Games, Learning Objectives and 'Telescoping'

If you should find yourself doing a course on game design, it's likely that you'll be asked to read James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003). It's a brilliant book, but, perhaps not that easy a way into the subject.

But, for a good introduction to some of the themes involved in applying computer games to learning you could do no worse than to take a look at the Steven Johnson book 'Everything Bad Is Good For You' . It's possible that Johnson does an even better job of explaining Gee's theories than perhaps Gee does himself. However, in addition to nicely summarising Gee, he also draws your attention to an aspect of modern video games which has immediately obvious educational applications - what Johnson calls 'Telescoping'.

This is when a gamer is forced to hold multiple objectives in his or her head in order to achieve a final objective. I immediately thought of 'Terminal' and 'Enabling' learning objectives, which are a staple of the Instructional Design Framework which NCALT e-learning staff work to. What's crucial here is the manner in which these objectives are 'nested' inside one and other, encouraging gamers and learners to cultivate the mental skills required to keep short-term goals in sight whilst never losing sight of 'the bigger picture'.

From 'Everything Bad Is Good For You':

"I call the mental labour of managing all these simoultaneous objectives 'telescoping' because of the way that the objectives nest inside each other like a collapsed telescope. I like the term aswell because part of this skill lies in focusing on immediate problems whilsy maintaining a long-distance view. You can't progress far in a game if you simply deal with the puzzles you stumble across: you have to co-ordinate them with the ultimte objectives on the horizon. Talented gamers have mastered the ability to kep all these varied objectives alive in their head."

Grim Fandango

As part of the game design course I recently took, I asked to do a study of the classic Lucas Arts game 'Grim Fandango' (pictured above) recently which gave me some classic examples.

Designed in 1998 by Lucasarts and widely held as the best 'adventure game' of all time, Fandango was a critical success but commercial flop. It still carries a large, cult following and has be held up as an exemplar of the genre of games.

Set in a universe inspired by Mexican day of the Dead mythology, the game is a tricky adventure game with a plot every bit as intricate as a Philip Marlowe novel. The clever story is complimented by an Art Deco look and feel, bonkers Bandito/Bee-Bop/Jazz score and excellent voice talent. Oh and it's very funny.

The game was the brainchild of Tim Schafer, previously responsible for the celebrated Monkey Island and Full Throttle. From Wikipedia:

'The story unfolds in four episodes, each set a year apart on the Day of the Dead. It is from this festival that much of the game's imagery is drawn — most of the game's characters look like skeletal calaca figures (based on the work of Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada). Various flowers are also used as tools of murder, in the form of a substance known as "Sproutella", which reacts with bone, destroying it by causing flowers to grow in it extremely rapidly. Characters refer to this manner of death as "sprouting". There is also unique fauna scattered throughout the game, such as bone-eating fire beavers and gigantic race cats.

The game combines this mythical underworld with 1930s Art Deco design motifs and a dark plot reminiscent of the film noir genre.[1] The design and early plot are reminiscent of films such as Chinatown and Glengarry Glen Ross.[2] Manny, whose job combines the roles of Grim Reaper and travel agent, turns detective when he discovers that deserving souls are being denied their rightful post-mortem reward of direct travel to Mictlan on the Number Nine train, bypassing the four-year trip that other souls must take. Manny's investigations draw him into a tangled web of corruption, deceit, and murder.'

Telescoping

The first sequence of 'Grim' involves Manny (the hero) attempts to get to the scene of a mass poisoning in the 'Land of the Living', so that he can reap a premium soul.

In order to get to the Land of the Living, you have to complete the following objectives:

To get to the Land of the Living, you need a car and a driver ('Terminal' objective)
To get a car and driver you have to go to the garage.
To get to the garage you have to find the lift down.
To get a driver you have to convince Glotiss to drive for you.
To convince Glotis to drive you have to have a signed form.
To get a signed form you have to go up to the boss's office.
To get into the Boss's office you have to climb the drainpipe and switch his PC's auto-prompt to tell his secretary to 'sign it' herself.
To get her to sign it you have to...

And so on. This dizzyingly complex set of objectives represents only half of the first level of the game - which overall comprises about 20 'Terminal' objectives.

The next step is to find an example from police work of obvious telescoping and see how the nested objectives could be broken down into a logical learning and activity path.

What next?

So, how could we use 'telescoping' in e-learning? Are there any obvious applications that spring to mind?

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

This is an updated version of a blog post which I originally submitted as part of my MsC. in E-learning at the University of Edinburgh, in Spring 2007.

Unavoidable

Anyone who attends e-learning conferences (or keeps up with the chatter on the blogs) will have found it difficult to avoid references to 'digital natives'. There are other terms which are popular (like 'Gamers', or 'Gen Y') but the term 'digital native' is perhaps the most commonly used term to describe the people currently entering the workforce.

But what are they and where does the term come from?

