Category: opinion

Educational Games

I have been skeptical about educational games. I’ve also been skeptical about “serious games” (I used to say I was more interested in “frivolous games” but it never seemed to catch on). I’ve also been down on narrative in games.

So it should come as no surprised that last semester I taught a course on videogame narrative where I had students play games with narratives and serious games.

It was an interesting experience not only because I was teaching something I wasn’t super into but also because I had been working on my main teaching gig so much that I barely had time to create the syllabus for this class. So for the first time in many years I was teaching a week ahead of what I was reading.

It ended up being a fun class if a bit chaotic. I’ll post my syllabus below if anyone is interested in it.

I was most proud of how I turned educational games on their head. Instead of having students play educational games I had them make games that illustrate the concepts of the course and I think it worked really well.

I’m not a programmer and I didn’t want to set any expectations of my student’s computer skills so I had them use Twine. There was a learning curve so I had them make a basic game and I also made a little tutorial twine as well as a google doc with a bunch of twine resources.

The games they made weren’t super polished. We kind of ran out of time and if I teach it again I will really try to give them more time to revise it. However, they were really creative and interesting. So here are the games my students made.

Here is the calendar and readings for the class:

Readings	Games	Assignments
Monday, August 27, 2018	cambridge intro to narrative	Adam Cadre’s Interactive Fiction Tutorial http://adamcadre.ac/if/tutorial.html
Wednesday, August 29, 2018	zork lebling1979 and Interactive Fiction how is it different	The Time Machine: A Chad, Matt & Rob Interactive Adventure!
Wednesday, September 5, 2018	Narrative interactivity play and games Zimmerman	Zork
Monday, September 10, 2018	Half-Real Juul Introduction	Choices
Wednesday, September 12, 2018	Half-Real Juul Chapter 2
Monday, September 17, 2018	Half-Real Juul Chapter 4	dys4ia https://freegames.org/dys4ia/
Wednesday, September 19, 2018	Games Telling stories
Monday, September 24, 2018	Ludology meet narratology	We Become What We Behold https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
Wednesday, September 26, 2018	gamestorytelling and breaking the string costikyan
Monday, October 1, 2018	Video Games Are Better Without Stories	My Horse Prince https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-horse-prince/id1173408461 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.usaya.prince.en
Wednesday, October 3, 2018	Character Development chapter 7
Monday, October 8, 2018	Character Development chapter 14	The Future of Football 17776 https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
Wednesday, October 10, 2018	Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine Excerpts2018-10-05-nohighlights.docx
Monday, October 15, 2018	Doki Doki Literature Club http://ddlc.moe/
Wednesday, October 24, 2018	Character Development sections.docx
Monday, October 29, 2018	Character Development chapter 12	Her Story http://www.herstorygame.com/
Wednesday, October 31, 2018	interactive storytelling for videogames lebowitz klug chapter 2
Monday, November 5, 2018	interactive storytelling for videogames lebowitz klug chapter 4	A Normal Lost Phone http://anormallostphone.com/
Wednesday, November 7, 2018	interactive storytelling for videogames lebowitz klug chapter 5
Monday, November 12, 2018	Video Game Storytelling – Evan Skolnick excerpts	80 days https://www.inklestudios.com/80days/
Wednesday, November 14, 2018	SLAY THE DRAGON chapter 2	Class Prep Activityalpha of group game due playtesting game
Monday, November 26, 2018	SLAY THE DRAGON chapter 3	Gone Home https://gonehome.game/
Wednesday, November 28, 2018	SLAY THE DRAGON chapter 6

What I’m playing november 2016

I’ve been busy teaching so I haven’t done much blogging but I have managed to play some games. I thought I would post what I’m playing as a way to get a new post on here to prove this site isn’t dead – if only to myself.

1. Paladins – people say it is an Overwatch clone but I wouldn’t know because I haven’t bought Overwatch. From what I’ve seen Overwatch seems like Team Fortress 2.5 anyway – shots fired! Overwatch is entertaining enough. It is free to play so it has that going for it. It is in beta so they keep changing things which is kind of interesting to observe.

2. Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker – I have never been that big of a Nintendo fan. I had an NES but never an SNES. I got an N64 several years after it was out and never had a Gamecube. Now that the Wii U is nearly dead I decided to buy a Wii and softmod it. So I’ve started playing through the gamecube games I’ve missed. Wind Waker is the first one. I think the only other Zelda game I ever played was Link to the Past that a guy in the dorm in college had on his SNES so it has been an interesting experience. I’m currently at the part where you gether the triforce. It is getting a little tedious so I might give up on it.

