Video Game Awesomeness Final Post

The other night I watched the Z-boys documentary which made me want to just surf and skate all day, so I thought why not play a skate game since right now skating is all I can think about. My friend dug up his Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 for his playstation 2. I was stoked he only had a playstation because there are less buttons involved and the controller fits in your hand better. I was able to pick the identity of Bam Margera, which I was super stoked about because I've always wanted to know what the day in the life of Bam would be like. I noticed that knowing who my virtual identity was made me way more into succeeding in the game. I was Bam Margera. The game had so many subdomains I should have totally started out this project playing this game. There was a practice level and a free skate level, so you don't even have to play the career mode until you've got some moves down. In the practice subdomain every trick you perform amounts of cash pop on the screen, which I found out is super useful later in the game because you need cash in order to unlock certain levels. There wasn't really a guide on how to do tricks except for the instructions from my friend, so there was a lot of discover learning going on while Bam was in the air.

Something I noticed was that since this game resembled a subculture that I could relate to, I was way more into it. I wanted to do well, and if I fell I would cringe and say ooooo like I could feel Bam's pain. While playing career the game did a really good job of telling me where to go and what to aim for by a stranger on the street that came up to me right away. The career level I played was called college and you got to pick between different cities to skate in! It is really easy to complete your goal, but the more you skate around and practice your ticks the more money you see pile up. Each time I would go up to someone with an arrow on their head, which was my goal, I would collect a letter because to pass the level I had to spell the word skate before time was up. Then they would tell an extremely quick story line instructing me what to do next. The time limit doesn't really give you the stress free freedom to learn how to do trick, but thats why there is free skate and practice subdomains. This game is simple, there isn't enough time to worry about a huge storyline. It's al about skating. I loved in for some reason way more than skate 2.

Video Game Awesomeness Post 11

I went home to Orange County on Monday and played League of Legends with my younger brother for the second time. I decided to play the subdomain tutorial again, that way it was like I was taking a refresher course on how to play the game, and I could learn more about spells. I chose the same character as last time, the blonde girl that resembles me more than any other character. I was using the Identity Principle because I wanted my character to be a surprisingly bad ass chick that could kick anyones ass! I was projecting on the character what I wanted to be like in real life, a chicken tiger! Chicken due to my skinny outward appearance, but a fierce and strong warrior like a tiger. Yes this is something I have been called before funny enough. I started to try and understand the whole spell thing because last time I randomly picked 3 spells and would click the same one every time even though it only worked every 2 minute. A lot can happen in this game in 2 minutes if your clicking s spell that won't work.

This is where the Practice Principle came into play. I would fight the enemy over and over again using different spells until I got the hang of what spell was best to use at one time. Still don't really know what they are called, but my favorite is the blue ball thing where light escapes from. This made my weapon shoot out 4 lasers and kill multiple of my enemies at once! My brother got tired of watching me play the tutorial and made me continue to playing the actual domain.   I still was the worst player on the team, but at least I wasn't running around like a chicken with it's head cut off. I died the most often, but I did contribute in killing the enemy and destroying some of the purple towers. What I noticed about League of Legends this time around was that the game uses a lot of text to tell the player what to do instead of symbols. There are symbols in the game, like the power up symbol, but a lot of the insight or instructions are via text. Also the chat box that allows the player to chat with the other players is constantly going off, and I have no idea how people are chatting while playing the game. They must play this a lot!

