Next Generation Environments abstract submitted by David White
The designers of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games face a significant educational challenge. They need to efficiently and subtly teach new players how to use their game. This involves teaching players about the environment and the interface whist keeping them motivated and drawing them into the challenges of the game itself. This is situated learning in which the games designer is the ‘master’ and the player is the ‘apprentice’.
This educational challenge is similar to the one faced by those intending to teach in Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) such as Second Life. There is a significant basic skill set that students need to master before they can successfully engage in meaningful collaborative activity. The traditional ‘orientation’ process in Second Life is didactic and generic, teaching skills in an abstract technical manner. This has come about because unlike an MMO, Second Life has no shared goal, its possible uses are many and varied. However, a teacher who wishes to use Second Life should have a defined set of goals or learning outcomes they wish to achieve. They should be able to define task-orientated activities that are relevant to their students’ motivations, for example, Art and Design students can be asked to compete to build the tallest monolith as a focus for learning building skills in Second Life rather than being given general instructions on how to create, scale and texture objects. In teaching terms, this seems like an obvious approach but often when faced with a complex new platform, teaching practitioners will often fall back on a basic instructivist style which may not align well with the approach generally taken at HE level for that discipline.
This is where we can learn from the MMO game designers who are careful not to fall into this trap as it is likely to make a players initial engagement in a game seem like a chore. For subscription-based MMOs, such as World of Warcraft, this would mean a high drop out rate and a massive loss of revenue, something that the HE sector can empathise with.
The JISC-funded Open Habitat project intends to learn from the MMO game designers by capturing the processes used in the initial stages of the World of Warcraft game and mapping the styles and types of task to the learning outcomes they fulfil. The data will be captured using pre- and post-activity questionnaires and video screen capture synchronised with video of the player at the computer. This data will then be used in the process of designing appropriate orientation sessions for pilots in Second Life with students from two disciplines: Art and Design, and Philosophy. The Open Habitat project recognises that some of the most sophisticated collaborative learning spaces online at the moment are MMOs and that the design of these games can be a relevant model for the pedagogical structures that we put in place for the educational use of MUVEs such as Second Life.
This presentation will preview the initail findings of this process and will discuss the implictions for the design of Open Habitats first phase of pilots in May and June.