The term was coined by the author Marc Prensky (pictured above) who used it to distinguish between people who have grown up using interactive multimedia and those who are having to 'learn' how to interact with and use services like Youtube, Google Reader and the dizzying array of social web services like Facebook, Orkut and Myspace.

From Prensky:

'Today's students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today's average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will get to how they have changed in a minute.'

Suspicions

My reading of Prensky's article on digital 'immigrants' and 'natives' was thought-provoking in two ways: firstly in that it seemed to confirm some long-held suspicions about current educational models and secondly because it proposed a new division of learners which I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with.

Prensky's arguments that 'digital natives' are not being well served by traditional pedagogies is one part of a larger argument which has been bubbling up within the zeitgeist for some time now. Any of us working in educational fields will be long-familiar with constant claims that school-children are more disengaged than ever before, with teachers complaining that learners are switched-off, suffering from attention-deficit disorder and that they lack the basic ability to concentrate in class. This isn't new - Plato uttered similar complaints in the 6th century BCE.

What's notable now is that such complaints have become so vociferous in recent years that increasingly there are more and more people suggesting that rather than there being issues with the learners, there is in fact a fundamental problem with the system which is trying to educate them.

Underground History

Some time back I stumbled across the work of John Taylor Gatto, who in his groundbreaking book 'The Underground History Of American Education' suggested that the American educational system is designed as nothing more than a complex factory line for producing hordes of compliant individuals, whose sole purpose in life is to willingly submit themselves to processing by multi-national corporations in menial physical labour.

The exact details of how this project came to be are complex, but if we accept Gatto's arguments for a moment, a large problem makes itself very clear. The Anglo-Prussian model upon which the US system was based was designed during a time of Industrial manufacturing. That age is now gone - with today's school-leavers thrust into a global 'knowledge economy' which they are ill-prepared to compete in.

This notion has been surfacing in several places - from blogs, to academic journals - to mainstream media where we saw in an episode from the seventh season of the TV show 'The West Wing', Democratic candidate Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits) railing against the US educational system because it was based on the agrarian calendar.

As dead as Gagne

I have no difficulty in accepting that some older pedagogical models may have had their day in the sun, but I'm concerned that such a rush to embrace the future may marginalise those of us who do not necessarily fit comfortably into one of Prensky's two categories. For example, Donald Clark (former CEO of the Epic e-learning company - where I worked for a year) posted a blog in February of 2007, where he stated that the increase in usage of the web in education is 'killing Gagne dead'. The Gagne that he refers to is Robert Gagne and his 'Nine events of learning'. This is probably the most often used ID model for producing 'chapters' of digital e-learning content.

Clark argues that the increased accessibility of content via the web (notably video content) is knocking such 'guided' models out of the water entirely. To an extent I agree with him - I believe that many digital learning solutions are designed not with the learner in mind but rather the tutor - accommodating perhaps the tutor's preferred learning styles rather than the learners.

However, a white paper from Epic (which Donald, as you can see from the comments below the blog post in question, is at pains to point out he did not write) makes a good case for different usage of ID models for different audiences. Specifically, it suggests that 'entry-level' audiences would benefit from the more guided models (of which Gagne is an excellent example) and that more free-form models of self-guided learning (such as are facilitated by the web) work better for more senior and experienced learners - who crucially have the time and the technical skills to enable such learning to occur.

Pedagogy or not?

My own experiences would seem to back this up: I work in creating digital learning solutions for a range of audiences - all of them in the Police services of the UK. Unbelievably, entry level learners to the police force have no protected learning time - rendering any offer for learners to learn in their 'own way' redundant. This, coupled with the fact that the learners we design for are acquiring sensitive, challenging and highly legislation-sensitive materials, behoves us to provide a clearer line of guidance in any learning materials provided. I would prefer it that we lived in a world that allowed trainee Police officers the opportunity to have exploratory, free-form learning experiences but the time constraints, legislation compliance and complexity of information negates this from happening - at least for entry level learners. Digital natives or not, pedagogy (of some form) is required for audiences such as this.

I can't help but feel that Prensky's narrow division of learners into 'natives' and 'immigrants' is reductive, binary and perhaps unhelpful. For certain a 12 year-old will have different wiring (as a result of the neuro-plasticity which Steven Johnson alludes to in his book 'Everything Bad Is Good For You') than a 32 year-old as myself, but I'm not entirely ignorant of new technologies and in some rare instances still have the ability to wow my teenage nephews with what seems to them like arcane knowledge of the web and it's myriad services. On the flip side, put them up against me in a PS2 shoot-em-up and they'll annihilate me. I'd like to think that myself and my nephew fit somewhere in-between 'native' and 'immigrant' and that neither of us would be pigeon-holed into one educational model based on our age and hours put in on an Xbox.

Read

Prensky's article on 'Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants' (pdf)

Watch

'Did you know?' - explaining the 'digital native'.