December 2006

The Ivy League Comes to Second Life

The online digital world, Second Life, already home to more than 800,000 "residents," is now becoming the home of an increasing number of "real world" college courses. One such course that's currently getting a lot of attention is being offered through Harvard University and it's called "CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion."

Taught by Harvard Law Professor Charles Nesson and his daughter, Harvard Law School graduate and teacher Rebecca Nesson, "CyberOne" is being offered in the real world at the university's Berkman Hall and in Second Life at "Berkman Island" (part of which is shown here). Harvard students who take the course in either environment receive real-life course credit, whether they attend class in-person or via their Second Life avatars. Numerous other people from around the world (as far away as China) are also taking the class for free (without course credit) exclusively through Second Life.

While the "virtual" classroom is not a perfect recreation of the real thing, the Nessons feel that their use of Second Life represents a definite advance in online distance education. "The typical experience in a distance-education class is to go to a website, watch a video, [and] correspond by e-mail… usually just with the instructor and even then only intermittently," says Rebecca Nesson. "Second Life gives us the capacity to really have a classroom experience with the students." In Second Life, Nesson says, the student/avatars actually meet each other and this "really changes the way the classroom conversation proceeds because you have a sense of all of these people being there participating in one way or another… it somehow gives people a sense of community that they're not by themselves doing this."

To find out more (and to see some cool video), visit the course’s website (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/). And you can learn about Second Life here (http://secondlife.com/).

 

Eco-game Tackles Global Warming

While there are innumerable topics that could be taught with learning games, some of them (e.g., ones with billions of variables and interdependencies) just seem to lend themselves naturally to game play. One such topic is the environment. And it's indeed the subject of a new video game called "Adventure Ecology."

Developed by the British explorer David de Rothschild and the agency Free Range Graphics, "Adventure Ecology" engages kids in exciting battles against evil characters like Agent Waste, Professor Ignorance and Miss Lies. The ultimate goal for players??? To stop pollution and defeat the sharp-clawed Global Warming!!! And according to Andrew Courtney of Free Range, kids are apparently having a good time while they do it. "I was skeptical about whether an eco-video game would be effective," he said. "But it's amazing to see how excited kids get when you present them information in a way that's engaging and fun."

"Adventure Ecology" is supported by a well-thought out curriculum and extensive teacher resources on its website. It also has a feature that assesses players' learning styles before they begin to play the game. "Adventure Ecology" automatically adjusts its content to take advantage of each player's strengths, so visual learners get more graphics, bookish types get more scrolling text, and kids learn about the environment in a way that's natural and fun for them.

Benjamin Stokes of Games for Change has been one of several to comment favorably on the way "Adventure Ecology" seems a perfect marriage of content and medium. "It's tough to teach interdependencies using linear media like books," he says. "But games, by their nature, are interactive systems. Our choices have consequences, like they do in real life."

Go to http://game.adventureecology.com/ to learn more about "Adventure Technology" and play part of the game, too.

"Shootout" at the History Channel

The games are free, they feature way cool 3-D graphics and they're advertised as "TV for a generation raised on games." What are they? They're a new set of games developed by Kuma Reality Games, and they put players in the middle of some of the exciting battle scenes (including Iwo Jima, the Battle of the Bulge) depicted on The History Channel's "Shootout!" series.

According to the partners on the project, the game version of "Shootout!" represents a natural and mutually beneficial example of the media synergy that can happen in today's world of multimedia. "We are helping TV take its place in today's exploding game marketplace," said Keith Halper, Kuma's CEO. "The ability to reach key consumers is greatly enhanced for advertisers by combining TV's reach and brand impact with games' immersive nature…." And Dolores Gavin of The History Channel went so far as to say " …season two of  [the series] 'Shootout!' was developed with gamers in mind. We think that the unique perspective of the series combined with the immersive nature of the game will allow our viewers to experience history in a whole new way."

In addition to the "Shootout!" game, Kuma offers a series of other war-related games, some of which have stirred up controversy because they've featured actual battlefield images from Iraq and Afghanistan. In spite of that, though, the company's collaboration with The History Channel is likely to bring it a much higher profile and is expected to lead the way to even more television/game hybrids.

Go to The History Channel’s site to see the game trailer for "Shootout!" . And you can download the game there as well (http://www.history.com/games.do).

 

Balzac… Truffaut… Donkey Kong?

"Call me the minister of video games if you want – I am proud of this," said France's culture minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres last month. "People have looked down on video games for far too long, overlooking their great creativity and cultural value."

So what's up with France and video games?

Well, if Minister Donnedieu de Vabres gets his way, the French government will soon recognize video games as a cultural industry and that would mean big tax breaks for French game companies. Donnedieu de Vabres’ announcement came in a year when the French government seems intent on celebrating video games. It recently bestowed one of its highest cultural awards, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, on three game designers, including Shigeru Miyamoto (the creator of Donkey Kong). And France also just released a set of postage stamps honoring famous video games.

Some in the French game industry have enthusiastically welcomed Donnedieu de Vabres' proposal. Yves Guillemot, chief executive of Ubisoft, suggested that the tax breaks could make it economically feasible for a French game company like his to actually employ more French workers (presently, only 600 of the company's 3,500 employees actually live in France – the rest are in Canada, China and the U.S.). Others, however, see Donnedieu de Vabres' idea as potentially harmful to the game industry. Patrice Chazerand of the Interactive Software Federation of Europe believes that tax breaks would make game companies overly indebted to the French government. "The French concept of culture is that the government knows better than the consumers," he said. "It is unhealthy to have the French government using discriminatory subsidies to influence video games."

Learn more about Donnedieu de Vabres' proposal and read further reactions to it at GamePolitics.com (http://gamepolitics.com/2006/11/08/345/#more-345).

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