Video Game Awesomeness Post 10

So inappropriate is how I would describe Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Funny thing is, its the game I've decided to do my final project on. GTA is a game that teaches you how to play through a story line, which I have figured out is the kind of game I like playing. Really looking at the game in depth for my project has shown me how video games teach the player how to play. The game starts off with a background story of the character the player is about to virtually become, Carl Johnson. The game teaches you a different skill through a story line, and then you are set free to practice that skill and complete the mission. The game puts the player in a specific situation to practice this skill so it becomes generalized. Then the skill will be more beneficial to the player later in the game. This is referred to as Gee's Incremental Principle. The next principle that teaches the player how to play the game is the Bottom Up Basic Skills Principle. Basic skills needed to p;ay the game are taught before more complex skills because the basic skills are needed throughout the entire game, and are mastered while continuing to play through out the domain. The basic skills like stealing a car, getting on a bike,  or punching someone are the first skills needed to get anywhere in the game. Some of these skills were learned through discover learning. When I entered the domain I pushed every button to find out which button made Carl perform which action. Probing was huge when I played the game because I was constantly driving, or running around trying to follow the map, getting lost, stealing cars and getting shot at, or running into the police. I had to figure out how to resolve all of these problems, but one problem in particular was that I tried to steal the car of a gang member and I didn't know how ti tell when the car was filled with gang members or civilians. I stole a few cars and figured out that the cars with people covered in a color different than green (my gang color) was a gang car. I stole enough gang cars that I started getting hunted down like crazy!

The last principle I think teaches you how to play the game is the Identity Principle. The Identity Principle involves taking on and playing with identities is such a way that the learner has real choices and new opportunities to meditate on the relationships between new identities and old ones. In GTA the player is free to choose what Carl does, doesn't do, when he does it, and who he does it too. Also the more the player takes on the role of Carl, the better they will understand the domain, and fulfill the missions. If the player plays into the culture of the video game, and identify with Carl, the quicker they learn to play the game. I feel like people might think it was weird or inappropriate that I am choosing GTA for my final project, but I just felt like was a great game for the topic of how the video game teaches you to play. I think thats why it is so popular. It does a great job teaching you skills and preparing you for what is coming next.

Video Game Awesomeness Post 9

Ok after playing so many video games FIFA is by far my favorite, probably because I have played soccer all my life and understand the game. Once the I understood how the controller worked, I have been pretty impressed with the plays I have been making. Funny enough I have been excelling at offense and getting lucky defensively. I find this amusing because even though I was a goal keeper I have always been better offensively at any sport, so for that to show even in a video game is pretty interesting. I do need to improve on my shot though because I either strike the ball too hard, or too soft. How I can improve on my controller skills though is by entering a tutorial domain where it is just me, the ball, and the goal keeper. After reading Gee I have realized that it was extremely foolish of me to just jump into the game with out entering the tutorial sub domain. Going into that domain slowed everything down for me, I did not have to worry about a player attacking me, or the time on the clock. Here I could use the concentrated sample principle as well as the bottom up basic skills principle. In this sub domain I have entered it is very controlled because I am the one controlling everything that happens. I can practice as much as I want, and learn the skills well before jumping into a game and anxiously start pressing buttons at random hoping it works out. Also these skills are basic and once I have the basic skills down , I can engage in more game and be unconsciously open to learning more advanced skills. Something else I noticed while reading Gee and continuing to play Xbox games was that the reason I was improving with the controller, was not due to constant playing of FIFA. I had only played it a few times and was actually pleasantly surprised with how my brain kind of knew what it was doing when I paced the controller in my hand. i improved so much because of what Gee calls the transfer principle. I had transferred what I had been learning about the controller in other games, and it caused me to become much more familiar with the controller so that my skills level in FIFA as well as Call of Duty went up! My next plan for FIFA is figuring out how to improve my defensive skills, and to eventually score a goal against my friend and FIFA opponent Tyler Zell. Once I accomplish that goal there is no telling what I will able to do in the FIFA world next!

Video Game Awesomeness Post 8

Unfortunately James Paul Gee points out that in order to really learn from video games you have to invest time into the game, so I decided to play Call of Duty 3 again. Although I did drastically improve, I still didn't get very far in the game. This time though I tried to get involved in the entire virtual world by listening to the story of the mission I was being sent out on. I knew that I had to try to get emotionally invested with the story plot of the game, or at least my character. Gee talks about how the autonomy of choosing the actions of what your character does has an emotional effect on you because you attribute motives and feeling to the character which allows you to "enter a realm of a world of your own creation." I started to play, but I did not project an identity onto my character. I could see how this would be easier to do if I was playing a game like League of Legends, or a game that is not have to do with constant gun fire. What I did notice though was that my attention was completely focused on the game. If I was't focused at any point I would be shot quickly and bleed out, or I would be stuck in a corner anxiously trying to figure out where I was which ended up with my soldier bleeding out as well.

