February 3, 2005
Games for knowledge creation
Wired News: Games Join Space Race
I read this article with great interest because I not only have a pressing need to understand the value of games for my current corporate training role but also have a great love of space exploration from the eight years I spent working in a planetarium (and the online planetarium community I still run).
I have to admit I am a bit skeptical when it comes to saying games are a "revolution" in education (I am not sure there are any real "revolutions" in education but that is for a future post). There are two issues that nag me when thinking of games, one is that they take a very long time to produce and are very expensive, which does not help with the overwhelmingly fast flow of information and rapid changes to knowledge. The other is that they are very designer-centric and go against the notion of personalization (what if I hate playing games and just want the information?). I know that many of the MMOGs have social systems that are formed by the people who play the games but I am not sure gaming is a one-size-fits-all instructional solution.
That rant aside, the scenario presented in SpaceStationSim offers (at least to me) a new possibility. Games as a knowledge creation tool rather than a knowledge dissemination tool. This combination of simulation-based acquisition (SBA) and gaming could be an extremely powerful way not only to have people immersed in a world but also to harness the thinking power of 100’s or 1000’s of people to jointly solve very difficult problems (could this be a connection between RSS technologies and gaming?). If you create rules that are indicative of the real environment (i.e. space) and then allow people to "play" the game within those parameters, there is great potential for creativity. If you create a bad space station, for example, game over. But gamers will keep trying to figure out the rules until they have a workable solution. They just might come up with things that people playing by "the rules" (i.e. scientists, engineers) have not thought of because gamers approach problem solving differently (try it out and fail quickly and repeatedly rather than trying to sit and theorize the perfect solution ahead of time).
Of course, using this approach to simulations in much more fluid, soft-skills environments will require AI more complex than is affordable right now but there are endless possibilities for this sort of activity. If you could design an aircraft (or spacecraft) this way, could you re-organize a business this way? The key is in capturing user input as a problem-solving tool and having the system learn this and apply it to everyone else playing the game. This is a far cry from how we currently see games in training, which is to have people learn some pre-determined set of skills (even if the sim is extremely complex and interactive). Any data gathered in current training/learning sims is generally to help the learner understand what they did wrong rather than to provide real input into solving a larger problem. In a complex environment, so much is unknown it seems as though knowledge gathering might be a more fruitful avenue to explore than designing specific outcome-based sims.
Posted by Rovy at February 3, 2005 4:42 AM