Weight Watchers, the Video Game

Here’s an interesting article from Clive Thompson over at Wired comparing Weight Watchers Online to MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. There are many similarities, Thompson notes, including leveling and rewards. He’s got a great point. I noticed the same thing about my kids’ tae kwon do classes. Of course the idea of designing work teams modeled after WoW guilds is not new, either. Here’s a closer look at the idea of “Corporate Warcraft.”

Beck and Wade pointed out, and are echoed by people like Karl Kapp, that young workers often approach work in a gaming framing of mind. Work objectives become “quests,” paychecks bring in “gold,” promotions equate to “leveling up,” and their bosses either become “guild leaders,” or “dungeon bosses,” depending on whether they help or hinder the employees (“players”) in attaining their quests.

So the idea of making other life goals into games, such as placing diet and fitness within a MMORPG framework, makes good sense. I agree with Thompson. Weight Watchers has something going there.

Study: World of Warcraft Eases Stress

Alas, this research isn’t published yet, but it was presented at the British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference in April. Jane Barnett over at Middlesex University spearheaded the effort. Here is a paragraph from a write up in Edge:

The psychologists studied 292 male and female online gamers playing World of Warcraft. They found that overall the gamers, aged between 12 and 83, were more likely to feel calm or tired after playing, although there were differences depending on sex, age and personality.

So far, the findings seem to be interpreted by the press as making a generalizing statement that feelings of relaxation tend to be experienced by violent videogame players. However, it appears this is foundational research in an effort to come up with a predictive instrument to measure proclivities toward real world violence among players. Barnett indicated the findings will help her team develop a more nuanced questionnaire for future efforts in an attempt to ferret out which players may exhibit a tendency to transfer virtual aggression to the real world.

References:
Study: Violent games relax players. (2008, April 2). [Online]. Available: http://www.edge-online.com/news/study-violent-games-relax-players

Study: MMORPGs Critical in Developing Tomorrow's Business Leaders

One of the neat things about educational videogames is the vast multitude of angles the research can take. Whether it is military/industrial applications, classroom adaptations, or medical appropriations, videogames can be used and studied in a wide variety of educational settings. Matthew Kirdahy has a nice article over at Sify.com on how playing MMORPGs can lead to enhanced business skills. Kirdahy gives a nod to another article appearing in the May issue of Harvard Business Review that marks the culmination of considerable research on the topic.

The article’s authors, Byron Reeves (Stanford University), Thomas W. Malone (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Tony O’Driscoll (North Carolina State), found that leadership in online games offers a sneak preview of tomorrow’s business world. In fact, they said these games exhibit leadership abilities crucial to the future of business.

Here is the key paragraph from the HBR article regarding the sometimes serendipitous but always interesting findings:

A number of our conclusions about the future of business leadership were unanticipated. For one, individuals you’d never expect to identify—and who’d never expect to be identified—as “high potentials” for real-world management training end up taking on significant leadership roles in games. Even more provocative was our finding that successful leadership in online games has less to do with the attributes of individual leaders than with the game environment, as created by the developer and enhanced by the gamers themselves. Furthermore, some characteristics of that environment—for example, immediate compensation for successful completion of a project with nonmonetary incentives, such as points for commitment and game performance—represent more than mere foreshadowing of how leadership might evolve.

Fortunately, of the article’s authors, Dr. O’Driscoll (now at Duke) has blogged extensively about the research behind the paper. You can find his most recent entry regarding what resulted in the HBR product here. A thorough write-up, with lots of links to articles, podcasts and work leading up to the findings can be found here.

Harvard Business School is no stranger to publishing research on video gaming and business applications. Beck and Wade published Got Game way back in 2004.