3. Alien: Isolation – I heard a lot of praise for this so I was looking forward to it. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The gameplay seems really straight forward and I don’t like the mini cut scenes that pop up or the pre-scripted story elements. Avoiding the Alien and other things can be quite tense but after it keeps coming back it gets monotonous (or tedious? I guess I should look up the difference between those! Hmmm… well this isn’t any help: “As adjectives the difference between monotonous and tedious is that monotonous is having an unvarying tone or pitch while tedious is boring, monotonous, time consuming, wearisome.” Merriam Webster states that monotonous means “used to describe something that is boring because it is always the same” while tedious is “boring and too slow or long.” So I guess I feel Wind Waker is becoming tedious while Alien: Isolation is becoming monotonous? One think I do know is that this post is becoming tedious!)

4. Candy Crush Soda – I guess it says something about my own perception of what counts as a “real game” that I didn’t originally think to include this or the other android games I play. I was playing Pokemon GO but they banned rooted phones so I can’t play any more. I would like to play Inkle’s Sorcery 4 but I know I would get too into it. Maybe over Thanksgiving. I’ve been thinking about how to use their Inkle Writer in my classes as a way to have students make games that revolve around a theme in the course. It looks more plug and play than twine. I don’t know that I’ve figured out what to use it for tough.

Bravery

I like listening to podcasts in my car, when I’m riding my bike, and walking around campus. So I’m always looking for new ones to listen to. One of my favorite places to look has been a thread on the Idle Thumbs forums which is where I ran across a post about the Spawn on Me podcast. On it they talk about videogames and identity. It has quickly became one of my favorites (except when they talk about sportsball… 😛 ) and often gives me something to think about.

The most last episode I listened to was no exception (I’m a little behind as they have released a new one since then). Titled “Blackademics 101,” the episode features guest co-host Tanya Depass, and guests Kishonna Gray and TreaAndrea Russworm talked a lot about not only race in games but also in academia.

On the episode they talked about getting pushback from students when they talk about race in the classroom and how they have gotten comments about it from students on their course evaluations. This resonated with me because I talk about race in my classes but I haven’t gotten much pushback from students and I haven’t had any mention of it on my course evals.

Now there could be a number of reasons for this:

I’m just an awesome teacher
I don’t talk about it as much as they do
I’ve just been lucky
I’m a white man.

Now, it should be noted that last year I did have a white female friend who did have a student mention how her talking about race made the white student feel uncomfortable, so it can’t be that white people are immune from getting such comments on student evals. Of course I also don’t know how much my friend talked about race or in what way. So, as people online love to write, “the plural of anecdote it not data.” So it must be that I’m just awesome…

However, when Gray and Russworm talked about some of the harassment they have gotten online it reminded me of the very minor incident I received a year or so ago and my reactions to it. It happened when someone started found the abstract to my dissertation and posted it in an online discussion thread I had been taking part in. They started trashing it and making assertions. I was worried they were going to start dogpiling me and hunting down personal information. Luckily, none of that happened and in a few hours the thread had died down and nothing has come of it. But in the moment I was worried. I contemplated deleting my accounts and posts or denying that it was me. But I didn’t want to do those because I was worried they would think it was a sign of weakness. Instead, I just closed the browser tab and went away for a few hours and it went away. No harm done.

What I experienced was minuscule and was over in a few hours. I can’t imagine what it is like to be the center of attention like that for days or weeks or months at a time. The urge to bury your head in the sand and never say anything ever again must be very strong. (Even as a write this I’m trying to be both vague as well as non-accusatory so that this very post doesn’t get any negative attention) But they and others who have been the subject of much harsher and sustained scrutiny haven’t buried their heads and that takes bravery.

Legendary Blandness

Legendary is a pretty generic FPS game with some odd things in its design that really make it hard to enjoy. First of all, even for a game released in 2008 it looks really dated. Wikipedia claims it uses the Unreal 3 engine but it really doesn’t look like it.

For example, here’s a clip from Gears of War, released for PC in 2007:

Now compare this to Legendary:

Now Gears of War probably had a much bigger team and the difference isn’t all that large but it is noticeable.

I also post this video to point out a design choice the Legendary team made that is really hard to understand. That Legendary video is the second part of the walkthrough after you watch an obligatory intro movie that sets up the premise and the game is still telling you things like “hold left shift to sprint.” Now the thing is that the game isn’t just holding your hand for a long time and it tells you that all the time. Instead, you can’t run or jump until the game decides to introduce the mechanic to you. In the first couple minutes of the game there was something in the way that I wanted to jump over but hitting the space bar didn’t do anything. So I assumed that you couldn’t jump in the game. Then just a couple minutes later the game decides to allow you to start jumping. You can jump from then on but why in the world would you disable the ability to jump for the first few minutes of the game? It isn’t like there are any cliffs you can fall over or something. It is just ponderous.

