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.

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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No Indoor Plumbing, but Plenty of Ethernet

Thanks to Tony Bates for pointing out the latest issue of Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. There’s a very interesting article, complete with photo spread, on a Chinese gold farm for World of Warcraft by Anthony Gilmore.

Far from the sophisticated urban centers marking China as a world power, this rural tech outpost employs folks around the clock, and pays them a decent local wage for their efforts. The article is quite positive toward this gray market endeavor despite its violation of WoW players’ TOS.

I’ve never bought gold in WoW (at the higher levels, making gold is rather easy, particularly when gaming the auction house), but I’ve always been curious about gold farmers. This article is worth a read.

References:
Gilmore, A. (2010, February). China’s new gold farm. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 2(4). [Online.] Available: https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/863/628

New 3D Learning Book by Karl Kapp

Karl Kapp is a longtime friend of this blog. His first comment was on a post comparing Second Life to World of Warcraft for educational purposes, way back in 2007, and his blog, Kapp Notes, has been on my blogroll ever since. Dr. Kapp is a full professor of instructional technology over at Bloomsburg University, and is a prominent thought leader and author in the field.

One of the things several researchers in educational gaming picked up on early was the facilitation immersive worlds featuring human-like avatars offered for teaching and learning. This idea has come to be generally termed “3D learning,” because the virtual gaming worlds in which it takes place are rendered in three dimensional graphics. It feels like you are in the world instead of simply playing a board game.

It seems to be a powerful learning tool, and has attracted a lot of attention from educational researchers. Perhaps, researchers suspect, there is something to the notion of transference, where players feels like they are experiencing what their avatar in the 3D virtual world is going through and go on to transfer knowledge from that virtual world to real life applications. Perhaps it is conducive to Csíkszentmihályi’s flow theory, where time becomes irrelevant in the pursuit of passionate tasks. Regardless, it’s an intriguing idea that researchers continue to investigate.

Karl Kapp’s latest book, co-authored with Tony O’Driscoll, explores the ramifications of teaching and learning within these immersive virtual environments. Aptly titled, Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration, provides a blueprint for corporate and educational professional development personnel when embarking on efforts to include this type of training in their organizations. Recently, Dr. Kapp made a digital preview of the book available to several bloggers, and embarked on a “virtual book tour.” I was honored to be included on the list, and found the book to be impressive.

I think one of the key contributions to the field this book makes is its insistence that 3D learning is a valid and valuable tool for both corporations and universities. For instance, the whole idea of role playing within virtual 3D environments is supported and reinforced in the book. Business personnel have long known the value of role playing within training regimens. I recall a conversation with someone familiar with the training program for the sales force of a Fortune 100 company. An artificial office environment was created, complete with cameras and recording equipment. The trainee would enter the office and attempt to sell the company’s products to another employee posing as a potential client. Trainers would later review the recordings and help the trainee hone techniques. This entire process is greatly facilitated through 3D virtualization, as the book makes clear.

On an entirely selfish note, I was glad to see the acronym “VIE” included, something I introduced to the field in 2007 in an article in the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. I called it a virtual interactive environment, while Kapp and O’Driscoll use it to mean virtual immersive environment. Regardless, it amounts to the same thing, and I’m glad to see the idea spread. Education and corporations can use a lot more VIEs.

Five Video Games for ESL and Language Development

Kathy Sargent, outgoing editor for TechEdge, (who is a great editor and has done a remarkable job over the years as Director of Communications for TCEA) recently accepted my article on “Virtual ESL” for the next issue. This post expands on the article with games suitable for ESL and the ongoing development of English skills. Certain video games are particularly well-suited to language acquisition and development, a point I made here a couple years ago. There is a heavy dollop of personal opinion in the assertions below, and I welcome dissenting views. Some of these suggestions are relatively expensive, some are free, and all but one are available online.

