Video Games & American Culture » February 24th: Serious Games

February 24th: Serious Games

Don’t forget to do your Weekly Discussion Post by Friday, 2/25, 11:00 pm. Set a reminder for the rest of the semester.

Plan for the Day

  • Go over Ch. 8 “Serious Games and Gamification—When Entertainment Is Not Enough”
  • Consider Constructivism, Behaviorism, Cognitive Learning
  • Look at a couple Serious Games
  • Return to Cultural Studies
  • Maybe Zombies…
  • I hope to have your What is American Culture? Essays graded by tomorrow or Saturday

Ch. 8 “Serious Games and Gamification”

As I mentioned in the Canvas prompt, Ch. 8 is more about education than video games. We’ll review the types of games that fall under “serious games,” but we’ll also consider the broader cultural place of video games. This is also the worst edited chapter and full of inefficient prose. For instance, if you were in my Editing class (ENGL 4183/5183), you would immediately revise the following way:

  • Original: Many researchers and practitioners in the serious games and gamification area will refer to subareas like school, military, health, or corporate. These are areas where there is historically a strong tradition for both use of and research on the use of serious games and gamification. (p. 242)
  • Revision: Many researchers and practitioners in the serious games and gamification area will refer to subareas like school, military, health, or corporate. These areas historically have a strong tradition for both using and researching serious games and gamification.
    (subtle difference when you remove nominalizations; the original and revision both adhere to the known-new contract)

Edutainment

  • The Oregon Trail (1985) is one of the most memorable edutainment games. I remember (back in the 1980s…) many girls would talk about how much they loved this game. It’s interesting that I never played the game because I loved history and could easily have been tricked into learning by playing this game. Let’s check out the intro of The Oregon Trail. Yes, we’re going to do a cultural analysis. How does game play (rewards in this case) reflect AMERICAN culture?
  • Interestingly, as long as I’m musing about the past, the only other game I remember girls* playing back then was Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? (1985). The game is definitely associated with education, and I remember my elementary and middle schools using this game.
  • p. 252: “Many edutainment games are consciously devised to mimic “normal” video games in order to make them more appealing….[but] they lack intrinsic motivation.”
  • p. 254: “the attitude among educators, researchers, and game developers toward edutainment titles is often one of deep skepticism.”

*These students were well under 18. They were girls. I didn’t know any adults who played video games (except for Leisure Suit Larry [1987], which kind of has a Saved by the Bell look).

Political Games

One of the political games that comes to mind is Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th (p. 245 in the textbook). You can’t win. Let’s see some game play. What does the game teach? Notice the introduction screen.

One of the textbook authors, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, produced Global Conflicts: Palestine (Serious Games Interactive 2008), but let’s look at an earlier game first: Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator (Virgin Mastertronic 1990).

Of course, the perspicacious student will recognize that all games are political (in the context of this class), and we should not ignore that. For instance, Ian Bogost, the often-cited video game scholar, discusses an educational game in his work (Bogost 29). I, of course, have a critique:

A clear example of ignoring the cultural context of video games comes in Bogost’s discussion of “Tactical Iraqi, a learning game designed to teach U.S. soldiers Arabic language” for their military deployments. The game’s creator, Elizabeth Losh, laments “find[ing] myself with an even more serious reservation about the game . . . realiz[ing] that the purpose of the game might be rhetorical not pedagogical.” Of course, there is no way to separate rhetoric from pedagogy. Losh appears to use rhetorical in a popular sense that means political speech used to win over audiences. Bogost continues with “Losh suggests, as an expressive artifact, the project might serve an agenda different from its primary one, namely drawing attention to a video game training system to distract critics from America’s military occupations of Iraq”; also, “its rhetoric is accomplished through media speech, not through process.” What he ignores is that, as a cultural product, created by the need to have translators in Iraq, this video game represents American empire and aggression. This technology serves a pedagogical purpose, but that purpose has nothing to do with media attention covering the game because it is an artifact reflecting American hegemonic goals of conquest under the guise of making Saddam Hussein responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the context of the invasion of Iraq and the George W. Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” the video game is a tool of empire.
…
Narrowly focusing on procedures may ignore what drove the need for a system. After all, technologies respond to social demands, often filtered through hegemonic interests.

