Category: Mechanical Sympathy

I‘ll come straight out and tell you that I’m an avid video game player, have been since I got hooked on Donkey Kong Jr. when I was ten years old. From dotty eight bit graphics on my first Vic 20 to the Pentium 4 powerhouses and monster video cards on my home network today, I’m a technology junkie of the highest order. A simple decision by my parents set me down the path of intelligent adoption early in my experience: I begged for an Intellivision, they got me a Vic20. Suddenly I’m programming instead of mind numbing button pushing – I’m a creator not just a user. Twenty years later I’m working as a systems trainer and technician.

From that brief biography I give you my reaction to the documentary called “First Person Shooter” I saw on CTV last Sunday (http://www.firstpersonshooter.tv/index.html), created by Robin Benger, a TV producer and film maker. Rather than simply trying to scare you while appearing to keep a semblance of veracity and professional indifference, I’ll try and unpack all of the assumptions and the real intent behind this lightly veiled propaganda. In its desperate attempts to stay on top I find the current popular media (and in this case medium of television itself) taking poorly researched, rather desperate shots at the latest distractions. In the case of “First Person Shooter” the father of a child deeply addicted to a game called “Counter Strike” uses his own medium (he is a television producer and film maker) to analyze and ultimately criticize his child’s dependency on media.

The general issue of addiction can be dealt with in fairly specific terms. Game playing, even in its most chronic form certainly can’t be quantified as a physical addiction. At best it can be described as a reinforced behaviour. What reinforces the behaviour of a chronic player, a need for control, expression, respect? Online playing is not just the wave of the future any more, it is here today. Community, interaction and team building are a huge part of the modern online gaming experience. A child addicted to this is a child addicted to a need to belong; not exactly a damning statement; and one that prompts the question: why are these things so lacking in his non-virtual existence?

What is especially laughable about Mr. Benger’s documentary is that he uses his medium of television to debunk a new and competing medium for media. I wonder if he is more upset that his child is having trouble prioritizing his life or that he isn’t supporting Mr. Benger’s own media infatuation. The question of what benefits television has in attacking a competing medium must be an integral part of this examination.

There is a small step between an addictive personality and an obsessive one and in either case they can lead to amazing, expression or discovery. The price people pay for this kind of infatuation can also lead them to depression and ultimately make them unable to support their need. In short if you’re shooting for a small target like genius you will often miss and the results aren’t pretty. If a child becomes so infatuated something that it consumes their lives, it seems to me the best way to push through it is to assist them in swallowing too much. They’ll eventually force themselves away from it and in doing so their rejection of the infatuation will surely be more meaningful.

In the meantime we’ve got something like video games, that many older people simply don’t accept. They find it threatening, difficult to understand and so place a low value on it. As a gamer (with a fine arts background and an honours degree in English and Philosophy) that gaming has been churning out exceptional pieces of art for many years now. As the technology continues to improve the media presented on it will only become more immersive and meaningful. Whereas once printing allowed for the widespread, sedentary activity of reading for the masses, and movie and television furthered the trend towards sedentary, cerebral entertainment, video gaming has reintroduced the entertainee as an active participant in the process. In doing so it promises to further enhance our ability to express and understand our selves and the reality around us; the goal of any media.

From: http://atking.ca/timothy/index.htm

There has been much talk of gamification as a means of engaging the digital native (sic).  I’ve been a fan of integrating complex simulation into the classroom for a long time now, and I believe that digital tools offer us a great deal of paracosmic power in that regard.  As a means of assessing student ability, nothing comes close to the immersive simulation to see multi-dimensional aspects of student skill, from basic knowledge to how they work under pressure and what their lateral problem solving skills look like (something most assessment is devoid of).

But like the flowery classroom in which no one can fail, the vast majority of games are designed to be entertainment.  The satisfaction you have in finishing them is entirely artificial – the point was for you to finish them.  Sort of like making a big deal of getting a high school diploma… way to get what just about everyone has.  I missed my high school graduation, but I didn’t miss my university ones.  The best part about those degrees where all the people who started with me that didn’t finish.

If we’re going to set up games in the classroom, then they need to be full spectrum experiences (where failure is an option).  If you want to go all the way, actually set up the simulation to put your students in an impossible situation and then assess how they respond rather than how they perform.  If it works for Starfleet Academy in two hundred years, it should work for us now.

