Academic Games Are No Fun 159
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Academics have been flocking to use virtual worlds and multiplayer games as ways to research everything from economics to epidemiology and turn these environments into educational tools. A game called Arden, the World of Shakespeare, funded with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant and developed at Indiana University was supposed to test economic theories by manipulating the rules of the game. There's only one problem. "It's no fun, " says Edward Castronova, Arden's creator and an associate professor of telecommunications at the university. "You need puzzles and monsters," he says, "or people won't want to play ... Since what I really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments on, I decided I needed a completely different approach." Part of the problem is it costs a lot to build a new multiplayer game. While his grant was large for the field of humanities, it was a drop in the bucket compared with the roughly $75 million that goes into developing something on the scale of World of Warcraft. Castronova is releasing Arden to the public as is and says his experience should serve as a warning for other academics. "What we've really learned is, you've got to start with a game first," Castronova says. "You just have to." The new version is titled Arden II: London Burning."
Why use money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't hurt me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering all the angst displayed here when World of Warcraft is mentioned there should be no shortage in OS programmers creating new and great MMORPGs to bring down the evil and all so boring and all so many people are leaving and etc etc World of Warcraft.
But there isn't.
The problem in crafting a MMORPG is that it takes a long long time. I can find any number of people "with great ideas for a MMORPG" I just cannot find anyone who is a. willing to expend the real time it will take, b. compromise with others, c. just be available for group meetings, and d. willing to code the grunt side of the setup.
Hell this guy is just making a module for NWN or such... all the ugly stuff most programmers hate is provided (art work etc)
The days of just tossing out something (laughable anyone think a MMORPG can be made quickly - even muds took time to evolve beyond copies of diku)
Re:Don't hurt me. (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but that's mainly because of one time-consuming thing you didn't list: building up the user base and getting them to stay there, so that the network effects take off. (The feeling that they're being toyed with isn't good for that.)
I was rather unsatisfied with the claims in the summary: A MMORPG needs puzzles and monsters? What about Second Life and Club Penguin? And why is it so hard to add them? $250,000 is quite a lot if you think in terms of "how much you'd have to pay five geeks to set up a vitrual world in a month".
Convincing people to come can pose other problems for the economic analysis as well. The fact that people can quit any given game but not real life, can influence results.
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Really, his complaint is "My idea for a game was dumb, and I'm looking for something to blame for all that money getting wasted."
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Actually, as a game developer, I'm going with A: tens of thousands of hours of content to churn, B: a multi-server technological platform infrastructure which is both synchronized and massively parallel across disparate random hardware, C: character separation via deep customization and minimum 5 - 8 primary paths, and D: intricate system interactions frequently orders
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You always have a way out. Unfortunately for games (MMOs in this case) it's all to easy to die, respawn and go back for a second try, or just quit the game. You would have to create an attachment to the character and the only way that I've seen that works is through "work". You have to create a reward at higher levels and coax people to get to it. You also have to make it hard to get there. When they start getting these rewards... (not farming, raidi
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That's assuming the angst is directed towards the specific game WOW and not just MMORPGS in general. An MMORPG can be made by a couple of people in a couple of months. A good MMORPG can't be made at all. Besides, we already have MUDs.
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Considering that the comment I was responding to addressed the
Whatever. I think you're wrong and there are millions of other WoW players who surely disagree with you too.
Ok, show me an MMORPG with a real plot, with a real dramatic conflict and resolution. You can't have the same kind of story in an MMO as you do in a single player RPG si
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The problem in crafting a MMORPG is that it takes a long long time. I can find any
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What are all those student games (produced in a semester or two in the extra time between bouts of drinking), IGDA festival entries, highly-polished flash games, Dwarf Fortress and other Roguelikes, IFF entries, Defcon/Darwinia/Uplink, Gish, Gate 88, and damn near everything Greg Costikian blogs about, if not things people either made in their garage for fun, or made with a small team for a low budget?
