take place in large, sandbox worlds where the player is given total freedom. It’s quite possible that players may never see content that they would like because the sandbox is just so big. Predictions about a player’s behavior can be used to guide her to the parts of the game that she would enjoy.

Eschewing surveys, the authors recommend a purely data-driven approach (as does Zynga):

We feel that a purely data-driven approach has significant promise for creating accurate predictive models of player behavior in games without the difficulties associated with earlier modeling techniques. Very little research has been done in this area to date.

Read the entire paper for further discussion of the algorithm they developed. Very interesting.

References:

Harrison, B & Roberts, D. L. (2011). Using sequential observations to model and predict player behavior. In Proceedings of the 2011 Foundations of Digital Games Conference. (FDG 2011), Bordeaux, France.

Wingfield, N. (2011, September 9). Virtual products, real profits. The Wall Street Journal, p.A1.
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The list of projects EDC/CCT is working on is extensive. Among many, one project with the U.S. Dept. of Education involves the design of educational game modules for the Nintendo DSi handheld, aimed at middle school science and literacy.

A paper by Marion Goldstein, Marian Pasquale, and Katie McMillan Culp, members of the Possible Worlds team at CCT, was presented recently at AERA 2011. Here is the abstract for the paper, entitled Using Students’ Naïve Theories to Design Games for Middle-Grades Science:

This paper reports on one phase of a long-term research and development project that is creating video game modules for middle-school science classrooms. The games are intended to help teachers address common scientific misconceptions by providing students with opportunities to interact with visualizations of otherwise abstract or inaccessible concepts or phenomena that are the source of those misconceptions. The visualizations serve as metaphors for natural phenomena, and linking activities help teachers build connections between the visualizations and the targeted concepts. Findings presented here are derived from formative research conducted to inform the development of a game and associated classroom materials that address genetics and heredity. The paper discusses how teachers in our sample typically teach this material in seventh grade, student expressions of common misconceptions about genetics and heredity, and how an initial design for the game responds to and addresses those misconceptions. Students’ misconceptions were associated with the concepts of randomness of inheritance, gene expression, and natural selection.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the team’s approach to instructional handheld gaming design is the commitment to research-based efforts. Through direct research with middle school students, the team uncovered several misconceptions held by the students through a series of experiments. When showed a mixed race couple, students’ assumptions regarding the physical makeup of the couple’s children were based on misconceptions. Other experiments uncovered faulty assumptions based on genetic adaptations of beetles and the random characteristics of lotteries. With this research in hand, the team set out to tackle common misconceptions among students at this age and grade level. The remainder of the paper discusses results with prototypes of the resulting game modules.

It’s an excellent report of a work in progress. Research and design such as this will ultimately result in stronger and more effective educational video games.

Tiltfactor is the first academic center to focus on critical play–a method of using games and play to investigate issues and ideas. Our mission is to research and develop software and playful art that creates rewarding, compelling, and socially responsible interactions, with a focus on innovative game design for social change. We are interested in the processes through which designers imbue their games with moral, social, and political values, whether intentionally or inadvertently, and the corollary processes through which these values are interpreted by players. Our approach involves extensive cross-disciplinary work among the Humanities, Social Sciences, the Arts, and the Sciences.

The academic gaming lab is funded in part by the NEH, NSF, and Microsoft. The center has researched and developed a remarkable list of educational titles. These include, among many others:

• Pox: Save the People, a board game teaching the importance of vaccinations
• LAYOFF, a video game designed to educate players about the financial crisis
• The Adventures of Josie True, a web game devoted to teaching middle school girls math

It’s exciting to see strong academic centers involved in educational gaming efforts like Tiltfactor is, and I encourage other educators and researchers to examine their work. As with most government funded initiatives, such as Josie True, the end product is freely available to schools and teachers. The research potential from their many efforts is considerable, and a list of selected books and articles Dr. Flanagan has written is here. Last but not least, Tiltfactor blog posts can be found at grandtextauto.

We recently released our first independently developed game called ‘Virulent’.  ‘Virulent’ is an action strategy game that was designed for the iPad but is also playable through the Unity Webplayer.  It places the player in control of a group of virus particles that are trying to spread their infection by evading the immune system and infecting cells.  The current version includes the first 7 of 15 designed levels.

The current version of Virulent is freely available for the iPad or the Unity WebPlayer. The team is seeking feedback as they continue building out the remaining eight levels. If you are interested in game design, would like to be part of a work in progress, and if you are willing to offer some insight and advice to the team, please take a moment to download the game and play through the levels.

