• I haven’t been in a classroom at all for a couple of years, I haven’t been the primary instructor in a classroom for almost nine years, I haven’t seriously experimented with new ways of structuring courses for about eleven years.
• The symposium in question took place three weeks ago, I don’t trust myself to remember the details of Roger’s position, and he didn’t actually put a concrete position statement on the symposium blog post. (See the Pericles Group website for some information about his approach, though.)

So, in other words: what I’m about to do is talk about a woeful misrepresentation of somebody else’s point of view based on knowledge and experiences of my own that are equally woefully ill-informed and/or out of date. (Alternatively: I’m about to write a blog post! *rimshot*)

Roger sees a close tie between games and teaching, and had some sort of pithy phrase that he used to express that tie. I can’t remember what the phrase was, but I believe its gist was that classrooms are always a game, and that students are going to perform according to the rules of that game: so make active, conscious use of that fact, designing as good a game as possible and one where success in the game is as closely tied to your learning objectives as possible. And, as far as I can tell, he and his co-conspirators are extremely successful in this—I can’t imagine reading some of Kevin Ballestrini’s posts from last school year and not getting the feeling that something special is going on there. So I’d like to understand it, to relate to my own experiences and philosophical predispositions, and see what I can learn.

On which note: my philosophical predispositions towards teaching are strongly shaped by reading Alfie Kohn. His book No Contest had a huge effect on how I structured my classroom time; his book Punished by Rewards had a fairly strong effect on how I structured my assignments and grading, contributing to my feeling that I wasn’t a misfit in academia solely for research reasons, I ultimately was probably more of a misfit for teaching reasons, even though (because?) I cared about the latter more than the former.

And certainly there are many ways in which Kohn agrees with (my interpretation of) Roger’s point. For example, Kohn rails at length against standardized tests, and one of his main points is that standardized tests encourage students, teachers, entire school systems to do well on those tests even if that comes at the expense of learning; to me, this dovetails quite nicely with Roger seeing classes as games, because you’d better make sure that the rules of the game enforce the behavior that you want! Standardized tests are, of course, a lousy game with lousy goals; Roger does much better on that end, and I’m sure that Kohn agrees that the sort of richer feedback mechanisms that Roger’s methods provide are a huge improvement.

Where I suspect the two would disagree (or, more concretely: my reading of Kohn gives me pause) is on the nature of the motivators that are involved. The point of Punished by Rewards is that intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation, and that the latter drives out the former. Now, classes are already chock-full of extrinsic motivators (grades in particular); if you accept that as the basis that you’re starting from, then sure, craft your extrinsic motivators to promote learning in the areas that you’d like, and overlaying role-playing game mechanics may help with that. But if you start from an environment that’s trying to work with and nurture intrinsic motivators, then while role-playing sounds good, I get nervous about game mechanics: it’s hard to do that without bringing extrinsic motivators into play.

Looking at this from a slightly different angle: I like learning. I think feedback is inextricably bound to learning. But I’m a lot more dubious about certification: its coupling of feedback with extrinsic motivation can be actively counterproductive. And that coupling is often very strong, and is expressed as a refusal to give feedback without submitting to those extrinsic motivators: e.g. most colleges will kick students out of school if they refuse to engage in actions that lead towards them getting graded.

(Tangent: in my last year and a half in academia, I taught calculus. Those courses were full of pre-meds; as far as I can tell, the course served much more of a weeding out role than a thoughtful attempt to ensure that those students learned mathematical concepts that would help them be more effective doctors. Most of the students put in a decent effort to learn the material—you generally don’t get into Stanford without such habits—but not all were particularly interested; from my point of view, not being interested was a perfectly reasonable possible choice, indeed one that probably more of the class should make, and I did not enjoy working within a system with strong forces pushing against students making that choice, or even being aware of the possibility.)

So the question that that raises is: are games simply feedback mechanisms that can be used in a variety of ways, or are they certification mechanisms? I was going to say that, whenever you bring in scoring, you’re already moving in a certification direction, but upon reflection that’s too strong: if a game really is about itself (go or, I assume, Starcraft), then the scoring mechanism is feedback pure and simple.

But if the game is about something else (as classroom-based games always are, though Roger’s approach works at narrowing that gap), then scores make me very nervous. For one thing, if the score is tied to something else (e.g. a course grade that is necessary for getting a degree) then it’s certification, not simply feedback; for another thing, the distance between the score and the broader topic means that you aren’t getting feedback about aspects of the topic that aren’t covered by the scoring mechanism. I see both of these all the time in video game RPGs: if you don’t fight and level up, RPGs will refuse to give you access to the game’s content, and even if you are willing to go along with that, that focus on combat and leveling encourages you to neglect other aspects of role-playing. (Fortunately, there are people whose drive is strong enough to withstand such discouragement.)

If you’re sensitive to these issues (as I’m sure Roger is), you can design your games to open up as wide a space as possible for learning. Take Rock Band as an example; in this context, we’ll think of it as a tool to learn about music, e.g. by introducing you to a range of music, to help you pick out the different parts of a piece of music (Paul McCartney’s bass lines), even to teach you concrete physical and mental skills involved in playing music. The first iteration of the series was relatively prescriptive: it wouldn’t even let you try to play harder songs until you’d performed adequately (according to the game’s criteria, not your own!) on the easier songs. I suspect no-fail mode existed in the first game, but I felt that its use was discouraged; in contrast, the second game turned no-fail mode on by default if you’re playing in easy mode, so if you want to listen to music with a bit of guidance from the game as to the shape of one of the parts, you can do that without having the game punish you if you don’t conform properly.