Garage Developers dead? Many people's Game of the Year, Portal, was a student project that got sn
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I think GP is refering to the fact that its pretty impossible to start a tripple A game studio from scratch today, which was'nt the case 10-15 years ago.
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Unfortunately, the day of the garage game developer are over
-Flow (a couple grad students, a few years)
-Bejewelled (a small team a half a dozen months)
-Everyday shooter (one, guy, loads of time)
-Counter strike (1 lead, small community)
-MS XNA
Small scale development is alive and well. You just don't get it for $49.95 at radio shack like you did in the days of yore. It's now $10-$20 off one of the various game stores. The maga budget games are like block busters in hollywood but indie hits still come. You just have to fit yoru idea with the technology available. You
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I think World of Warcraft has something like 64,000 objectives within the game.
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Of course not. Everyone knows that everything open source is viral...And viral is bad, mmmkay?
Oregon Trail was fun! (Score:5, Funny)
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Honestly, I'm surprised my settlers didn't get scurvy from all the meat they were eating.
They'd have to be (Score:2)
They'd have to be. Who shoots an 800 pound buffalo and only takes 100 pounds of meat back with them?
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I'm not THAT bad of a butcher, and with the right supplies it'd be quite possible to convert most it to jerky or other forms that wouldn't spoil even without refridgeration.
In real(er) life I'd have stopped for an additional day if that was necessary to get that 100lbs up to 500 or so. I'd even get a buffalo blanket or coat out of it as a bonus.
Even in grade school I knew that modern refridgeration and spoilage guidelines are on the paranoid side.
Wish there was a Mormon Trail... (Score:2)
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I remember playing the solar system one at the library. It was pretty fun - jumping around in low gravity and such.
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The special Donner Party [wikipedia.org] version?
Everything old is new again. (Score:5, Informative)
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Didn't we just have this comment yesterday?
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Requires Neverwinter Nights (Score:4, Insightful)
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They were a couple years too late in doing this project if they're going to base it on NWN. From my experience playing NWN online, I'd say that the online population of players for that game hit its peak in 2005 or so.
Many players have moved on to other games, and most of those who remain are fairly dedicated players of the servers where they do play and have been playing. Most won't bother to try out a new server unless it has something more than Castronova's name going for it.
Plus, I think i
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And at the least, couldn't they maybe have based it on something like Oblivion, as a mod package?
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Shoulda learned from real MMORPGs (Score:4, Insightful)
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Perfect Competition (Score:3)
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Things like this were done in a live-roleplaying game: Money made out of clay (Adobe, so to say): It would crumbe with time, making for an automatic deflation. People tried to get rid of money as fast as possible...
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Oh yea... Fun! (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you thought this through? Whenever a regular MMO changes it's rules, an almost instant flamewar commences and many people leave the game.
If you want people to play your game, and keep playing your game, you will not be able to simply change the rules to test some theory of yours concerning economics... No, you'll have to be busy keeping people interested, and not randomly changing the rules is one aspect of that!
It's a great idea, I give you that, but it's simply not feasible for real...
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If you want people to play your game, and keep playing your game, you will not be able to simply change the rules to test some theory of yours concerning economics... No, you'll have to be busy keeping people interested, and not randomly changing the rules is one aspect of that!
It's a great idea, I give you that, but it's simply not feasible for real...
Don't be daft - people love economic rule changes.
By the way, I've changed the rules to add a my-reading-your-post tax, which incurs a two cent administrative fee per word. Thus you owe me $1.78, which exponentially increases if there are replies to this (and possibly other) thread(s) unless a) they are moderated Insightful b) Jupiter's third moon aligns with the rhombus of Capricorn. On a Tuesday.*
*Rules subject to change at my discretion and with no notice. It'll be more fun than crack cocaine, honest
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It might be better for the professor to use his grant money to study games that already exist and have been around for years. Most games have in game economies, but many have interact
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But doesn't this effectively happen often enough in the star wars MMORPG, even WoW and EVE?