Toscano, 2020, p. 28; internal quotes from Bogost, 2007, p. 48

Advertainment

I don’t think we need to play any of these games in class to do a cultural analysis. Why would these types of games be created? Notice that I’m not asking why would they be popular. The book made it clear that these aren’t the most popular types of games–possible exception America’s Army (Ubisoft, US Army, Sega 2002) (p. 261).

  • What mediates advertainment?
  • What economic factors make advertising in general necessary?
  • What are the “games” companies create to attract you to their brands?
  • p. 246: “advertainment…rel[ies] on sweepstakes wrapped in a very simple quiz-like or other basic game mechanic. In addition, e-Sports now allows an easier way to reach the same audience.”

Important Terms from the Chapter

  • behaviorism: learning happens solely through repetition and positive/negative stimuli
  • cognitive learning: (as a direct response to behaviorism) building on one’s prior knowledge to learn new concepts
  • constructivism: one learns not through passive means (e.g. rote memorization) but by actively constructing new knowledge based on your discoveries. Lev Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development is an important aspect of this theory.
    • Full disclosure: I’m not an psychologist or educational theorist; however, in my anecdotal research, I’ve come to learn that, even though one may have a preferred learning approach, we learn, relearn, and reevaluate knowledge in a variety of ways.
  • Exogenous/external: motivation comes from outside the game (or activity)
    • Usually, passive players
  • Endogenous/internal: motivation comes from within the game (or activity)
    • Usually, active engagement
    • p. 252: Table 8.2 might be worth a look
  • ontology: (philosophy) study of the nature of being and why/how certain concepts are grouped into specific categories; search for the fundamental essence of a thing.
  • Consider in relation to epistemology: study of knowledge and ways of knowing; different disciplines privilege certain (often overlapping) ways of knowing.

Other Areas from the Chapter

  • p. 242: We spend lots of money and time on video games!
    • “Few other entertainment media have managed to encroach on other lives like this—maybe with the exception of social media.”
  • p. 243: Why aren’t games-for-change effective?
    • “…there exists limited direct research evidence that games can change the world despite the very influential work by Jane McGonigal. McGonigal, with her book Reality Is Broken [Why Games Make Us Better and Why They Can Change the World (2011)], has been very influential in arguing that one of our favorite pastimes can serve as backdrop for serious collaboration, thinking, and reflection.”
    • Although I question the influence she’s had, there is no doubt about her recognition as a major mind in video games.
      Check out this link for her book.
      Here’s a talk she gave at SXSW in 2011.
    • Why my skepticism…”Games can bring us leverage to solve real problems like in the alternate reality game (ARG) World Without Oil [2007], where players enter a community that most try to engineer, develop, and build solutions in a world with an oil shortage.” (p. 243)
    • Games for Cities
  • p. 244: “exer-gaming has received a lot of positive research attention, to combat obesity by using new interfaces that force players to move while playing.”
  • p. 247: “Often contradictions in the research fields stem from the fact that researchers are examining different phenomena or have radically different starting points on humans and learning.”
  • p. 249: “Games cannot necessarily be said to be more effective than other teaching forms, although most studies have offered evidence of higher motivation, better retention over time and potentially better transfer. Students also tend to subjectively rate their learning outcome higher when they use games, and to prefer gaming to other teaching methods.”
  • p. 255: Repurposing COTS (commercial-off-the-shelves-games)
  • p. 256: “Despite great interest among both teachers and students, computer games are not well designed for classroom use.”
  • p. 258: “All entertainment games rely heavily on building fantasies for players to explore, and educational serious games should be similar rather than abstract and distant.”
    • My contention is that, once you learn the rules of a game, you might not be able to draw a comparison to the real world. In Civilization, you quickly learn that domination is the way to win, but peace allows more attention for building your city improvements and keeping people happy. However, you need a strong military to immediately squash an aggressive country: beating them fast and furiously makes them quickly pursue a peace treaty based on the game’s algorithm.
    • Who thinks that’s a realistic form of diplomacy in the real world?
  • p. 260: “video games are tools for the players in constructing viable learning experiences. Games mediate discussion, reflection, and analysis. The video game experience is facilitated by the surrounding classroom culture and the student’s identity.”
  • p. 261: “Some researchers question the viability of packaging education as fun.”
  • p. 263: “drill-and-practice games are easy to develop compared to the design challenges facing other types of titles. Microworlds, for example, have proven significantly harder to design than classic drill-and-practice games. In microworlds, the player is confronted with a virtual world that contains a condensed version of the most important variables and characteristics of a given domain.”
    • “Klawe points out that the immersive effect of video games leads to a lack of awareness of the mathematical structures and concepts integrated in the video game.”
    • “when students wrote down math problems on paper while playing a math video game, they were more successful in transferring the video game skills to other classroom practice.”
    • FYI: why you should take notes by hand…

