Response to Cultivated Play: Farmville

I've got a few posts saved up that I've written while trying to decide what to do with this blog. It's gone through a few different hosts (ultimately back to Blogspot), a few different titles/URLs, and dozens of different templates. I think I'm finally happy enough with it to start posting for reals, so I'll be posting some of that backlog. So that explains why I may sometimes, like here, be commenting on articles from months ago.

Quite a few blogs have linked to this piece. There are a few critics, and a lot of people who just seem to like the idea of criticizing Farmville.

There are many things to criticize about these games, but I don't think that Liszkiewicz's criticisms happen to be valid ones, so I feel the need to rebut most of his points individually. Specifically, I'll just focus on his assertion that Farmville is not a game. Now, I haven't read Caillois, though I really should. But I will go ahead and take his definition of game at face value rather than debate the definition itself - and I still think that if Farmville doesn't count as a game by this definition, many other things commonly referred to as games don't count either.

A couple thinky videos

Neither of these is all that new, but they both make some interesting points about the future of education.

The first gets a bit alarmist in spots, but I like what it has to say about the changing face of knowledge, learning, and education:


Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

The second is a talk by Philip Zimbardo, of the infamous Stanford prison experiment, who apparently is doing stuff about perception of time now. As my husband put it, it comes off as he's found his hammer and is now turning everything into a nail, but I don't think that makes it any less interesting. Anyone studying cognitive, behavioral, or social sciences knows by now that there are a million factors involved in any action and a million lenses to view it through, and every lens gives you a bit more of the whole - so viewing all of this through a "perceptions of time" lens certainly won't hurt.



I do take issue with his characterization of time spent playing video games as "alone" - Reed Stevens, Constance Steinkuehler, and plenty of other scholars will tell you that video game playing is very often a social activity, whether with others physically present or online. The point remains, though, that many of these interactions are different from "traditional" socialization (especially those that happen online, often semi-anonymously) and so might be changing the ways that young people view social interaction.

Revamp

When I created this blog, I was intending two things:

1) That it would be about learning through play, games, and toys.
2) That it would mostly be a place for me to make note of publications and other resources I've found for later reference.

Since then I've realized two things:

1) That kind of learning is one thing that I study and am interested in, but by far not the only thing (I knew that already), and I'd like to post more general stuff as well.
2) Focusing only on what other people say without ever saying anything myself (except brief comments on what they say) doesn't make for an exciting blog, nor does it really make me excited to update it.

So this blog just got a new URL (from play-learning to cognitive-informalist), a new description, and will now have both more general learning content (but toys and games are still a big focus!) and possibly more original content. Possibly.

Interaction Design and Children Proceedings

Last year, the Interaction Design and Children conference was held here; unfortunately, it was during finals week, so I was only able to attend a couple of sessions. The ones that I did go to were excellent. "Interaction design" was used very broadly, and I saw sessions both from academics and toy industry types, about television, video games, software, and physical toys (like an interactive Barney doll).

I just found the full proceedings from this conference online - warning, I'm not sure right now if you need a university login to view this or not. I now have quite a lot of reading to do!

D is for Digital

More things I found months ago and never posted!

And this one is even publicly available, no university login or journal subscription required.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, part of Sesame Workshop, has a postdoctoral fellowship each year. Last year's fellow, Carly Shuler, produced the report D is for Digital, on the current state of the market of interactive digital learning media for kids ages 3-11. If you're used to reading heavy, dense, academic articles, it makes a nice light read that's nonetheless very enlightening.

Here is a list of other recent publications from the Center.

In Game, In Room, In World

I read this article months and months ago - about the same time as the last time I updated this blog, and meant to post it but never did.

In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids' Lives, by Reed Stevens, Tom Satwicz, and Laurie McCarthy. I was very excited to find an article that is looking at the social interactions surrounding video game playing. It's really just scraping the top of what I'm guessing there is to find, but you have to start somewhere.

I spoke with Tom Satwicz during a symposium at AERA this year, and he mentioned this newer article written from the same data set, on kids' understanding and use of quantity in the games. I haven't read this one yet, though.

New DS, Cool Master's Thesis

I am a big fan of the educational possibilities of the Nintendo DS. It's got everything going for it - portability, networking, many types of input (writing, typing, voice). This little machine has so much untapped potential!

Today Nintendo added to that with the announcement of the upcoming DSi, which will also have a camera, the ability to download games via Wifi, and an SD slot. What can't you do with that, I ask?

In celebration I went looking for what I knew was nearly nonexistent research on the educational use of the DS, and found a new Master's thesis that also got me very excited, though I've only read the abstract. I love problem-based learning, I love the DS, whatever this guy did it must be awesome! If the author, Michael David Lipinski, ever happens to read this (maybe by googling your name and ending up here?), please contact me, I'd love to talk to you!

Motivation in games

Not published research, but an interesting essay on using reward systems to keep people playing. Very familiar territory in terms of zones of proximal development and motivation - rewards have to be challenging in order to be motivating, but if they're too difficult or too rare, the motivation drops. Always interesting to note where game design intersects learning theory.

MMORPGs: Play or Work?

An interesting little piece from Games & Culture by Nick Yee at Stanford on how online games (MMORPGs in particular) blur the line between play and work.

I know from experience it isn't just MMORPGs that do this - Animal Crossing is an essentially single-player game that many people experience as walking that line. AC always felt fun for me, though, even when it veered into work territory - I recently bought Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life for my GameCube, and although I'm not far into it, it feels more like work than play so far. Even the DragonWars application I recently installed on Facebook feels more like a routine than a game... but I keep going back, because I want that most expensive dragon, darn it.

Also, as often as you see play referred to as "children's work," is it really surprising that the boundaries would continue to be blurred into adulthood? Is playing house really that different from playing at a career later? How can this fact (that play can often include the same actions as work, but retains some kind of difference motivationally) be used as an advantage in an educational context? If you convince a child to play at being a scientist, will the lessons learned during the game apply elsewhere? It's not obvious that they would - I doubt the people running pharmaceutical companies in Star Wars Galaxies are out thinking about new drugs in real life... but do they learn something about running a business?

Yee also has an article up on the risks and benefits of kids playing MMORPGs.

Ethnography for Protoyping Educational Toys

Just found this paper from the 2002 Human Factors Conference in Australia (pdf), on using "rapid ethnography" as a development tool for a new web-enabled educational toy. I'm always interested to get a look at the toy design/development process in industry.

Here is a link to the jaredRESEARCH page on their work with LeapFrog.