Forget the kids and teach the teachers. There are so many teachers out there of the "old guard" mentality that literally revel in their refusal to adapt and learn new ways of delivering knowledge.
Its not really about teaching technology to students. The kids grok it, and grok it better and faster than we do. The trick is to get the teachers to *use* it, and use it in ways that have not been even tried yet.
Not to say there is any replacement for a classroom (or good ol' old fashioned repetition) but, as an example, many concepts and theories in math and science can be more effectively demonstrated visually and interactively than they ever could from a static textbook. These topics lend themselves very well to simulation and demonstration. And once a student understands the basics that build into principles, then we can get them to use it in the class. And so on.
A math teacher friend of mine routinely observes that his kids are learning in different ways than how we did. The textbook is falling prey to a massive culture of distraction. IM, web, games, television, cellphones... the ubiquitous pull becomes even worse when the last thing a student wants to do is read a boring math text. I'm less inclined to simply blame the student - is it really their fault? Why not have those technologies reach out to them in the same way? Should we risk denying the reality of the world we actually live in (versus how we think it should be)? In other words, adapt to new learning styles. Make learning the game that they play for 4 hours a night (instead of reading math).
So thats exactly what my math teacher friend has started doing.
Its in its infancy, but longer term he will be using it for learning augmentation across the board. Its pretty interesting stuff, and possibly helpful for any other Math and science teachers here on/.
Right now i see the whole discourse on schools and technology centre on how much it costs to put computers into classrooms. And how to "teach technology" to our kids. Why? I think we should bury the technology and stop oohing and ahhing over it - and just start actually using it for what its meant for.
Why did the designers and marketers decide to model the game on the World of Warcraft series, when its clearly an extension of Diablo?/K
Re:The market does not support innovation
on
The Ultimate MMORPG
·
· Score: 1
When I was at DiGRA I had the opportunity to be somewhat of a fly-on-the-wall with many game developers, academics, fanboi, and the like, listening intently to their opinions about innovation, story, humour, gameplay, balance and all of the multitudinous things that revolve around making good games.
The concept of Innovation was a pervasive shadow lurking beneath all of the interesting discourse. "Oh innovation, where hast thou gone?" "Oh woe and woe, the big media have spit us out!" And its no less true in cyberspace, where people are clamouring for more risk and innovation, decrying the PC as dead, a place with no innovation.
And so I listened, and nodded, and said, "Yes, oh yes" at the appropriate times. And then I'd ask the dire purveyors, "So what about Doom?".
"Oh. Doom. Yeah, the days of Doom are over."
And by Doom, I mean, that upstart, brilliant, independant developer that came up, and changed the course of the industry.
Sure. Those days are over, and the big media have taken over. Catering their watered, weighed and shellacked offerrings to audiences that obviously "don't know any better". You are so right - Warcraft isn't innovation - its distillation. A product of archaic online phenomenon that found its roots in Moira (with its central town shoppes instead of Nethack's inline dungeon vendors), then Diablo, then EQ and perhaps a host of nods and bows to countless other carefully researched RPGs before it... all of it composed while pouring huge buckets of money all over it.
Yep, you are so right. It is a bit of a wash isn't it? WoW is exremely successful (at least today), but remember that WoW was designed and executed less with savvy PC MMORPG gamers in mind, and more for relative neophytes, and as essentially an answer to the mosnter that is EQ. And it did it sparklingly and staringly well. 100% on execution, there is no doubt about that.
But there are glimmers for the smaller and fainter among us. Look at the GTA.
"Oh GTA? Yeah. Oh well, that was a somewhat special case."
Were they particularly safe? I think the first thing in game design and particularly MMORPGs is to know your audience. Bake your game to your niche. Perhaps, if done right, that niche boils over into the mainstream. Rockstar knew that there were no games that catered to a "hiphop/eighties/mobster" sensibility. Their execution was nearly flawless. In other words, they innovated.
