Sophie Sampson

Last night I had an interesting evening at the November London Edugames Meetup. There were three neatly contrasting talks, from a game maker, a teacher and a resource provider, and as I took plenty of notes I was asked to make them available. So forgive the omissions and elisions, I was mostly following up the things that were new to me, which makes this mostly about what the teachers were saying rather than the game devs. Quotes aren’t necessarily accurate quotes, but more just to make grammatical sense.

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First up was Phil from Preloaded, talking about what games are good at in terms of education. He has blogged his thoughts himself extremely lucidly here, so I won’t reproduce that except where my notes followed him into more detail – I started typing furiously when he was talking about simulation:

“It’s good for projects that have science in them – content that can be modelled and expressed in code can easily be simulated. There’s a but though – it’s way too easy to make simulations that aren’t fun. Generally we have to reduce complexity in order to find the nugget of truth, then make sure that nugget is expressed in a way that is genuinely fun.

A teacher interjected to talk about how she uses Launchball to assess how well her 11 year olds have understood physics – “they always want to start on hard mode and then creep back a bit later to ask if they can put it on easy”.

Phil talked about the friction between learning outcomes and fun: ”Making educational games is a lot more effort than just making games that are fun. You’re constantly having to consider the question ‘is it fun or is it true’, and find a way to balance the two.”

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Next up was Dawn Hallybone, who is described as a superteacher – she’s very involved in games-based learning and has spent the last four years exploring it in her classroom and school, which was fascinating for the game makers in the room. She teaches Year 5 (9-10 year olds), and illustrated her slides with quotes from her kids, starting with some words they came up with to describe how they feel about games:

• challenging
• social
• exciting
• skills
• having fun
• funny
• in control

Control was picked out as the key – they are able to guide their own experience, which can be unusual in a school setting.

Dawn quoted Mary Lou Cooke “Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” Dawn’s call to action is “I see gaming as that – I’d like to see curriculum there too”

Playful learning is about challenge, motivation, goals and risk taking

It’s really important to teach the kids to fail.

Using the gaming hardware they have at home means they are using familiar tools in a different environment. The school has a box of 30 DSs that get taken around the school to different classrooms. This was originally inspired by a project called Consolarium which worked at putting games in schools in Scotland – Dawn wanted to do the same within her own local area.

Started using Brain Training about 4 years ago.

Kids feel in control – they can work through the games at their own speed, and if they get it wrong they can work out how to do it right on their own – don’t have to go to Miss and get told whether you got it right or wrong

“Its like putting maths in a 12v food blender”

Using Professor Layton “The best thing for teachers is that there are walkthroughs online”

“We used it in literacy for a week, then asked them to design their own Professer Layton Game – what characters will you put in, what maths puzzles would you put in. They drew a game map and got really into it, they really surprised us.

The learning outcomes were around speaking and listening, literacy and maths

Mario and Sonic at the the Olympic Games – used in a module about the Olympics

Out of it we got:

• history - origins of olympic games
• games themselves
• geography – used google earth and sliders to watch Beijing Olympics being built
• art – designing logos for their own Olympics
• maths – forces
• PE – held own olympics in playground
• literacy
• science
• ITC
• PHSE

The way we work in the classroom means that not everyone needs to have their hands on a controller all the time – we have 2 kids actually playing a game, one group acting as spotters,  helping the kids who are actually playing by eg googling animals they don’t recognise, one group diary writing about how they felt and what they learned.

They use Mario Kart to teach forces and friction – kids put in teams of four – use it in conjunction with a programme called Race to Learn in which you become a Formula One team. The kids interview drivers, they do job applications, make a launch event, an advertising campaign, make carts physically to race in class, have a league and use it to work out averages, end of term you race a gokart around the playground

The school is part of the Redbridge Game Network – a contextual hub for gaming

- it’s a network that pools resources and share the games, each school has a Wii plus DS’s

Now we also have an XBox and PS3, have Kinectimals in the Nursery

It’s spreading, now there’s an East Midlands Network, a Sussex Network

Just Dance is great if it’s wet and you can’t get out to do games and there’s another group in the hall. Dawn does Just Dance alongside her class, recording her high scores like everyone else. 2 kids have the controllers, everyone else in the classroom is doing the moves along with them. There’s a league, they use it to practice averages etc.

They also use a lot of online games, and these are great because the kids can continue at home if they’re interested, although this can mean they race ahead of the lesson plans.