I was excited though that I was so much more accurate with the controls! I could walk and look to my sides at the same time, and I shot soldiers that were against me instead of just shooting anyone that was around me. I stayed alive long enough to learn how to save my partner, and I consecutively shot 4 bad guys the last three rounds I played! This was due to the fact that my friend was playing with me, which made it easier to learn new tools for the game. We were learning together! Gee would say that we were getting a "taste" of the domain in which the presence of others is essential.

The probing principle also had an effect on the way I played the game because the first few times on a mission the enemy would hide behind a wall and when my teammate would rush threw the hall way, he would be right there to shoot her! Reflecting on these actions, I decided to tell my friend not to rush the hallway until I started to rapidly fire at him and the wall he was hiding behind. My hypothesis worked! He couldn't pop out his head to shoot back because of the flying bullets that would sail through the wall. The last thing I noticed about my reaction to the game was because I kept going on the same mission, I was able to strategize because I knew what was ahead for the most part. What is cool about video games is that even if you accomplish the mission, or beat the level, there is always something new that you have to figure out. A new mission means new abilities, new enemies, and a new virtual field. The learning never seems to stop!

Video Game Awesomeness Post 7

The fact that the game is called "Angry Birds" confuses me because it makes me so happy! It is seriously the most addicting game I have ever played. Angry Birds is a game that allows you to slingshot a bird into stacks of wood and ice blocks. There are pigs placed under different parts of the woods, or ice blocks and the goal is to have the bird cause the tower of items to fall and kill the pigs. There is a lot of problem solving that comes with this game because the higher the level, the more complicated the obstacle of wood and ice gets. Also you are given different colors of birds that have different strengths, so you have to figure out which bird best hits which spots of the obstacle to make it fall. It definitely took me a few tries to figure out my strategy. Angry Birds uses critical thinking and learning because I had to figure out what angle the sling shot needs to be at and how far it needs to be stretched to hit the weakest part of the wall so the wood and ice fall onto as many pigs as possible. I also had to learn each birds strength and abilities, so I could strategize which bird needed to hit which spot on the wall, which meant each bird needed to be thrown at a different angle and speed. I started to look at the game as coming up with ways to manipulate the game in certain ways to achieve my goal. Experiencing new things about the game is what James Paul Gee calls active learning. For example learning that after I let the bird fly off of the slingshot, if I touch the blue birds before they hit the wall they separate into three birds. This gives me a clue that with every new type of bird that comes with a new level, if I touch them before hitting the wall they might have more abilities that could help me succeed. I was forming new affiliations and this prepared me for future learning for the levels to come.

 Another thing that I noticed about the game was the more I failed, the more I learned. When I failed to hit the right spot on the wall, or I aimed the wrong type of bird at the wrong spot because it was too weak to knock that part of the wall down,  I was able to figure out not only how to fix it and make it work consistently. This could be James Paul Lee's principle of psychosocial moratorium because in a video game learners can take risks where real world consequences are lowered. Where there is more room for error, the more learning can go on. Another one of James's principles that definitely applied to my success with Angry Birds was the practice principle. Obviously we all know that practice makes perfect, but when the practice is not boring and I have constant ongoing success, mastering Angry Birds will definitely happen more quickly because of how consumed I am with this exciting virtual world. A game that I played yesterday however, (Call of Duty 3) I did not have a similar experience with, but I will get into that in my next blog. Overall I am learning so much more about how video games are not a waste of time through the Gee book, and I have actually been arguing with people who think the opposite. I may not be turning into a gamer per say, but I am definitely getting on board with understanding why my brother is so into games!