For the iPad:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/virulent/id438485177?mt=8

For the Unity WebPlayer:
http://discovery.wisc.edu/media/MIR_images/erca/virulent_web/Virulent_2011_06.html

Here’s a screenshot of the game on the iPad:

Here’s the key quote:

I devised the following as a simple checklist for evaluating or modifying classroom activities. The items are based on game design literature, in particular Koster’s (2005) list of features shared by historically popular games (120), and Salen and Zimmerman’s (2004) discussion on what motivates us to participate in game-like activities (337). They are also partially intended as a summary of the theory (readers interested in learning more about educational computer game applications online are referred to the blog links in the reference section). In order to illustrate the major concepts incorporated in the questions, I will show how a commonly used classroom activity, the cloze task, could and should be more like computer games by showing the computer game application of each item, elaborating on the theory behind it, and discussing the application for classroom activities.

Included in the checklist are considerations on goals integrated into the games, incremental challenges, strategic decisions, and uncertain outcomes.

This is a great article for teachers of ESL interested in adding educational games to their pedagogical arsenal, and a good resource for those involved in the designing of related educational video games. Highly recommended.

References:
Francois, S. J. (2010, February). Making ESL/EFL classroom activities more game-like. The Internet TESL Journal, For Teachers of English as a Second Language. [Online.] Available: http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Franciosi-Activities.html

I am not a gamer. I don’t own any consoles, and the only game I play with any regularity is Tetris online. When I look at video games today, I usually see them through the eyes of an educator. This is why I’m so convinced that everything we need to make paradigm-shifting educational video games that kids will actually play has already been created. Instead of starting from scratch, educators need to team up with innovative video game studios and merely tweak the powerful learning-based game models that already exist.

My revelation came over winter break as I was visiting my family in New Jersey. What was to be a very busy holiday turned into a week of me sitting on my Dad’s couch, sick as a dog. My father has an xBox 360 and regularly plays games that involve running around and shooting things (first person shooters or FPS in gamer parlance), none of which I’ve had interest in. This year he was focused on a game that was very different, where he was given a wide open world with innumerable choices and methods of achieving goals and completing tasks: Fallout 3, widely regarded as one of the best xBox titles ever (if not best video game ever).

It is a mix of first person shooter, role playing game (RPG), puzzle (in the vein of Myst or Riven) and open-world exploration (like a single player Second Life) on a scale that by all accounts is hard to find elsewhere. In this game, you make decisions that change your character, and who you are changes the possibilities of what you can do.  You solve difficult problems, most of which have more than one answer. It’s the kind of thinking that we want students to do in school, that we know they need for college and beyond, but it often gets buried beneath rote memorization and test-prep strategies.

Fallout 3 represents a world of well-designed, immersive, and most importantly popular video games that have most or all of the structural elements that make learning possible. These elements are now fairly common in top games:

• Players make decisions that effect not only themselves, but the world around them.
• Players are faced with multi-step problems that require logic and reasoning skills.
• Collaboration and cooperation is encouraged (if not required).
• An engrossing story creates a context that’s fun and far different than their school-influenced concept of “learning”.
• Players are given small, specific tasks to complete, keeping meaningful goals in clear sight.
• Each small task completed is often part of a bigger picture, and each one opens up the possibility for other tasks that keep the player going.
• Most tasks or problems have multiple solutions.
• A comprehensive, fairly automatic system tracks players’ achievements, and can be referred back to at any time.
• There’s some level of freedom to explore and to choose which tasks they will do first (or at all).
• Often, tasks require or would be made easier with background knowledge of a subject players might not already know about. They are often forced to look up and learn about these topics if they truly want to reach their goals.
• Players are encouraged to go back and replay part or all of the game differently in order to reach measurable goals.

If you replaced the word “players” with “students” above, wouldn’t this list appear to be the features of an excellent, high-achieving classroom?

The immersive video game of today encourages, even requires learning and higher order thinking. The structure is there. More importantly, let’s not forget that these games represent the most popular and ubiquitous games available, with a generally bigger audience than movies and TV shows.

The only thing missing is for educators to partner with the studios to incorporate content across the curriculum, taking advantage of what’s already there. Isn’t that what the best teachers always do?

This is a guest post by Tom DeRosa, aka “Mr. D” of I Want to Teach Forever. You can find more ideas, resources and inspiration for teachers on his blog, or in his book Ten Cheap Lessons: Second Edition.

