Tengrrl sent me this link today because she wanted to make sure that I wasted valuable time playing games. Oh wait….I like playing games and it’s part of my research, Nevermind. Thanks tengrrl! ‘Speare: The Literacy Arcade Game by the Canadian Apollo Games is basically a space shooter (much like space invaders except you don’t get to hide behind barriers) where you destroy enemy ships in order to retrieve orbs that bear key words of a Shakespearian phrase that you are supposed to complete for that round. During each round you also receive a series of “transmissions” that give you Shakespeare themed trivia facts. Once you successfully complete each round you can then answer a series of trivia questions for additional points. Accumulated points can be used for ship and weapons upgrades.
I played the demo through and it kept my attention for a few minutes. The trivia facts were more interesting than the Space Invaders knockoff interface, but they definitely pulled you out of the narrative of the game in the attempt to build a Shakespearian meta-narrative. I’m not sure of what the proposed age range is supposed to be, but the ringing endorsements from a 13 year old student and a 6th grade teacher makes me think that the intended audience is middle school aged children. As a former elementary school teacher I am a bit skeptical of edutainment type games (even if the developers don’t want to call it that) because children generally see through the thin level of entertainment very quickly. Oddly enough I think that ‘Speare might actually grab the attention of a gamer for a few moments. The question is how do you draw in a non-gamer? One of the things that I noticed about the game really quickly was that there were a lot of transmissions coming through, but no faces to put with the voices. I wonder if adding a more “personal”/human touch to the game might be more friendly.
I also wonder about what happens if you die. Do you have to start all over again? You have a limited number of ships and you can earn more, but to be perfectly honest I am too damned competitive to actually keep dying so that I can see what happens when/if I run out of ships/lives. Someone else want to try out the demo and tell me what happens?
via TheStar.com -’Wherefore art thou (zap) Romeo?’ by way of tengrrl
Nathan Mckenzie said,
30 April 2007 at 5:28 pm
I’m actually kind of torn on this game.
On the one hand, I applaud their effort - unlike a lot of ed-games I’ve seen, this legitimately looks like it’s heading in the direction of being a fun game. As you mentioned, it’s certainly not as solid a Space Invaders / Ikaruga-style game as the best of such games on the market… but it does seem like they’re actually trying to make something validly fun and compelling. I feel like I’ve seen far too many ed-”games” that simply announce that they are games, get some brightly colored graphics to help hammer that fact home, and then don’t replicate ANY of the mechanics or nuance that make players like games. I’m much more excited to see people make an honest stab and fall short than to not bother at all.
But Shakespeare? …Huh. To be honest, teaching Shakespeare seems like one of the most difficult tasks that an ed-game maker can bite off. Most of the really difficult and important topics in humanities seem like hard fits for games generally. So much of something like Shakespeare is about analyzing ambiguous human behavior in the context of other ambiguous human behavior, all mediated through extremely complex language which is further informed by a historical context. I will say, as someone who has done a lot of game programming - these are all things that computers are pretty awful at.
Still, if the game were significantly compelling, I could see myself at that age suddenly being more interested in Shakespeare in the classroom proper if my interest had already been seeded, in a way, by familiarity with some of the names and locations at the very least via a game. I remember that, because of my exposure to Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, I was always far more receptive to lessons on Greek mythology in school because I felt like it was my culture, incredibly geeky as that is to admit. There’s probably something to be said for that gateway drug kind of influence.
Moses Wolfenstein said,
30 April 2007 at 6:39 pm
I’d like to hold back here and be nice, but I’m afraid I just can’t do it. Rex Gibson is surely rolling in his grave on this one and not because of the video game format. The thing about Shakespeare that so many well meaning people fail to get is that his work was never meant to be studied as written literature, and it’s just damn hard to get that way. It might be possible to create an effective game for learning Shakespeare, in fact I’m sure it is possible, but what that game can’t be is decontextualized. It’s the singular mistake that countless teachers and curriculum writers have made for some time now, and the thing is that for students to “get it”, they need the opportunity to engage with the language authentically. I could go on, but I won’t.
I hear Nathan’s call that the opportunity for groundwork to be laid in terms of interest is poetentially valuable, and I can’t ignore the praises of teachers and students as they have some inherent value, but still, I’m more than skeptical on this one.
Nathan Mckenzie said,
30 April 2007 at 7:42 pm
Talking about this has gotten me to play through the demo again, which in turn has left me with some thoughts.
It seems to me that one of the major barriers to entry for students reading Shakespeare is vocabulary - through no fault of our own, language has evolved a lot since then, and that definitely adds an extra hurdle.
When I’ve taken classes that taught Shakespeare previously, the texts were always very highly footnoted and annotated, with a great deal of clarification on what words and phrases meant or referred to or punned on ever couple of lines.