By the third game, the amount and range of possible feedback has expanded enormously; because of that feedback, I’m finding the experience much more powerful as a teaching tool, with my actions being much less driven by the scoring mechanisms of the game. I almost always have no-fail mode turned on (and I wish there were a way to turn off the missed note sound: frequently I find that sound to be useful feedback, but in some circumstances it’s actively counterproductive to my learning goals), and while the game’s scoring system (and other metrics, e.g. streak length) can be a useful feedback mechanism (e.g. breaking a streak while playing Outer Space last weekend pointed out that I was missing a bass line transition), the extrinsic motivation aspects of that feedback, while still relevant to me, is no longer as dominant as it once was.

And with Rock Band 3 in particular, there’s feedback that’s provided outside of the game context, that your ears and hands give you. That game is, admittedly, a quite special case, but its nature may make it particularly well suited to provide examples for how to design games to work in a classroom situation.

Returning to what I said earlier: I’m convinced that Roger’s methods are effective, but I’m not sure I really understand the sources of that effectiveness. Continuing the theme of talking about areas that I’m ignorant of: how much of the effectiveness of these methods is due to a magic circle effect? Bringing in an explicit game mechanic (instead of the implicit mechanic that’s provided by grades and testing) may serve as an inoculation against extrinsic motivators, as an explicit acknowledgement of those motivators coupled with a refusal to give them undue power. And role-playing mechanisms in particular may be a particularly strong inoculation, with the dual role allowing for one of those roles to be motivated by intrinsic motivation while the other role goes along with the more certification-y aspects of the feedback systems.

Which, in turn, raises the question: what would a classroom look like with magic circle effects but without game mechanics? That puts an unexpected light on some of my own teaching experiences. One of the most powerful such experiences that I had was in the very first course I taught at Stanford: it was a differential equations course, and I’d spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to design the course. I balanced student work and lecturing in a very different way than in courses I’d been in as a student, and had a quite unusual homework / exam policy. I continued feeling this out as the quarter went along; I had a great time, the students seemed to be enjoying it, and the students seemed to be learning something.

So I was ready to declare the methods a success, and indeed I think the methods I used were good ones; but subsequent iterations of the class didn’t have the same feel. Part of that is doubtless chance (e.g. the specific students involved), and part of that is that I was less actively investing mental effort in the later iterations. But I bet that the fact that I was clearly experimenting had an impact on how the students saw the course, and did so in a way that’s similar to a magic circle effect, treating it as an explicit alternate space that muted the impact of certification on their learning.

Interesting stuff, I wish I understood the interplay of forces here better. I hope we’ll talk about this more in future VGHVI Symposia (of which there will be one this Thursday); follow the VGHVI blog if you want to participate!

It’s a very simple song, built around the three simplest chords possible: I-IV-V, where I is an E power chord (open E string, index finger on the second fret of the A string, middle finger on the second fret of the D string), IV is an A power chord (open A string, index finger on the second fret of the D string, middle finger on the second fret of the G string), and V is a B power chord (index finger on the second fret of the A string, ring finger on the fourth fret of the D string, pinky on the fourth fret of the G string). So you move your hand between those three positions, with the occasional flourish thrown in.

And it’s the details of those hand movements that got to me. The I-IV transition is performed by shifting your entire hand up a string, reflecting the fact that each of the bottom four strings on a guitar is a fourth up from the next lower string. (Or, alternatively: the tuning on a guitar is chosen exactly to express that I-IV power chord shift; this is different from a violin, for example, where adjacent strings are separated by a fifth instead of the fourth.) Also lurking in this transition is the fact that you play the second fret on the D string in both chords: the chords in question are open fifths, so this expresses that if you go a fifth up from IV, you get back down to I, meaning that an E shows up in both of them.

Next, the IV-V transition. Here, the chords are a whole step apart from each other; that’s expressed in the simplest way possible, by shifting your left hand up two frets while playing the same strings. (So, in particular, the two chords have no notes in common.)

Finally, we go from V back to I. Power chords are open fifths, so the the two notes that make up the I are simply the E that’s its root and the B which is the root of the B power chord that’s the V in this sequence. (In any of these chords, the third note is repeats the bottom note an octave up.) In particular, B shows up in both chords, and in both chords, you’re playing that B with your index finger: and when making the V-I shift, you keep that index finger in place, but shift the positions of the other fingers. (Actually, when you make that transition in the song, it throws in a G (third fret on the E string, which in that context I play with my ring finger) between those two chords, but you can leave your index finger in place while playing that G as well.) This gives that transition a different feel from playing the I-IV-V power chord sequence in keys other than E: if you weren’t starting from an open string, then the V-I transition would involve sliding your whole hand left and up, so none of the fingers would stay in the same place.

So: your hands move less than you might expect, and that fact reflects something about the relationship between the chords involved, that they’re rotating somehow around the B. It’s not the only place where my hands moved less than I might expect: there’s a little flourish that you perform several times, and when I first ran into that in practice mode, I was a bit stymied by it. Eventually, though, I realized how little my hands had to move when performing that flourish, and it became much easier. (This unfolding of quiet simplicity happens to me all the time when learning bits on pro keys; not as often in the past on guitar, though I imagine that will change as I get better and have to deal with more notes.) That flourish sometimes comes after a I and sometimes after a V; in both cases, though, it’s approximately as easy to play, and in both cases that B you’re playing with your index finger is a key note.

Some other bits that struck me while going through the song:

• The flourish mentioned in the previous paragraph involves a pull-off; I can go through the motions well enough for the game to score me as playing it successfully, but when I play it unmuted and plugged in, I sound a lot worse unless I’m very careful and crisp with my finger movements. So clearly something to work on.

• Sometimes, when the guitar part comes in after being quite for a while, you play I, and sometimes, you play V. Which I hadn’t really noticed when listening to the song (my pitch recognition can clearly use some work!), but once I was aware of that possibility, I could tell which chord to expect: not so much because I recognized the notes but because my brain could feel that the V-I resolution was coming up. Which gave me a lot more appreciation for the Suzuki practice of listening to songs on CD over and over again before playing them: that’s what I’ve effectively been doing by going through every on-disc Rock Band 3 multiple times on multiple instruments before I first started playing them on expert pro guitar, and it’s seeping into my understanding at a subconscious level of how the songs are put together.