I'm not convinced that the scientists wouldn't be less than current games. After all, it'd be deliberately introduced by the scientists to test a theory and make measurements. Scientists who're probably looking for more subtle results, and not some semi-mythical 'game balance'.
It could even be things as subtle as changing the federal discount rate by a tenth of a
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Things need correct focus (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually I don't even think it's that hard to come up with educational games. For instance I can identify every kind of ship in the Star Wars universe and I don't even LIKE Star Wars. Why? Because when playing Tie Fighter it's just secondary knowledge that you picked up. I took a class in college where the class worked on an academic game, and it had potential. It took place in the old west and kids were meant to do various things. Now you aren't going to be able to quiz kids every 30 seconds, but you can easily drop in things that are somewhat educational like what people used to buy, what sort of horse does what task, etc. No one would be rabidly pleased at how educational your game is, but it's not that hard to get people to pick up small bits of real knowledge.
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I think you hit the head on the nail there. Education is obsessed with testing even tough most people in education agree it is a poor way to judge learning abilities. The problem with most educational games is that it is focused on giving the players easily testable skills vs. actually bringing the student into a world where they virtually become primary sources of the topic, (where most primary sources of history will normally fail the test the
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The work of James Gee and Kurt Squire is all about this - the idea that all successful video games are (almost by definition) ideal learning environments. You necessarily have to learn stuff to progress in the game - if it were too easy or
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Age of Empires, etc. (Score:2)
Actually I don't even think it's that hard to come up with educational games
I agree, and I'll point to Age of Empires as an example.
In junior high and the beginning of high school, I had a number of history classes focusing on the ancient world. Simply knowing the vocabulary -- having an idea what a phalanx is, or a trireme -- was useful when writing essays. Of course, Age of Empires is not a faithful simulation of ancient combat, but it gets enough right that its educational value is definitely nonzero. In fact, the manual that came with the game (do people read those? I d
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I can attest to this. While learning Japanese, probably the most useful asset that helped me memorize the kana was Slime Forest by Project LRNJ. The game itself was set up like an RPG (with a kind of unusual plot; fun nonetheless!), but winning any of the fights throughout the game was completely reliant on one's knowledge (and quick recollection) of the Japanese kana.
I think what made that game entertaining was that while the academic incentives were there and clearly visible, the actual "game" itself wa
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Number Munchers, Super Number Munchers, Donald Duck's Playground, Oregon Trail, Oregon Trial 2, anything involving Sesame Street.
Of course, it's easier to make educational games for children. Part of the reason is that even if they don't know how to play the game as it was intended, they'll play it a different way. I suppose this is also mimicked by adults with Grand Theft Auto, but then again, adults aren't learning much other than the various ways of killing prostitutes.
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Hey, that is very important knowledge. It helps you stay alive in the only job still available once globalization and the outsourcing trend reaches its logical conclusion.
Nomic (Score:4, Informative)
Nomic is a little different from the emphasis of TFA, in that nomic's creators focussed on the political implications of self-referential, self-modifying rule systems, and TFA seems to be mostly about the economics of such systems.
I and a group of my friends took on nomic many years ago, and found it to be mostly theoretically interesting, and not all that fun in practice.
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Interesting - I was exposed to Nomic [wikipedia.org] via Monochrome [mono.org], it can be quite fun for a while, but then I started to get bored with it as the game progressed. It's a good intellectual challenge, with more than a fair share of game theory sprinkled in for good effect - for example if someone is close to winning, then it is in the interest of other players to change the winning condition, whilst ensuring that they maintain their own position.
I think it's a game best played online with decent records available to
You need puzzles and monsters? (Score:3, Insightful)
"You need puzzles and monsters" eh? Explain Second Life then.