Unfortunately, nothing breaks up the flow of a play (which has an intended pace) so much as having to hit up footnotes every couple of words. In particular, it’s difficult to catch the larger emotional impacts of scenes, or usages of irony or sarcasm, when a reader is jarred out of the moment over and over, jumping down to footnotes. It’s hard to maintain context.
So in some sense, it seems like ‘Speare is pointing in a potentially great direction - what if students could memorize the entirety of the footnotes for a Shakespearean play prior to reading or hearing it? Clearly, in a classroom setting, you’re going to be awfully hard-pressed to get students excited about doing that. Games, on the other hand, happen to be enormously powerful tools for skill+drill or memorization based learning, IF they are good, compelling, and well-designed games. Just by remapping feedback, for example, Guitar Hero has gotten me to interact with the rhythmic patterns underlying a very large body of songs that I would never have sifted through via a book full of musical scores, say.
I’m not sure ‘Speare succeeds in the way I just described. It puts a bit of vocabulary on the screen, but it doesn’t do much to help you understand that the synonyms are, in fact, synonyms of anything in particular. The speed of enemies, too, and the distracting nature of shooting the words to cycle them to an acceptable state (with shades of Konami’s Twinbee / Stinger and Parodius games) seems like it makes too harried of an experience for players to think about how the words relate to each other.
Nevertheless, it does seem to suggest a really interesting axillary role for games in humanities education.
Moses Wolfenstein said,
30 April 2007 at 9:16 pm
I fear my earlier post didn’t do justice to what Gibson says about Shakespeare so I’ll offer you his words and then a bit of my own commentary:
“Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed, to be brought to life on stage before an audience. Over centuries, however, generations of scholars have transformed each play into a literary text. That legacy of textual scholarship has weighed heavily on school Shakespeare. It is part of a tradition that is deeply suspicious of enjoyment, that finds it hard to accept that pleasure and learning can go hand in hand. It sees literature as ’serious’ and ‘work’, and drama as merely ‘play’.
The notion of ‘text’ is deeply ingrained in Shakespearian study at all levels, and carries greater status than ’script’. ‘Text’ implies a deskbound student who passively reads, rather than enacts the play; it implies authority, reverence, certainty. That implication does its own sad work in schools - it tacitly suggests that studying Shakespeare involves the pursuit of a ‘right answer’.
In the clearest contrast, treating Shakespeare as a script (and calling it so) suggests a provisionality and incompleteness that anticipates and requires imaginative, dramatic enactment for completion. A script declares that it is to be played with, explored, actively and imaginatively brought to life by acting out. A text makes no such demands. Its privileged taken-for-grantedness conceals its social construction behind a mask of naturalness.”*
Allright, that’s a lot of Gibson and I’m gonna keep my own commentary short. You can see the obvious irony with ‘Speare here. Play is being utilized, but not to ground Shakespeare’s work in any dramatic experience. Instead it’s being utilized to serve in the scholarly tradition of tetxtual analysis, which honestly takes the heart out of Shakespeare’s work and stomps all over it with its clompy loafers and/or argyle socks.
Also incidentally, as I understand it, Shakespeare’s language was difficult to understand even for his contemporaries (he made up words). This wasn’t, however, a problem when the actions were suited to the words. Allright, that’s enough out of me.
*Gibson, R (1998)Teaching Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 7-8.
Robert Jones said,
2 May 2007 at 9:50 am
As an educator and former English major, I want to offer up a take on the Speare game that may seem blasphemous. While personally I have enjoyed and appreciated Shakespeare’s often laser-beam accurate de-construction of the human condition, I question the value of a game that simply makes easy the rote memorization of his words. Having played the game, it does try and teach his language through the use of synonyms and homonyms; however, even once students have accurately determined the right solution, they are left with a passage that needs further parsing to really be educational in any way. Moreover, isn’t the memorization of classical passages a vestigial hangover from a “banking” model of education (to invoke Paulo Friere) that seems to undermine the unique form of learning that video games enable. Due to their procedurality, games offer an approach more indicative of critical pedagogy than the ingestion and regurgitation of facts. So much of what has been written about the Civilization franchise reflects this. Doing well at that game requires that players learn a process of complex decisions around resource allocation and management. And the complexity of those procedures of both diplomacy and war strategies gives the player an insight into the complexity of geopolitics over the course of history. A lesson not easily conveyed in a history book. So while I want to applaud efforts that continually try and use games as learning mechanisms, I want to say that unless we are fully utilizing the procedural quality that distinguishes them from textbooks we are not maximizing gaming’s pedagogical potential. So what does a game that utilizes procedurality in the teaching of Shakespeare look like? I don’t have that answer. I just know that Speare is unfortunately not it.
Nathan Mckenzie said,
2 May 2007 at 3:23 pm
Robert:
Two prefaces to what I’m about to say:
1) I don’t think ’speare is a great example of what I was describing above; rather, I see it as pointing a potentially interesting future direction.