• The song has two sections involving lots of alternating strumming. In one of them, where I had to shift which note I was strumming, I had to practice at slower speeds; I eventually managed to play it successfully at 95% speed but not at full speed. Close, though, and I’m glad I’ve started practicing hard bits slowed down and going through the whole solo separately. (I’ll need to do that more and more to have any chance at not embarrassing myself as the solos get less straightforward.)

  In the other (much longer but much simpler) alternating strumming bit, though, I managed to keep my streak going for quite some time; listening to myself plugged in, I wasn’t quite as regular as I would have liked, but still: progress!

• One of my disappointments when playing Beatles Rock Band was how hard it was to play guitar while singing: those are songs I know well, songs I should be able to sing on autopilot, but I generally couldn’t manage that while playing expert guitar. I was curious how much that had to do with the fact that doing two things at once is hard and how much had to do with the artificial nature of Rock Band fake plastic guitar.

  As I started to get comfortable with the guitar part for I Love Rock and Roll, however, I noticed myself singing along with the song during easy sections and breaks in the guitar part; so once my guitar playing got decent, I pulled out a mic stand, turned on a second controller, and had the game score me on both simultaneously. I got 90% on pro guitar and 95% on vocals (expert in both cases), and while I can do better playing either side of that by itself, those scores are more than good enough to support the hypothesis that the structure of real guitar playing allows my fingers to work more on autopilot so I can devote more of my brain to my singing. Which isn’t to say that the two didn’t interfere: it was definitely a good thing that I didn’t have to sing during the aforementioned flourishes, and when alternating strumming bits showed up I generally stopped singing while my brain focused on establishing the rhythm, though I did manage to get back to singing after a few measures of the alternating strumming.

A great way to spend half an afternoon. And I’m only three songs in! I can’t wait to see what the rest of the songs are like in their full glory.

I decided that I’d declare victory when I’d gone through all the parts (including vocal harmonies) on all the music (including all the DLC). And the fact that I’d do such a thing (indeed, had already almost finished doing that, I only had three album parts to finish before this last push) is both a sign of the excellence of this game and a sign that I’m still sticking with my earlier thesis about the non-fiction nature of the game. Because I learned something over and over again when doing that, whether about the music or about my relationship with the music.

The music: Paul McCartney’s bass lines are awesome. Ringo’s drum parts, while less inspired, are surprisingly pleasant. Playing through the different eras of songs brings home in a very direct way how the band evolved, how much the music changes every couple of years. Drive My Car is super fun to play. The tabla part on Within You Without You is a revelation, completely different from any drum part in any other Rock Band song I’ve played. The trombone part in All You Need is Love is not so much fun to play: the controller has more of an effect than I’d expected. (I had the same experience with the Scherzo from Beethoven’s Symphony #9; more reason to look forward to keyboards, though it won’t be a perfect match with either of those examples, of course.)

And then there’s my relationship with the music. I do a lot better with the drum parts and vocal parts than I do on most Rock Band songs (my vocal range isn’t that great a match for Paul’s, but I actually kind of prefer singing in falsetto, so it ends up a wash); but, despite intending to branch out more, I still ended up spending most of my time on guitar. I’m lousy at vocal harmonies, in particular almost completely unable to hit them if the harmony is beneath the lead vocals; but on those occasions when we do hit them, it feels great. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had when playing a video game; the flip side is that it’s one of the video game experiences I’ve had that is least tied to the medium, which is a somewhat unsettling thought: maybe I should be spending more of my time elsewhere! I tried out simultaneous guitar and vocals, though I also didn’t spend as much time with that as I would have liked; and even for songs where I knew the vocal parts well, playing expert guitar turns out to demand enough of my concentration that singing along became quite difficult. (I wonder how much that speaks to the artificiality of pre-Rock Band 3 guitar parts? It’s not that the mechanics of playing expert guitar parts are necessarily so difficult, I just can’t do them by ear.) And actually medium guitar turned out, in some ways, to also demand more of my concentration than hard: so many of the notes were missing that I had to concentrate a bit more to hit the rhythms.

Also tying in to the nonfiction nature of the game, and to the mentoring power of achievements: the achievements for hitting all the hammers-on and pull-offs in a piece. When I first saw them, I thought it was a fun idea, but it seemed odd to include three such achievements: wouldn’t one be enough?

As it turns out: no. I’m not a guitarist in real life, so doubtless Dan will correct the details here, but it turns out that the three songs use hopos in rather different ways. Octopus’s Garden is the most traditional; the hopos are rather elaborate but ultimately they’re there for runs of notes. In Dig a Pony, however, you’re sort of sliding around the guitar; in particular, it has the highest proportion of chord hopos. And in Dear Prudence, the actual music is finger picking instead of strumming, so the hopos are used for notational purposes, to heighten the fact that you’re simultaneously picking out a melody part and harmony parts.

Quite a game. It’s a real shame that the other ten albums didn’t make it out as DLC; but Harmonix had good enough taste in the three albums that they chose and in the on-disk content that I don’t feel too sad about that. And, after all, I have thirty or so pieces of regular Rock Band DLC sitting on my hard drive that I haven’t gotten around to playing; I should really take care of that before Rock Band 3 lands…

What continues to impress me is the scope of the vision that the company has. They are not just trying to make a game that’s a lot of fun: they are trying to fundamentally alter humanity’s relationship with an art form that is older than recorded history, and to do so in an unalloyed positive fashion.

Guitar Hero, of course, kicked this off. It was mostly just a fun video game (though one with far reaching effects in the industry beyond video games, in its revitalization of alternate control interfaces), but it also tried to drag our interactions with music out of the relatively passive listening context, adding in some amount of interactivity. I don’t want to overstate the novelty of this—people sing along and play air guitar and drum along to music all the time, and there are karaoke games out there as well (though I haven’t done my research well enough to know how their dates compare to Guitar Hero‘s), but doing this in an instrumental game context was important and struck a chord.