And for innumerable more reasons I'm convinced that this mysterious beast, the upstart developer, still exists. I think audience and execution are important pieces of the puzzle (surely not the only pieces, but you catch my drift). You say safe? I say audience. You say money? I say innovation. You say publisher? I say march in and show them what you can do. Put a veritable gun to their head and march them to signing that cheque. In essence they'd have to when faced with the prospect that you'd take your creation to their competitors.
I complained loudly about how bad BF2's UI and browser execution was. I mean, it was so bad and so obviously rushed, that it affected so much opinion about the game in general.
The saving grace is that it really is a fun game to play. I would have called the game a triumph if not for the horrible pain it takes to actually start playing!
The escape buffer doesn't go into the input video, only letter and symbol keys.
I was sufficiently swayed by your obvious genius so I went back and did a quick test. I skipped the intro screen and then it put the escape character into my saved password. But thanks to your cunning wisdom and sage advice, the game only thinks it did it, when it really didn't. Thanks.
A helicopter mapped key will only affect other helicopter keys
By goodness, your emminent superiority has struck again. When I tried to map a Common Control key, it shot a dialog box into the middle of my screen (and snapped my mouse to the OK button) stating, "That key is already mapped to a key in the Helicopter Controls section". But its obviously wrong since you said that only helicopter mappings affect helicopter mappings. Thanks again.
The server list is interruptible with the new hotfix.
I am so impressed with your command of the facts, that I am going to name all of my wife's ex-husbands children after you. I tried the new hotfix! I went into the game, and in the heat of battle I pressed ESC to map a key... the options screen loaded, and the server list started to refresh. Now I can press STOP! Awesome! I get back into the game, and I'm dead. But at least I can stop the server list refresh.:-)
When you click the pre selected radio command, IT DOESN'T FIRE YOUR GUN!
You're fixing my game as I read this post. I went into the game and deliberately injured myself, found a medic, pointed my crosshairs at him, and then invoked the radio message. BOOOOOOM!!! But the bleeding medic immediately turned to me and said, "Hey man, the game didn't really do that. Don't worry, Shim said it all coo." Then he died. [FORGIVE]
Battlefield 2 is the greatest game to ever be made...
...but if terrorists have hijacked a plane, who is suggesting that they're gonna be SSH'ing back into Taliban world headquarters to check their mail or get into steamy chat?
"*tap tap tap* Oh no! We got on the wrong flight! This planes going to Ft. Lauderdale!"
"*tap tap tap* Hey lady, we are two hot stalions we wanna have partying!!!t#*#&$&$NOCARRIER"
Personally, I love the fact that pressing the Escape key to skip the intro movie will save it into the input buffer, thus applying it to the password field of your "auto login" screen. So even if you have the correct account password saved, you have to edit it to get rid of the escape character.
I think its awesome that in order to change your keymappings that you have to un-map them one by one first, and then pray that they are not mapped to helicopter strafe-right or some other thing that happens to be completely hidden in the UI. Double bonus that unmapping pops up a dialogue box in the middle of the screen and snaps your mouse focus to the OK button saying, "You have unmapped this key [OK]". This is extremely helpful to remind me of what I just did, yes thanks for the workflow.
Very enjoyable to have a server browser that insists on invoking the uninterruptible server-list refresh every time you access the game menu - even though you're still connected and playing a game.
So much fun to make it such that to select a pre-canned radio message you have to press FIRE. This is especially interesting if you request a medic and your crosshairs just happen to be aimed directly at one.:-)
I am particularly impressed with the fun and challenge of finding a ranked server that has reasonable ping since most of them show up as ZERO in my browser.
The game should be called "BF2 : Revenge of the UI" or some shit like that...
By the time I actually make it into the game and start playing, I'm yearning for the safety of a trench being bombarded by howitzers...
Couldn't agree with you more, Z.
Doom 3 is an excellent engine. I remember the demo during Quakecon 2002 where Todd H. was extolling the "movie-like" qualities of the Doom3 engine. I had to agree.
