Thursday, December 22, 2011

CS315 Final Assessment: Games about Beneficence

For the last eight weeks of the Fall semester, the eleven students in my CS315 Game Programming class had been working as one team, following Scrum to complete a version of Morgan's Raid implemented entirely in Unity. The team worked very well together, as I have written about previously. At the end of the semester, they had produced a reasonable facsimile of the Morgan's Raid release, given our constraints.

Regardless of their collective accomplishments, I still have to assign individual grades to each student, and I take this responsibility seriously. We used self- and peer-assessments during our four two-week sprints, and these helped me approximate students' individual contributions to the project. However, I still felt that I was missing hard, individualized evidence, and so I presented my students with a novel form of final assessment that we called Mini Ludum Dare.

Ludum Dare is the Rapid Game Development Community, most well known for hosting regular 48-hour game development competitions. Each competition begins with the announcement of a theme, and all games must incorporate that theme. For our Mini Ludum Dare, I told the students to spend no more than four hours on digital prototypes, my rationale being that I wanted to see what they could get done in about a half-day's work. This seems like an appropriate assessment, that at the end of a game programming class, one can individually produce a proof-of-concept for an idea. Because I was grading strictly on technical issues, I also provided a "default" game design that students could use if they were not feeling inspired by the theme. They were allowed to complete the prototype in Unity or Slick, these being the two primary technologies of instruction for the semester.

The theme was "Beneficence." This can be interpreted in a few ways, the most obvious connection being to the statue who also graces Ball State University's logo.



During our university-assigned final exam slot, the students each had a few minutes to show off their creations. It was inspiring to see how creative our Computer Science majors could be! The Java-based solutions are a bit tricky to get online, but with some coaxing (and peer pressure from the community on the department's Facebook page), the Unity-based games are online. Here are some links:

A pretty amazing selection of game prototypes built in only a few hours each. Nice work, gentlemen!

Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain

Two nights ago, I gave a presentation at the 2011 IGDA Indianapolis Charity Toy Drive, a great event that I hope becomes an annual tradition. My presentation was entitled Fun, Learning, Games, and Responsible Design (in under 20 minutes). I gave an overview about the relationship between games and learning, and my core message was a rallying cry, asking designers to seriously consider what players learn by playing their games. My perspectives on this are heavily influenced by Raph Koster's work, and as I told the crowd, every designer should read Theory of Fun for Game Design.

I generally don't post slides from my talks because the slides don't stand alone: you could not reconstruct the message by only looking at the slides. I agree with Martin Fowler, that "slideuments" are flawed by definition. However, there was one slide from my talk that really seemed to resonate with the crowd. I based much of my presentation on applications of Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain toward gameplay experiences. Wikipedia has a nice, simple diagram that presents the taxonomy, and I have used this in presentations and handouts before---but this was always when using OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice directly. For the IGDA presentation, I needed a PDF, and something about the conversion to PDF left the diagram quite jaggy. To solve my problem, I made my own variant on the public domain image within LibreOffice, and it looks a little something like this:


This variation is CC-BY in case you want to insert it directly into your own presentations, papers, posters, etc. An ODG version is available as well. Full license terms below.

Creative Commons License
Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain by Paul Gestwicki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at en.wikipedia.org.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Books for practitioners

At the end of the semester, a few students asked me for technical book recommendations. I have listed below the books that I tend to reference most often in my teaching and in my practice. Links to Amazon's listings are provided, not because I specifically endorse Amazon, but they sure are convenient.

All of these books are worth reading, but where you start depends on your interests. If you are interested specifically in object-oriented design, definitely start with Holub on Patterns. Clean Code and The Pragmatic Programmer are replete with bite-size tips that can immediately make you a better professional. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning is not about technology per se, but rather it is about how to be a more effective learner. Finally, Cockburn's book is the largest and most academic on the list, but it provides tremendous insight into how one can approach software development methodologies from a perspective that is both humanistic and scientific.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Thoughts on Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I've been playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and I had a few game design thoughts to share. This post contains minor spoilers. You have been warned.

A lot of people have commented on the incongruous "boss fights" in Human Revolution, and rightly so. They are quite embarrassing, really. They force the player out of the story, thrusting you through the fourth wall to realize that yes, this is a game, you just finished a level, and so there's a boss fight.

Not that I've scoured the Internet for reviews, but I have yet to see anyone else address the issue of the game's beginning sequences. In a game that prides itself on cleverness of storytelling, how am I supposed to believe that Adam Jensen is actually the head of security in a multinational biotech company? In the first level after the prelude, my boss—the man who runs the company—gives me a choice of exactly one weapon to take with me into an unknown situation. I take it for granted when I have dozens of inventory slots that I can probably carry more than just a short-range stun gun. We can let this one slide because it's a tutorial level, but notice that this is a foreshadowing of the narrative-jarring boss fights: this is a game that knows it's a game and won't let you forget it.

The next scene has Adam Jensen, Head of Security, back in his office building. Once I realized I had an office, I checked my email and found out that someone has been stealing office supplies. So, what's a Head of Security to do? Obviously, the answer is break into some offices and search for clues. Break into offices?! I'M THE HEAD OF SECURITY. I should be able to get into anyone's office, and I sure as hell shouldn't have to CRAWL THROUGH DUCTWORK to do so!

Aha, so the game wants me to learn about breaking and entering in a safe place, where there are no armed enemies. It felt wrong to crawl through ductwork in my own building, especially when every office has windows, through which you can see people chatting in the hallway. So in the spirit of "it's just a tutorial," we could let it go. However, there was one part of this scene that completely snapped me out of the game.

