A shout out to Eliane Alhadeff for her recent post Search as a Serious Game which highlights a seriously cool search interface from SearchMe.com. A picture says a thousand words so file this under User Experience and go take it for a spin to see what web search + gamer centered design might look looks like. For more visit the SearchMe blog.
As a cold-war baby one of my favorite cartoon strips was Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. 
That all flashed back to me a few years ago at the second Serious Games Summit in Crystal City, VA, just across the highway from the Pentagon.
There, it didn’t take long to realize — with equal measures of horror and fascination — that nearly half the conference attendees were either CIA, DIA, another spookier breed of __IA, or were soldiers in cammies on state-side rotation. Then, the business, training and education verticals were sorely lacking. Today, between forums at the Game Developers Conference, the Virtual World Summit and sessions at SIIA, AEP, FETC and other conferences, all I can say is what a difference a few years make.
In their on-going coverage of games for purposes beyond entertainment, Wired Magazine recently ran a story called U.S. Spies Use Custom Videogames to Learn How to Think. As much as it reminded me of the conference in Crystal City, it also shows how far we’ve come in the acceptance of games’ power to inform and motivate:
Given a choice between a droning classroom lecture or a videogame, the best method for teaching Generation Y was obvious. “It is clear that our new workforce is very comfortable with this approach,” says Bruce Bennett, chief of the analysis-training branch at the DIA’s Joint Military Intelligence Training Center.
In one of the games anti-terrorist forces land by helicopter in Sudden Thrust. The goal of the games is to focus players on epistemology. […] The titles may conjure images of blitzkrieg, but the games themselves are actually a surprisingly clever and occasionally surreal blend of education, humor and intellectual challenge, aimed at teaching the player how to think.
[…] Each game only takes about 90 minutes to three hours, and has multiple story lines that branch depending on a player’s actions. All DIA analysts will eventually play them, from rookies to old hands who will use them for refresher training. The DIA has about 2,000 analysts, but the agency has been tasked with training another 2,000 in the U.S. military’s combatant commands, many of whom work overseas far from training facilities. With classroom space and instructors at a premium, Bennett estimates that every hour spent training with a game saves one hour of classroom instruction, plus travel time and expense. Read the full article here >>>
Though Spy vs. Spy came to mind when I attended Serious Games Summit and first read this story, that isn’t the point. What’s key here is to recognize that games are a seriously effective tool for reaching the digitally native learner and for motivating the digital immigrant.
Just as back in the day the Defense Department spawned the Internet through its DARPA program, they’re again showing the way forward. Companies like IBM are getting the message and so is Cisco who use games to train new engineers. Children’s technology and entertainment executives are tuning in big time and soon finance, pharma and professional education will be on the bandwagon as well. Clearly the digital natives are restless and the games are beginning.
How could you go wrong choosing William Shakespeare’s plays and characters to be the centerpiece of a massively multiplayer online game?
Just ask Ted Castronova who received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation to create Arden: The World of William Shakespeare, then discovered genius alone isn’t enough. As Chris Baker reports in WIRED this week:
Ted Castronova, a social scientist and professor at Indiana University, made a name for himself studying the economies of online games, going so far as to calculate the exchange rate between US dollars and EverQuest platinum. But he wanted to do more than study virtual worlds — he wanted to create one.
So in 2006, armed with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant, Castronova and a team of grad students got to work designing Arden: The World of William Shakespeare. The aim was to have players explore an Elizabethan environment, interact with characters from the Bard’s plays, or just go to a tavern and wager a few farthings on card games like One-and-Thirty. Meanwhile, Castronova would further his research by studying players’ behavior. Hey nonny nonny!
The game was released last fall — to little fanfare. It seems something was rotten in the state of Arden. “It’s no fun,” Castronova says ruefully. “We failed to design a gripping experience.” The scholar says he has, however, gained a deeper appreciation for the challenges of game design… article continues >>>
What can we learn from Castronova’s perfect storm? To begin with MMOGs are enormously complex systems, so having some humility and realizing you don’t know everything is a good starting point. Castronova’s five tips for making games that don’t suck, which are discussed further in Baker’s WIRED article, are valid too:
A couple of years ago Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein made an effort to articulate the rules of game 
design in The 400 Project. Although they never got past #112 it’s still a good staring point. Taking it further, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman literally wrote the book on game design in Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals
Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun
Above all, don’t get discouraged. Play as many games as you can — both the genre you’re creating and those that you’re not — and remember, conceiving of and designing virtual worlds and MMOGs isn’t supposed to be easy. As with three-act plays for the stage in the Bard’s time, video games are still a relatively new form of creative expression. And with all due respect to Castronova, Harwood and Falstein, Salen and Zimmerman and the Bard himself, the rules of this game are still being written.