1. Second Life
   Second Life has a long history of educational adaptation, and the idea of using the environment for ESL purposes was adopted early. Like many efforts with no external motivations however, some formal ESL initiatives have fizzled over time. One still going strong is the Second Life English Community. Founder Kip Boahn had a nice article profiling his work in Forbes a while back. Players from almost 100 different countries regularly gather for such online ESL activities as phonetic treasure hunts through SLEC.

   The global reach, open nature, and ease of use offered by SL, (not to mention the fact it’s free), have helped academics around the world key in to the platform for language training. Since avatars can type or talk over a simple computer connection, engaging native speakers in an interesting 3D environment that is not overly taxing to most hardware results in an ideal environment for language learning.
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2. World of Warcraft.
   Of the millions of players frequenting the popular MMORPG, you might be surprised to learn there are some engaged in educational activities amidst all that medieval fantasy action. The most famous group devoted to exploring pedagogy in WoW is the guild Cognitive Dissonance, run by Lucas Gillespie and Peggy Sheehy. Lucas’ blog EduRealms follows his educational efforts in the game.

   It is very easy to start up groups and guilds in WoW, and while Asian gold farmers have annoyed North American players in the past, Dr. Edd Schneider over at SUNY-Potsdam gained considerable attention in 2007 for suggesting WoW was a promising platform for ESL in Asia, provided stateside supervised guidance was included.
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3. My Word Coach
   Although available for the Wii, the DS version of My Word Coach offers players an easier time writing, with its included stylus and touch screen. Plus, the “DS factor” makes it more portable and affordable for classroom or after-school use. It’s not promoted as an ESL product, but the vocabulary training couched in a gaming environment works just as well for non-native speakers.
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4. Webkinz
   The popular children’s game tied to collectible plush dolls offers a restricted communications feature. “Kinz chat” uses basic sentence elements for players to communicate. While Webkinz probably is not suitable to older ESL students, for the younger crowd it offers a fun and relatively painless way to introduce English. It’s also offered in 12 other languages, so gamers can play in their native tongue as well as the Queen’s.
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5. Whyville
   Whyville is the free online world designed for children learning, and it has an impressive pedigree with corporate and government sponsorship stretching back several years. Although its strengths lie in STEM games and activities, one of the key features of Whyville appealing to teachers is the sanitized chat feature where cursing is automatically edited out.

In the process of investigating the many mini-games out there, a couple of nifty titles rose to the top. The advantages to using online mini-games for ESL include the fact that teacher supervision is not as heavily needed as it is for the above examples. On the other hand, mini-games typically focus on a much narrower skill set, and kids may tire of them quickly.

A couple of my favorites in the mini-game category included Word Frog, which is a neat way to drill antonyms and such, ala Number Crunchers. I also enjoyed Grammar Ninja,which drills identifying parts of speech in a playful way.

Video Game Psychology: Hijacking a Dopamine Rush for Educational Purposes

Wai Yen Tang, who runs the excellent VG Researcher Blog, introduces us to The Psychology of Video Games Blog, run by Jamie Madigan, an author, programmer, and government personnel psychologist with a PhD in Organizational Psychology.

Dr. Madigan devotes his blog to exploring the psychology involved in making and playing games. His post Phat Loot and Neurotransmitters in World of Warcraft focuses on the reward system in WoW. He notes an early experience while leveling up a hunter, when a blue (high level) item dropped while he was still at a low level. This greatly encouraged his game play and led him to play even more in hopes of further random drops. Madigan draws a parallel with slot machine players, who likewise continue gambling in hopes of hitting another jackpot.

All of this has a neurological explanation, Madigan asserts. Dopamine in the brain is released in expectation of a wondrous event, such as hitting it big at the slots or finding a rare item in a video game. I think also intermittent reinforcement plays a role in gambling and gaming when there is truly no pattern evident for the rewards other than putting in the time (and in the case of gambling, the money).

So, from an educational perspective, obviously, there would be strong interest in leveraging the dopamine rush experienced by players for pedagogical purposes. The question is, can we adequately insert worthy content, say SAT study materials or state exam questions, into a game that provides the same rush as World of Warcraft (or slot machines, for that matter)?