• Moshi Monsters – have been using since 2007
• tutpup – multiplication race – whole class can log in together
• Manga High – for year 5 and year 6 – although the question comes up of why are the girls always wearing really short skirts
• Questionaught (?)- BBC problemsolving games
• BBC Bitesize – use it as a plenary (You can embed it in the school blog and they can play it direct from there)
• We also use 303 squadron and Sneeze from C4
• Launchball from the Science Museum
• Great Fire of London – from the Museum of London
• Primary Games Arena

The kids are very critical consumers – if it looks like they are learning they won’t play it as often. It’s all about secret learning – getting in through the back door.

Phones and tablets are less useful – primary children generally don’t have their own devices and there are issues about inclusiveness if you’re expecting kids to have access to particular devices.

But Dawn’s iPad gets taken into school every day and the iPad 2 can now connect to the interactive whiteboard and show the whole class something – suddenly it has become really useful.

• Epic citadel – going to do writing projects around the world
• Puppet pals – they can create little animations to show what they’ve learnt, rather than always writing or being tested.
• Morris Lessmore – wonderful story
• zondle.com ‘games to support learning’ - You can create your own game with your own drawings and questions inside it

A big part of this has been getting the kids to teach each other, both within a class and also between classes – they have set up a register of ‘learning champions’ – kids who can go into a class that is trying something new and run them through it for ten minutes. It’s great for the kids’ confidence, and useful for the teachers too – they don’t have to be the fount of all knowledge.

“We want our kids to be educated and inspired and take risks, not just pass tests.”

Questions immediately turned to getting buy in – Dawn started by inviting all the governors in to play. “There were a lot of skeptics at first but by the end of the evening they were hooked”.

After spending £2000 on 30 DSs and 30 brain training games being clear about the learning outcomes really important, but reluctant people can really see that it works after a while.

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Finally Paul and Sarah from BBC Knowledge and Learning gave a talk about the changes they are making to the site, and opened up a discussion with the floor about what teachers would find useful.

“Right now, we’re sprawling, disconnected, and BBC Bitesize is the core of it

Knowledge and Learning is a crazy bundle of stuff, contains everything from ethics to interior design

Right now loads of duplication – for example 5 spanish portals, 3 parenting sites

Siloed content reflects the internal structure of the organisation – no links between different sites. They used the example of elderflowers – content about them is on at least 7 different sites, and there’s no way to make links between connected bits of content right now except by hand.

Content is made, fanfared and then left alone for years – not continuing to update links

Interestingly, they feel like the problem with flash games are that they are difficult to link to and from in a nuanced way

Also the BBC has a commitment to accessibility which is difficult to serve with flash.

However, some games like Dance Mat Typing are still huge and much loved by audience – how can we take that audience with us into the new world?

The grand vision is to inspire a life full of learning. They want us to learn more about ourselves and the world, take control of our own learning, be more involved in society.

But this involves huge organisational change, to commissioning, workflow:

• get peeps talking to each other within the organisation
• responding to changes to the curriculum, what’s in the news
• Not duplicating so much
• making it more open, multiplatform and accessible

So, they’ve been working on it for about a year

They showed a case study of a teacher trying to find content on the homepage

There’s a Volcano erupting which she’d like to make a lesson about

A link on the home page or new page takes her to a Volcano page

Intro, bitesize links, onward links, she can save content to her binder

Within the binder she can make a lesson plan, set due dates, share it with either her class, a network of teachers, or the world

Basically a neat bundle of content that can be used on the whiteboard, but also share it with the students afterwards

But where’s the fun?

They are very interested in bringing in Gamification

“We’re aware of the possibility of doing this badly”

“What should and shouldn’t we be doing? The vision is to make people feel better about themselves and learn more. The elephant in the room is BBC Jam – everyone feels a bit painful about it.” Not trying to take on commercial rivals, but looking to get people using the great content they make around TV and Radio and taking it into classrooms.

“We want this to be Pan-BBC - not just Knowledge and Learning, but the whole website – iPlayer, music sites, etc

Learning Journeys as game types:

• formal – satisfy learning objectives as quickly and efficiently as possible
• deep diving – taking your time
• roaming – learning as an open world game – getting lost in wikipedia, audiences lured by tineresting links and content
• one off – collecting mission – I need a particular thing
• help/how to  – gaining confidence especially around food and lifestyle – walkthroughs

“Question – what have we missed – who else should we talk to – what traps should we avoid?

It would be really useful to be able to identify yourself as a teacher, and what keystage you’re looking for and get tailored results

Bitesize is still the jewel in the crown and will continue to be.

Search really needs to be better – everything being tagged would be really great

Navigating through – all the paths being available to you because the editors didn’t have to do it manually

Suggestion: Use gamification to get people to tag your content rather than trying to put a game layer on the site – earn points for treasure hunting for particular content.

