Research on Benefits of Children Playing Videogames

Some interesting new studies and projects have come out recently showing beneficial links to videogame playing for children. Linda A. Jackson, professor of psychology over at Michigan State University, led a study finding that videogame play was a strong predictor of creativity in children. Here is the abstract:

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.

RPG Accomplishments are the New Boyscout Badges

My 6 year old proudly showed me a new accomplishment on Wizard 101: “Junior Archeologist.” It reminded me of when World of Warcraft added “The Explorer” accomplishment for characters who had “explored” the game’s content. Several players created new characters called Dora so they could earn the sobriquet “Dora the Explorer” on their realms.

Another thought: it reminded me of Cub Scout and Boy Scout days, diligently working toward merit badges. Nowadays, it seems videogame accomplishments are the new merit badges.

It some ways, that’s probably a good thing.

Using Video Games to Solve Complex Problems

The blogosphere and the Twitterverse were buzzing today with news about the latest crowdsourcing coup, where a video game was used to unravel the molecular structure of viral enzymes that cause AIDS in monkeys.

Such tedious work often requires human cognitive abilities, and combined efforts seem to flourish within a gaming environment. The online game used is called Foldit, and Firas Khatib and Frank DiMaio over at University of Washington’s Dept. of Biochemistry along with several others published a paper in Nature detailing the effort, entitled Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players. Here is their abstract:

Following the failure of a wide range of attempts to solve the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease by molecular replacement, we challenged players of the protein folding game Foldit to produce accurate models of the protein. Remarkably, Foldit players were able to generate models of sufficient quality for successful molecular replacement and subsequent structure determination. The refined structure provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs.

The game looks quite interesting, and by playing you might help make a significant contribution to science.

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Kriegsspiel: Powerful Lessons from War Games

Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor of English and Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) over at University of Maryland, has a most excellent article on wargames at Play the Past.

“To a wargamer,” writes Greg Costikyan in the just published collection Tabletop: Analog Game Design, “wargames are not abstract, time-wasting pastimes, like other games, but representative of the real. . . . You can learn something from wargames; indeed, in some ways you can learn more from wargames than from reading history”

I agree. Gee has been telling us for most of the last decade that we can learn from games.

Kirschenbaum went to the recent Connections wargaming conference. He says wargaming has a rich history:

Indeed, the Connections conference advertised itself as being held on the 200^th anniversary of the “invention” of wargaming. What can this mean, with games like Chess and Go dating back to antiquity? In the early 1800s, the Prussian staff officer Georg von Reisswitz formally introduced his Kriegsspiel, a game played by laying metal bars across maps to mark troop dispositions (derived from a set his father had made up) to his fellow officers. “This is not a game! This is training for war!” one general is said to have exclaimed. (The authoritative account of the origins and development of Kriegsspiel is to be found in Peter Perla’s excellent The Art of Wargaming.)

One of the key elements of beneficial learning players obtain by engaging in these games is not so much historical knowledge, but rather decision making skills. When faced with limited resources, for instance, in times of high crisis such as war, what are the best decisions a leader can make? Better yet, what are the best skills a leader can acquire so that he or she can make the best critical decisions when previously unforeseen circumstances arise? It is within this context that wargames provide a beneficial sandbox.

Most of the action seems to involve sitting around a table and talking (sometimes colloquially referred to as BOGSAT, “Bunch of Guys [and Girls] Sitting Around a Table” by those in the know). Such games, which are staged not only by the Pentagon but also by corporate consulting firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, can be about response to a global pandemic or an interruption in the supply chain for a manufacturing process as well as military operations and contingencies. Wargaming, increasingly, is a term as likely to be encountered in a business leadership seminar as inside a Beltway think tank.

The article hardly qualifies as a blog post. It is more along the lines of something one would read in The Atlantic. It’s a very interesting perspective and well worth the read.

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Study: Predicting Player Behavior and How Zynga Profits from Data Analysis

An interesting front page story in The Wall Street Journal today by journalist Nick Wingfield discusses how casual gaming giant Zynga cashes in on their millions of players. After developing Fishville, following in the footsteps of highly successful titles like Farmville, managers noted players spending in-game currency on one type of fish more so than others. The “translucent angler fish” was being purchased more than 6 times the rate of other virtual fish. So the company quickly developed a whole line of translucent sea creatures, charging as much as $4 (this time, in real world money) for more exotic varieties.

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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2011 International Serious Play Award Winners Announced

Here’s a press release announcing the winners of the 2011 International Serious Play Awards. Special congrats to the team from Texas A&M and their gold medal for RiggleFish.

Also note bronze medal winner Virulent, which I blogged about earlier this summer.

SEATTLE – Aug. 25, 2011 – Twenty serious games were chosen by a panel of experts, as medal winners at the 2011 International Serious Play Awards, a program distinguishing superior examples of corporate, military, healthcare and school/at home learning titles. The winners were selected at the Serious Play Conference, Tuesday – Thursday, August 23 – 25, 2011 at DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash.

Air Medic Sky One, created by University Medical Center Utrecht, was awarded Best of Show.

The award program received submissions from commercial organizations, seasoned and emerging development studios as well as students. This year’s entries included 13 international submissions.

“Games for learning are moving onto every platform, from iPads to Smart phones,” said Clark Aldrich, conference director.