2) I think Kurt’s work with Civ is extremely interesting and fruitful stuff. I was one of the first people to read his dissertation through, and I think it’s fantastic that such work is being done. I’m glad there are people exploring educational games from these specific vantages points and theoretical frameworks.
With that said, I think by saying “Due to their procedurality, games offer an approach more indicative of critical pedagogy than the ingestion and regurgitation of facts.”, you (and people who adopt similar stances, who number not a few) are cutting off at the knees an enormous amount of the potential of games as educational devices. I think games can be fruitfully used as Kurt is exploring. I also think that the space where games can be effective is much bigger than that. It would be an intense shame to doom exploring those spaces prematurely, particularly if such dooming arises primarily from ideological, rather than pragmatic, grounds.
Clearly a lot of subject matter (Shakespeare is a good example) suffers from being turned into fact memorization exercises. With that said, though, at least in my experience, it is premature to claim that, because previous methods of getting people to memorize things have fared poorly, any concepts of teaching that focus on memorization as a goal are ill-conceived.
Never mind students for a second, or trying to evaluate what is good for hypothetical other people - _I_, as both a game player and a learner, have tons of bulk knowledge that I don’t want to memorize, but would love to have memorized. I wish that I knew more higher level math. I wish I knew more vocabulary in foreign languages. I wish I knew the entire contents of APIs for several major programming languages. I wish I knew more chord shapes for my guitar, and more scales, and more standard song progressions.
For each of these are topics, a certain amount of reading and contextualizing and mulling and pattern exploring is essential, of course. I don’t think anyone should argue that exclusive memorization makes someone into a great guitar player or a master programmer… but at the same time, all of the fields of knowledge I just described also have elements that just represent an enormous bulk of details that have to be mastered, and that mastery mostly comes through repetition. And repetition is mostly really boring. This is, in fact, exactly why I say “I would love to learn more X, Y, and Z” rather than saying “I have learned X, Y, and Z.”
But here’s the thing. My mom is a third grade teacher. I talk to her pretty frequently about my ideas about educational games. At one point, she made the off-hand (and dry) comment, “My kids can’t learn their multiplication tables, but ask them about any of those 150 pokemon, and they seem to know every single detail about them”. Regardless of your feelings about memorization, that’s a game teaching bulk knowledge. Is that the goal of Pokemon? Would you consider that memorization-based learning? Are we just splitting semantic hairs at this point? I’m not really sure - but I do know that if memorizing Pokemon were somehow an important skill for entering the work force as a white collar wage slave, or if memorizing Pokemon were the doorway into being a more effective citizen in society, the Pokemon games would be utterly fascinating and effective bits of technology for imparting that knowledge, certainly more so than either tedious flash cards or enormous tomes detailing the finer points of Pokemon life.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m convinced there’s a space and a role for good games that teach bulk content knowledge. Never mind for anyone else - I want them for me. I’m greedy like that.
Robert Jones said,
2 May 2007 at 4:47 pm
Nathan
My apologies if my post had somehow offended you. I want to assume your vehement response was in the spirit of lively debate, which I welcome. I was merely trying to engage the Speare example as an extension of what I have always found problematic within the U.S. model of “banking” education. I know that memorization is a necessary evil. Without it, how would doctors know a tibia from a femur? And if I had to choose a means of memorizing skeletal anatomy, I would certainly choose a game over flash cards to do it. So I am absolutely with you on that point.
However, as a person also interested in educational reform and expanding more forms of critical pedagogy, I want more from the medium I so dearly love. That is not to say that I want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. The Speare’s of the world offer a certain value and I am not suggesting that we get rid of them. I just worry that it becomes a slippery slope where every possible topic for educational purposes just becomes a new skin for a tried and true gaming mechanic like Space Invaders. My post was more of a question than a solution. What are some of the ways that we can explore the educational potential of video games via their procedurality? And isn’t more fruitful to demand more both from education and game design?
Nathan Mckenzie said,
2 May 2007 at 5:03 pm
Robert:
No offense taken, and none intended in the other direction, for that matter - it was definitely intended in the spirit of lively debate.
If I have any vehemence, I think it stems from the fact that, while you are clearly right that much U.S. education, as practiced, doesn’t aim very high or very far and isn’t very thoughtful, most academics and intellectuals seem to position themselves very ardently against such the entire space of such practices, effective or not, sometimes to the exclusion of a much broader space for discussion. I understand why it happens, but I feel like it can shrink, not grow, the space for productive and honest discussion sometimes.
But none of that has anything to do with your question, which I think is a productive one. To be honest (and I alluded to this earlier), the main problem I see with making non-trivial games out of Shakespeare is that it almost seems like you’d have to solve a lot of non-trivial AI problems about humans before you could make a game honest to the topic. I think in some ways Facade tried in that direction, but it had its issues, and it’s wasn’t trying to be educational either (it was based on a play, I think).