Unfortunately, games aren't movies. The beautifully perfect and cinematic environments didn't map to a show-stopping amount of fun. I battled monsters using the same methods against the same AI as I did in 1996.
Doom 3 was good. It was not great./Kafka
Something heavy was goin' down...
on
The Escapist
·
· Score: 1
I could smell trouble. It was a palpable feeling, right down to my bones. I sensed it in the steam and heat of the night, waiting, watching. And it told me to get the hell outta dodge. As I breathed quietly to myself in the pits of the alleyway, I listened. The cops kept on, their sirens dopplering in the distance. I knew my boys were getting picked off one by one. But not me. Getting caught was for noobs, and I trust my instincts. I'm no noob.
If reality was hackable, I'd be the devil.
A rolling stone grows no moss.
I could write this shit and barely even touch the keyboard - it just writes itself.
OBBookPlug :
If you enjoy a *good* solo spy novel - read Quiller. He's an abosolute joy, and a truly well-imagined spy.
If you look at the chat window you can see them counting down.. "5 4 3 2 1... Wipe!"
Also, the staging is evident in the swallowed laughter of a few of the characters.
The video is hilarious, albeit a bit "niche" - for WoW fans only.:-)/Kafka
Excellent point, and well said. The console does the console thing well. How could it pretend to be a PC?
Do you actually think MS cares about gaming? Microsoft wants the XBox (and whatever comes later) to have a mouse and keyboard and an internet connection. Because when that happens, they can force you to pay a subscription fee for Office.:-)
What happens when the PC isn't double that of a console anymore? What happens when the console is basically the same, and the advances on the PC just don't stay ahead by leaps and bounds? These are my reservations about the Console -> PC discussion.
Save this poster everyone. Save it on your desktop. Print it out and hang it in your office.
In fifteen years you will find it in your attic, dust it off, and remember with amusement...
How stupid microsoft is.
Was.
/Kafka
Re:Massive processor, not much for graphics though
on
The Xbox 360 Unveiled
·
· Score: 1
But.. you just need one to have sex with three, cause there are three cores. Unless you want to have sex with twelve, then go ahead and buy four.
l-eight-r!/Kafka
The speed in which this "legislation" has warped through the democratic process is very telling.
The likelihood that the end product, the "RFID licenses" will be ill-thought, ill-conceived and ill-executed has been assured. Hacking and manipulation have just discovered a new end-game. Have fun. This is going to be such a mess.
Watch one of the world's largest bureaucracies fall on its face.
My thought was that Turbine bought Asheron's Call from Microsoft, in the face of its impending demise. I would guess that it was a bargain, and essentially allowed Turbine to use the property and its technology to make other games. Viewing it like this, the playerbase for AC1/2 becomes less important, since these are not essential to Turbine's longer term business objectives. With these larger and more powerful franchises close at hand, it would not surprise me that AC1 and 2 were merely used as breeding grounds for the newer games. (This is just personal speculation).
However, someone argued that powerful movie franchises don't do as well in the MMO-space as original property. I'd have to agree.
SirBruce, do you have any data to support that?
And maybe they know this, and are using the new capital to sweeten the game for the market... like purchasing the voice and character talents of Ian McKellan and Elijah Woods.:-)
Definitely agree with you. AC was probably acquired very cheaply, since it was likely to get killed by Microsoft anyways.
The game was stupid to make things where high level char's could not really help lower level characters so there's no incentive to help people.
To a lesser degree, WoW doesn't do the "assistance" game very well either. There are no qualified methods within the game's mechanics to sweeten the prospect of helping lower-level characters.
City of Heroes has the "exemplar" and side-kick system to bring level differences closer. See IGN's 'CoH Tips' page
It isn't perfect but is a far cry from WoW's complete lack of "levelling the level playing field". Ouch, it makes my head spin trying to say what I'm trying to say.:-)
How about hooking up a "Quake" type engine with a Sim type mapping engine so you could zoom in and enter buildings and interact with characters?
