Short version
It's time to update your links and/or RSS feed!

My new site is located at: http://systemicbabble.com/ (blog, RSS)

Long version
After two and a half years, five hundred and fifty posts, thousands of comments, and nearly one million visits it is finally time for me to retire 'Of Teeth and Claws'.

As I alluded to last week this is hardly the end of my blogging; I've been going strong in some form or another since 2003 and simply cannot keep my digital mouth shut for more than a couple of weeks at a time. I am, however, looking to shake of the single topic rut that I keep getting myself into. Over the course of my blogging career I've ran an Ottawa Senators hockey blog, a Canadian political blog, a military history blog, and now a gaming blog. As much fun as these focused sites have been, I always feel that I need to keep myself on message when I'm writing, with infrequent deviations.

So it's time to fix that. I have set up a new blog here: Systemic Babble. (RSS, Twitter)

I have seeded the blog with 101 articles from Of Teeth and Claws, and will be pulling in some older posts from 'Bound by Gravity' and 'Never Forget' over the course of the next few months.

Concurrently, I will be writing new material. A lot of this will be video game related, but you will also see posts about a number of other topics that interest me, as well as updates from the Web Critters project whenever I have status to report.

Also, as of now, new comments on Of Teeth and Claws will be disabled. I feel I need to take this measure in order to unburden myself from dealing with the constant barrage of spam that the site receives, and I don't want people to think that I'm ignoring their contributions.

See you on the new site!

While the bear’s away, the cats can come out and play?

Well, it’s in a little different vein than the usual game design articles here, but I felt the topic was pertinent enough to entertainment game design to post here. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I’m particularly interested in the convergence of video gaming and video game culture with formal Education and educational psychology. It’s one of the frontiers of both Education and gaming, so it makes the news fairly frequently. That said, I was surprised to spot this recent article on Yahoo news:

Inspired by popular video games like World of Warcraft, an Indiana University professor is applying game design principles such as clear, well-defined goals and gradual, incremental rewards to his college classes. A hit with students, the approach has some employers showing interest, too.

Students at several of Indiana University's game design courses begin their class with zero "experience points," which corresponds to an F grade. Instead of completing presentations, they'll perform "quests;" sitting exams becomes "fighting monsters;" and handing in assignments becomes "crafting." Students even team up into "guilds" to tackle group projects.

As much as I’d like to say this is a great idea and recommend that other courses and programs adopt an approach like this.. well, there are some problems. Now I need to preface this.. It could be that this particular game design program in Indiana is already addressing all of these issues. I just don’t have any way of knowing from the two available articles. I believe that there are five significant problems and issues with the approach:

Buying In

The first major issue is buy-in. So far, every single person I’ve talked to about the article has basically said the same thing: “Interesting.. but kinda dorky”. Several people even felt insulted at the idea of ‘pretending’ that college work was like ‘questing’. As I described in a previous article here, two of the five requirements for something to be a ‘game’ are cognitive, wrapped up in the perception and mindset of the game ‘player’. Some activities just aren’t going to be games for some individuals, and getting a person to accept something as a game requires more than just giving non-game activities trendy game labels. But let’s suspend disbelief for a few moments, assume that we’re going beyond just renaming, and look at some real potential differences between a traditional college class and a ‘game’ class.

‘Maintenance’ vs. ‘Progression’

The concept of ‘experience points’ has been a part of nearly every fantasy role-playing game to date. Experience points are one tool that games use to create game ‘progression’, or a method for helping the player feel like they’ve accomplished something and assisting the player in goal-forming. It’s a popular game concept, as the commentary for the Yahoo article highlighted:

“This system works because traditional grading is actually flawed. In the traditional system, you start at 100% and have to MAINTAIN that. Maintenance of anything is harder, more stressful work than PROGRESSION, which is how this ‘gamer system’ works.”