World of Warcraft Goes to School, Part II

I was happy to plug Lucas Gillespie’s WoW in Schools wiki a few weeks ago, designed to offer a collaboration point for lesson materials centered on World of Warcraft. Since then, publicity for the effort has multiplied, and recently WoW staff became interested. They interviewed Gillespie and co- educational conspirator Peggy Sheehy, who helped start a guild aimed at educators, among many other things. (Love the guild’s name: Cognitive Dissonance.)

Some really good info here for teachers interested in starting a program for at risk and/or gifted kids. Typically, Sheehy and Gillespie said, this sort of program begins in an after school environment. Sheehy indicated kids who test at lower reading levels perform higher in a gaming context.

Other items of interest: Both indicated the highest levels of professional decorum must be maintained when playing online with kids, especially after hours. Said Sheehy: “We would not be embarrassed if the school board saw our chats or heard our discourse.”

Another striking tidbit was the enthusiasm of fellow educators. Again, from Sheehy:

I was just standing around the main office in my school one day, talking to my principal who’s a great guy and we have a nice relationship. I turned to him and I said, “Hey, you’re a gamer, aren’t you, Brian?” And he just kinda looked at me and said “Yeahhh … Why?” And I said, “I just leveled up! I just got to level 40 last night in World of Warcraft,” and he just kind of smiled. And then every once in a while, I’d make these comments to him, until one day I said “Level 70,” and he said, ” … you do know that I have like four level 80 ‘toons?”

Then I started hounding him to join the guild — and he did. So now there’s a whole new dynamic, because now when I go into a 10-man raid, the first thing I do is say, “Ok, I gotta make sure that my principal doesn’t die.” Now, when I talk to the kids at school, I’ll have my iPhone out and have Chest open or something and be looking at my armor, and the kids’ll say, “Let’s see Mr. Fox’s armor!” And then I get an e-mail from him saying, “I just had three kids come into the office and tell me I had to get more purples on my Hunter.”

Read the full transcript here.

World of Warcraft Goes to School

Lucas Gillespie, whose EduRealms site has long been on my blogroll, has started a wiki for teachers on using World of Warcraft in the classroom. In a recent entry, Gillespie notes that several educators use WoW, and the responses from those he’s shared the wiki with have been very positive.

Gillespie leads a guild with other teachers he works with along with several students, and he has long noted that enthusiasm for the game can be translated into increased educational moments of opportunity. Since MMORPGs are essentially dynamic databases of ever-changing statistics, math becomes a reasonable subject to explore in-game. Creative writing has long been a staple of gaming, and now machinima adds to that by introducing 21st Century skills to student assignments. Opportunities abound for critical thinking, too.

Read more on his article about using WoW in school here, and visit the wiki here.

Update: GameSetWatch has a better write-up here. Thanks, Eric!

Study: Scientific Method Best Taught in Video Games

Tom Hanson is editor of the highly regarded OpenEducation.net. We talked earlier via e-mail about an excellent post he has on empirical research by Constance Steinkuehler over at U. Wisconsin and doc student Sean Duncan. The title of their paper sums up nicely Steinkuehler’s and Duncan’s research: Scientific Habits of Mind Within Virtual Worlds, accepted for publication in the Journal of Science Education and Technology and due to appear in the Spring issue. They looked at online discussion forums for World of Warcraft, long the most popular MMORPG, and found the vast majority of the posts consisted of “social knowledge construction” rather then “social banter.” About 2,000 posts in 85 threads were examined.

Over half of the posts evidenced systems based reasoning, one in ten evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an evaluative epistemology in which
knowledge is treated as an open-ended process of evaluation and argument.

Steinkuehler and Duncan suggest that scientific habits of mind, developing proper skills of inquiry and increasing students’ scientific literacy, are not effectively developed in traditional school environments. On the other hand, virtual worlds and online games like World of Warcraft do engage students and encourage them to use the scientific method, or at least certain elements of it, along with teamwork and persistence to solve problems.