You mean, like get in there and start SHOOTING your Sims? Thats an awesome idea.:-)
/Kafka
Re:For anyone who is sick and tired of MMORPGs...
on
Guild Wars Launches
·
· Score: 2, Funny
No one seems to think that just because you get a dungeon to yourself WoW suddenly loses it's MMO status.
It would definitely be questioned if WOW had nothing but instancing to progress in the game.
Every person playing in America is playing in one massive server and everyone can interact with each other if they choose.
True. Thats cool. But when it comes to actually playing the game (as in, engaging in the activity that progresses the game), you're back to a private instance with a handful of players. So, in the meetup areas, its more of a waiting room than a game.
it is the same thing. MMO players have come to accept these annoyances as a byproduct of being in a MMO world.
They may be annoying to you. By your list of grievances I would say you shouldn't be playing MMOs at all.
The game is progressive and different, made by people that obviously know what they're doing. But don't call it an MMO. Its not. Its a hybrid at best.
Slashdot Mirror
We just had a thread on the future of technology in schools.
Something tells me that this is not it. Seriously.
As I said, he's getting started. But there is decent tech in there; you'll see some interesting innovations in the next few months. :-)
Not to say there is any replacement for a classroom (or good ol' old fashioned repetition) but, as an example, many concepts and theories in math and science can be more effectively demonstrated visually and interactively than they ever could from a static textbook. These topics lend themselves very well to simulation and demonstration. And once a student understands the basics that build into principles, then we can get them to use it in the class. And so on.
A math teacher friend of mine routinely observes that his kids are learning in different ways than how we did. The textbook is falling prey to a massive culture of distraction. IM, web, games, television, cellphones... the ubiquitous pull becomes even worse when the last thing a student wants to do is read a boring math text. I'm less inclined to simply blame the student - is it really their fault? Why not have those technologies reach out to them in the same way? Should we risk denying the reality of the world we actually live in (versus how we think it should be)? In other words, adapt to new learning styles. Make learning the game that they play for 4 hours a night (instead of reading math).
So thats exactly what my math teacher friend has started doing.
Its in its infancy, but longer term he will be using it for learning augmentation across the board. Its pretty interesting stuff, and possibly helpful for any other Math and science teachers here on /.
Right now i see the whole discourse on schools and technology centre on how much it costs to put computers into classrooms. And how to "teach technology" to our kids. Why? I think we should bury the technology and stop oohing and ahhing over it - and just start actually using it for what its meant for.
Why did the designers and marketers decide to model the game on the World of Warcraft series, when its clearly an extension of Diablo? /K
When I was at DiGRA I had the opportunity to be somewhat of a fly-on-the-wall with many game developers, academics, fanboi, and the like, listening intently to their opinions about innovation, story, humour, gameplay, balance and all of the multitudinous things that revolve around making good games.
The concept of Innovation was a pervasive shadow lurking beneath all of the interesting discourse. "Oh innovation, where hast thou gone?" "Oh woe and woe, the big media have spit us out!" And its no less true in cyberspace, where people are clamouring for more risk and innovation, decrying the PC as dead, a place with no innovation.
And so I listened, and nodded, and said, "Yes, oh yes" at the appropriate times. And then I'd ask the dire purveyors, "So what about Doom?".
"Oh. Doom. Yeah, the days of Doom are over."
And by Doom, I mean, that upstart, brilliant, independant developer that came up, and changed the course of the industry.
Sure. Those days are over, and the big media have taken over. Catering their watered, weighed and shellacked offerrings to audiences that obviously "don't know any better". You are so right - Warcraft isn't innovation - its distillation. A product of archaic online phenomenon that found its roots in Moira (with its central town shoppes instead of Nethack's inline dungeon vendors), then Diablo, then EQ and perhaps a host of nods and bows to countless other carefully researched RPGs before it... all of it composed while pouring huge buckets of money all over it.