Looking at the difference a little closer, however, it’s really only a difference in frame of reference. If you consider the total points available in a course, and compare that total to your current points, you have a progression system. But if you compare your current points to the maximum possible points available to date, you have a maintenance system. The key difference between these two viewpoints is actually the words ‘maximum possible’. As those familiar with MMORPG game design will tell you, one of the critical requirements for a successful MMORPG is ensuring that the players never feel like they’ve hit the end of progression, the end of the roller-coaster ride. The player should always feel like they have more that they can accomplish, because they minute they reach the end of the ride, they’re probably going to stop playing. So how do you cognitively change the course into a progression system? Remove the ‘maximum possible points’.. don’t let the student hit the end of the progression.

There are two reasonable ways to accomplish this. First, you can make most or all ‘quests’ available at any given point in the course so a student always has the opportunity to make progress. Unfortunately, this isn’t always feasible in some content areas and classes. Sometimes certain activities and assignments require information or resources that the students don’t have yet. It also doesn’t address the progression issue of when the student gets close to the end of the course: What happens when they’ve completed all of the ‘quests’ available for the entire course, and still don’t have as many ‘experience points’ as they would like? Alternately, you can provide a near-unlimited number of ‘quest’ opportunities. In a traditional grading system, this would be called ‘extra credit’.

Meaningful Learning

The previous section described methods for allowing students to experience game ‘progression’ in a classroom setting, and there are a number of potential benefits and problems involved in creating such a system. In gaming terminology giving the player lots of possible methods for making progress is typically referred to as giving the player ‘multiple routes’ for success. In Education, it’s called ‘differentiated instruction’. Giving the player multiple routes to success allows them to play to their strengths, both in terms of activities the student is most comfortable with as well as activities that fit the student's learning style best.

However just as the game designer can re-brand ‘assignments’ and ‘presentations’ as ‘questing’ and ‘crafting’, the player is equally free to rename the activities (quest) ‘grinding’. Anyone who’s played MMORPGs for any length of time can probably attest to how routinized and tedious ‘questing’ can become. While the player may learn valuable skills and techniques during their first few quests, quite quickly quests come down to nothing more than time and route optimization, a fairly mindless activity for most players. To parallel the curricular problem: It is easy to create another worksheet or assignment for a class, but much more difficult to make each activity an equally-worthwhile learning experience. From a survey I conducted on World of Warcraft learning, one of the trends I noted was that players typically reported that game rewards were less meaningful than the rewards from non-game activities, despite being more tangible and immediately useful. Incorporating progression into a course needs to add to the motivational experience, not just suck the meaning out of the activities, and this is no small challenge. Further, dramatically increasing the number of possible assignments and activities (as well as the timings of when they can be completed) would significantly increase both the lesson planning and grading necessary for the course.

Reward ‘Currency’ & Controllable Environments

Anyone who’s played fantasy role-playing games quickly becomes familiar with the concept of game reward ‘currency systems’. The fluidity of game reward currency compared to typical non-game rewards gives games significant motivational appeal: You might be hard-pressed to come up with any tangible benefit to struggling to learn Calculus, but you know exactly what you can do with the gold you’ll get from doing that quest. This is particularly important in enticing players to try a game for the first time. James Paul Gee, one of the foremost experts on video game learning, calls it the ‘Amplification of Input Principle’. Ideally, the game activity should allow the player to feel successful within the first few minutes of playing, and reward the player in an immediately-useful way. What I’m getting at here is that on their own ‘experience points’ are not a currency with much utility or fluidity. In the simplest classroom setting, all you can trade them for is your grade for the class. In most games, however, ‘experience points’ are typically traded for ‘levels’, which in turn give the player access to other forms of more-useful currencies like ‘skill points’.

As I mentioned in a previous article, one of the five basic requirements for an activity to be considered a ‘game’ is that the activity is ‘controllable’. Ideally, not only should the player have some level of control over the final outcome of the activity, they should also have some ability to influence the course of activity events. In this case, that means giving ‘experience points’ greater utility than just currency toward a course grade, or the addition of other complementary currency systems. For example, students might be able to trade experience points for class absences (or the extra assignments or activities that are typically associated with making up missed classes) or the ability to opt out of a test or assessment, or specific amounts of experience points might be required (or used) to ‘unlock’ certain kinds of activities or projects.