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) began in 1984 as a conference to bring together people from those three worlds who wouldn’t ordinarily meet. Today it’s become a gathering of the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers in these fields and beyond, challenging them to share their best ideas and insights in 18 minutes. For years it cost dearly to attend in person — and still does — but last year TED released videos going back to 2004, a huge gift I’ve often enjoyed. During my morning scan today I watched Sir Ken Robinson talk about how most formal education conspires to kill creativity and it made me appreciate even more the few teachers of mine, like Earnest Boaten and John Langdon, who went against that norm and encouraged my creativity to shine through.
The complete archive of more than 200 TED videos is here and you can subscribe here: 
Fed up with leaving a huge carbon footprint as you travel on business? As the Virtual Worlds conference concludes here in New York, David Wortley of the Serious Games Institute in Coventry, UK writes that CNBC Europe has broadcast a feature story that discusses the use of virtual worlds for distance meetings and other core business applications.
http://richardcarey.net/media/CNBC-Europe%20on%20Virtu%23C3754C.mov
CNBC’s Kate Russell hits all the right notes about the use of virtual worlds for business communications using CISCO, Second Life and Forterra as examples. Though her concluding quote from Gartner Research — that “86% of business people will have virtual world avatars in the next decade” — may be overly bullish positive remarks from the punditry never hurts.
No? Then I’m sure this post is preaching to the choir, but even so Nicholas Kristof’’s op-ed piece With a Few More Brains… in the Sunday New York Times today is a must-read for anyone concerned about the relentless dumbing-down of political discourse and the dismal state of education in this country — two issues that are intertwined (IMHO) and among the most urgent problems of our times. In Kristoff’s own words:
A Ohio University poll in 2006 found that 36 percent of Americans believed that federal officials assisted in the attacks on the twin towers or knowingly let them happen so that the U.S. could go to war in the Middle East. Then there’s this embarrassing fact about the United States in the 21st century: Americans are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution. Depending on how the questions are asked, roughly 30 to 40 percent of Americans believe in each.
A 34-nation study found Americans less likely to believe in evolution than citizens of any of the countries polled except Turkey. President Bush is also the only Western leader I know of who doesn’t believe in evolution, saying “the jury is still out.” No word on whether he believes in little green men.
Only one American in 10 understands radiation, and only one in three has an idea of what DNA does. One in five does know that the Sun orbits the Earth …oh, oops.
I urge you to read the whole article and forward this to anyone you know who’s on the fence or doesn’t get it. For although Al Gore may be working hard to raise awareness about global warming, insisting that if we “put our minds to it” we can find a solution, that assumes — and requires — there are minds to apply to the problem in the first place. And that’s where the importance of enlightened politicians and press, educators and technologists come in to play.
Can a video game evoke human emotions more subtle than the adrenaline rush of offing gun-toting zombies and other digital miscreants? After playing a demo of The Graveyard, produced in an expressionist film noir like black and white by Belgium-based Tale-of-Tales, I’m that sure they can. From Tale-of-Tales’ press release:
The Graveyard is an experiment with what makes video games appealing beyond traditional game experiences. Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn are determined to explore the potential of interactive media. They believe that for the medium to grow (up), designers need to have the courage to abandon the game format and dare to explore other types of interaction, other types of emotions, stories, etc.
“We know that The Graveyard is not really a game. We could have easily added some form of gameplay. But The Graveyard wasn’t designed just for the players to have fun. While it doesn’t make a clear statement about anything, we hope that playing the game gives people the opportunity to contemplate the various topics that the experience touches upon. Not even to come to some kind of personal conclusion (though it’s ok if you do). Just to think about death, and life, for a moment. It’s good for the heart.”
The Graveyard can be downloaded from http://Tale-of-Tales.com/TheGraveyard
Ever wonder your website or blog wold look like if all the links out were traced five or ten hops to their ultimate destination?
BrandExperience found this applet by Salathe Marcel where you “…put in your web address and it turns it into this very cool, visual graph.” Very cool indeed.
The illustration here is a visualization of this site. What does yours look like? Enter your URL here and find out.
Today when most of us think about the potential of serious games in the classroom, computer-based games come to mind. With all the attendant issues about the ratio of students to computers, software trouble shooting, not to mention tightly prescribed lesson plans and class periods, however, it’s not surprising the original enthusiasm fades quickly. 