Gamification

This is the section related to the question I emailed you on Wednesday: Besides relationships, consider the board games, video games, gambling games, and, of course, sports that you hear about. I also mentioned, “Gaming and gambling are very similar activities; the gambling industry even uses these terms interchangeably. The main difference between the terms is that for gaming the outcome is achieved by skill, not chance, whereas for gambling, the opposite is true” (greo)

  • p. 269: “In gamification, you bring the game into the activity you are trying to enrich, rather than the other way around.”
  • p. 270: “loyalty programs are offered as an example of early gamification systems.”
    • Remember McDonald’s Monopoly game?
    • MyVegas App for rewards at M-Life Casinos.
    • Are loyalty programs games? Even Food lion has a loyalty program that offers discounts and coupons.
  • p. 272: Idealist vs Instrumentalist
    • “idealist approach…stresses that the gamified activity should not only get people to do things but also provide a deeper, more meaningful activity that wants people to do it.”
    • “The instrumentalist argument is, yes, we can create a deeper experience, but really, it’s not so important as long as we achieve the goals we set out to accomplish.”
    • Instrumentalism is focused on doing not critical awareness.
  • p. 274: “Rewards for effort trigger releases of feel-good chemicals in our brain, which train us toward a desired behavior.”
    • “Facebook is addictive partly because it allows us to receive real-time feedback on our actions.”
    • Time permitting, a Facebook post that went flat…
  • p. 276: “students in the gamified course tended to decrease in motivation, satisfaction, and empowerment relative to the non-gamified course.”
  • p. 277: “The study that finds negative results seems to deploy a very instrumentalist version of gamification, where some badges are flicked together and can be achieved by performing a task.”
    • “Hanus and Fox report that the intrinsic motivation decreases for the students in the gamification group, and that this negatively impacts their course outcome.”
  • p. 278: “it seems clear that the cookie-cutter approach, where you just implement gamification, is far away from the realities in the classroom.”
    • “There is also bigger question with regard to whether reliance on extrinsic motivation in one knowledge domain will spill over into other areas.”
  • Seduction of the masses: Do we need illusions to live? {that question is not in the textbook}
  • p. 279: “lot of gamification is simply implemented with an instrumental approach, which can be problematic.”

After 20 years of teaching, I want to point out that one can’t just take a technique, lesson, etc. from one context and assume it’ll “work the same way” in a different context. Rote memorization can easily be gamified, but what’s the bigger meaning behind that idea? Why is critical understanding not as likely with gaming?

Cultural Studies

Let’s get into Cultural Studies. I don’t have anything formal to present, so lets see if we can apply any theories to video games. It might be best to ask “what’s the goal of cultural studies?” We didn’t cover this on February 10th, but here’s a video we should watch:

What parallels can we recognize between the a closed cultural system and a gamespace?

Cold War Video Games

Well, these games might start getting renewed attention with Putin’s aggressions in Ukraine. Time permitting, let’s look at gameplay and consider what we learn and/or what we might need in order to play.

For more Cold War video games, check out Wikipedia’s category and this article “10 Unique Videogames from the Cold War.” There is also an argument to be made that our contemporary video games had a genesis in the Cold War space race of the late-1950s into the 1960s. (Of course, we all know Guglielmo Marconi invented online games.)

Next Class

Read Ch. 9 in Understanding Video Games for next week–last chapter in that book. Then, you have Spring Break and your Midterm Exam right afterwards.

Further Reading

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT UP, 2007.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford UP, 2002. (originally published in 1947).

Stoet, Gijsbert and Geary, David C. “Sex Differences in Academic Achievement Are Not Related to Political, Economic, or Social Equality. Intelligence, vol. 48, 2015: 137-151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2014.11.006

Toscano, Aaron. “Approaches to Video Games.” Video Games and American Culture: How Ideology Influences Virtual Worlds. Lexington Books, 2020: 17-40.