One of the most immersive games I’ve ever played was called Planescape: Torment.  I’ll spoil it for you because no one will go looking for a fifteen year old game to play.  You begin in a Memento-esque amnesia in a morgue.  Through the course of the narrative you learn that you are immortal, though you’ve been killed many times (and are covered in scars).  The end of the game has you having to come to terms with a character you’ve come to identify with realizing that he has to die (and spend an eternity in hell – he hasn’t been a nice man) in order to complete the game.  It was a game playing moment where I was completely lost in the story, when it asked more from me as a participant than I wanted to give, but I gave it anyway, and have never forgotten the effect.  Watching a character you’ve struggled to keep alive walk into an eternal battle on the planes of hell was truly epic.  Winning isn’t always about collecting badges.

I’ve had a number of those epic moments while playing Dungeons & Dragons.  I’ve also created some sufficiently complex simulations in the classroom where students have forgotten where they were.  Being a Dungeon Master is excellent training for a teacher.

In English I’ve spun mutants v. humans in a Chrysalids simulation that had students who thought the prejudice and violence shown by characters in the book where ‘ridiculous’.  An hour later the simulation had the same students jailing (and worse) the hidden mutants in their classroom, while the mutants tried to hide, then ended up drunk on their own power.  It left many students hyper-engaged, frustrated and introspective about human nature.  I wonder what kind of quiz would have resulted in that mind space?

Immersive simulation is a powerful learning tool – I believe it should be the end game of digitization in education.  A student who has had to experience Brock’s sacrifice or Napoleon’s Waterloo will have a sense of personalized learning that strikes the gaming nerve – they feel like it was a personal experience rather than something told to them.

They do this on the holo-deck all the time in Star Trek.  Janeway has Leonardo Da Vinci as a mentor, Data has arguments with Einstein and Hawking about physics.  Their learning is personal and they are active participants in it, the learning environment is personalized, immersive and offers the mightiest access to information.

Any well designed simulation has to allow for free-play and unexpected outcomes (Data vs. Moriarty is a good example).  If your games are designed for single outcome, or you’re throwing badges on achievement, you might as well go back to photocopying worksheets, you’re not getting what games can do for people.  Unless you take into account player freedom of choice and are willing to address unexpected outcomes, you’re only hanging a badge on the same old linear knowledge attainment.

I’m still struggling with my Mum’s recent, sudden death.  While that is going on, I’m dealing with a previously signed up for teaching qualification in computer engineering, and a series of slanderous attacks on my profession.  I can’t help but be self-reflexive about how I’m dealing with the role of student; I fear I’m not doing it very well.

Culturally, I think I’m on the Ridge

I’ve felt thin since that phone call on June 1st.  The North American manly thing to do is dismiss anything to do with it and proceed with a steady course of denial.  I suppose the stiff upper-lip English thing is to do something similar.  Since being dumped somewhere in the mid-Atlantic as a child, I’m having trouble adopting a social convention to follow.

The thinness I’m feeling has made for some awkward moments with time management.  On the first weekend, when I should have been plugging away on our first big assignment, instead I ended up going to the cottage and passing out on the couch.  It made for a stressful Monday when I returned, but one of the things about being thin is that there isn’t enough butter to evenly cover the toast.

I feel like we’re over the hump in the course now.  I’m finding old habits returning around hard focusing on specific tasks instead of just directionlessly wandering through the material we’re covering.  I’m a good student, even when I’m incomplete.  The deadlines have been difficult to handle, but perhaps their imminence helped me get my mind off subjects it wouldn’t let go of otherwise. The fact that the emotionally turbulent month of June is slowly receding might be helping too.

I’ve had students who have gone through emotional crisis, some of which make mine look like a walk in the park, yet we still come at them with curriculum expectations and demands.  I’ve always tried to step lightly in those cases, out of a sense of compassion.  It’s a difficult thing for a teacher to deal with.  In some cases a student who has gone through trauma is best left with space, but in others, giving them something else to focus on might help move them on emotionally.

No clear answer to this one, I fear.  Some days I’d be driving down to the course with tears rolling down my cheeks because of a song on the radio, right now I’m feeling pretty solid.  It comes and goes.  I guess the one take-away from all this is that you can’t make an algorithm or develop a system for dealing with emotional crisis; each person experiences it differently, and coming at it in a curriculum orientated, systemic manner is a recipe for disaster.

A good teacher will remember their own ups and downs and differentiate not just in terms of what a student is capable of intellectually, but also in terms what emotional focus they can  bring to bear.

In my own case, I’ve been trying to change my mind, but when it runs deep, it’s not always a matter of conscious choice.  In the end, if I can remember where I am now with my students in the future, I’ll be in a better place to respond to their needs.