They hired Renaissance scholars to advise on period garb, architecture, urban planning, weaponry and the like. They took tens of thousands of photographs of interiors and streets. They used Google Earth liberally to piece together the ground-up and sky-down perspectives through which the action flows. …

The game’s creative director, a Montrealer named Patrice Desilets, lived in Italy for some years, where he acquired a feel for the vivid intrigues of the Renaissance. He grew fascinated, he says, with the notion that “finally people can control time, and relive the past, through games.” The producer, Sebastien Puel, was born in the south of France, in the fortified medieval French town of Carcassonne, and grew up surrounded by history. The head writer, a Harvard graduate from Los Angeles and former screenwriter, Corey May, was driven, he says, by the challenge of “telling a story that feels real and is set among real people who existed.” …

Overall, though, Assassin’s Creed II is as close as we’ve managed to get to real time travel. The grown-ups can lap it up as a kind of virtual tourism. For the high schoolers, still the main audience, the video offers a kind of education by stealth. History matters more if your life depends on it, even as Ezio, and even if you’ve got lives to spare.

The amazing thing is developers of a highly anticipated release would even care to get most of the details right. If modifications of the game are allowed, it may find its way into history courses. It may find its way into classes regardless. Other academic efforts, such as Rome Reborn offer students only the opportunity to explore architecture. In AC2 students can fight bad guys while exploring.

Now, another major game focusing at least in part on the Italian Renaissance is due for release. This one is based on Dante’s Inferno. Yes, players will plumb the depths of hell, as envisioned by Dante, in this game from Electronic Arts. As you might imagine, hell is a bit graphic. Also, if you’ll recall, Dante described levels associated with the seven deadly sins. In the game, the level for lust is particularly graphic, replete with phallic symbols and nudity. This and other extreme graphics earn the game an M rating.

Producers are releasing a print edition of the poem illustrated by pictures from the game, hoping to encourage players to read Dante’s original work. Maybe kids who talk their parents into buying the game, despite its M rating, can actually learn something about the original work. But, I suspect parents would prefer the old-fashioned text version of the poem rather than an explicit video game.

References:
Kaylan, M. (2010, January 12). Time travel gets closer to reality. The Wall Street Journal, D7.

From a commercial standpoint, especially with languages like Logo, the urge to combine programming with real world robotics has been highly successful, most notably with the Lego Mindstorms line of products. Now, a new company has developed a toy spy robot that will encourage the creation and posting of programs by its fans.

The Spy Video TRAKR from Wild Planet Entertainment will blend online and offline fun for budding robotics enthusiasts. Offline, the target market of eight-year-old and older boys can guide the remote controlled vehicle into other rooms and use its wireless camera for surveillance. Taking a tip from Webkinz, which ties an online product with toys in the real world, the Spy Video TRAKR will offer strong inducements to play on their site. Here’s a quote from a recent news article:

Wild Planet says the Trakr goes a step further than other Web-tied toys. It sends children online to create application and then brings them back to the toy, instead of just leaving them playing related games online.

The marketing pitch for this seems brilliant. The toy will function as a spy robot right out of the box, but for the kid who wants more, plenty of customization is offered, whether it’s an app downloaded from the site or one he makes on his own. Here’s part of the press release:

Though the Spy Video TRAKR can be used without ever being hooked up to a computer, tech-minded kids will be quick to connect their toy and start the customization process. Beginners can access an online application modulator that will allow them to modify existing apps as they familiarize themselves with writing code. All the tools they need to write their own unique programs will be available online, for free.

The toy will be available in October, in time for Christmas, and should retail for about $120. I wish the best for Wild Planet, and I hope their new product is highly successful. Also, hopefully, it will encourage many new future programmers to pursue careers in the STEM fields.

References:
Zimmerman, A. (February 10, 2010). I spy a market for kids. The Wall Street Journal, D1.

Pesner next will be contributing to a new chapter book edited by Patrick Felicia over at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland. The Handbook of Research on Improving Learning and Motivation through Educational Games: Multidisciplinary Approaches is scheduled to be released in 2011. Pesner’s contribution will explore the “chasm” that has formed between commercial and educational games in terms of “enticing and appealing qualities” between the two genres.

This is a particularly juicy topic ripe for social science research, since it’s so fuzzy. What are the elements in commercial games making them so appealing? Conversely, what makes educational games so dull? How would we measure the difference? What can educational game makers learn from commercial game makers? I think I can speak for Elaine when I say both of us very much are looking forward to Dr. Felicia’s book and Pesner’s contribution.

References:
Clements, P., Pesner, J., & Shepherd, J. (2009). The teaching of immunology using educational gaming paradigms. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Southeast Regional Conference. [Online.] Available: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1566474