I never played Guitar Hero 2, so I don’t have a good feel for how transformative its addition of bass was. My guess was that it wasn’t too transformative—bass and guitar isn’t all that compelling a fantasy context (though, having written that, I’ll have to admit that Liesl and I have a great time doing just that), and of course the mechanics of playing the two are very similar.

But I did play Rock Band, and the jump from Guitar Hero to that game was huge. Playing a full band is a compelling difference from just playing a guitar: it makes it a much much more social experience, and there are a lot of people who are naturally drawn to vocals or drums who wouldn’t be drawn to fake plastic guitar.

And that wasn’t the game’s only key advance: downloadable songs began to appear right after release, and they’ve come in a steady flow every week ever since. Harmonix’s support for DLC is in sharp contrast with almost every other gaming company out there, and it made it clear that they see Rock Band as a platform, not just a game, and one which they want to actively curate. And the steady flow of DLC began to raise the question: why aren’t all songs available this way? I mean, I know the practical reasons why that’s currently the case, but surely that’s a bug, not a feature? So what has to happen to fix that bug?

Next came Rock Band 2, which was an incremental improvement, albeit a solid one. It tweaked the social aspects, and its support for not only DLC for the original Rock Band but the ability to import Rock Band songs made it clear that Harmonix was serious about their platform vision.

And, a year later, we had The Beatles: Rock Band. Again, not a major advance (though vocal harmonies are surprisingly powerful), but I really appreciated the lovingly curatorial approach that the game showed. These games are altering our interactions with one of the most ancient of art forms; as such, they should treat music with love, care, and respect, and The Beatles: Rock Band very much did so. (Incidentally, that curatorial approach is another another strength of the band approach over Guitar Hero‘s single instrument: I got a lot more appreciation for the different musical parts once I was able to isolate them and concentrate on each one individually.)

So, at this stage, what are the major issues remaining, what are the next steps? The first issue is the bug I mentioned above, that not all music is available for Rock Band. The folks at Harmonix are great, and they’re putting out an unprecedented amount of DLC (I just had my 360 red ring, and when looking through the list of DLC when deciding what to re-authorize, a good 80 to 90 percent of it must have been Rock Band songs), but even so they’re clearly a bottleneck here. The solution to that, of course, is Rock Band Network; in the long run (and even the medium run) I expect that to be one of the most important video game developments from 2009.

And then there’s another variant of that problem: there does, in fact, exist music that is written for ensembles other than guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. This is, obviously, a quite open-ended problem (witness the Accordion Hero and Sousaphone Hero parodies), and it will take a long time to solve, but as a piano player, I would like to have keyboard support.

Finally, there’s the complaint that pressing colored buttons and hitting the strum bar isn’t very much like playing guitar. I don’t see this as an active problem (and I also note when it comes up that that isn’t the case for the new instruments in Rock Band), but it’s clearly an area where one can imagine improvement.

Which brings us to Rock Band 3. It attacks those two problems head on: I’ve been asking Harmonix employees in my twitter feed for keyboard support for a couple of years now, and not only do I have it, I have a couple of octaves of keyboard support, which is about as good as I can imagine right now! (And talking to people about Rock Band 3 over the last day or two, I’m not the only person out there who would like to put their piano lessons to use.) And they took the most unrealistic instrument, and completely overturned that: now, if you wish, you will be able to play Rock Band 3 on an honest to goodness electric guitar with full fingering charts. (They made incremental improvements on the realism of drums as well, but of course not as much improvement was needed there.)

And I’m looking forward to this more than any other video game news in ages. I’ll get a keyboard controller on launch, and dive into the deep end and see how well I can swim. I imagine that I’ll eventually dabble with pro mode on the guitar, too: I’m a reasonably good guitar player on Rock Band, and I think I’d get a lot more out of bumping up the realism on easy songs than from trying to master the most difficult songs on the current expert setting. I doubt I’ll dive into drums in the same way, though: I’m a much worse drum player, not even able to finish all drum songs on hard, and I imagine that I’ll be able to sink arbitrarily large amounts of time into guitar should I so choose. Which is actually another question that I’m wondering: just how much of my video game playing time is this game going to absorb in the year after it gets released?

So: what should we expect next from Harmonix? I imagine that there are enough big changes in Rock Band 3 that Rock Band 4 will end up being an incremental improvement similar to Rock Band 2; after that, though?

The above narrative points out two obvious areas for improvement. Harmonix has removed themselves as a major bottleneck for music availability, but while we’re getting a lot more content off of Rock Band Network than we could get before, there’s still a further flood of music out there that I want unleashed on the world; I’m not sure exactly what the next step is to enable further growth, but I am sure that next steps are out there. And the other is that we’ve gone from one instrument type (plus a minor variant) to three to four; we’re not done yet, and at some point we’re going to make a jump to “many”. Again, I don’t quite understand how that is going to happen (though a deep partnership with an external manufacturer, as they’ve done, is a good first step), but happen it should.

The other area of improvement that I’d like to see is for Harmonix to get platform independence. I’m now on my third Xbox 360; and even if that hardware weren’t seriously flawed, console lifecycles are only so long (though this one will be longer than normal, mercifully), and at this stage I fully expect to care much more about my musical investment than about the actual games for the console. To some extent, I’m resigned to losing most of that investment, but this is a problem that Harmonix (or somebody!) needs to solve eventually: we need to be able to move gamified songs from platform to platform the way we can move mp3s from platform to platform.