I don't "get it" (SL) and actually remarked to a co-worker after trying it for a while that it wasn't any fun because you don't kill anything, but lots of people spend a lot of time there.
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This was a failure of imagination, methinks.
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Second Life is not a game (Score:2)
I'd say it parallels the web quite nicely in that SL is really a medium for doing things. Some people play. Some use it as a 3D chat. Some as a base for programming/building projects. Some role play. For some it allows simulating their dreams: If you want to be an anthropomorphic cat, or to live
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A pretty good summary. I've wonder that as well. I see a lot of parallels in SL compared to the web back around 1994. Some companies tested the waters a bit, a lot of ugly web sites were up, most of it was a novelty. Like I went into the Sears and Circuit City "stores" in the IBM island and th
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I hear IBM is quite happy actually, it seems they own quite large amounts of land there and use it for meetings or something like that. Personally I almost never visit corporate areas, so I don't really know.
One thing though: It's normal for a shop in SL to be deserted. That doesn't mean it's failing. SL is
Re:You need puzzles and monsters? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a single puzzle or monster in it (well, the wampus, but chasing a black dot through mountains hardly qualifies as a real monster
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"You need puzzles and monsters" eh? Explain Second Life then.
Or, how's this? It's a puzzle how to build anything moderately interesting! And it's filled with monsters who are just there to indulge their deviant fantasies!
Or, another simple one. "Hype hype hype."
I could go on for hours^Wminutes!
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Isn't Second Life supposed to be a virtual reality environment and NOT a game? If it's a game, where does winning come in and what are the benefits of doing so?
In my opinion, I'd be hard-pressed to compare this with something ilke World of Warcraft. Then again, I'm not a gamer by any means, so I could be very wrong about this.
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The official ones are grossly inflated because they count free trial accounts that were only ever used once.
I strngly suspect that despite the hype there are really not many people playing it.
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You can get starts on the number of accounts, and the number of accounts that were used in the last X days. The actual amount of people is impossible to tell because SL doesn't require paying to login anymore.
But I don't get what's with the obsession with numbers anyway. You can login and see that there are a lot of people. Whether it's 1, 5, or 50 million doesn't really change much.
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It's like trying to calculate the number of *people* using Slashdot. Some have one account. Some will have many. Some are probably not even human (there are quite a few bots in SL).
Point is, not even Linden Lab has accurate stats on it. They do however have stats on the number of accounts, the number of them used in the last 90 (I think) days, how many are paid subscribers, and how many are logged in right now. It's about as good as it get
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I think Prof. Castronova used a poor choice of words. I think a better way to say it would be, "You need things to interact with that challenge you, and you need either AI or other players that give you challenges to overcome."
Nooooo not fun ... (Score:2)
For $250K... (Score:2)
Game vs Virtual World (Score:2)
I would have chosen a model like Second Life - set up the conditions/environment/physics, and let the users/test subjects run with it.
It has to be a game first and foremost (Score:5, Insightful)
Democracy is popular enough for me to do a sequel (nearly done!), and this time round it does contain a whole bunch of real world statistics and background data (in wiki-style form) which is presented as additional (and optional) to the game itself. This is just like those historical RTS games which have a built in encyclopaedia. You can play Age Of Empires just for fun, but it you really want to find out a bit more about trebuchets, the game is happy to help.
that is as it should be. Games on interesting and intelligent topics that encourage the curious player to learn more. You should never ram the educational bit down the players throats. People play games for fun. If they want to do hardcore learning, they break out a textbook.
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In DragonMUD I built a "quest" which required the player, in solving it, to learn a few words and grammar rules for ancient Egyptian, the language of the hieroglyphs. Everyone said it was one of the hardest quests in the game, and it ranked very, very highly among the players. It got academics interested in VR, and in fact DARPA poured $63 mi
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Democracy is popular enough for me to do a sequel (nearly done!), and this time round it does contain a whole bunch of real world statistics and background data (in wiki-style form) which is presented as additional (and optional) to the game itself. This is just like those historical RTS games which have a built in encyclopaedia. You can play Age Of Empires just for fun, but it you really want to find out a bit more about trebuchets, the game is happy to help.
