Training & Games

Just a brief link & thought.  One of the oldest uses of game simulations is strategic training.  Tripp Robbins passed this Wired Article along, about how football players are learning new moves from playing Madden.  Of course, to the extent we learn things by virtually doing, isn't this just a bit troubling as applied to Grand Theft Auto?

Comments

[gentimouton]

1.

Or to Flight Simulator?
Actually, the Youtube trailer of Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat (free to watch at babelgum.com) shows at 1:20 someone who mentions that terrorists (could) use Flight Simulator to train.

[Richard Bartle]

2.

greglas>isn't this just a bit troubling as applied to Grand Theft Auto?

GTA teaches people that if they don't want to get dragged from the wheel of their car, they should wear a seatbelt.

If more people wore seatbelts, hundreds of lives a year could be saved. The government should therefore be buying the game in bulk and giving it away for free to teenagers learning to drive.

Richard

[greglas]

3.

Seatbelts. Right. :-)

So I confess to a bit of bear-baiting, since GTA is such a popular target for regulators and people who don't play video games and want to complain about them (who may happen to be regulators as well).

But if we can put all that to one side (can we?), I do think it is worth pointing out that doing things in simulations is something midway between watching things on a screen and actually doing them. Which means that games are different than past media in an important way, a way that may have implications for designers, and a way that may have ethical implications for both players and designers.

And afaik -- putting aside the question of whether the state has any place to play in the design/play process -- Richard and I agree that VWs and games generally are significantly different from other media in that way. That's all I'm saying.

[Andy Havens]

4.

I've played a few hundred thousand hours of games, and I'm trying to think of anything I've learned that isn't either:

1. Some kind of fact I could have learned elsewhere, or;

2. Meta-skills that come from playing many, many games; rule/spin determination, UI/UX issues, etc.

Driving games? Not so much. You'd need a lot more haptic feedback for it to be useful, I think. RTS? Nope. I don't have any use in my day job for tactical or strategic troop movement skills, even if the game did improve them. FPS? Again, back to the haptic thing. You might be able to improve your overall reaction time using games, but firing real guns, arrows, etc. is a lot different than using a joystick.

I thought the Wired article was very interesting for that reason. My guess, though, is that the end-run time-waste procedure is something that has been done in RL before this. But, statistically speaking, very few players get the chance to do something like that in RL, making the game experience of something rare into something helpful when that once-in-a-lifetime moment comes up.

I'd like a proofreading sim, please, that all my students could play...

[Raph]

5.

Proofreading sim: slurp a text file, pop words on screen scrolling by, put randomized typos in them, require the user to buzz in when the word is spelled wrong. Sounds like a game to me!

When I was a practicing journeyman letterpress printer (both my wife and I did this in college) we learned the way to proofread under those "no takeback" sorts of circumstances: read each word in isolation, one at a time, in a group, with a pause between each word.

It.

Forced.

Attention.

On.

Each.

Word.

which is of course a big part of the challenge of proofing text, because that's not how we read -- we read words holistically, not by piecing them together out of letters.

[Richard Bartle]

6.

Andy Havens>I've played a few hundred thousand hours of games, and I'm trying to think of anything I've learned that isn't either:
1. Some kind of fact I could have learned elsewhere, or;
2. Meta-skills that come from playing many, many games; rule/spin determination, UI/UX issues, etc.

Yup, this is my view too. Games are great at teaching facts or anything you can learn through rote, and they're great at teaching high-order thinking processes, but there are better ways to teach the things in between.

Unfortunately, most of the serious games work is aimed at those "things in between".

I wrote a blog post on the subject a while back, if you're interested.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

7.

Raph>read each word in isolation, one at a time, in a group, with a pause between each word.

The way I was taught to do it was to read the text backwards. It's good for finding syntax errors (hopeless for semantic errors, though!).

I never do read the text backwards, by the way, that's just how I was taught when I worked on the university newspaper...

Richard

[Andy Havens]

8.

Richard: I remember that blog post, yes. I may have been inadvertently or subconsciously channeling it when I replied to this post. I remember thinking at the time when I read it originally that, yes... that is the problem with most learning games. They hit you over the head with the lesson, thereby making the learning part not fun and the game part not fun.

I learned where Yakutsk was from Risk. I also learned that if you hole up in Australia for 10 turns or so while the Alpha Males battle over Asia and Europe, you can then pop out and screw everybody. I then learned, when playing against somebody who did that, that you can kinda do the same thing with South America or Africa. I then learned that you can lose friends over a game of Risk.

I got better at real life Scrabble by playing computer Scrabble. Not sure that counts for anything.

From Civilization I learned that military victories are much cheaper and quicker in earlier technological eras. Agincourt was a big deal with a couple thousand guys and longbows. WW1 slugged on forever. Nukes ruin your economy and pollute the whole world.

The interesting thing about the original football story is that football players playing Madden are playing a game that is related to what they do for a living. What I do for a living is marketing. I wonder if you could do an advertising MMO.... Hmmmm....

MMMM = Massively Multiplayer Mad Men

[heartlessgamer]

9.

Hasn't Grand Theft Auto taught us a good thing though? I've learned to always shoot first when some maniac tries to pull me out of my car.

[Richard Bartle]

10.

heartlessgamer>Hasn't Grand Theft Auto taught us a good thing though? I've learned to always shoot first when some maniac tries to pull me out of my car.

My MMO experience has taught me that if I'm ever attacked by a tiger, I should send a fireball down its throat.

That said, there are some gameplay tropes with enough basis in reality actually to work.

Richard

[Shava Nerad/Shava Suntzu in SL]

11.

You know, I don't think I learned how to fire a musket from playing Napoleonic miniatures, or how to maintain myself as a despot from playing Civ.

But the football players are learning football strategy. Good on them. I've never bothered with the game.

But this is nothing new -- Dynamix had the first flight sim that was certified for ground training for new pilots in the late 90's.

If new drivers are learning driving skills from GTA, they're probably also aware that there's no reboot button on their body, and the crashes could kill them. Or else, hey, maybe their males under 25, in which case that lesson's lost anyway. ;)

Most skills are obliquely learned -- we talk about that a lot.

I was a geeky female wargamer back in the 70's before D&D hit, and I can tell you a few things I learned from gaming before I learned them from real life.

- how to budget and allocate resources
- how to negotiate, and when to trust the outcome
- how to speak up (big lesson for a rural girl in the 70's)
- how to be secure in my being female in a male-dominated environment

Very glad I learned these things before I started managing programmers at age 23...:)

Maybe not from driving games, but I think people are still learning these things and the various mentioned above from gaming. As I've mentioned here before, my son learned to read at adult levels and he learned math up to algebra/stats in 1st grade from playing Pokemon with me, and he learned all those things from Civ too.

@andy -- actually, I'm designing a game based on entrepreneurship, with some serious underpinnings but really cast more like a Steve Jackson-style card game, falling between Illuminati and Chez Geek. My background's in marketing -- I'll keep you posted.

[Education Tay]

12.

Virtual learning is used in a range of industries including building, engineering, car design and of course the games industry. As a teacher I have started to use virtual learning and the student like the idea. Health and safety checks and cut down on wastage are other good applications for virtual platforms.