Game-play Motivations

Finally, once we’ve adequately established the course activities as a ‘game’, it’s important to examine what types of game players would be attracted to the particular game. Ideally, we want the game to appeal to all students. Players of MMORPGs will probably have heard of the ‘Bartle Test’. The test, designed by Richard Bartle, is designed to identify a MMORPG player’s ‘game-playing motivations’. According to the test, there are four primary game-playing motivations, designated the ‘Achiever’, the ‘Explorer’, the ‘Socializer’, and the ‘Killer’. Everyone has a little of each motivation in them, with a player’s two highest-scoring motivations most directly affecting the kinds of games and game activities that will interest that player. If you’ve never taken the Bartle Test, a free version of the test can be found on the GamerDNA site here.

A course experience point progression system definitely fits best with the ‘Achiever’. Achievers “enjoy setting goals, surpassing previous performances and hitting new milestones. They tend to have lots of high scores, badges, trophies and other concrete evidence of their successful endeavors”. An experience point progression system with multiple routes for success would also appeal to the ‘Explorer’. Explorers enjoy discovering the unique and novel aspects of the game environment and system. They want to examine every possible route to success and understand every nuance of the game environment. "It's not so much the wandering around and poking about, but that euphoric eureka moment the Explorer strives for.”

Unfortunately, nothing about a course experience point progression system directly appeals to the ‘Socializer’. Players with high Socializer scores “enjoy interacting with other people, forming bonds and finding cooperative solutions to the challenges within the (game) world”. Enticing the Socializer would require adding a social and community aspect to the course: not just group activities and assignments, but the ability to discuss the game environment and related activities and to share ideas and understanding. In short, the creation of a course learning community. A lot of college classes encourage ‘study groups’, but the social networks and systems employed by gaming culture are typically much more elaborate and extensive, including blogs, wikis, discussion boards, databases, and facebook and twitter groups. Further, unlike study groups led by graduate teaching faculty (GTFs), gaming learning communities are typically player controlled, giving players ownership over their learning environment.

Most problematic is the ‘Killer’. In general, direct competition between students in a class is frowned upon. Achievement in schools today is typically ‘mastery-based’: student learning is compared against a ‘benchmark’ goal, rather than against other students. Further, laws protect students’ grades and performance. The character-comparison sites and ranking systems common with online fantasy role-playing games would be illegal in a school setting. While carefully-controlled optional in-class competition could be one method for enticing the Killer, another reasonable approach would be to provide averaged student data throughout the course, allowing those interested in the competitive aspect of gaming to track their own accomplishments against the class average in a variety of ways.

In conclusion, I definitely think we’ll see more and more attempts at bringing gaming and gaming culture into our Educational experiences.. and hopefully these attempts will gradually incorporate more and more of the kinds of learning that have been found to be effective in successful video game design, rather than just attempt to give traditional classroom activities game labels.

I've been enjoying my most latest mini-break from blogging, but it didn't take long for the writing itch to return. I'm a weak, weak man and I have far too many opinions to keep bottled up inside. I'll be getting back to full time blogging soon, but for now I'm mouthing off over on Twitter to try to familiarize myself with the application.

You can find me over there if you're interested it what I'm thinking: SystemicBabble. I promise I won't yammer on endlessly about the minutia of my life. (Slap me if I do.)

Personally I'm still somewhat surprised that I'm on Twitter at all - after all, up until a few days ago all I could do about the service was bad mouth it. Much to my chagrin an idea squirreled its way into my brain, and since then I've been unable to shake it. Twitter is the basis of this idea, and so learning it became a priority.

You see, one of the things I've been working on during my blogging hiatus is an old project that I continually neglect: The Web Critter Project. I've recently dusted the codebase off and will be putting a lot more effort into finishing what I started, with a twist.

The initial plan was to create an ALife simulation that used web pages as an environment. One incredibly difficult problem with this idea was that web pages are complex and often messy, and so using them introduces a layer of ugliness that kept me at arms length. (Not to mention newish technologies like AJAX that transform the web into a much more dynamic thing.)