Commercial Organization/Development Studio Awards:

Gold Medal Winners:

• Air Medic Sky One, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands (Games for Health)
• Aircraft Marshalling Virtual Trainer, Heartwood Inc. (Government/Military)
• Gamestar Mechanic, E-Line Media (Education)
• RoboMath, Project Whitecard Inc. (Education)
• Motion Math HD, Motion Math (Consumer Game)
• RiggleFish, Texas A&M University (Education)
Silver Medal Winners:

• McGraw-Hill Education Practice Marketing, McGraw-Hill Education International and Muzzy Lane SW (Education)
• Fate of the World, Red Redemption Ltd. (Games for Good)
• Play True Challenge, World Anti-Doping Agency (Games for Good)
• SpaceChem, Zachtronics Industries (Consumer Game)
• Emergency Birth, Engender Games Group Lab – University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (Games for Good)
• Treadsylvania, New Mexico State University Learning Games Lab (At Home Learning)

Bronze Medal Winners:

• Distraction Dodger, Web Courseworks (Education)
• MiddWorld Online Language Roleplay Game, Middlebury Interactive Languages and Muzzy Lane SW (Education)
• Waterkeeper, First Nations Education Steering Committee (Education)
• Game for Science, CREO (At Home Learning)
• Primaires à gauche, Le Monde (Games for Good)
• Virulent, Morgridge Institute for Research (At Home Learning)
• International Racing Squirrels, Playniac (Consumer Game)
• Devil’s Advocate, UCF Retro Lab (Government/Military)

The Serious Play Student Award was sponsored by Microsoft Corporation.

All commercial entries were also reviewed for Serious Play Certification, which assures that a serious game offers a high standard of performance. Certified games are given Serious Play Certification and a 2011 Seal of Approval. Certification is valid for three years.

For more information, visit www.seriousplayconference.com

Contact:

Samantha Owyang/Robert Brown
The Bohle Company for Serious Play
(310) 785-0515 ext. 232/231

Center for Children and Technology Reports on DS Games at AERA

I’m honored to be invited to participate in a discussion group this fall put together by the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology (EDC/CCT). The research this group is involved with in the field of classroom gaming is impressive.

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.

2011 International Serious Play Finalists

Here’s a press release concerning the International Serious Play Conference. Congrats to all involved.

SEATTLE – August 22, 2011 – A panel of experts have selected 20 games as finalists in the 2011 International Serious Play Awards, a recognition program honoring outstanding examples of corporate, military, health care and school/at home learning titles. The games will be featured and final winners and a Best of Show selected at the Serious Play Conference, Tuesday – Thursday, August 22 -24, 2011 at DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash.

The award program received submissions from commercial organizations, seasoned and emerging development studios as well as students. This year’s entries included 13 international submissions.

Commercial Organization/Development Studio Finalists include:

• Air Medic Sky One, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands (Games for Health)
• Aircraft Marshalling Virtual Trainer, Heartwood Inc. (Government/Military)
• Virtual Reality Dome Controller, TNO Defense & Safety and VisionShiftStudios (Government/Military)
• Distraction Dodger, Web Courseworks (Education)
• Gamestar Mechanic, E-Line Media (Education )
• McGraw-Hill Education Practice Marketing, McGraw-Hill Education International (Education)
• MiddWorld Online Language Roleplay Game, Middlebury Interactive Languages (Education)
• Waterkeeper, First Nations Education Steering Committee (Education)
• RoboMath, Project Whitecard Inc. (Education)
• Game for Science, CREO (Games for At Home Learning)
• Virulent, Morgridge Institute for Research (Games for At Home Learning)
• Play True Challenge, World Anti-Doping Agency (Games for Good)
• Primaires à gauche, Le Monde (Games for Good)
• Fate of the World, Red Redemption Ltd. (Games for Good)
• International Racing Squirrels, Playniac (Consumer Game)
• Motion Math HD, Motion Math (Consumer Game)
• SpaceChem, Zachtronics Industries (Consumer Game)

Student Finalists:

• Emergency Birth, Engender Games Group Lab – University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (Games for Good)
• Treadsylvania, New Mexico State University Learning Games Lab (At Home Learning)
• RiggleFish, Texas A&M University (Education)

The Serious Play Student Award was sponsored by Microsoft Corporation.

All commercial entries were also reviewed for Serious Play Certification, which assures that a serious game offers a high standard of performance. Certified games will be given Serious Play Certification and a 2011 Seal of Approval. Certification will be valid for three years.

Finalist entries will be on display at the Serious Play Conference. Attendees will have a chance to play the games and vote for the Best of Show award. Winners will be announced Wednesday, August 23 at the Awards Reception.

For more information, visit www.seriousplayconference.com

Contact:

Samantha Owyang
The Bohle Company for Serious Play
(310) 785-0515 ext. 232

Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor Researches and Designs Social Games

I’ve been conversing via e-mail with Dr. Mary Flanagan, the founder of Tiltfactor at Dartmouth, where she is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities. Dr. Flanagan and Tiltfactor are doing exciting work in educational gaming. One of the key areas many researchers think it’s strongest is the social arena. This is where “fuzzy” concepts that are so difficult to teach through reading and lecturing can be more effectively transmitted via gaming. Consequently, Tiltfactor focuses on social games, including health and educational initiatives. Here’s a paragraph from their website explaining the organization’s purpose:

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.

Check Out Virulent, a Hot New Medical Game in Development

One of the hottest areas in educational gaming at the moment is in the medical field, where players can be immersed in virtual biological environments. I’ve been corresponding by e-mail with Nathan Patterson at the Morgridge Institute for Research, a nonprofit biomedical research institute. Nathan sent a note describing what his team has been working on lately:

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: