{"id":513,"date":"2009-04-01T06:47:19","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T05:47:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=513"},"modified":"2009-04-01T06:47:19","modified_gmt":"2009-04-01T05:47:19","slug":"gdc09-taking-spore-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2009\/04\/01\/gdc09-taking-spore-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"GDC09: Taking Spore seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Margaret Robertson<\/p>\n<p>[ADAM: I missed the first quarter of the talk because I was at a long meeting, and missed the Q&#038;A because I had to rush to another. Sigh]<\/p>\n<h4>Common Elements<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>No-one is using the game, they&#8217;re all using the creature-creator\n<li>Nearly all working with under-12 year-olds (7-12 years)\n<li>Teaching collaboratively because they can only afford one shared copy\/laptop, so the whole class has to share\n<li>Exporting data digitally was key to making use of it &#8211; e.g. <a href=\"http:\/\/mashon.org\/spore\">http:\/\/mashon.org\/spore<\/a>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Why are they not using the game?<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>no educational discounts from EA\n<li>too slow to play the game through and see the final effects of early choices [ADAM: it&#8217;s very non-casual &#8211; the game doesn&#8217;t allow you to jump in, doesn&#8217;t allow you to choose to play the bits you want, doesn&#8217;t let you speed up \/ fast-forward etc]\n<li>too complicated, user-interface keeps changing from game to game\n<li>prejudice against using &#8220;games&#8221; in the classrom\n<li>TTP (time-to-cock) is short enough that teachers are afraid of letting kids have that freedom in the classroom\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Spore API<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>competition is still running [ADAM: also see <a href=\"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/index.php\/2009\/03\/05\/web-20-games-creativity-ugc-and-socialising-in-spore\/\">my previous post on the API here<\/a>]\n<li>it&#8217;s a laboratory, but not for the consumers: for *EA\/Maxis* to learn how they could\/should have made \/ should modify the game going forward [ADAM: it&#8217;s like an in-game-engine version of MMO forums where you get to see many things that players want, don&#8217;t want, how they are metagaming the intended game, etc]\n<\/ul>\n<h4>What can crossover games learn?<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>subject-specific advocates are necessary pre-launch to avoid PR problems and knee-jerk reactionaryism from communities\n<li>teaching materials: pre-made save-games for teachers, etc\n<li>&#8220;free&#8221; saved not just teacher budgets, but also spared teachers from filing lots of paperwork to get sign-off for it. Free was overwhelmingly popular in education, but not as a philosophical thing, just a practical thing\n<li>lots of teachers couldn&#8217;t install the game on school PC&#8217;s because they&#8217;re not allowed admin rights [ADAM: this is amusing &#8211; Runescape learnt in 2002 that this made an orders-of-magnitude difference in success in schools. Ironically, Runescape was just a clone of an EA game (Ultima Online), but maybe EA still hasn&#8217;t learnt the lesson?]\n<li>it takes a long time to evaluate the outcomes and effects of using this in teaching. It&#8217;s going to take several years, not several months\n<\/ul>\n<h4>What&#8217;s the most-requested feature from schools\/educators?<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>easy to use, cross-game, machinima tools\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Margaret Robertson [ADAM: I missed the first quarter of the talk because I was at a long meeting, and missed the Q&#038;A because I had to rush to another. Sigh] Common Elements No-one is using the game, they&#8217;re all using the creature-creator Nearly all working with under-12 year-olds (7-12 years) Teaching collaboratively because they can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,52],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}