There was money everywhere.

It seems that in the future, people only use gift cards, and they leave them all over the place. It made me wonder, if I were to walk through my building (or crawl through its ample ductwork) and look at my coworker's desks, how many would have hundreds of dollars on their bookcases or in their desk drawers? But it wasn't just the presence of the money that bothered me: it was the gameness of it. I found myself staring at a credit chit, wondering if I should take it or not. More specifically, I wondered, Does this game have a karma system, and am I going to lose morale or reputation for taking this? See, this stuff wasn't credits or money at all—it's just a mcguffin that I can collect. And because it's there, I need to take it, because I know how the economics of these games is balanced: if you want to get the best goods, you need to be an explorer and take everything you can find. I'm not taking cash from my coworkers. I'm just collecting arbitrary units that I can use to get the bigger gun I know I'm going to need, because the only other thing I know about the game at this point is that there's going to be rough boss fights. (Thanks, Internet!)

I finish exploring every nook and cranny of the building that I can access without leveling up my hack skill. After all, I don't want to actually hack my own building's security system, I just want to explore its ductwork. The next mission has me leaving the building and getting out into the streets of Detroit. (The Assassin's Creed developers know how to make a city feel crowded; Human Revolution pays homage to the empty streets of the original Deus Ex.) One of the first places I visit is a weapons dealer in an abandoned gas station. I am Adam Jensen, Head of Security, and I'm buying a tranquilizer rifle with stolen money from a guy in an abandoned gas station. I cried a little and almost stopped playing, but at this point, I haven't seen one of those famous boss battles yet, so I felt obligated to carry on.

They did do a nice job allowing for multiple solutions to problems, and I did have fun playing the game. I'm going to jump ahead to the ending. The spoilers get more serious here, so be warned.

Ninety percent of the story involves Adam looking for Dr. Reed. Whether it's love or curiosity doesn't matter: it's Reed that he's after. You see her for a brief moment, right before going into the endgame. If you've read this far in my post, then you probably already know that the ending is determined solely by one decision at the very end of the game. This was the worst part of the original Deus Ex, that everything you did amounted to nothing except for your very last decision. Again, Human Revolution pays homage to the wrong part of the original. This one was even worse, though, since what screamed out to me as an obvious option was completely missing. All I wanted to do was stop the transmission. That's it. Stop the transmission, then go get picked up by Malik, go find Reed, and talk to her. I don't want to send Crazy Cripple Guy's message, or lie about terrorists, or something else I don't care about, and I certainly don't to kill myself and everyone else that I just painstakingly avoided killing.

The original Deus Ex ended with you having to chose one of three options, none of which were appealing, but all of which were inevitable. This one felt completely contrived, as though the designer just couldn't wait to show me B-roll of starving kids in Africa. I guess I am the sap. I actually empathized with Adam, and I actually wanted to know why he cared so much for Reed, and how she really felt for him. I thought they would come to some understanding about where Adam came from. The character development in this game was awfully shallow, but I fell for it, because I play these games for the RP part of RPG.

In conclusion, my recommendation is, after finishing Human Revolution, go play The Missing Link DLC. At first, I was upset to hear that some really good content was left of the game and released as DLC; I think this is a bad direction for games, especially for elements that happen chronologically in the middle of the main story. However, in this case, it was a blessing. The Missing Link was quite fun, with interesting levels and much more believable and interesting characters. When Missing Link ends, you can pretend that you don't actually know what happens next, and your imagination can then give you a satisfying conclusion.

Friday, December 9, 2011

CS Ed Week: Reflections on a busy week

Once again, we've reached the end of CSEdWeek, and I'm pushing to get this post in before it's over.

I attended two blogworthy public events this week. On Monday, I went to the Indiana Historical Society's Annual Founders Day Dinner and Awards celebration, along with my collaborator Ronald Morris and our Dean, Michael Maggiotto. The College of Sciences and Humanities at Ball State University was awarded the Outstanding Project of the Year award for Morgan's Raid.


Among the other recognized individuals and organizations were eight Centennial Businesses, Indiana companies celebrating 100 years of operation. Not surprisingly, none of these were software development companies. However, I'm willing to wager that all of them now rely upon software for their daily operations. In 2111, will they be looking back at 100-year-old software development shops?

Wednesday was the BSU Building Better Communities Project Showcase, where about twenty student teams showed how they worked with faculty mentors and community partners. Several of my students were there to demonstrate the Digital Archaeology Simulation project. A poster provided the background and rationale for the project, and the software is still under development by Emerging Technologies. A prototype was available, and while I didn't take the opportunity to run the latest build, several passers-by told me that they were quite impressed. Ball State University President Jo Ann Gora spent a few minutes with members of the team to talk to them about their work—a great opportunity for the students to show some of their best work (even if the photo is rather poor).

This week was also the final project presentations in CS222: Advanced Programming. Each team of four had to pitch a project and complete it in six weeks, with two three-week milestones. Several of the teams impressed me with their hard work and dedication, investing significant amounts of their own free time in order to create the most impressive systems they could.

Rather than make any grand conclusions, I think the best way to close this post is to say that I have a great job. My students rise to the challenges I set before them. They appreciate learning how to learn, and they respect the fact that I respect them. We all get a bit stressed this time of year, but it feels good at the end of a busy week to reflect on all the great learning experiences I have had with my students this year. Thanks to my students for sticking with me, for trusting me even when my methods are unconventional.

Happy CS Ed Week.