Twitter, on the other hand, is a great little environment. Messages are at most 140 characters long, and do not have any implicit formatting. If I treat each Twitter account as a specific location within the simulation's environment and consider a user's last N tweets as the available resources, then suddenly the simulation starts to take shape.

I'll write more about this later, so watch this space if you're interested. Oh, and video games. I'll talk about them too.

Just a heads up that I need somewhere between a few weeks and a month or two to recharge my blogging batteries.

I've been feeling compelled to post every single day recently, which means that writing is starting to feel like a job. From past experience (I've been blogging since 2003) I know that if I keep pushing to meet arbitrary self-imposed quotas then I'll burn out hardcore, and need way more time off then if I take a break now.

Toskk has free reign to post here in my absence, so things might not be completely dark.

See you all on the other side.

As time goes on video games are slowly shaking off their reputation of being nothing more pointless escapism. With many of the original video gamers well into their 30's and 40's, it makes sense that more and more of the decision makers in the world have, at some point in their lives, had a positive experience with gaming.

Today I have a series of three articles that articulate some of the non-traditional uses that have been found for games..... they're no longer just about having fun.

1. Tackling societal problems
CNN has a great interview up with Jane McGonigal, a games developer who focuses on "the way that massively multiplayer online gaming generates collective intelligence, and interested in the way that the collective intelligences thus generated can be utilized as a means of improving the world". (ref)

Here's a quote from the article:

The cooperative skills and hopefulness that people learn while pecking away at online games like World of Warcraft will help our society address real-world problems like climate change and nuclear arms proliferation, she says. To get people to use less oil and mentor entrepreneurs in Africa, she also is developing games that merge the digital and real worlds.

"My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games," she said.

2. Winning hearts and minds in a warzone
The American military has created a video game that attempts to teach soldiers how to properly deal with the civilians that they interact with during wartime and peacekeeping operations. This is always a sticky problem, as different societies are often completely alien to foreign visitors - especially those bearing arms.

A new game may help soldiers in that problematic campaign–winning the hearts and minds of people in occupied countries. The game, developed by the University of Texas and backed by the U.S. Army, gives American soldiers deployed abroad some lessons in foreign customs and cultures. This is the opposite of a first-person shooter game; the Pentagon calls it a “first-person cultural trainer” game.

Air-dropped into foreign lands, soldiers often find themselves at a loss, knowing neither the local language nor the cultural conventions. The new 3D simulation game is intended for soldiers to learn the niceties in Iraq and Afghanistan, where a friendly relations with locals could make the difference between life and death.

3.Teaching science
Finally, Discover.com blogger Sean Carroll discusses his greatest hope for video games, which is well within their capacity to accomplish:

The kids these days, they love their gaming. So it makes sense to ask how that passion can be put to good use. Personally I’m fascinated by the prospects of using games to teach people science. Not just facts and features of the real world — although those are important — but the scientific method of hypothesis-testing and experiment.

Games already feature exactly those features, of course; everyone who figures out the "laws of nature" in the game world is secretly doing science. It wouldn’t be that hard to tweak things here and there so that the techniques they were practicing connected more directly with science in the non-virtual reality.

As I'd hoped, Bill has posted a battle report for the game of Axis & Allies (revised edition) that we played on Saturday. I played the Allies, while he controlled the Axis powers. Although it was a one-sided affair almost from the start, which is less interesting than a tight game, we still had a fun time with it overall.

Players of the original Axis and Allies will definitely want to check out the later edition. Not only does it add a couple of new unit types (artillery and destroyers), but it also corrects a lot of the imbalances present in the 1981 edition, most importantly the terrible tech charts.