A story out of Idaho, where chess is being taught in 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms, shows there’s another way — with no batteries required — that can be equally effective. The New York Times reports that:
Once a week, Deborah McCoy, a third-grade teacher in Donnelly, Idaho, unpacks chessboards and pieces and spends an hour teaching her 20 students how to play the game. […] Mrs. McCoy does not do this because she is passionate about chess; she barely knew how to play before this school year. But she began teaching it as part of an unusual pilot program under way in more than 100 second- and third-grade classrooms across Idaho. […] “One of the things that we hear is that too much of what we do is based on rote memorization,” Mr. Luna said. “The part I really like about this program is that kids are thinking ahead.”
Mrs. McCoy said she has been pleased with the results.
“So many kids spend their time plugged into video games, iPods, television and so they are more isolated,” she said. “They learn give and take in chess. There are courtesies that you follow. It has been really beneficial for them.”>>> story continues here
The program in Idaho was developed by America’s Foundation for Chess, who have created a standards-based curriculum, First Move™, utilizing the game of chess as a learning tool for 2nd and 3rd grade students. It promises “students have fun learning, while the requirements set forth by the No Child Left Behind Act, and state standards are being met.” More information is available here.
Tonight was the second public stress test of Raph Koster’s Metaplace virtual world and being there over the course of a half-hour gave up some hints of what’s to come. The local client runs in Flash 
and logged-in users arrive in the lobby where they can invoke help, learn about the rules, or play the game — a simple space shooter for the purpose of this test. There’s also a chat window and a count of how many users are online. Once in the play space there’s another chat window that can be turned on or off, the stage itself, and unexpectedly rich audio effects to accompany all the shoot-em-up action (click images to see full size). The stage is about the same size as on other sites that rely on a Flash or Java plug-in rather than an installed client-side application, and while one might wish for larger it was adequate, made to feel larger perhaps by the bright, seemingly dynamic sound track.
After the test was over (in the 30 min. I was online no more than 85 users at one time, no server crashes, but some wonkiness in how user actions were articulated) I was browsing the Metaplace forums to see what people had to say and found Raph’s 
notice from last week that Metachat — the first public instance of a Metaspace world — had been launched on MySpace. I clicked over and logged in to my normally dormant MyPlace account so I could check out what was going on. As soon as I had Metachat installed and loaded, I found that Raph and some of the other testers had gathered on a soccer field to kick around the results and a few virtual soccer balls too. Cool. Clearly hanging out there gives a good idea of what’s in store from the Areae crew as Metaplace comes to life in other iterations. Raph adds more detail in his blog post announcing Metachat’s release:
I know you’re tired of hearing it by now, but Metaplace is a platform for virtual worlds. There are a lot of kinds of virtual worlds – we’ve shown you a puzzle game, a multiplayer arcade game, and a chat world with avatars. Our testers are busily creating more sorts of worlds, ranging from RPGs to experimental collaborative music systems, and we look forward to showcasing some of those for you in the next few weeks.
We’re still many weeks away from letting everyone into the full tools, but the time has come to start releasing some of the individual worlds
that we have made and leaving them up permanently as a “sneak preview” so that people can see the breadth of what can be done with the Metaplace platform. So today we’ve released the very first Metaplace world on MySpace: Metachat.
It’s just a simple chat app, with movie playing, soccer balls to kick around, and some other features. It only uses a fraction of what Metaplace can do, but it’s a start. We invite all of you with MySpace profiles to add the app and check it out. >>> post continues…
So what’s it all mean? First of all log on to your MySpace page, load Metachat, and get someone to 
join you. Got that? Now imagine that you were in a private virtual world or were playing a card, strategy game or shooter game you had made or modded, and embeded on your blog 0r MySpace page. Add a crowd of friends, co-workers, classmates or the general public, and you begin to see the potential for deploying custom, private-yet-public virtual spaces.
Of course Metacafe (and soon, Metaplace proper) are only two of a surge in social media mashups that are giving users tools and license to create their own games, movies and animations; the tools to share them privately or publicly; and the communications framework to grow a full-fleged online community.
So far these services are all good fun. If, however, you allow that the growth in virtual world subscriptions I talked about last week is more than a bubble and reflects public acceptance of the MMOG form. And if you trust that the authoring tools these services are developing really are fun and easy for noobies to learn. Then this surge may point the way to an ecosystem of purpose-built virtual worlds. In the serious games space, they will give professors, teachers and instructors new tools to teach, and provide students new opportunities to meet, practice and work together outside the classroom. At least that’s my theory, something we’ll debate further at the SIIA EdTech Summit in May.
Richard Carey is a product development executive, project manager and producer with 20+ years of experience creating e-business, e-learning, social media, games, virtual reality, video and multimedia products, and bringing them to market. Call 718-858-8858 or click here to learn more. 
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Meet me at the NY Tech Meetup (first Tuesday of the month) or the Video 2.0 Meetup (last Thursday of the month) for a sneak-peak at the digital goodness brewing in New York City's lofts, alleys and media factories.
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