Designing Learning Technology

Wed, 04 Jun 2003

"Productive" Video Game News
Everyone's in a tizzy over the recent report that shows that first-person video games can dramatically improve visual attention skills. Finding one benefit to first-person shooters, while interesting, hardly tips the balance: if you played the games already, you can feel mildly better about yourself; if you didn't, you probably won't start now. An important question is whether the first-person game actually has to be violent, or graphically violent, to contribute to the attention gain. My guess is it doesn't, but researchers haven't done those tests (not surprising, since there aren't a lot of non-violent first-person games out there). So for now, the news reports are conflating the violent, socially negative qualities of the game with the fast-moving, first person perspective, which is more likely what's contributing to the effect.

A much more interesting (to me) recent game announcement is The Wild Divine, which is slated to be released this fall. This (quite peaceful) game challenges players to develop better control of their own body. By using biofeedback sensors, players can control actions in the game by mastering their own physiological responses (galvanic skin response and heart rate variability). Hopefully some studies will explore whether proficiency within the game transfers into meditative expertise outside the game.

@02.16 #

First Glance at Revolution 2.0
Follow-up on Runtime Revolution 2.0, a nice cross-platform development tool in the HyperCard tradition. The price tag's pretty high, but the product is worth a closer look. The developers have done a very good job providing basic functionality for free. The free version of the tool lets you build whatever you want, with the single restriction that no individual object script can contain more than 10 lines of Transcript code. The documentation takes pains to explain exactly what this means (and what counts as a "line of code") and even suggests a number of strategies for maximizing use of Revolution, given this restriction. The bottom line is that this makes the free version of Revolution highly useful for a variety of tasks, including prototyping, bolting a front end on various command line tools, and simple information management applications (something HyperCard excelled at, in my view), among other tasks.

@01.44 #

NECC in Seattle
NECC, a major computing in education conference, is coming up in Seattle, June 28 to July 2. Register online.

@01.44 #