Living and Learning on the Holodeck

Okay, I finally got this technology figured out. And thus begins my blog on the potential use of Video Games in Education (Or I should say, the transfer of my blog onto the internet, as I have been producing it in written form since I began the play of Age of Empires III). However, within this blog, I will not be restricting myself to “Education” only in the classroom definition, as videogame simulation environments have become popular in the training of military and medical personnel (as I will show), as well as in other areas. In addition, I will not be restricting myself to the present environment, as the “potential” use of videogames in the near future is a much more interesting topic. However, this is not a stretch: if we consider how the Internet has changed certain behaviors in all of our lives, and the internet is only (realistically) say 40 years old.

There is always the potential that a new innovation could come along and change the way we approach education (afterall, a person wishing to begin with Matlab or Excel can quickly find a “how to” on YouTube and receive a Audio/Visual walk through; whereas, even 5 years ago, a person would have to find a web page “how to” on the Internet and actually READ THE PAGE (“…the Horror. the Horror” I know).

Regardless, I will now begin listing some of my notes taken in my discovery of Age of Empires III; with the preface that I will expand this blog to encompass the larger topic of the potential use of videogames in educational goals in letter blog posts:

8/31/08 – Testing out Age of Empires III as a potential game choice

Hypothesis behind game choice: “AoE III allows a player to embody a real life character from History, and through simulations based in a historical context, allows the player to learn about history in an entertaining way.” (this hypothesis turned out to be wrong for this game, but I will get to that in later blog posts).

Game Introduction: vivid, nice graphics, lots of work on sound elements, impelling story.
Game Tutorial: the game tutorial is absolutely excellent! Seriously, as I go through the walk-through I am thinking I could write my entire paper on just the “Game Tutorial” part of games: afterall, this is where the player is begin “taught” how to play the game (and it works successfully in this case, even without ever having looked at a “game manual.” If VCR’s came with this kind of Audio/Video Tutorial built in, a great deal more people would know how to program them and they wouldn’t flash “12:00” all the time.). And if you think about it, a videogame is a very complex thing to teach, there is an AWFUL LOT going on to learn how to play well.

In this case, a female voice reads instructions to the user that are also repeated in text formal in a corner of the screen (just incase you misunderstood a part, you can reread it).
This instruction happens in an interactive way: that is, the player must click with the right-or-left mouse-click on the appropriate areas of the screen as dictated by the female instructor (in order for the Tutorial to proceed forward step by step). In other words, the tutorial is interactive, and the player cannot reach the end without having followed the instruction and processed the information enough to follow along. From a Computer Science point of view, it would be very easy to set a software marker as to whether the player (or “student”) made it to the end of the Tutorial. However, in this case, the player is very “motivated” to pay attention and get through the tutorial because he or she really wants to play the game. The idea that the student would not be “motivated” to go through the Tutorial in order to play the game, just means that wasn’t a very good videogame.

Regardless, the player learns the following skills in the Tutorial in a very short period of time (and a very straightforward and non-time-wasting way, I might add): how to select your characters or buildings with a left-mouse click (or dragging mouse movement to select multiple characters), how simply moving the mouse pointer over an item displays additional instructions in the corner of the screen (an additional but seamless form of “in game” learning that also deserves mentioning), how to execute an action with a right-mouse click upon the object which is intended to receive the action, how the screen is divided into three sections (with “game action” taking place in the middle section, and the upper and lower section intended mainly to provide information for the player), and finally, what different colored icons mean. This last part is very important as well: if the game is like a map, the Tutorial can be thought of as the “Map Key,” providing interpretation for symbols and colors that have no obvious meaning otherwise. It is interesting to think that the Computer may have been the first device that could roll complexity into Audio/Visual Tutorials of how to interpret and unravel that complexity, effectively.