Avoiding duplication – there’s been a massive audit about what there actually is – now they are doing the thinking about what takes precedence and why.

So that’s what I took from the evening, and I know I missed a lot – if anyone else has things to add, please do in the comments. It was a really interesting evening and felt really worthwhile for getting new perspectives on what how to make games that genuinely help people to learn.

This is interesting: Bluebrain, makers of The National Mall describe it as a “location aware album” that is designed to change seamlessly as you move around a particular space. It’s lovely because it was designed actually on the ground, and is an entirely ambient experience. If I’ve understood the UI correctly, there is no hunting for the next location and then ‘collecting’, it simply knows where you are and reacts.

It’s something that is really familiar from 3d videogames, which always *just know* where your avatar is. Open world games are really fertile grounds for understanding location-specific stuff – they are basically human scaled worlds where every pixel and interaction has been designed to be fun. Parkland is probably our closest comparison in the real world – it’s designed to be pleasant and varied to walk through, to have moments to pause and things to draw you into the distance. Constantly changing music feels like an excellent level of interaction – it accompanies you as you explore and rewards you for going further, without demanding your full attention.

My only sadness is being the wrong side of the atlantic to experience this in person, especially as they have just launched a Central Park version.

(This is the talk I gave yesterday – it synthesises a lot of the design work I did this summer into a set of rules of thumb for making this kind of work)

These are interesting times for publishers, the very notion of what a book is is being broken down. People have said it’s like the Wild West and you can do anything, anyone can be a publisher. My contention is that just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I’ve spent part of the last year making location-specific stories and games on an Iphone platform called Placewhisper and testing them on the ground with real people. I’m going to talk to you about what I’ve learned – through real experience – and then consider why this sort of work might be interesting to publishers.

Location-specific content is really good at one thing, which is making you feel like you’ve stepped into a narrative. Moments of emotional connection. I started to understand this while making quite a different kind of game – a playground game about the Battle of Hastings for the BBC.

I spent a lot of time looking at diagrams like this:

And by the time the game was made and I was travelling around the country playtesting it in schools. I happened to do a test in Hastings, and on a whim hopped off the train and went to see the site of the battle itself. Which looks like this:

The thing that slightly blew my mind was how steep it is. In all my years of studying the period and hours of looking at squiggly diagrams, that fact had never got through to me. And suddenly the Normans at the bottom with a seemingly impossible task ahead, the Anglo Saxons snugly at the top with everything in their favour, made more sense than it ever had before.

It wasn’t that being in the place was somehow intrinsically better than looking at the diagrams. Without knowing the diagrams it would just have been a field. But the point is that knowing the diagrams made being in the field better. Being in the field deepened my understanding of the diagrams. That multiplication is the nub of what’s important about making location-specific content.

Whatever you are offering people has to make their experience of going to a place better, otherwise why are you asking them to go there? This sounds really obvious when you just say it, but it has huge implications in design terms. The bargain you make with the person who accesses your content is really different to the one you make when you are making web content or physical books, where people have absolute control over where they are when they access it. There’s a physicality to the experience which needs to be considered.

This is sculptor, Anthoney Gormley’s Another Place. It’s a really poetic piece that interacts with the environment beautifully. It stands on the boundary between land and sea, and as the tide goes in and out it reveals and conceals metal casts of the sculptor’s body that all look out towards the horizon. And every year the coastguard get called out several times to rescue people who have got into difficulties while looking at the artwork

Gormley’s take on this (as it kind of has to be) is that people can look after themselves while they’re looking at art, and they don’t lose their critical faculties.  This is possibly true with art, but I know from making pervasive games that as soon as there’s an element of interaction that’s no longer true – people expect you’ve got their back while you concentrate on the challenge you’ve set them.

It’s tempting to make location based work the easy way – google maps, google earth, from the top down. You can’t. Initial research has to include *pounding pavements*

However, there are really positive reasons to make this kind of work, and it’s really not necessary to risk drowning your punters. I wanted to talk about those reasons through the lens of Watch the Water, a project I made this summer with Coney. It was commissioned by Trigger for the Edinburgh Art Festival.

Watch the Water was a location-specific iphone app, made on PlaceWhisper.

It’s a work of fiction: eerie audio placed on places with open drains, which told the story of the engineering that underpins the city with a Lovecraftian twist. (For those that don’t know it, Edinburgh is built on an extinct volcano and the railway station is in a drained lake – how it doesn’t fill up with water whenever it rains is a constant wonder to me).

