I’m going to try to explain this and I may not get it right. If this doesn’t send chills, then I guess you had to be there. During one of the panel presentations, yesterday, a 17 year old looking fellow, Justin Hall, demonstrated a game (PMOG) he has developed that involves web surfing. It only works with Firefox and it involves registering, downloading a Firefox extension, and then surfing — surfing for points.
I suspect that it works something like this. The extension checks the domains of the web sites that you visit. The developers have ascribed a valued point system to the game, such that as you visit the site, the extension matches it with any ascribed qualities related to that site on the game host, and then awards points based on what you are looking at, doing, and how you got there.
To add another dimension to the game, players can anticipate sites that their friends will be visiting, and plant bombs there, such that as that person hits the site, they get a message indicating some change in their points (either increased or decreased) or some other effect on their play.
Hall admitted that many people would be hesitant to try this sort of thing because of privacy. Most would rather get root canal. But he explained that all of the surfing data (urls) are dropped immediately, and that only the points are and profile are held.
At the end of the presentations, the session was opened up to the audience (there were three presentations in all) and I got a question in just as the session time was about to expire. I asked, “Considering that most of the teachers here work in classrooms with certain constraints, but considering session is about games blurring beyond the tradition, do you have notions of how your games might blur in such a way that they can influence classroom teaching and learning?”
Hall took the microphone first and exclaimed, “Absolutely not!” ..and then continued to describe what were apparently several prickly conversations that he’d had with librarians, who were terrified by the privacy implications of his game. I certainly understand their concern. But I suspect, that if we could address the user security, librarians, especially, would jump all over this.
Librarians, as the rest of us, are keenly interested in the skills that our students develop in using the networked digital information landscape to accomplish their goals. If there was a way to lay over that experience a way of not only tracking their navigations, but also value them, and provide some currency of reward, and make it even more interesting by allowing them to anticipate the routes of their friends and affect them in some way, we might be able to take research, evaluation, decision making, creativity development to a whole new level.
What do you think?
Absolutely I can see an application for this in a school. What about teaching kids proper searches and quality websites? Let’s play a game:
Find websites that will most likely help you predict the weather in your region for the next 6 months – GO!
If you got points for finding the sites that are most relevant and academic then the pursuit for this answer it would make the searching that much more fun. In the process someone might accidentally learn something.
Thanks for this writeup David – it was a pleasure to speak at Games Learning & Society, and it was a pleasure to take your question.
I talked to one middle-school librarian who mentioned that Wikipedia has been banned at her school. That was stunning for me to hear. Wikipedia! The collective human knowledge experiment. Sigh.
So that made me think the user-generated content in PMOG would immediately scare away any school district.
On the other hand, I’ve had conversations with schoolteachers who have said, “you could tell if someone had actually visited sites on the web?” meaning that web-based reading assignments could at least be tracked. And perhaps made fun or interactive! With extensions we’re working on now to our current gameplay models.
It’s as Hank describes in the comment above – if you can suddenly map simple RPG/game dynamics on web travels, you can reward behaviors which look a lot like learning. Because so much of what we do online is research and self-education!
Sounds fantastic to me – what a great way to reinforce searching skills! Maybe even negative points for retrieving opinions instead of facts, failing to use a diversity of information sources, choosing outdated material, etc.
This sounds absolutely incredible. Yes, teachers could give out points for visiting particular websites; but the whole game requires critical thinking in a very intriguing way. What about allowing students to determine point values in some collaborative way?
There’s a forum/gaming/social site called gaiaonline.com where kids message and comment to each other and the ‘reward’ is the ability to clothe an avatar with more and more cool items.
I had my students explain it to me, and the thing I was most surprised about was how long they would spend on it, all for the sake of get different outfits for their cartoon characters. (Boys or girls it didn’t matter.)
If we could get them that motivated about a variety of topics, math, art, science… Some of my students made a podcast about the site here: http://nokomiswarriorbroadcasting.mypodcast.com/2007/04/Gaia_Part_One-13195.html