If I were to pick a few rules changes that make the biggest strategic difference they would be:

1. Changing the defense value of tanks from 2 to 3. This is particularly massive for Russia, as it allows them to maintain a stronger defense while simultaneously delivering powerful attacks to Germany's eastern front.
2. Adding the Sahara desert to Africa. This makes it far more difficult for the Germans to conquer the continent, starving them from what used to be a guaranteed source of IPCs.
3. Low cost submarines. At 6 IPCs, subs are a steal - and with their sneak attack they can cause havoc early and often.
4. Removing the combat value from transports, and making them ineligible as combat targets. A staple strategy in Axis & Allies naval combat used to be bringing extra transports to a battle to take early hits. Not only is this moot, but now transports are auto-destroyed when present in a sea space containing only enemy units.

I look forward to playing a game as the Axis sometime soon; after the beating that I delivered to Bill I'm curious to see if I can overcome the problems he ran into and threaten the world.

Bill and I had a rare games day yesterday which, as always, started with a ritual gorging on an orgy of food at Denny's, and then graduated into a game of the new Axis & Allies (which I'm hoping Bill will review on his site) before moving into a few rounds of Panzer General: Allied Assault, a game that I received for my birthday last month.

Panzer General is an interesting collaboration between Petroglyph Games and Ubisoft. The World War II strategy title was co-developed for the Xbox 360 (XBLA) and meatspace game market. I only have experience with the physical version of Panzer General, however the Gamers With Jobs discussed the XBLA version shortly after Christmas and seemed to enjoy it.

Gameplay overview
At first glance Panzer General is a dauntingly complex game. When you open the box you are greeted by a huge stack of cards, and an obscene number of cardboard chits. The rulebook only further serves to scare the crap out of new owners: while not as heavy as traditional hex-based wargames, there are so many steps involved in a single turn (combat alone is a 16 step process) that I was wondering what I had gotten myself into. Thankfully, after walking through a couple of turns step-by-step, we were able to set the rule book aside: the game is simple to internalize and becomes very natural in a hurry.

The game, like many modern strategy titles, does not come with a fixed board. Instead, cardboard tiles representing various terrain features (hills, towns, plains, etc) are assembled to create a playing area tailored to specific scenarios. The beginner scenarios are 5x6, however differing sizes and shapes are possible.

Gameplay is completely card-based. You receive an allotment of cards - both actions and units - to begin the game, and are able to replenish your hand at the start of every turn. Unit cards are played onto the map (face down at first, but then exposed when they contact the enemy) while action cards are played when specified (during combat, or as full actions during your turn).


The first thing that you will notice when playing Panzer General is how cramped the board feels compared to other war games. 5x6 is not a lot of room to maneuver, and so battle lines will be drawn in a hurry. Placement of units becomes crucial, because it is almost too easy to box your own units out of important battle, and render them useless. Thus, planning for the end game is necessary from your very first turn.

Combat is extremely intuitive, but also strategically deep. Both units get a chance to inflict damage on the other with the attacker usually going first. Combat is resolved by comparing the innate attack value of the attacking unit with bonuses for terrain, morale, and support against the defense value of the target combined with bonuses for terrain. Action cards can then be played to further modify the outcome, and finally a small random component is applied to the totals . The results are then tallied up, damage is applied, and if it is still alive the target gets a chance to counter-attack.

The key to most battles is support. Any units that is capable of attacking the target can lend its support value to the fight. Usually these consist of tanks or infantry in direct contact with the target as well as artillery at range. It is very important to establish strong support lines, and not over-extend yourself deep into enemy territory where you are exposed to more fire.

One other important game mechanic is 'prestige'. Prestige is the currency of Panzer General, and is gained by holding territory. You spend your prestige in order to play new units, activate action cards, and draw extra cards at the beginning of your turn. Prestige is collected at the end of each of your turns, and that allowance must last you through your opponents turn as well as your subsequent turn. Running out of prestige in often fatal - action cards can heavily influence battles, and being unable to play them when you get attacked (or are attacking) ensures defeat. (Likewise, running out of cards is not recommended.)

Final thoughts
All in all, Panzer General is a nice change of pace from traditional war games that involve manipulating plastic pieces on a battle field. Once you get your head into the proper mindset and start playing the game for what it is (instead of what you think it should be) its a lot of fun. If I had an Xbox I would certainly be picking up an electronic copy to see how it translates as an online experience.