I think the reason why this sort of learning game is so effective is because it provides relevance to the historical facts. When you look at the strengths and weaknesses of different governments, it's one thing to read about them in a book, quite another to live through the consequences when playing Civ. My personal learning style is more oriented towards participation than lecture. I fall asleep in conventional classes but if I am actively engaged in the process, I'm all eyes and ears.
The story I heard ab
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Reinventing the wheel (Score:2)
- be played by a bunch of self-selected participants who are conscious of the testing and metrics, and thus will actively seek to 'game' them if possible.
- be played by too small a group to draw reasonable statistical inferences (seriously, in their wildest dreams, do they expect more than 25,000 players?)
I would argue that it would make much more sense to approach Blizzard, sign NDA's out the wazoo
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Any more than people try to 'game' stuff in things like WoW? Make it fun and people will probably forget that the 'game' is actually a research device.
Otherwise, well, people gaming the system would kinda be the whole point of the system - figuring out secendary effects of rule/market changes.
besides, as a WoW player, I'd love to have an economist speak
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nation of 300million? 1,000. You don't need unfathomably large data sets for them to be statistically meaningful,
just well selected and more than you can count on you and your housemates' digits...
Bad use of "game" (Score:2)
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Wait, what does this have to do (Score:2)
Aim lower (Score:2)
Planetarion [planetarion.com] peaked at over 100,000 players (before it went pay-to-play) and all you need to play it is a browser. It's a simple game to code, as evidenced by the countless clones that were quickly written when the owners started charging. Gameplay ther
Even Better (Score:2)
So capture everything that happens in several different mmorpgs servers(1 per mmorpg) for a year, and put it into a simulation and change the events.
He's actually spot-on... (Score:2)
"You need puzzles and monsters," he says, "or people won't want to play ... What we've really learned is, you've got to start with a game first," Castronova says. "You just have to."
That formula worked wonderfully for Typing of the Dead [wikipedia.org]. It may not be quite the kind of "academic game" they're talking about, but I'd argue it is because typing is a crucial skill. In any case, it's the only typing tutor I've actually enjoyed playing, which lends credence to his statement.
Game Concept (Score:2)
No, you wouldn't be a plant looking for the bursting seed pod powerup. You would be a lion hunting gazelles, or a gazelle dodging lions, and dealing with the normal cyclical changes environmental changes, or manmade ones. The idea would be to view an ecosystem from within it, but (hopefully) with enough of
I think there's a real fallacy here (Score:2)
Arden failed. Is it because:
A. it was an attempt to make an academic game, or
B. it was an addon module for a commercial game that might not appeal to Arden's target audience, or
C. its subject matter just wasn't interesting to its target audience, or
D. the game design was poor, or
E. the game execut
$250k for that? (Score:2)
I) A professor did not realize people would not play his game if it wasn't fun.
B) Someone in charge of $250k did not realize this.
or
3) He doesn't realize that if Arden wasn't fun, no one will even look at Arden 2
Conclusion) Now he's got funding for an Arden2???
Marketing: What they've really learned (Score:2)
I'm relatively informed about gaming, and I'd never heard of this one until they made a big deal about how it failed. And of course while the article is all about how they tried really hard to make this first one good, it spends a few paragraphs reassuring us how the next one will be much better because they've learned from their mistake
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> I don't like to play it.
What about life? People are constantly changing rules there also.
Besides "changing rules" can be a game in itself; and some of that "change rules" is part of a lot of games: the "what if". You can't try out things if you don't change rules, because you'll end up trying to recreate the real world.
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Please, Eve is just as flawed as every other economic system in MMORPGs.
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Fixed that for you.