Another weird design choice is that early in the game pretty much the only monsters are these lava creatures. It gets really monotonous. Then they switch to something else and they never use that monster again. That just seems weird. There’s no reason why they would confine the lava creatures to just one part of the game or that they wouldn’t mix it up more. They just don’t.

Gameplay-wise, the game reminded me a lot of old-school SiN and I’m not really sure why. Maybe it is because killing the lava creatures often requires turning on water to put their fire out and stuff like that. Even though SiN is ten years older I think I had more fun playing it. Of course I’m ten years older too so that might have something to do with it…

There are some boss battles which are pretty standard and a partner who is largely on the radio (like SiN and a million other games). Then the end is basically incredibly anticlimactic.

Two thumbs down

Legendary, huh?
Legendarily bad, right?
Or just kind of blaah…

A Call of Duty edition of Newsweek?

I was in the grocery store Monday and decided I would check out the magazine rack. I was surprised to see a magazine devoted to Call of Duty with the Newsweek logo on it:

While there have been special issues of magazines for specific videogames before and whenever someone famous dies it seems like there are special “tribute to X Collector’s Edition” magazines on the stands just days later, it seems weird that Newsweek would be the one to have their name attached to this. Of course, because I love gaming magazines I had to buy it, so I guess the combination worked.

Analog keyboards and rumble mice

Back in December I got a PS3 for the first time and more recently I’ve been working on a side project that involves looking at a bunch of gaming stuff from the 90s. Recently these two interests have combined in a way that made me think about the lack of progress in the way pc games are played. Ever since the Atari 5200 came out with a different controller than the Atari 2600 it has become common for console controllers to change with each new console. Most of the time the new controllers don’t just look different but they add in new/different features. Some of those features then go on to become more or less universally adopted.

This really isn’t the case with pc gaming. Aside from incremental improvements such as using a laser instead of a ball in a mouse, the mouse and keyboard for the earliest computers isn’t really all that different than modern ones. Sure, mechanical switches are the hot thing now but those are really just coming back. No matter how many leds and lcd screens they add to a keyboard or mouse it is still basically the same and doesn’t really change your gaming experience.

There was a time, however, when there was more experimentation on pc controllers. There were controllers that basically tried to make the keyboard more comfortable like The Claw, the Wolfking Warrior, the Z-board which offered replaceable keyboards for a specific game, or the Razer Orbweaver and similar products but all of these are just putting buttons in the different spots.

My research reminded me of one controller that tried to have analog movement: the Spaceorb 360.

I remember when this came out and while it seemed like a cool idea, I never saw one in person. Unsurprisingly it failed because it was weird looking. (a somewhat similar looking controller was the Microsoft Sidewinder Dual Strike but it used the ball thing to look and not move like the Spaceorb). Apparently the Spaceorb has its fans since someone made an Arduino interface to make it work with modern versions of Windows. The thing that is appealing about the Spaceorb is something I’ve wanted in pc games for a long time: variable speed. How nice would it be in a FPS to be able to easily be able to control how fast you move? Here’s what I want: analog keys on a keyboard. Maybe just for WASD or whatever but imagine keys that would work like triggers on a controller where you could push them down a little to go slowly and all the way to run. I know it might make the clicky keys weird but surely they could just put in a potentiometer or something on the keys to measure how far down the keys were pressed without making them feel different.

Running across the Spaceorb reminded me of the other old control device that never took off but seemed really cool: the rumble mouse. Logitech released a couple different kinds of these over the years. The first was the Logitech Wingman Force Feedback Mouse. Check out the video of how this thing works:

Maybe it is just me but it seems like it would be pretty cool to have a mouse that could do that. Unfortunately, to make it work the mouse was apparently attached to the pad which meant you couldn’t really move it very far.

The other line of force feedback mice Logitech came out with was the iFeel mice which looked like regular mice. I never used either of these but I would imagine that the iFeel didn’t have as much movement as the Wingman because it wasn’t attached to a mouse pad. It was, however, apparently useful outside of gaming as it could be used to rumble when you moved the mouse over a link, a window border, or something else. That seems like it would be kind of neat and could come in handy when trying to move your mouse to just the right spot to resize a window or move a text box border. Unfortunately, like the Spaceorb, the rumble mouse also failed to catch on.

However, it has been more than a decade since the rumble mouse was released and nearly twenty years since the analog controller so I think it is time for someone to try these ideas again. Come on Razer or Das Keyboard and give me a keyboard with analog keys and a rumble mouse! (seriously, give me one because I’m poor and couldn’t afford to buy them if they came out).