To that end, the most relevant parts of the recent announcements are the fact that all the new instruments have MIDI output ports, and that most of the existing DLC already contains symbol markings for use with the new drum kit. The point here is that this isn’t a brand new problem that Harmonix needs to solve. What we want is a way of representing music that is good enough to support learning to play it on real instruments (at least to the extent of telling if you’re basically playing the right notes at the right time), that is capable of degrading gracefully (as seen in the drum example above; I wonder whether Harmonix is already scoring keyboard parts in such a way that, eventually, we’ll be able to use Rock Band 3 and later content with an 88-key piano?), and that supports future instrument choices. And we need a platform-independent and more-or-less instrument-independent output format that can be matched up against said musical representation.

This, of course, isn’t rocket science: we’ve had perfectly suitable musical notation formats for hundreds of years now, and MIDI is (I assume, I’ve never looked into it) probably something that can do just fine on the output format representation. Also, the nice thing about this is that it gives a proof of concept that there is actually a natural stopping place to the feature creep here: we have known solutions that are sufficient to allow us to represent almost any piece of music in existence in a gamified format, which is what’s really important here. Heck, for all I know, their planned MIDI controller will already let us have most of that ability for free!

So, what’s the next big step? I don’t know for sure, of course, but it seems to me that the natural path forward is as follows (possible simultaneously, possibly in some order):

• Harmonix generalizes their music representation format to support arbitrary instruments, with whatever changes are necessary to support that in their authoring tools.
• Harmonix makes a full version of Rock Band available on a non-console platform, or probably on multiple non-console platforms. (I’m sure they’ve thought about launching their own dedicated device, but I don’t think this is particularly likely—they’re already moving away from hardware vertical integration, and I don’t think that a console would be enough of a match to their current strengths to help them more than it would hurt.)
• Harmonix opens their own game music store (think “iTunes store for Rock Band“, and eventually for all music), offering long-term persistence and portability of the music that you purchase through it.
• Harmonix, MTV, peripheral manufacturers, and actual sane forward-thinking record company executives all work together to make this a huge success, supplanting mp3s as the default format for music purchases going forward.

That last one is a bit of a stretch: sane, forward-thinking record company executives? And, of course, there are good reasons for record company executives to not want to give somebody too much exclusive control over key areas of their business. Certainly I would prefer to live in a world where this developed as an open standard that companies could freely share in; and quite possibly that’s the way that this will turn out. (Though, as is obvious, I’m enough of a Harmonix fanboy to be willing to give them a chance at being our benevolent musical overlords, at least in the short-to-medium term.)

But happen it will. Maybe I’m drinking too much of my own kool-aid, maybe being at GLS is causing me to see the potential for games everywhere. But really, how could it not happen? Having music come embedded with its own score is both obviously good and completely technologically feasible; using that embedded score for ludic and didactic purposes (and really, aren’t those one and the same in this instance?) is equally obviously good; and we are at the dawn of a golden age of gaming that makes this sort of transformation inevitable.

The talk was all about how video games (and other sorts of games, too) are moving away from their traditional confines and are appearing in all sorts of surprising real-world settings. Given that I love games in general and video games in particular, one might expect me to find this super-exciting: I should see this as a way in which our culture could become even richer! (See, for example, this Jane McGonigal interview.) And the video game blogosphere might largely be expected to react the same way, too.

The talk did, indeed, get a huge amount of discussion in the blogosphere (I’ll include a bunch of links at the end of this post), but the tone of most of those articles wasn’t so positive: while people generally thought that it was a very good talk, they also thought that it was a very good talk about a potential dystopia. I suspect there are a few different reasons why the talk got that sort of reaction, but certainly one of the main reasons is the last part of Schell’s talk, in which he painted a world full of organizations trying to convince you to take actions based on receiving points. (And you don’t have to stretch to see this as a dystopia: in his GDC microtalk, Schell himself described that as being akin to Brave New World.)

Extrinsic Motivators

More broadly, much of the discussion focused on the problematic nature of external rewards. As a long time Alfie Kohn fan, I’m pretty dubious about external rewards (or “extrinsic motivators”), for many of the reasons that Jesper Juul gives.

Which leaves me conflicted: I love video games, I don’t like extrinsic motivators, but here we have a talk about video games penetrating broadly through society that is being read widely as linking the two! I don’t enjoy cognitive dissonance more than anybody else; what should I do to resolve this?

There are a few options here. Probably the most attractive is to say that games aren’t all about extrinsic motivators, that (for example) only bad games are. There’s probably some amount of truth to that, but less than I would have expected going in. Let’s set aside video games for the moment, and talk about my favorite game of any sort, namely go. This is a game that I think is an inexhaustible source of richness and depth, and even on a superficial level I think that the layout of stones on a go board in a good game has real beauty of its own. Yet, if I were given a go board and a set of go stones and told to make something beautiful, I wouldn’t be particularly likely to try to follow the rules of go to do so: I would only be likely to make go-like patterns on a go board if I wanted to win a go game. (Either a game I was playing right then, or a hypothetical game that I might play in the future that would be informed by my investigations on the go board now.)

So, while there’s a lot of intrinsic motivation in my desire to play go (love for beauty, love for problem solving, wonderment at the layers upon layers of higher-order concepts that emerge from such simple rules), there’s extrinsic motivation there, too: the winning conditions are one example, as is the fact that I play in tournaments and got excited when my AGA rating made it up to 1 dan and bummed when my rating slipped back to 1 kyu.

And, of course, this mix of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators within a single game isn’t exclusive to go. I’m growing increasingly tired of the combat in games where I’m primarily interested in the environmental or narrative hooks. So, I have an intrinsic motivation which certain aspects of the game satisfy (the stories, the cities), but the mechanics fulfilling that intrinsic motivation serve in turn as extrinsic motivators to get me through other aspects of the game (slogging through repetitive combat).

To make game designers’ jobs worse, the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators isn’t universal across their audience! If I’m playing a narrative FPS, I may feel that I’m slogging through the shooting because it’s the only way to progress the plot; an FPS fan, however, may be going to the kitchen to fetch something to eat during the cut scenes, waiting until he or she can get back to shooting stuff.