Yep, you are so right. It is a bit of a wash isn't it? WoW is exremely successful (at least today), but remember that WoW was designed and executed less with savvy PC MMORPG gamers in mind, and more for relative neophytes, and as essentially an answer to the mosnter that is EQ. And it did it sparklingly and staringly well. 100% on execution, there is no doubt about that.
But there are glimmers for the smaller and fainter among us. Look at the GTA.
"Oh GTA? Yeah. Oh well, that was a somewhat special case."
Were they particularly safe? I think the first thing in game design and particularly MMORPGs is to know your audience. Bake your game to your niche. Perhaps, if done right, that niche boils over into the mainstream. Rockstar knew that there were no games that catered to a "hiphop/eighties/mobster" sensibility. Their execution was nearly flawless. In other words, they innovated.
And for innumerable more reasons I'm convinced that this mysterious beast, the upstart developer, still exists. I think audience and execution are important pieces of the puzzle (surely not the only pieces, but you catch my drift). You say safe? I say audience. You say money? I say innovation. You say publisher? I say march in and show them what you can do. Put a veritable gun to their head and march them to signing that cheque. In essence they'd have to when faced with the prospect that you'd take your creation to their competitors.
The Sims is their flagship title. And early on, they wanted to kill it. LOL.
The saving grace is that it really is a fun game to play. I would have called the game a triumph if not for the horrible pain it takes to actually start playing!
I was sufficiently swayed by your obvious genius so I went back and did a quick test. I skipped the intro screen and then it put the escape character into my saved password. But thanks to your cunning wisdom and sage advice, the game only thinks it did it, when it really didn't. Thanks.
A helicopter mapped key will only affect other helicopter keys
By goodness, your emminent superiority has struck again. When I tried to map a Common Control key, it shot a dialog box into the middle of my screen (and snapped my mouse to the OK button) stating, "That key is already mapped to a key in the Helicopter Controls section". But its obviously wrong since you said that only helicopter mappings affect helicopter mappings. Thanks again.
The server list is interruptible with the new hotfix.
I am so impressed with your command of the facts, that I am going to name all of my wife's ex-husbands children after you. I tried the new hotfix! I went into the game, and in the heat of battle I pressed ESC to map a key... the options screen loaded, and the server list started to refresh. Now I can press STOP! Awesome! I get back into the game, and I'm dead. But at least I can stop the server list refresh. :-)
When you click the pre selected radio command, IT DOESN'T FIRE YOUR GUN!
You're fixing my game as I read this post. I went into the game and deliberately injured myself, found a medic, pointed my crosshairs at him, and then invoked the radio message. BOOOOOOM!!! But the bleeding medic immediately turned to me and said, "Hey man, the game didn't really do that. Don't worry, Shim said it all coo." Then he died. [FORGIVE]
Battlefield 2 is the greatest game to ever be made...
HUZZAH!
"*tap tap tap* Oh no! We got on the wrong flight! This planes going to Ft. Lauderdale!"
"*tap tap tap* Hey lady, we are two hot stalions we wanna have partying!!!t#*#&$&$NOCARRIER"
Personally, I love the fact that pressing the Escape key to skip the intro movie will save it into the input buffer, thus applying it to the password field of your "auto login" screen. So even if you have the correct account password saved, you have to edit it to get rid of the escape character.
I think its awesome that in order to change your keymappings that you have to un-map them one by one first, and then pray that they are not mapped to helicopter strafe-right or some other thing that happens to be completely hidden in the UI. Double bonus that unmapping pops up a dialogue box in the middle of the screen and snaps your mouse focus to the OK button saying, "You have unmapped this key [OK]". This is extremely helpful to remind me of what I just did, yes thanks for the workflow.
Very enjoyable to have a server browser that insists on invoking the uninterruptible server-list refresh every time you access the game menu - even though you're still connected and playing a game.
So much fun to make it such that to select a pre-canned radio message you have to press FIRE. This is especially interesting if you request a medic and your crosshairs just happen to be aimed directly at one. :-)
I am particularly impressed with the fun and challenge of finding a ranked server that has reasonable ping since most of them show up as ZERO in my browser.
