The Story in Stories Past

I’m currently picking my way through Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future there are many ideas in this book (a future blog will be a review) but it made me think about how much has changed in last fifteen years, and how Stories Past developed.

We started from an episodic story Stoney Grove which debuted in March 1998. It ran through three seasons, and is the story of an Englishman and an American women who meet, win the lottery, buy a ‘great’ house in England and finally fall in love. We did three seasons and concluded with a live interactive wedding. The site used multiple narrative techniques – emails, diaries, newspapers, direct chat and letters (it was the old days!). It also used dynamic html to present the story.

From this site we created an education module. Students were asked to explore a version of the house and try and discover the who, what and where – who lived there, when they lived there, what was happening to the family, and what was happening in the world at that time. We were completely naïve when it came with working with schools and, though we did have some great feedback from a number of students who used it, we never were able to go “commercial.”

So we took the ideas and techniques we’d developed went to museums and archaeology programs and said, let us do this for you using your content. Since then keeping up with the technology changes is a constant challenge but the range of what we can do now is extraordinary. If you can describe what you want, we can find a way of doing it. But our approach is informed by some of the ideas we had when creating Stoney Grove: learning works best when it’s contextual, some (though not all) students learn more from an active/interactive learning style, and that a good module is exploratory and non-linear.

If you’ve got a few hours Stoney Grove is still online!

Review: Videogames and Education by Harry J. Brown

Videogames and Education by Harry J. Brown

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Brown’s engaging read can serve as a primer for looking at video games. The first section, poetics, looks at video games through the lens of storytelling, aesthetics and film. He points out the two approaches of seeing video games: Ludologists who essentially see them as puzzles and Narratologists who see them as story. One difficulty in looking at games as stories is that they lack a clear central narrative  - but this is judging them as traditional literature. At their best games weave multiple threads, with the player a part of the story, presenting perhaps a conversation, or a shared performance, more than a telling, with an end result that is more “history”, rather than novel. Perhaps games have not yet found their Dickens, as Brown suggests, but we don’t judge all literature by the most hackneyed romance novels. The great works may be just around the corner, but they won’t be like books. This book does a good job in placing games in a wider context, but also notes that they remain ‘other’ – a point Brown re-inforces by pointing out how badly games have translated into movies!

I think Gee has argued that games are inherently educational, that their structure begets learning though the problem solving required in games. Brown, I think, would be more cautious, and in several places he emphasizes that games do not replace educators, but ask them to be more like guides, than the source of all wisdom. Some of the controversy over the use of gaming in schools is more clearly as discussion of what and how students should be taught, rather than a disagreement of the efficacy of the methods. But in the second section of the book, Rhetoric, Brown talks about the rhetoric of interactivity, the idea that playing a game, or perhaps using ‘playful mechanics’, is a fundamentally different engagement for students than reading, listening or watching. It’s an engagement that he sees relating to the teaching of empathy, but it also ties into different learning styles for different students. Maybe some, but not all, students will learn better this way.

In the final section, “pedagogy” he examines education, identity and communication, and finally “modding” using the tools of gaming to create new environments. He looks at the creation of social spaces and points out that for effective learning these spaces still need to be mediated. I personally doubt that shy students are suddenly ‘freed’ by a virtual identity, bullying still occurs on the online world. But equally an online environment changes the social dynamic, and its emphasis on non-verbal communication is clearly a benefit for some students.

In most of the literature I’m reading, and in this book, there seems to be a lack of clarity at times about what video games are. Some arguments seem to relate as much to games, as video games. Do video games have to consist of an immersive space? Are we criticizing the games, or the biases, and failures, of the gamemakers. How is the aspect of social media playing out in learning? While there is discussion of MMORPG’s how does playing alone, or in a group shape the learning experience? What are the implications for distance learning?

For both fiction and non-fiction I often feel that a books ‘success’ for a reader depends when it is read. For me this book served came at the right time, broadening my understanding and leaving me with the desire both to go back and re-read certain sections and follow some threads and questions into cyber space.



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Failing to Learn – More Games and Gee

Filament games http://www.filamentgames.com/ created some educational video games, working with James Gee, author of Video Games are good for your soul (see previous blog).
Argument Wars, http://www.icivics.org/games/argument-wars, looks at legal cases. It must have been a challenging design concept. Computers aren’t good at parsing language, and this could have been a bad multiple choice game. But, by presenting possible arguments through a hand of cards, and asking players to decide which to play, and when, it make you pick a strategy. I think the cards could have been made a little more complex (larger hands, different types of cards: argument, support, evidence), but the game works, and is informative and fun.
I also liked Energy City. The first time I played I crashed and burned, but repeated play let me get more successful. It’s one of the things in their philosophy statement “Good games embrace experimentation and, by extension, failure.” It seems, with the dogged insistence on GPA that the education system at present doesn’t allow “good” kids to fail. Yet we all know that we can learn more from failure than success. By working within a framework, allowing exploration and replay we can get better – and in this case maybe learn to save the planet.

And a headline like this http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110202/ts_yblog_thelookout/tree-octopus-is-latest-evidence-the-internet-is-making-kids-dumb-says-group needs to be challenged and discussed (as indeed the reporters do!)