I’m not sure exactly what to make of all of this. I guess one lesson of the go example is that one level of extrinsic motivators is fine, even good: it can give you the structure to make something a game instead of an activity, and as long as accepting that structure opens up a range of experiences that satisfy your intrinsic motivation, great! But once you open up extrinsic motivators on top of extrinsic motivators, experiences get a good deal bleaker. My problem with most JRPGs isn’t just that I have to fight through battles to advance the plot, it’s also that I’m applying the same strategy over and over again in battles: so I’m only pressing the buttons out of the extrinsic motivation of getting through the battle, and I only want to get through the battle out the extrinsic motivation to advance the plot. (Which I am intrinsically motivated to do!) And of course it gets worse if games (as frequently is the case) add a third consecutive layer of extrinsic motivation: maybe I’m only going through battles to advance my level or to be able to buy new loot, which aren’t (for me) intrinsically rewarding. In fact, I’ll propose that as my definition of grind: three directly nested game mechanics that function as extrinsic motivators for me.

This desire to avoid consecutive extrinsic motivators almost sounds like my old friend Alternating Repetition, this time between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, though I guess the analogy breaks down somewhat because we’re changing levels of scale while going down the motivation chain. (Also, I don’t see anything inherently bad about having consecutive layers of intrinsic motivators, if that makes sense in a game context.) And the main tool to get layers of intrinsic motivation is, I suspect, my recent obsession of Strong Centers: going back to the RPG example, make the battles strong enough to stand on their own (which seems to be the secret behind the appeal of Demon’s Souls), strengthen the appeal of exploration itself (Etrian Odyssey), make the cut scenes good enough that even people who are there for the fighting will be happy to watch them, make both fighting and narrative elements strong enough to appeal to people who come to the game for one of those are happy to stay for the other (Mass Effect 2, see Christina Norman’s GDC talk).

Achievements

The above discussion of extrinsic motivators considers them inside core video game gameplay; but many of the followups to Schell’s talk discussed extrinsic motivators outside of the core gameplay, typically using Xbox Live achievements as an example. (Almost always a negative one.)

And, indeed, achievements seemed to me unambiguously like extrinsic motivators when I first encountered them; now, though, I’m not so sure. Many achievements do seem to me to be extrinsic motivators: taking Mass Effect 2‘s achievements as an example, “Power Gamer” acts as an extrinsic motivator (though not one that’s been effective enough to get me to earn it!), and I spent a while thinking about how I would react to “Paramour” and “No One Left Behind” in that light. (I ended up deciding that I wouldn’t go out of my way to earn either of them, but then Thane won my heart and I made the right choices on the final mission so got them both after all.)

Other achievements, however, didn’t act that way for me. The story progress achievements were simple checkpoints from my point of view: there was never any real question as to whether or not I was going to make it through the whole game, so they just served as a bit of punctuation. (And added a bit of fun looking at my friends’ profiles and seeing how much faster than me they were going.)

And then there’s the combat achievements: these did affect my gameplay, but in general not in ways that I think of as extrinsic motivators. The clearest example here is “Tactician”: my character didn’t have any biotic powers, and I wouldn’t have thought to experiment with combining biotic powers if the achievement hadn’t been there. But it was there, and it served to open up my eyes to some new tactical possibilities that I hadn’t considered before. (And then I closed my eyes after experimenting with it a few times.) So that achievement served to make me aware of an area of the gameplay space that I wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise; to use an education analogy, it’s like the difference between a professor telling me that I have to study something to pass an exam (extrinsic motivation) and a mentor suggesting that I look into an area that I hadn’t studied before because it fits in with my interests. I don’t think that the majority of achievements act this way, but Mass Effect 2 certainly isn’t unique in that regard—I could post to examples in The Beatles: Rock Band and Burnout Paradise as well.

And, as with the earlier example of in-game extrinsic motivators, these aren’t clear objective categories: an achievement that serves as an extrinsic motivator for one person can serve as a neutrally-marked progress meter or mentoring for another person.

A great talk; I will repeat my exhortation to watch the video. The combination of extrinsic motivators and video games certainly gives a lot to think about; I hope I’ll be able to understand their interplay better in the future.

Other Writings

Some blog posts that other people have written about Schell’s talk:

• Sirlin on external rewards.
• Mitu Khandaker on the future of games.
• Annie Wright and Kirk Hamilton on too much for me to summarize in one sentence.
• Dan Lawrence on behaviourist game design.
• Jesper Juul on demotivation by external rewards.
• Jim Rossignol on taste.
• George Kokoris on achievements unlocked.
• Chris Breault on grinds.
• Ferguson of Interactive Illuminatus on rewards.
• Ian Bogost on persuasive games.
• Ralph Koster on gameifying everything.
• Bryan of The Pretentious Gamer on convergence.
• Jay Bachhuber on “ludic century nonsense”.

At any rate, as soon as I stepped into the entry area to Rapture and heard a slightly scratchy rendition of Beyond the Sea, I was hooked. The musical selections really are wonderful—I was going to write that it’s the game I own whose soundtrack overlaps the most with my iPod, until I realized that was patently false, but it’s right up there, and it’s definitely the game I own whose soundtrack overlaps most with the music sitting on top of my piano. And the music is just one aspect of the wonderfully nostalgic world they’ve created: I love the industrial design, the signs and artifacts that are sprinkled about. My only quibble is that the sequences of rooms often didn’t seem to fit together as a coherent three-dimensional chunk, but I can’t think of a first-person shooter that’s handled that better.