The game should be called "BF2 : Revenge of the UI" or some shit like that...
By the time I actually make it into the game and start playing, I'm yearning for the safety of a trench being bombarded by howitzers...
Couldn't agree with you more, Z. Doom 3 is an excellent engine. I remember the demo during Quakecon 2002 where Todd H. was extolling the "movie-like" qualities of the Doom3 engine. I had to agree. Unfortunately, games aren't movies. The beautifully perfect and cinematic environments didn't map to a show-stopping amount of fun. I battled monsters using the same methods against the same AI as I did in 1996. Doom 3 was good. It was not great. /Kafka
I could smell trouble. It was a palpable feeling, right down to my bones. I sensed it in the steam and heat of the night, waiting, watching. And it told me to get the hell outta dodge. As I breathed quietly to myself in the pits of the alleyway, I listened. The cops kept on, their sirens dopplering in the distance. I knew my boys were getting picked off one by one. But not me. Getting caught was for noobs, and I trust my instincts. I'm no noob.
If reality was hackable, I'd be the devil.
A rolling stone grows no moss.
I could write this shit and barely even touch the keyboard - it just writes itself.
OBBookPlug :
If you enjoy a *good* solo spy novel - read Quiller. He's an abosolute joy, and a truly well-imagined spy.
If you look at the chat window you can see them counting down.. "5 4 3 2 1... Wipe!" Also, the staging is evident in the swallowed laughter of a few of the characters. The video is hilarious, albeit a bit "niche" - for WoW fans only. :-) /Kafka
(Didn't you guys figure out he was humming the theme from 2001?) /Kafka
Excellent point, and well said. The console does the console thing well. How could it pretend to be a PC?
Do you actually think MS cares about gaming? Microsoft wants the XBox (and whatever comes later) to have a mouse and keyboard and an internet connection. Because when that happens, they can force you to pay a subscription fee for Office. :-)
What happens when the PC isn't double that of a console anymore? What happens when the console is basically the same, and the advances on the PC just don't stay ahead by leaps and bounds? These are my reservations about the Console -> PC discussion.
Save this poster everyone. Save it on your desktop. Print it out and hang it in your office.
In fifteen years you will find it in your attic, dust it off, and remember with amusement...
How stupid microsoft is.
Was.
But.. you just need one to have sex with three, cause there are three cores. Unless you want to have sex with twelve, then go ahead and buy four. l-eight-r! /Kafka
The speed in which this "legislation" has warped through the democratic process is very telling.
The likelihood that the end product, the "RFID licenses" will be ill-thought, ill-conceived and ill-executed has been assured. Hacking and manipulation have just discovered a new end-game. Have fun. This is going to be such a mess.
Watch one of the world's largest bureaucracies fall on its face.
Is a 'noise violation' the decibel level of the sound, or the character of the sound?
Cue fart jokes here.
However, someone argued that powerful movie franchises don't do as well in the MMO-space as original property. I'd have to agree.
SirBruce, do you have any data to support that?
And maybe they know this, and are using the new capital to sweeten the game for the market... like purchasing the voice and character talents of Ian McKellan and Elijah Woods. :-)
Definitely agree with you. AC was probably acquired very cheaply, since it was likely to get killed by Microsoft anyways.
To a lesser degree, WoW doesn't do the "assistance" game very well either. There are no qualified methods within the game's mechanics to sweeten the prospect of helping lower-level characters.
City of Heroes has the "exemplar" and side-kick system to bring level differences closer. See IGN's 'CoH Tips' page
It isn't perfect but is a far cry from WoW's complete lack of "levelling the level playing field". Ouch, it makes my head spin trying to say what I'm trying to say. :-)
TFA
You mean, like get in there and start SHOOTING your Sims? Thats an awesome idea. :-)
Every person playing in America is playing in one massive server and everyone can interact with each other if they choose.
it is the same thing. MMO players have come to accept these annoyances as a byproduct of being in a MMO world.