Hanson notes a recent interview in Wired between Dr. Steinkuehler and Clive Thompson, in which she describes her epiphany regarding the potential of MMORPGs for instilling scientific habits of mind. It occurred during 12 hour stints in Lineage, playing mostly with young boys scattered across the four corners. She and the boys would construct a theoretical model on defeating a raid boss, try it and see what worked; modify accordingly and try again. She realized she was witnessing the scientific method put to work within an online gaming environment, often without the participants realizing it. Thompson states it thusly:

This led Steinkuehler to a fascinating and provocative conclusion: Videogames are becoming the new hotbed of scientific thinking for kids today.

Click on over to Tom Hanson’s summary. I think you’ll find that his OpenEducation.net is well worth visiting.

The Art of Marriage Proposals Through Gaming

We Aggies know a thing or two about proposing to our beloved, especially if she is an Aggie too. (Alas, my wife is from Louisiana, where everybody professes loyalty to LSU, whether they attended that fine school or not.) There is one tree on the A&M campus in particular, the Century Tree, that has a tradition of serving as a pop-the-question spot for thousands of couples. Here’s a YouTube video of one such marriage proposal. (If a woman is lucky enough to be or snag a member of the Corps of Cadets, as in this video, she gets quite a bit of extra pomp and ceremony throughout the entire wedding process than the average Aggie these days. The Corps has dwindled from comprising the entire student body back in the day to a couple thousand or so students now.)

There have been many other creative proposals at TAMU over the years (probably mostly by guys who weren’t in the Corps (see parenthetical above)). During my graduation ceremony, for instance, an Aggie awaited his beloved to descend from the podium, her diploma in hand, before going down on one knee. The MC had been briefed ahead of time and paused in calling out names to wish them well, and everybody in the coliseum whooped and hollered for the couple.

Another story that comes to mind dates back to when a thriving hot air balloon business existed in College Station, and Kyle Field was left unlocked and accessible most of the time. The fellow had friends buy hundreds of paper plates, and had them spell out the Marry me? question on the bleachers so she could read it as they floated over in the balloon.

So, Aggies know a thing or two about proposing to their sweethearts. But there are lots of neat stories about guys finding creative ways to pop the question. I recall one fellow hiding the ring in a box of Cracker Jacks and setting up a picnic for his girlfriend on a cliff overlooking the ocean. After the couple finished off the meal, for desert he handed over the box, and waited nervously for her to open the “toy surprise.” She reared back her arm to toss the packet over the cliff, willing to carelessly toss away what was usually a cheap trinket. He went ballistic, grabbing her arm and yelling, “Wait!” She opened it, and was surprised, but it was a close call and he almost lost an expensive diamond engagement ring.

Guys dating women who like games seem to consistently hit upon the idea of sneaking marriage proposals into the game. Several men over the years have popped the question through crossword puzzles, convincing complicit editors to run rigged games. Here’s one example.

But finally, we have a real gaming geek story. This fellow re-programmed his girlfriend’s game so a ring and wedding cake appeared upon reaching a certain score. Bernie Peng ported over a copy of Bejeweled to the Nintendo DS, and gave it as a present to his girlfriend. There is no official version of Bejeweled for the DS, you see, so this was something special for her. Ordinarily such shenanigans might be frowned upon by corporate, but PopCap Games (owner of Bejeweled and other popular casual titles) turned it into a publicity event.

There have been marriages in virtual worlds, notably in Second Life and World of Warcraft. Somehow, cheating in marriage garners more publicity. But electronic marriage is old news, since any enhancement to communication leads inevitably to more social interaction. The book, The Victorian Internet, detailed a legal marriage performed at a distance via telegraph and Morse Code. But as video games continue to gain a stronghold in the public psyche, look for more social interactions like marriage, and social research, online.