Five design decisions that made this really work for the people that tried it.

One of the really smart things about the commission is that there was a really clear funnel into the start of the experience – it was designed for people visiting one of six galleries as part of the Art Festival we knew where they would be physically and where they would be going.

It’s a comfortable space to be on foot, day or night.

But mainly, Edinburgh is hugely atmospheric – you get awesome  hi res 3d graphics for free. Let’s just dwell on that for a moment, *for Free.*

You could consume the audio clips – and the story – in any order you wanted. This gives people a bit more agency, allows it to fit in with their other plans rather than having to set aside a certain time to do your experience.

I’m a big believer in doing this with audio. It means there’s no screen between you and the exciting stuff. Instead of looking down at your phone, you’re looking up at the world. Again, it’s all about making connections with what you’re standing in front of, otherwise what’s the point?

Watch the Water was 9 pieces of audio in the space of less than a mile. Each between 40 seconds and a minute and a half. The points could have been more densely packed in the space, but the area didn’t want to be larger – that’s already a lot of walking.

There’s something about making invisible things tangible that people really respond to. The mechanism of discovery gives people a sense of ownership of the work.

This is a new way of delivering content, but it’s something that can fit into traditional publishing models. I have a couple of examples:

Imagine: Everyone at a literary festival is invited to download a free app from the app store, with a story from a new writer mapped onto popular locations at the festival. It’s promoted through the festival as something to do between talks. Those who try feel that sense of ownership, and word of mouth is created. There’s a route to buy the book direct from the app.

Or: A popular crime writer deeply associated with a particular city – like Ian Rankin in Edinburgh, or Henning Mankell in Ystad – spends two weeks writing a short whodunnit you can play in that city over about 2 hours.

It sells for £4.99 in the app store to the writer’s fans and tourists visiting the city who want a ‘different’ ‘authentic’ experience. Not only can this become profitable in itself, people who play feel more ownership of that writer’s stories. People discover more about their back catalogue and in a couple of clicks can buy books that mention particular places they’ve been.

What I’ve learned from all my work with location-specific content is that it isn’t always the right answer. In the right kind of circumstances, though – and there aren’t many of them – it gives you so much for free: hundreds of extras, thousandss of years of history, and the best visuals money can buy.

Most importantly, it reminds the consumer how much you value their imagination.

I’m looking to make more of this type of project, so if you have a situation where there are a lot of people physically in a particular place, do get in touch.

Just to say I’ll be on my way here tomorrow to talk about designing for location-specific storytelling to an audience of publishers, which should be fun. I get to talk about lots of meaty stuff about the precise circumstances in which it’s a good idea, and will hopefully get to stick my nose out into Frankfurt for half an hour or so too.

We’re all used to films coming out with games attached, both console games and for marketing – I’ve made some of them myself. It feels quite new for books though. There have been games that adapt books (Dante’s Inferno and The Great Gatsby for NES come to mind), but games to market books? Not so much.

The Night Circus is a good book to try it with, both because of its structure and its audience. We know gamers read more than the average population, and in particular fantasy has a big crossover population. Failbetter have done a good job of adapting the Echo Bazaar mechanic to make a smaller, simpler game that reflects the content of the book. The only thing I regret is that the stripped out  much of what gives players a sense of agency in Echo Bazaar. You are almost entirely a slave to the cards you are dealt, but it’s an elegant slavery. The strong look taken from the book makes it look fresher than the game its based on – no beige at all.

I’d be fascinated to know Random House’s specific marketing objectives for the game and how it relates to the book. The game had the softest of soft launches, with no fanfare at all as far as I could see. I only found out it was launching from a chance conversation. There are lots of mechanics within the game to get you to share it with people, but a little PR push would surely have delivered many more curious people to the top of such an unusual experience, and allowed it to do that job of amplification on a much wider audience.

The thing I didn’t expect is that having played the game made the book better for me. Meeting images in the book I remembered from the game was always a joy, because I felt they were in a small way mine. I had won them with my card turning. It’s something I think film marketers understand really well, making the content your own before you see a movie, and I was thrilled to meet it here.

So if the goal was creating passionate advocates for the book, I feel like it’s succeeded.

Old project wrap-up – this week some posts are going up on the Hide&Seek blog reflecting on what we learned from making the Green Lantern. It starts with transmedia, and what we found out when we tried to push it in new ways.

Read it here.

Suddenly you look up near the end of a long project and realise you haven’t written anything else for months. But happily other people have, so I’m shamelessly going to link to them and just show a beautiful image of the Milky Way taken by the Spitzer Space telescope. I’ve been doing a lot of staring at the intricate detail of these, and they are endlessly fascinating. More in a couple of weeks when it’s all over.