Video Game Awesomeness Post 6

My 7 year old cousin is obsessed with the game Frisbee Forever. The concept is to follow a pathway by moving the iPad to the left or the right. As simple as the concept seemed, I failed to understand how to not move the iPad with the correct amount of aggression. This was my problem with the Xbox controller as well. For some reason I get really tense during racing games and press the buttons, or the joy stick way to hard. Having the perfect touch takes a lot of skill and practice and was definitely the main discover learning that was going on.

Frisbee Forever had intrinsic rewards with leaderboards and a competitive edge that motivates you to want to keep playing just to get further than the last time. There are a ton of obstacles along the course and each time I would die right before making it through one, I would have to try it again! I had to keep trying until I could solve the problem of how fast the frisbee needed to be rotated.

Wednesday night I went to my parents house and played Backyard Sports! I use to love this game when I was a kid and was constantly competing against my brothers for bragging rights in the house. I played Backyard Soccer and I made have had even more fun than when I played FIFA. The autonomy of this games allows you to draft your own players, pick your team name and color, and strategize your field positions. Strategy is also a huge part of the game as well by allowing you to run your lineup, and even by having plays you can choose from when taking corner kicks. The game also teaches you how to manage a team, and in the game you make all of the decisions that pertain to your team. There are also playoffs which intrinsically motivates you to want to win it all and get the 1st place trophy. Not only does being the champion motivate you, but the chance to move divisions to play brand new teams and get your team name on the leaderboard makes the game not only intrinsically motivating, but exciting.

Video Game Awesomeness Post 5

The game's name The World of Keflings seemed like it had the potential to be a fun and easy game to tackle and it was extremely easy, but fun is not a word I would use to describe the game. There was not a lot of autonomy in the game considering that you could only choose to build a house, a town hall, and a workshop. As you advance maybe that changes, but you don't even get to choose where to build it! A blue square lights up telling you where to place the item. The only thing you had to master was how to chop down wood, or breakdown rocks. Once you had enough wood and rocks the game built the actual item for you. The game's purpose is ultimately to build an entire town where these tiny Kefling people can live. As for a learning purpose, the only thing I can think of is that it teaches you patience, and gets you familiar with the Xbox controller. There wasn't even a leaderboard, or badges to intrinsically motivate me, which just made the game seem pointless and a waste of time.

Hexic on the other hand is a great puzzle game! It is a lot like Spirit Stones where you connect colored dots in order to destroy those dots. Each time the dots are destroyed others fall into the place the previous dots were located. The purpose is to destroy as many dots as possible until you move on to the next level without hitting a bomb. The game is definitely a problem solving game because unlike Spirit Stones you could only connect three dots at once, and the highlighted dots rotated clockwise or counter clockwise depending on which trigger was pressed. You where allowed to move the highlighter around to other sections of the grid, but the hard part of the problem to solve was how to destroy the dots. Not just one dot of the sam color could be touching other dots of the same color, they had to be touching in a triangle. Once I figured that out I was becoming a master of the game! Problem solving was not the only thing Hexic had going for it, but motivation as well. Sometimes when destroying dots, a bunch of other dots would fall into triangles and be destroyed. This made it exciting, fun, and caused me to want to keep going. Another way the game motivated me was that it didn't take long to level up, and once I got on the leaderboard I was emotionally invested and intrinsically motivated.

There was definitely discover learning going on in both of the games, but because I have been playing so many Xbox 360 games, I noticed that I started to have more control over the game controller. I could make assumptions about which button might rotate the triangle, or which button might chop the wood. The controller even felt like it had started to belong in my hand, which made me feel like I just might be starting to master the control buttons. Now that I feel more confident with the controller, my self esteem may have gone up just enough to try Call of Duty Again.

