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.

Daily Practice

On a bad weather day a few months back, my boys were suffering a bit from cabin fever. I started thinking and researching activities that could burn up some of their energy without destroying our house.

About the same time, I was watching the Super Soccer Skills DVD by Dan Metcalfe. In this video, Dan demonstrates a bunch of drills that can be done in the living room in front of the TV. The drills are all footwork drills, dribbling in place. The DVD fits right in with the fundamental skill of soccer as shown in the Coerver pyramid below, ball mastery. In particular, beginning players (like my kids) really benefit from spending lots of time with the ball at their feet, learning the feel of the ball and how it responds to various types of dribbling, turning and passing.


Coerver Pyramid of Player Development (coerversoccer.com)

Now the really cool thing about the drills in Dan's video is that its the kind of thing that can be practiced every day. It doesn't require good weather, special equipment, etc. The problem with these drills is that they are a bit too hard for young kids to do and also they are quite boring (according to my boys). Also, my boys already have so many daily requirements such as chores, piano practice, daily reading and math that I hesitate to add another requirement. (Interesting how Scott's first grade class has gone to daily, at home, extra practice of fundamental skills like reading and math.)

But, I really like the concept of trying to work in extra soccer practice when the kids would be watching TV anyway. The key, I think, is to make practicing fun enough that they'll want to do it. So I put two and two together and came up with a set of quick and simple activities that kids can do indoors to work on their soccer footwork (with minimal damage to the furniture). And, I'm working on an idea for incorporating these activities into some type of game, to make the drills less mechanical and more fun. So far, the game is coming together nicely. I'll post back here if anything comes of it.

Education and Practice

I've been thinking a lot about education lately. My wife is getting her teaching certificate, my three sons are going through preschool and elementary school, I'm coaching soccer, I'm learning new skills and I've been working on several computer-based training projects.

I'm just starting to dive deeper into educational theory, so much of what I'll be posting will be from my limited point-of-view. On first glance, there seems to be dozens or hundreds of different educational theories or systems in the literature. A large percentage of these seem to have very little in terms of independent validation.

With regards to teaching a new skill, the following elements seem to be widely accepted:

• Explain
  
• Demonstrate
• Practice
• Assessment
  
• Feedback

From my limited reading and experience, practice is king. From everything I've seen and read, if you want to improve performance, you need practice -- the more the better (almost always). The other four bullets are about setting the student up to practice the right thing in the right way. I'll discuss this more in my next post, but for now I'll lay out a series of references that I've come across recently that show the importance of practice.

Power Law of Learning
I first learned of the power law of learning when I was taking Dr. John Anderson's cognitive psychology class at Carnegie Mellon University. Also called the power law of practice, this law states that memory performance improves as a power function of practice and is one of the most validated findings in education. Basically, the more you practice, the better you get and this improvement follows a logrithmic power curve -- faster improvement at the beginning followed by slower improvement as you reach peak performance. This curve is one of the origins of the term, "learning curve." The following graph from Dr. Anderson's cognitive psychology textbook demonstrates this effect.



The 10,000 Hour Rule
The next reference comes from a very popular recent book called Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. In this book, Gladwell researches and interviews successful people on the extreme outer edge of what is statistically possible and tries to determine how they got there. He finds that in almost all cases it is an accumulation over time of high-quality practice and repetition. Read the wikipedia review of Outliers for a more complete description.

Sports
Not only is this effect true in academics and business skills, but it also applies to sports and physical skills. Gladwell's book documents the case for Canadian youth hockey. Similarly, I remember an article about Russian youth tennis camps based on the same premise (but I can't find it right now). Coaching Youth Soccer by John McCarthy has this nice little nugget, "The more you get your players drilling their skills, within reason, the better your team will be. That's the surest thing about any sport."

Google Maps for Knowledge Elicitation

I'm experimenting with Google Maps "My Maps" drawing tools for knowledge elicitation. In this case, I'm specifically interested in knowledge elicitation for ground combat. My plan is to create a custom map someplace on the globe and use the drawing tools to draw up a combat situation using the MIL-STD 2525 notation. My Maps has very simple drawing tools, but I think with just lines, polygons and some custom icons like the ones below, I can do some interesting things.



Here's my second set. This time I made them a bit smaller, added red platoon icons and some icons to indicate that the red units are not visible. I also made the icons a standard size 50x50 pixels so that they line up better.



Here's an example of what you can get out of My Google Maps just using these icons and its standard drawing tools.



I'll write up my procedure and results soon.