References:
Beck, J. C., & Wade, M. (2004). Got game: How the gamer generation is reshaping business forever. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Kirdahy, M. (2008). How online videogames can help groom biz leaders. [Online]. Available: http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=14721468

Reeves, B., Malone, T. W., & O’Driscoll, T. (2008, May). Leadership’s online labs. Harvard Business Review. [Online]. Available: http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp;jsessionid=
3FGSKMZGNNJNSAKRGWDR5VQBKE0YIISW?ml_action=get-article&
articleID=R0805C&ml_page=1&ml_subscriber=true

Games Empower Learners: Gee’s Speech at GLS4

James Paul Gee over at Arizona State is renowned among educational gamers because he wrote what is widely considered to be the first scholarly book on educational applications of videogames: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003). Recently, he keynoted the 4th annual Games, Learning, and Society Conference. Michael Abbott over at Gamasutra caught up with him and detailed the meat of his speech here. Some excerpts:

Gee sees the current U.S. educational system as inadequate to the task of addressing the problems of an increasingly complex world. He stated that “21st century learning must be about understanding complex systems,” and he believes many video games do a better job at this than the antiquated sender-receiver teaching model that dominates American classrooms.

Passion communities encourage and enable people of all ages to do extraordinary things. Gee believes the ‘amateur knowledge’ that arises from this immersive involvement often surpasses ‘expert knowledge,’ and cited fantasy baseball as an example.

Other highlights:

- Passion communities give users power and control, not necessarily money.

- He cites a young lady who learned PhotoShop in order to make better clothes for her Sims characters, later for avatars in Second Life. She remains uninterested in fashion, though, preferring computers because they empower her.

- Gee cited the game Portal, which could be construed as a parody of school life, as a means of allowing players tools to construct reality in the game’s environment. RL schools should be like this, Gee mused. “Education isn’t about telling people stuff, it’s about giving them tools that enable them to see the world in a new and useful way.”

- Complex games engender involvement in whole new ways for players. Mods allow players to manipulate the environment in ways they see fit. Mods are tools allowing players to put personal play theories to the test.

Abbot sums up:

Gee clearly situates video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy with genuine power to transform students and equip them to address complex problems.

References:
Abbot, M. (2008, July 14). Analysis: Games create ‘passion communities’ for learning. Gamasutra. [Online]. Available: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19389

Virtual Lemonade Stands Earn Real Money

Training for the epic flying mount skill in World of Warcraft costs 5000 gold. As I pursued this amount, mainly through cornering the auction house market on various primal cloths (at one brief point I was commanding prices of 95 gold each), I remarked to my wife how nice it would be to make money this easy in the real world.

So it was with interest I read that rather than toiling in RL this summer, some high school and college students are translating their virtual labor into real cash. The Wall Street Journal generated buzz with this article by Alexandra Alter about kids pursuing money making opportunities in games and online worlds rather than flipping burgers or some other typical summer job.

The key site for raking in the bucks, according to Alter, is Entropia Universe, where one teen profiled in the article claims to have earned $35,000 over four years, or about $730/month. Not bad coin.

In the real world, summer jobs are in short supply. Only about a third of teenagers are expected to work this summer, the lowest levels in 60 years, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Summer youth employment has fallen from about 45% of teens in 2000, a downward trend made worse this year by the faltering economy.

But money-making opportunities in virtual worlds have grown as such sites go mainstream. Research firm Gartner Media estimates that by 2011, 80% of Internet users worldwide will have an avatar, making animated online personas as common as screen names. Such companies as IBM and Adidas have moved into Second Life, helping to drive employment.

The differences between Second Life and Entropia Universe appear to revolve around the need for heavier programming skills in SL. Skilled programmers can design virtual clothing or architecture in SL, for instance. In Entropia Universe, “crafted” items are in demand that involve time on the part of players to develop. These can then be sold to other players, much like “crafted” items in traditional MMORPGs. Activities like hunting, mining, and tailoring are offered in EU.

So, essentially, EU offers many of the activities a traditional MMORPG offers, with the possibility of earning real money from time and effort spent in the world. Users can add or withdraw real money, converting it into or from virtual funds through an ATM card.

Most of the research around the SL and EU economies seem to stem from marketing firms, although SL also has a strong history of academic interest.

References:

Alter, A. (2008, May 16). My virtual summer job. The Wall Street Journal. [Online.] Available: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121088619095596515.html

Games Boom Despite Food & Fuel Costs

Today is the release date for the fourth installment in the Grand Theft Auto titles, otherwise known as GTA IV. This highly popular, sex and violence saturated series has generated plenty of publicity (mostly negative) for its publisher, Rockstar Games. Some interesting factoids can be gleaned from an article in the New York Times by Matt Richtel.