Very nice gameplay, too: I don’t like FPSes in general, and I was a bit worried that I’d be paralyzed by the choice of different plasmids; the latter didn’t happen, though, and I rather enjoyed some of the alternative gameplay mechanisms. (I’m a sucker for picture taking as a game mechanism, and the hacking minigame was pleasant enough.) And I appreciated some of the thoughtful choices the game made, e.g. not allowing me to waste my film taking pictures of enemies whose research I’d already maxed out, instead of treating film as an ammo like any other.

I could go into more detail about all of that, but, as with so many other people, all I really want to talk about is the Little Sisters. When I first heard about them and saw pictures of them in the prerelease coverage of the game (back when I actually paid attention to prerelease coverage of games!), they freaked me out enough that I wasn’t sure I would be able to play the game at all. I’m largely inured to video game violence, but for whatever reason (perhaps because I have a daughter myself, who was 7 or 8 years old at the time), those pictures really hit home, and I was not at all looking forward to playing through a game with such imagery in it.

I eventually came around, and I’m glad I did. But, with that as my initial impression of the game, the thought of harvesting Little Sisters never crossed my mind. In general, I’m not very good at appreciating “moral dilemmas” in video games (sorry, BioWare), because, given a choice, I can rarely imagine following one of the options. And this game would be an example, except that there’s a third, covert choice here.

Consider: I’ve been thrust into an extremely dangerous and extremely strange world. Almost everybody I meet seems to want to kill me; there’s a voice on the radio acting nice enough, but those I encounter in the flesh are rather less pleasant. And, in the middle of all of this, there are these strange little girls, with “Big Daddies” hulking nearby; neither of them wants to hurt me, the Big Daddies protect the girls, and the girls are evidently quite fond of the Big Daddies. (Or of “Mr. Bubbles”, as they call them.)

Given this, what kind of person would kill the Big Daddies? The main answer, I think, is a psychopath: either somebody who is so amoral as not to care, or so afflicted with a sort of white man’s burden megalomania as to think they can march in and set things to right. (Without doing any of the real work that is actually involved in looking after young children in even a normal environment, let alone a murderous one.) But somehow, in this game, killing their protectors and leaving the girls with nobody to guard and care for them in a place like Rapture is supposed to be the good choice?

I assume that the game designers had some uncomfortable thoughts along the same lines, because of the way they structured the first Little Sister encounter. In that one, the Big Daddy is already dead, and you have to save the Little Sister from a splicer yourself. After which, you meet Tenenbaum for the first time; she makes a case that “rescuing” the little sisters is good for them, but does so in a context that paints her as an unreliable narrator.

Given this, using the magic device Tenenbaum has given you that is supposed to cure the Little Sisters is horrifically irresponsible at best; and, even if you’re tempted to do so, not stopping when the girl cries out in horror is, well, beyond my powers to describe. I felt intensely uncomfortable, but of course the game doesn’t give you a chance to stop when she complains. (Incidentally, when rescuing Little Sisters here and over the course of the game, l Iearned something about how I act when I’m uncomfortable: every single time I rescued a Little Sister and heard those protests, I raised my left arm and scratched the back of my head. What a bizarre tic, I’m not sure I wanted to learn of its existence.) Stopping when confronted with the choice would have been conceivable, but I’m almost positive that the game wouldn’t have let me continue without doing something to the first Little Sister. (And, in the extremely unlikely case that it would have let me proceed, I’m also sure it wouldn’t have let me actually look after her.)

And, once you’ve rescued the first Little Sister, she thanks you, setting you on the slope to further evil: the next time you meet one, she’s with her Big Daddy, but you can rationalize (given all the other murder you’re committing in the game) killing her protector, because the end result is for her own good, right? (It is, of course, for your own good, but we’ll have to construct some sort of rationalization that goes beyond that.) Which I dutifully did because the game expected that of me—given that I wasn’t going to stop playing the game, I decided to go along with its design—but doing so broke my heart every time. (As did seeing a Big Daddy alone later on in that same level—in retrospect, watching a video, it wasn’t the Big Daddy protecting the first Little Sister I’d rescued, but that’s how I interpreted it at the time. Even if you accept that rescuing the Little Sisters is best for them, how can you justify killing their surrogate fathers while doing so?) Unlike with the first Little Sister I assume that it is possible to avoid killing any of the later Big Daddies; if I were more given to alternative playthrough styles, trying the game that way would be very high on my list.

A powerful game, and a very good one. Though also, in its own way a very depressing one: it’s one of the pinnacles of our art form, but it devotes most of its art to exploring adolescent Randian power fantasies instead of, say, exploring a topic like what it means to be a parent. (And that final movie shows just how paint-by-numbers the game designers’ basic approach in that area seems to be.) Sigh. Maybe I should come around to Chris Hyde’s point of view and turn more of my attention elsewhere.

Which didn’t work out so well at first: aside from my running into slightly more hardware issues with it than with other PC games we’ve played, I found myself spending most of the first couple of levels alternating between waiting, getting caught, and reloading. I didn’t feel a huge sense of accomplishment when making it past obstacles, either, and combining this with my worries about ever using limited inventory meant that I wasn’t having much fun.

One advantage of the VGC, however, is that it’s taught me something about my own play styles. And my early Thief problems reminded my of my early Deus Ex experiences. In that game, I started out frustrated by stealth and by inventory restrictions; as the latter eased, though, I found myself more confident with the range of options at my disposal, and rather enjoyed most of the game. So, combining those memories with other’s claims that the proper way to play to play Thief is to figure out how to actively manipulate your environment, I decided to try to consciously expand my search for options when dealing with obstacles and to be more generous with the tools in my inventory.

Which I dutifully tried to do for the next couple of levels. And, indeed, I enjoyed them more, but not for that reason: I would be proud of myself for using a water arrow to put out a light in an upcoming intersection, but then when I went through it a guard turned out not to be anywhere nearby! Instead, I just had an easier time parsing the levels and knocking out guards.

