Icarus Studios News

Obstacles and Rewards

(Continued from Part 2)

Many universities already have virtual campuses—places where their students can meet one another, talking with instructors, or participate in online lectures. While these activities make sense for students who live a great distance from the university (and other non-traditional students), they’re using only a few of the virtual learning environment’s possibilities. Virtual environments can become simulation spaces, where students can explore and experiment with the topics that they’re learning. Games have been used as teaching tools for a long time (some folks might argue that games are all about learning, but that’s probably a topic for a different post), but too often, the learning gets “bolted on” to a video game mechanic that has little to do with the topic being taught.

On the other hand, a quest structure built into a virtual world can be a marriage of task and environment, and in the last installment of this post, I started looking at how I think that can work. The quest presents the player/student with a problem that makes sense, one that’s broken into easily assimilated chunks that fit into a coherent whole. The next step of the quest then involves placing obstacles in the player’s path, things that he or she must overcome on the way to the reward. In classical quests, the obstacles come in the shape of enemies and puzzles: Odysseus discovers a way to hear the Sirens’ song yet continue his journey. Perseus defeats the Gorgon. And only Galahad’s purity allows him to find the Holy Grail. The relatively simple obstacles in these tales often reflect a more complex problem faced by the hero, one that may even seem unrelated to the task at hand. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the real obstacle that Gawain must overcome is temptation, not the Green Knight’s axe.

Obstacles in a learning quest should work the same way. They need to be integral to the environment and the problem at hand while simultaneously guiding the student to a deeper understanding of the topic. Quest obstacles serve the teacher’s role in this situation: they present challenges that require the students to manipulate in-world elements, experiment with the subject of study, and discover for themselves what works and what doesn’t. Physics students in a virtual environment would get the chance to experiment with levers and pulleys as they work their way toward their goal. Beginning economics students could experience how supply and demand interact. Quest obstacles can give players access to situations that would be difficult, dangerous, or impossible to experience in real life, in the same way that pilots have been using flight simulators since the earliest days of mechanical flight.

Once a player accomplishes the tasks of a quest, he or she expects a reward for her success. In games, rewards help keep the player excited about the game and eager to return for more play see this post for a detailed look at quest rewards). In a learning situation, the reward can be more or less game-like, depending on the virtual environment. Traditional game rewards make sense only if the student can expect to continue interacting with the game world over many sessions. Players who will only experience an environment one time won’t be interested in things like high scores, in-game cash, or other virtual items. MMO-style persistent worlds naturally have the possibility of recurring student interaction and continued exposure to the world. This means that these types of virtual worlds can easily create persistent profiles that can be developed from one learning session to the next. If rewards are connected to real-world consequences (grades, classroom discussion, etc), then students will have even more incentive to complete their tasks.

The most important part of the reward system is the feedback it gives players and students. Students expect feedback on their actions, and games are great at immediate feedback. Players are used to finding out right away if they’ve failed a task, and if they do, they generally try again and again until they get it right. Students will obviously benefit from this chance to repeat a failed task—too often, the three to four day turnaround time for homework assignments means that students have forgotten the details of a problem before they get any feedback at all. Failed quest tasks encourage immediate repetition, requiring students to evaluate their own performance and determine where their initial assumptions went wrong.

To me, the persistent, virtual worlds that MMOs offer feel like natural learning environments. The quest structure (already in use in many games) mirrors traditional learning patterns and can be a framework for implementation of already accepted pedagogical methods. Beyond that, the virtual worlds themselves bring a lot to the learning environment—they can be engaging in their own right, so that players want to visit them and explore the learning opportunities they offer. Plus, they’re open to other important elements of the learning process, such as evaluations and group activities. In short, the virtual environment offers nothing but opportunities for instructors who are ready to expand their students’ learning experience.

-Jason Cisarano, Virtual Worlds Team