Richtel focuses on several college students and twenty-somethings who profess to barely have enough money to eat each month, but are more than willing to shell out $60 for GTA IV (or $90 for the collectors’ edition). Sales of five million copies are expected in coming days.

The so-called addictive nature of games is also brought up, with quotes from the only academic in the article:

“When gamers are in it, it’s like a druglike state. It feels so good,” said Jennifer Aaker, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. She said players face constant challenges and receive instant feedback, a superstimulating artificial environment.

Not only is the play experience emotional, but the purchase is emotional, too, Professor Aaker said. Players want to be the first to buy the game and master it, sweeping aside the matter of affordability.

“The last thing that comes to mind is: ‘Can I afford it?’ That question isn’t even on the radar,” Professor Aaker said. “The question is: How fast can I buy it?”

Not mentioned, but clearly related to the popularity of the series is its wide-open world approach, wherein players are not required to follow any set rules or instructions. Instead, players can simply do what they want in the environment. Such approaches are also popular in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft.

Another interesting tidbit Richtel referenced in the article is the fact the gaming industry is booming despite hardships felt elsewhere such as rising food and fuel costs. Sales of consoles and titles are up across the board; GameStop excels while other retailers suffer.

References:
Richtel, M. (2008, April 29). For gamers, the craving won’t quit. New York Times. [Online.] Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/technology/29game.html?

Interesting Sessions at Games for Health, 2008

Games for Health, 2008 will be held May 8-9 in Baltimore. Here are some of the sessions I found particularly interesting:

A Randomized Controlled Study of the Effectiveness of Casual Video Games in Reducing Stress and Improving Mood
Carmen Russoniello, Eastern Carolina University

Should “Videogame Addiction” be in DSM-V?
Jack Kuo, Promises Treatment Centers

The World of Warcraft Blood Disease : Epidemiological Observations and Findings
Nina Fefferman, Tufts University

PDwii: Using Novel Interfaces to Promote Physical Rehabilitation & Achieve Quantifiable Results
Red Hill Studios

The one by Fefferman on the WoW disease will be intriguing because it will attempt to show how dynamic virtual environments can represent RL phenomena. I’ve covered Wii-hab, stress reduction, and the question of including videogame “addiction” in DSM-V here. (In a word, the answer to this question is, “No.”)

There are many more sessions, and all of them look inviting. The Games for Health conference is always chock full of good content, and this year will be no exception.

The Cell Phone Book: Interactive Literacy for New Media

Mike Elgan over at Computerworld has a nice column discussing the much ballyhooed indicators showing a decline in reading and literacy since the early 20th Century. People just don’t read anymore, and Elgan points out where Steve Jobs said much the same thing recently (good thing they still listen to music, ay?).

But then, Elgan points out that half of the top 10 best selling books in Japan last year started out as cell phone books.

The books-on-phones genre started when a home-page-making Web site company realized that people in Japan were writing serialized novels on their blogs, and figured out how to autocreate cell phone-based novels from the blog entries.

The popularity of these blog novels on cell phones sparked huge interest among readers in writing such novels. Last month, the site passed the 1 million novel mark.

Some of these amateur writers become so famous on the cell phone medium that the big publishing houses seek them out and offer lucrative deals for print versions. The No. 5 best-selling print book in Japan last year, according to the [New York] Times, was written first on a cell phone by a girl during her senior year in high school.

Contributing to the cell phone book craze in Japan are long commutes where book reading is hard to do, but scanning the ubiquitous cell phone is easy and convenient. The Japanese have figured out a way to make reading participatory, through cell phones and blogs explains Elgan. In America, participatory entertainment such as videogames are squeezing out passive entertainment. Thus the decline in reading.

At least, the decline in reading of books. Elgan points out something I’ve long held to be true: students are reading and writing gobs of data through text messaging, videogaming, e-mailing, web surfing, etc. etc. I look at the volume of words processed by my kids in online games such as World of Warcraft, and can only marvel at the typing speeds they’ve attained.

It boils down to literacy events in the life of a child. The exposure to text, in whatever venue, increases the reading and writing skills of children. If children read a book, a comic book, or the story line in a videogame, they are reading. And that makes all the difference.

