What is a 'Social Game'?

Several of the games I'm developing I think qualify as a 'social game' in that it requires you to learn and use social skills. This article provides the best explanation I've seen for this.
http://www.simplelifeforms.com/2009/01/19/what-is-a-social-game/

All games are driven by gameplay. Gameplay essentially means the basic ‘what you do’ in order to play the game. Chess is driven by strategic gameplay. The Sims is driven by character-building gameplay. Tetris is driven by speed and sorting gameplay. The common factor here is that what you are doing is testing something. Games test your skills and make you better at them, and in the process you have fun.

Social gameplay? It tests your social skills.

So a social game is one in which your social activities with other players (trading, dating, lying, flirting, charming, imploring, cajoling, whatever) actually matter. Many games have socialising (such as chat) as a part of their overall framework, but those social activities don’t really matter to how you play. World of Warcraft is a good example of this. Every player in the game has a character, but if you actually watch games in progress, 95% of the time players do not bother to play in character. There’s no test or reward for doing so.

Learning in Immersive Worlds

Thought I'd share this great report titled, "Learning in Immersive Worlds." It's directly relevant to several of our serious games projects. Some of the best stuff starts on the bottom of page 11:

...this report adopts a more general approach considering learning through play, with games and with simulations as part of a more general process of learning in immersive worlds. Immersive worlds are taken here to mean ‘microworlds’ that is the space of the game, the game-world. See call out box on microworlds. Realising that some games and simulations may be puzzles, board games or adventure-style games, this report focuses rather upon games and simulations as facilitators of virtual experiences rather than as sources of data or information which can be assimilated. Learning in immersive worlds itself is a process of learning, of flow or of activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1992) that is a set of interactions or constructed reasoning that may or may not be transferred into lived experiences, expressions or outputs.

Microworld
The concept of ‘microworlds’ was introduced by Minsky and Papert (1971). Microworlds are given domains or environments which may be explored in a non-linear way by users or learners, the environment includes artefacts and objects, and learners may learn through exploring the environment and its objects in a relatively open-ended way.

For learning to be effective in immersive worlds, or indeed any contexts, a relationship needs to be made between what is learnt and how it is applied in practice. This broadly follows Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (Kolb, 1984) although connections are not always made between what is learned and how it is applied in practice. This is the reason why post-exercise reflection and correct embedding of the ‘virtual experience’ into a learning context is so important. The phrase ‘exploratory learning’ will be used in this report therefore to mean the learning process that takes place in an immersive, virtual context, that may (or may not) then be transferred into lived experience in the real-world, a real-world experience, or abstract reasoning or imagining at a later time or in another similar or usually dissimilar context. Exploratory learning is in a sense taken to mean play as rehearsal or ‘pattern formation’ or in a neurological sense as a ‘mapping of types of maps’ (Edelman, 1992: 109)

de Frietas, S (2006). “Learning in Immersive Worlds: A Review of Game Based Learning.” JISC, retrieved January 15, 2006 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning_innovation/gaming%20report_v3.3.pdf

JHotDraw

JHotDraw (http://www.jhotdraw.org/) is one of the best open source Java drawing tools available (not that there are many). It covers the basics of vector drawing with the types of tools that people expect (see image below).

The main reason that I'm interested in it is that I like to draw. But I don't just like to draw for other people, I like to draw pictures as inputs to programming. A framework like JHotDraw gives me most of what I want from a drawing tool in a form that I can easily customize to create visual programming languages or semantic images. More about that to come in later posts.


If you're interested in getting started with JHotDraw, you should be very comfortable with Java. Although the code is pretty readable, there is a lot of it, there is very little up-to-date documentation and the included examples are fairly complex. To help you get started, I'm posting my implementation of the simplest possible JHotDraw application - HelloJHotDraw. This code is based on the latest version of JHotDraw at the time of this writing: v7.4.1 You can find the JavaDoc at http://www.randelshofer.ch/oop/jhotdraw/.

-- code --

import org.jhotdraw.app.SDIApplication;
import org.jhotdraw.samples.draw.DrawApplicationModel;
import org.jhotdraw.samples.draw.DrawView;

public class HelloJHotDraw extends SDIApplication {

public HelloJHotDraw() {

}

/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
HelloJHotDraw app = new HelloJHotDraw();
DrawApplicationModel model = new DrawApplicationModel();
model.setViewClass(DrawView.class);
app.setModel(model);
app.launch(args);
}

}

Combat Sim Wargames

I've been looking for realistic, modern US Army computer-based wargames from a commander's perspective. No first-person shooters. My emphasis is on commercially available games that use realistic Army terminology, symbology and tactics.

I found some good background information on Wikipedia under Wargaming. Another website to check out: DoD Game Community.

Here is the list of games that I found, organized by size of echelon. Several of these are commercial versions of training games that are being used by the military:

• Close Combat - Modern Tactics (Company Level)
• Full Spectrum Command (Company Level) - Not Commercially Available
  
• TacOps (Battalion Level)
• Armored Task Force (successor to Brigade Combat Team) (Battalion & Brigade Level)
• Decisive Action (Division & Corps Level)

I also looked at The Operational Art of War (Battalion, division, and corps combat), which looks fun, but not particularly realistic.