This is a man and he has a name: Edge gets bylines

A short followup on something I wrote way back in November of 2007 when I noticed that Edge magazine doesn’t give author credit on its articles.

Well, as a couple months ago that has changed because Edge now lists the authors of their articles:

The weird thing is that although the editorial for the first issue where they started listing authors they noted differences in some of the columns and layout but they didn’t mention giving authors credit.

Thoughts on the PS3 from a Windows computer gamer

Now that the PS4 is out, I finally bought a PS3. I know… I’m poor. Give me a job and I will be happy to spend my money on expensive consoles. I thought about buying either a PS3 or a 360 for a while but decided on the PS3 because I don’t want to pay to play online (I’m poor) and there are more exclusive PS3 games I haven’t played.

So on Black Friday I ordered the PS3 with Last of Us and Batman Arkham something or other and it arrived on Monday. Setting it up was interesting so I thought I would write up my impressions. (Spoiler: I’m not really impressed so far)

I plugged it into my tv and plugged an ethernet chord into it and started it up. The setup process was pretty easy but I thought it weird that I had to put in the date and time manually. Can’t it just get that from the internet?

It set its output to 1080p but my cheap Polaroid-brand tv is only 720p. I could still see the text so I just figured I would let it go and change it manually later. I went into the settings and ended up in bluray and dvd settings. I think I found the output settings but I didn’t change it because I figured if it ain’t broke I won’t try to fix it.

Getting it connected brought up one of my least favorite problems with non-computers: cryptic error messages and no way to fix them. I last experienced that when I had an ipod touch that wouldn’t download updates and I finally got it to work by running a vpn to my university. The PS3’s error was no less cryptic. It tried to get online and after a while it couldn’t. It threw up an error message with a strong of numbers. I look online to see what people say about it but as it usually the case there were a bunch of different errors. No way to get to ini files or anything like that. So I just restart it and it magically works…

Next I get to the dreaded updates. I had heard the PS3 is constantly updating and it was true. There are tons and tons of updates. People used to say that about Windows too but with computers you can at least do something else while it downloads updates. Not so with the PS3 (for example, while I’ve been writing this I’ve been downloading and installing an update on the ps3.)

I’m really surprised at how bad the PS3 is at running multiple apps at once. Some stuff can’t be downloaded in the background at all. Even when it can, you have to click the button but even then you still have for the system to do something before it will even let you download in the background! I tried to background download Uncharted 3 and it said I would have to wait 7 minutes before I could do that!

So I left it on and went to sleep. I got up in the morning and the game didn’t show up so I start the download again. I went to class and when got back the game has downloaded. But it hasn’t installed yet. There were all these files: Uncharted Multiplayer, Uncharted Single Player, Uncharted 2D movies, Uncharted French language pack. So I install the single player part. But it still doesn’t show up. So I install the multiplayer part and the 2D movies. Then the game finally shows up.

Alright, the game is installed so I can play it. I click on the game and the screen goes black. The screen goes black a lot. No indication that anything is going on. If that happens on a computer that’s a bad thing. But I guess it is just business as usual for the PS3. Now, once the game gets started I get a loading indicator. Of course, my computer has an SSD that my Steam games are installed on so it doesn’t take forever to start unlike the PS3. Now, to be fair I cold install an SSD on the PS3.

Satisfied that the download worked I go to download Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. The background downloading works better for this though. So I watch something on Netflix while it downloads. I go to check out the download status and somehow it is trying to download Uncharted 3 again… grrrr….

To wrap it up, the PS3 is no computer. I realize it is old technology. But I guess I’m still not a console guy. I’ll play the PS3 exclusives but I think I’ll stick with my gaming computer and my roku for most of my gaming and media watching needs. If nothing else I’ve got a bluray player!

Is G4TV a ghost town?

I was never a huge fan of G4tv but it did have good access to videogame events like E3 and occasionally good interviews and Ninja Warrior. Now it seems like a ghost town.

First, it was supposed to become the Esquire Network in April of 2013 and they fired all their on-air staff and recorded the final episodes of their shows. Then April came and they were all like, “no, no. We meant September!” Then September came and they made a last minute switcheroo and instead kept G4 and made Style the Esquire Network.

So what about G4 then? Well, apparently nothing. Their website hasn’t been updated in months:

Their last tweet says that their twitter is moving to Esquire TV’s account:

The links on their website to their forums don’t go anywhere. As far as their programming is concerned, they just keep airing the old episodes of Attack of the Show and X-Play and other random stuff like reruns of Lost and Airwolf.

So why is NBCUniversal keeping the channel around? Is having that channel on cable so valuable that they might possible one day maybe want to put something on it? (Probably). It just seems odd and a waste.

…But I don’t even have cable so what do I know?