References:
Elgan, M. (2008, January 31). Elgan: Will cell phones save books? Computerworld. [Online.] Available: http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic
&articleId=9060501&pageNumber=1

Peer Review a Gaming Text Via Blog; Read a Classic for Free

Noah Waldrip-Fruin is embarking upon a grand experiment this week by having his latest book peer-reviewed via blog. Waldrip-Fruin, over at UC San Diego, is well known in academic gaming circles for co-editing with Pat Harrigan First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media.

As first widely reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education today by Jeff Young, Waldrip-Fruin discussed peer review of his newest book with his editor at MIT Press: Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. What better place than Grand Text Auto, the far-reaching academic blog that Waldrip-Fruin runs along with Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Andrew Stern? And so it is the book will be made available on the blog, in modified format, entered as blog entries to be available for comment by readers. The first excerpt slash blog entry is here.

In related news, Julian Dibbell wrote a book some time back about a text-based online world that predated Second Life, World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Ultima Online, etc. etc. These text-based multi-user dungeons/domains remained popular into the 1990s. I recall messing around in them on mainframes back in the day (though I was more enamored with the graphical stuff Richard Garriott was producing, I must say). Rumor has it, there remains a small contingent of passionate devotees who sneer at graphical worlds in contempt. Hm.

My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World covers the world of LambdaMOO in the early 1990s. Without getting too technical, a MOO is sort of an advanced MUD, that allowed users opportunities to program the environment. Dibbell’s book delves into topics SL is now grappling with years later in more graphical environs.

This month marks the 9th anniversary of My Tiny Life’s publication. Dibbell recounts his noble idea of placing the work under creative commons licensing, since the publisher let it go out of print. Although the arrangement would mean no royalties for the author, the text might well have enjoyed a renaissance and gained a wider audience.

I was going to announce today that MY TINY LIFE had been liberated — not merely launched anew but born again under a Creative Commons “copyleft” license and thus set loose for any passing amateur to upload, remix, mashup, and otherwise repurpose in all the many fruitful ways that copyright, precisely, fails to permit.

Alas, quirks in copyright law have prevented that, so Dibbell has offered the text as a free download from Lulu.com.

So read an old gaming text for free, and help review a new one. All is possible through the power of the Internet.

NASA Looks to Build Educational MMO

Dr. Daniel Laughlin, Project Manager over at NASA’s Learning Technologies, Goddard Space Flight Center, announced recently that NASA has released a Request for Information (RFI) regarding the development of a NASA-themed MMO aimed at middle/high school students to college students. The vision for the MMO is one designed for educating students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) using NASA educational materials and appropriate learning game activities and simulations within the MMO (i.e, not necessarily “World of Warcraft in Space.”)

The thinking is, an exciting STEM MMO will encourage students to pursue careers in STEM fields. Here’s the main copy regarding the reasoning behind NASA LT’s latest initiative:

Persistent immersive synthetic environments in the form of massive multiplayer online gaming and social virtual worlds, initially popularized as gaming and social settings, are now finding growing interest as education and training venues. There is increasing recognition that these synthetic environments can serve as powerful “hands-on” tools for teaching a range of complex subjects, including STEM-based instruction. Virtual worlds with scientifically accurate simulations could permit learners to tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, and experience microgravity – making it easier to grasp complex concepts and quickly transfer this understanding to practical problems. MMOs help players develop and exercise a skill set closely matching the thinking, planning, learning, and technical skills increasingly in demand by employers today. These skills include strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, team-building and collaboration, and adaptation to rapid change.

The power of games as educational tools is rapidly gaining recognition. NASA is in a position to develop an online game that functions as a persistent, synthetic environment supporting education as a laboratory, a massive visualization tool, and collaborative workspace while simultaneously drawing users into a challenging, game-play experience.

Submitters to the RFI are expected to address the following:

1. How a NASA-based educational MMO should be designed.
2. How a NASA-based educational MMO should support both formal and informal education efforts.
3. How a NASA-based educational MMO should connect to current and future NASA missions.
4. How NASA career opportunities exploration and significant STEM learning experiences would be incorporated into the design [of] a NASA- based educational MMO.
5. How a NASA-based educational MMO game play would be engaging for all participants.

In due course, a request for proposals (RFP) should be forthcoming. For more details, visit the MMORFI information at SpaceRef.com, and the NASA MMO Game page.