To join the narrative I’m currently ushering through its run, start at newtonastronomers.com. To look at more glorious milky way pics, spitzer.deo-br.com

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently – how things that happen change us as people, how plots affect characters as stories progress.

This starts with character. I’m playing Mass Effect 2, and loving that I get to play a female character who really seems capable of the things the plot asks her to do. She looks and sounds tough, hardened and battlescarred. Unlike, say, Lara Croft, whose main emotional resonance is a grunt as she hits the wall, Commander Shepherd feels like a real character outside of me playing her.

I’m still going to do that videogame thing of asking her to get into firefights with undifferentiated aliens and progress the story by shooting them in the face, but I’m not going to ask her to remain untouched while doing so. The sense of a person who is used to command comes across very strongly, and that she can take what the universe dishes out.

Perhaps it’s an unfair comparison, but think about a pair of comic book movies, Fantastic 4 and Iron Man. Both have quite smart, funny scripts if you read them in isolation. Jessica Alba plays Sue Storm in the Fantastic 4 movie. Her job title is chief genetics researcher, but science is only there as a metaphor for power, nothing more nuanced. I actually think Legally Blonde takes a rather closer look at how knowledge changes you. This Sue Storm is there to fill out a costume and act as a plot point so that chaps can fight over her. There’s no light behind her eyes that says ‘I worked bloody hard for that PhD so please don’t patronise me’.

Whereas Robert Downey Jr really sells the idea of being a design engineer. To be fair, the Iron Man script does him the great service of having him have to build himself a new heart in a cave in Afghanistan, thus having to make imperfect things and fettle them to fit. That feeling gets slightly lost later in his super-engineer pad where apparently nothing needs filing when  it comes back from the rapid prototyping machine. But he still manages to exude a kind of mad joy at making things, a fundamental character trait in the way that having nice breasts is not.

Does this kind of realism have any place in fantasy stories? It depends, I suppose, on whether you want emotional truth or not – there are whole genres where it isn’t really the point.  But let’s say for the sake of argument that you, like me, do prefer it in your fictional worlds, then we need to consider the consequences of what happens. This doesn’t mean interminable cut scenes ‘to get across the character’ or imposing narrative externally on game structure, it’s just an argument for considering character to be more than just dialogue or a list of events that have happened.

The best thing about running games in the real world is seeing people having fun that you designed. So here’s a couple we crowned King and Queen of the V&A for getting all the questions right. They weren’t the first, but I was so shocked at how quickly the first people finished I forgot to take their picture.

House of Shadows was more of a puzzle than a game, kind of like Where’s Wally but using rooms of the museum as your puzzle pages. It fulfilled its brief in that it got people moving round the museum and looking closely at objects. Also I think got people to experience some of what I find really fun about the V&A and museums like it – that there are so many ways of, say representing a horse’s head in metal, all lined up for your consideration, all slightly different. You can really trace the craftsman’s decisions in their forms.

As someone who once studied fashion, the waistlines was my favourite – what year is each of these waistlines from and which is not a dress but a statue of a goddess? On the night we had a chap who claimed to know the collections so well he didn’t need to go and look, and he was often in the right century.

I’ve been making a lot of digital games recently, and there was something lovely about doing a project where there were absolutely no barriers to entry – no need for a specific mobile platform, internet time, no wrestling with how to hook people to move between physical and digital platforms. The audience was restricted to people who turned up on the night, but anyone who wanted a booklet could take one, and lots of people came back to take booklets for friends. It’s nice to be able to say yes constantly.

I need to thank my lovely volunteers Holly, Kim, Ian, Matt and Robin, and all the lovely people who gave up Sunday afternoons to test earlier versions of the game.

I’m testing a treasure hunt/puzzle game at the V&A this Sunday 24th for the next V&A Late, and I’m looking for volunteers.

I’ll be at the V&A between 2:30 and 4 this Sunday afternoon, and I am looking for people to come for 30-45 minutes during that time. It’s a calm, wander round the galleries at your own pace kind of thing, so babes in arms and hungover people are welcome.

EDIT: Be aware, this isn’t a mobile game, right now it’s very much a pencil and paper thing, so I will be thrusting sheets of paper at you. (Location tech doesn’t quite work well enough indoors yet to do this,but I live in hope)

Just email me at sophie@fictionalprojects.com to let me know you’re interested and get details of meeting.

Cheers,

Sophie

cc licensed image by Pink Sherbert on Flickr