WolfQuest

Dave Raves:
Claims for learning outcomes from games run the gamut from “nothing at all” to professional assassin skills. Hopefully the truth lies somewhere else. In a recent Harpers Magazine roundtable, Raph Koster makes the lovely point that what a game teaches may bear no relation with its ostensible subject or goals. “In Pac-Man, we think we’re eating dots, but the game is actually about visiting very location on the grid. With first-person shooter games like Grand Theft Auto, we’re learning to position a cursor on a screen accurately.” There is inevitably some distance between the user’s concrete actions in the game interface and the scenario of the game. This has always been interested me—how to ensure that what user’s do is tightly connected with the content and learning goals.

But surely something else is going on in the player’s head beyond mastering the interface and these basic tasks of the game. The context and layers wrapping that core gameplay matter, don’t they? What about the meaning-making?

Perhaps the most extreme argument that learning games are effective teachers comes from people like David Grossman, who claims that videogames and other contemporary media “teach our kids to kill.” But this “monkey see, monkey do” theory reflects a discredited transmission or “empty slate” model of learning. If it were true, we’d have to ban not only violent games but also racing games that encourage reckless driving, strategy games that require players to conquer rival nations, not to mention seemingly innocuous games that actually allow players to starve people.

And if it were true, we’d also have shelves of effective learning games that caused all sorts of noble behaviors from to recycling to world peacemaking.

Alas, people ain’t that simple. Players don’t go out and shoot their neighbor after playing a violent game any more than they’ll roadtrip to Yellowstone and grab an elk by the teeth after playing WolfQuest. People consume games just like they consume everything else they encounter. They chew it up, taking the parts they want, filtering it through their own idiosyncratic interpretations on it, and finally swallowing those transformed bits while spitting out everything else.

So we don’t have to worry about PETA boycotting WolfQuest. No elk will be harmed as a result of this game.

But players will learn…something, right? Hopefully so. To think about what that might be, let’s see what learning researcher James Paul Gee says players would learn from a state of the art instructional video game. He looked at Full Spectrum Warrior, a game adapted from an Army training simulation. The game immerses the player in the specific activities, values, and ways of seeing of the professional soldier, with support from NPCs (non-player characters) who provide just-in-time guidance and information. “I now know,” says Gee,” what ‘bounding’ means in military practice, how it is connected to military values, and what role it plays tactically in achieving military goals. A mere dictionary definition could not begin to compete with mine.” Gee calls this approach “authentic professionalism.” A successful game introduces “complex languages and the ways in which such languages are married to specific experiences, like gravity to a tossed coin. These experiences are then used to solve problems and answer questions.”

Squad tactics, group hierarchy, attack strategies, territorial conflicts….WolfQuest is not that different than Full Spectrum Warrior, except that the domain of professional expertise is that of the wolf rather than the soldier. Wolves have knowledge of their environment, their pack, and their ways of survival. If we do our job right, players will gain a general appreciation of this wolf knowledge along with some deep, active understanding of the particular wolf skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in the game. They might use this knowledge of predator-prey relations or pack hierarchy to understand why their backyard is full of squirrels or why their dog does (or doesn’t) heed their commands. Eventually, they might check out a library book about wolves, incorporate wolves into their dramatic play, write a letter of support for wolf conservation and reintroduction, and perhaps even persuade their family to go see wolves in the wild.

Gee notes that Full Spectrum Warrior does presents a certain ideology, one that may not be palatable to everyone. Certainly the Army hopes that the game will inspire some percentage of players to join up, or at least give a respectful nod when they pass a soldier on the street. We also intend WolfQuest to present an ideology — about wild animals and wilderness. Players will inevitably transform that ideology as they integrate it into their own worldview. We don’t expect them to shut off their computers forever to go live in the wilderness (how would they hear about WolfQuest sequels if they did?). But we do hope that they’ll keep something of WolfQuest with them when they do go outside, occasionally seeing the world through the eyes of a wolf, and savoring the primal connections between one predator and another.

Dave Raves:
Educational computer games don’t get much respect. In the three decades since the first Apple computer created the field, we’ve seen thousands of “drill and kill” games along with content-driven efforts like the Oregon Trail series. Yet the current wave of attention on games and learning rarely references that entire generation of products. And at the Web Designs for Interactive Learning conference last year, a crowd of people at an informal rant session bemoaned the dearth of good learning games to the point of wondering if the term was an oxymoron. And at the Games, Learning and Society conference this year, most sessions focused on the potential for games as learning tools, or the lessons learned from commercial games.

I’ve pondered the same thing for a long time as well, and if I had a good answer I’d go get a grant to make a good learning game. Wait, we did that…so now I’m on the hook. There are probably a lot of good answers and I hope to ponder some of them in this blog as we wrestle with them in the development of the WolfQuest game. Giving the content priority over gameplay is, of course, the first reason why there are so few good learning games to date.

But another notion that I keep coming back to is the idea of “safety.” As educators, we naturally want to avoid doing any harm to our learners, especially if they’re children. We also don’t want to tick off any parents or teachers, since they provide our surest access to kids. And that means we stay on the safe side when it comes to our content and gameplay. Let a character die? Probably not–it might upset a child. Let the child’s character die? Almost certainly not—and if so, then only in the most oblique or gentle way. Allow a child to kill something? Absolutely, positively not!

Do other children’s media have the same restraint? Hardly. From David and Goliath to Old Yeller to Obi-wan Kenobi, death is a central theme in children’s literature and film. Of course, the difference is that children aren’t playing those characters when they die. How traumatic would it be if they were? Well, my kids (age 7 and 10) take the death of their avatars in stride when playing computer games. It’s just part of the game. They naturally understand that the virtual world of the game is by definition a safe zone–you’re in that magic circle–where bad things can happen without hurting us. That’s why we go into the magic circle–to experience things we may not be able to, or even want to, experience in real life. Games, whether on a screen or on the playground, have always had a transgressive quality to them.

Furthermore, virtual worlds are also designed for players to push against as they try to discover the boundaries of the world and the consequences of their actions. Circumscribing those consequences to preclude death just makes the world less interesting and less exciting. Besides, if kids can’t explore extremes of existence like death in a game, where can they?

So does all this mean that death will be a strong possibility for player-wolves in WolfQuest? You bet! Players can die of starvation, exhaustion, or wounds resulting from boss battles with elk or other wolves. Even better, players can attack and kill all sorts of prey. It’ll be great. Since survival and death are core content topics for us, we’d be remiss to sidestep it. But I think that these ideas should apply to other learning games as well. The chance of death (your own or others) heightens the stakes and helps fulfill one of the greatest potentials of virtual worlds—to explore actions and consequences in all their fascinating, thrilling, and terrifying glory, with no risk to anything but your free time.