Video Game Awesomeness Post 4

Too bad I didn't play the original Nintendo Mario Kart on "Throwback Thursday", or "Flashback Friday" because those are the perfect words to describe how I felt playing it. I'm really familiar with Mario Kart on Nintendo 64, but the original Nintendo is a different story. The remote doesn't have a tiny joystick to control the direction of the players, which made it harder to control the kart! The resolution of the game was incredibly dull to what video games look like today, and the music is awful. I found it so hard to control the direction and speed of my character and his kart that the game got old pretty fast, so I decided to switch to guitar hero. I will fully admit that when I was in high school I suffered from a Guitar Hero obsession, so I tried to hold off playing it for this assignment until I couldn't take it anymore. I can proudly say that I can even play on the expert level for some of the songs. I played about 7 songs and then decided to call it a night, but if no one can find me tomorrow thats what I most likely will be doing.

It is kind of hard thinking of what Mario Kart was trying to teach me, but two areas it does test me in are patience and bringing out my competitive spirit. It is so easy to become frustrated in Mario Kart if you cannot control your kart very well because the kart will never do what you want it to. Playing it with others, as well as playing against the game can capture your competitive spirit because there are objects you can use to throw the others off, and obtain the lead of the race. It is exciting when the game spins to choose your object because you never know what you are going to get! Guitar Hero also brings out your competitive spirit because after you play a song it gives you a percentage of how well you did. I would always strive for 100% all the time because I would always be so close that missing it by 2% would kill me. Guitar Hero teaches us patience as well because sometimes you have to keep playing a song over and over until you play it well enough to unlock another song. It motivates you to finish a goal by having the only way to play all the songs in the game is to unlock 4 songs at a time. It also increases the quickness between the processing of information of the notes on the screen to the correct button on the guitar. There wasn't a lot of discover learning going on because I had already been familiar with the games, but I did discover how much I missed Guitar Hero!

Video Game Awesomeness Post 3

Ok I finally gave in... I played League of Legends, and I didn't hate it! My brother loves playing League of Legends. A lot of what he does all day is sit in his room and play it, which for some reason caused me to stir away from the game. The whole fantasy realm of these types of games has never really appealed to me, but when I started playing the first thing I said was "This is like Lord of the Rings...but cooler!" I started off playing the tutorial just to get an idea of what was going on. My brother also told me the gist of the game too so I felt pretty comfortable after playing for ten minutes. Then I decided to play a real game and saw that I was playing with other people online! I had a mild freak out and said, "I feel bad because all of these people on my team seem really into it." I died frequently and then I started paying attention to the magic spells at the bottom. I had two "go to" spells I started to use, and my brother would keep reminding me to level up when the golden addition signs popped onto the screen. Unfortunately I continued to die frequently, but I helped destroy the last glowing purple diamond in the last tower! I got so excited I continuously yelled, "I helped! We won and I helped destroy the purple thing!" I really liked how no matter how many times you die, you are never completely out of the game. I helped me learn about the game quicker and caused me not want to just stop playing because then I would let my team down. There was a lot of discover learning going on because it was my first time playing, especially when it came to the spells you can use. Social learning theory when I started playing with others online because I would fallow the other characters around, falling back or moving forward whenever they did. I really believe that the more I play and understand the game the more I will get out of it. From what I've seen while playing all of the games are mostly behaviorist, and Constructivist learning theories. Most of the learning that happens involves others, so there is a lot of communities of practice, social learning, and social development. League of Legends even has a chat bar on the side to talk strategy, or just communicating in general so the players can all help each other into victory.

Brain wars is my potty game of the week and I really enjoy it because you play against another person thats online, and it's not intimidating! Mostly because you will most likely never talk or see this person in your life, which makes the challenge less emotional. There are categories of games that you choose to play like concentration, speed, accuracy, ect. Each game is only about 20 seconds long and keeps your score at the top so you can see who is wining. At the end of the 3rd game the scores are tallied and the winner is shown. It's pretty cool because it shows you your strengths and weaknesses and you can continue to improve on your areas of weakness! This game helps you improve on memory, math, and quickness, which I think is more of a cognitive development learning approach. You have to really process and understand the directions of the activity, or else your score will be extremely low and you will be beat by your opponent.

Overall I will definitely be paying both of these games again and League of Legends definitely got me in the mood to watch Lord of the Rings again.