And then I hit the Thieves’ Guild, the first of the Thief Gold levels. The first section or two was okay, but then I found myself going in circles for ages on end; that was partly my fault, but not entirely, and when I got past that, the game gave me hints that there was quite a bit left to do in the level. I took a break for dinner; after dinner, I asked myself, “is this really what I most want to be doing right now?” And the answer came back that, no, I’d rather spend my time elsewhere.

So I stopped. And I’m glad I did: judging from the discussion in the VGC forums, I would have found the rest of the level quite frustrating, and I’m confident that I put enough effort into the game as a whole that it wasn’t about to magically click for me. (Plus, this frees up time that I can use to learn Haskell.)

I’m not going to say Thief is a bad game or anything; but its style unfortunately ran into several of my personal mental quirks. (Most notably, when given a choice between paralysis and imperfection, I have a bad habit of choosing the former; this game lets me do that in more than one way.) And there are some unfortunate misfits between it and my living situation: the amount of time that I can spend playing video games is fairly limited, and when I play PC games, I have to isolate myself in a room away from my family and play them in a VirtualBox installation that has both sound and control quirks. Also, if there’s anything I’ve learned from the VGC, it’s that even quite good games from the 90′s made design choices that are more than capable of turning away video game devotees a decade later.

I do wish my experiences had led to a better appreciation of the stealth genre, though. (Or, alternatively, a more cogent understanding of the flaws of the genre.) And it makes me sad to have not seen a VGC game through the end, though I suppose that had to come eventually.

Which got me wondering: what differences are our conceptions of video game genre blinding us to? What are the video games that we think of as being part of the same genre (because of their shared mechanics), while cutting across quite different areas of the theme and design space in ways other than their mechanics?

I’ve been thinking about this recently because of the Beatles game. Which I adore, as do many others; some people, however, even people who are as big Rock Band fans as I am, are less impressed. It generally comes down to the Beatles’ music not being to their taste; if you combine that with the gameplay being in many ways identical to earlier Rock Band iterations, then of course you’d prefer the wider musical variety in the earlier games.

Having said that, however, The Beatles: Rock Band isn’t quite the same as a reskinned Rock Band 2. Some differences:

• The songs are (almost) all unlocked from the beginning.
• Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t unlockables: you can unlock pictures and other historical artifacts.
• If you play through the game in its story-based mode, you encounter the songs in chronological order rather than a difficulty-based order.
• There are fewer ways in which your play affect the music that is played. (E.g. no drum free play to activate star power.)
• On the easiest setting (which is the default), you can’t fail out of a song.
• You can’t customize your avatar.
• Each song has custom artwork, custom animations.

And these are not random differences or a collection of isolated refinements: they all point in the direction of moving the game away from focusing on players’ generic mastery of techniques and towards a focus on the Beatles’ music and their surrounding history. I’ll even claim that the game’s achievements show this difference: the achievements have moved away from generic gameplay accomplishments and towards achievements that get you focusing on individual songs, and even on techniques within those songs. (I’m thinking of the hammer-on/pull-off achievements for Dear Prudence and Octopus’s Garden; or the achievements for double-fab and triple-fab singing, which will lead you to appreciate just how differently the harmonies play out in different songs.)

The picture that I’m getting from this is a game that, on a non-mechanics genre level, is profoundly different from the vast majority of video games. At its core, the Beatles game is a non-fiction game in the sense that most video games are fiction games: while the game certainly takes its liberties with the historical material that it’s presenting, it’s easy to imagine reaching the game by starting from a book about the Beatles or a course about the Beatles, and dreaming about how to make it more interactive, more immersive, enabling the learner to view the music from different perspectives and to isolate different aspects of their music. (I’m not the only person who appreciates Paul McCartney’s bass lines a lot more after going through the game on bass than I did before playing it.) I’ve been hearing about the Serious Games movement for years; in its own way, this game is one of the best examples of a serious game that I can think of.

Having written the above, now that I’ve had my eyes opened to the nonfiction nature of the Beatles game, I think that other Rock Band games actually largely fit within the nonfiction space as well: they’re much more of a representation and exploration of externally constructed subjects than (to pick another game within the rhythm game genre) Space Channel 5 is. I think it took the kick of a game saying “no, we’re not going to organize the game’s progression in terms of difficulty” to open my eyes to non-fiction video games that surround me, but now that my eyes are opened, I see them there.

Or maybe they don’t surround me, actually—looking at my game shelf, Wii Fit, the Brain Age games, and (I suspect, I haven’t played it) Endless Ocean qualify, but not much else. So maybe what’s really going on here is that two companies, Nintendo and Harmonix, are doing something special; five or ten years from now we’ll look back and marvel at the changes in the possibilities that games represent that are getting their first big market successes right now. (Yes, I am aware that non-fiction games have been around for quite some time; I had a lot of fun playing Robot Odyssey a quarter-decade ago!)

Of course, everybody’s aware of what Nintendo is doing in this vein (it’s certainly hard to ignore Wii Fit); Harmonix’s efforts are, to me, going underappreciated. I’m very excited about the possibilities of Rock Band Network: I now find it frustrating that there’s any music that I can listen to but can’t play along with in a game. So I’m very much looking forward to a future world where that is no longer the case, where we have a continuum moving gradually from recordings of music that we purchase to performances of the music that we play ourselves. (Though, as mashups remind us, the linear notion of a continuum is quite misleading here!)

And just as video games will make their presence known in various places in that continuum, so too will they make themselves known increasingly broadly across our culture. But breaking free of the narrow focus on game classification into genres based on gameplay mechanics is, I think, an important step in that broadening influence.

So I need two more mics; and I don’t want to have to hold them, so my wife and I can sing along while playing instruments. Does anybody have any recommendations on the topic? Honestly, what I’d find most ideal would be something like a USB headset except without the earphones, so the game would recognize it as a mic. But if there’s not anything available like that, then I guess a mic plus a stand would work okay. Wireless is nice but not a big deal, we sit pretty close to the TV and Xbox.