let’s make a game *

In March I had the honour to be invited by Anitel (the Italian national association of e-learning tutors) to give this workshop on games, and it was a pleasure for me to meet many other colleagues interested in e-learning and the learning potentiality of virtual worlds.

I can say that in all my second life I’ve been working with games and informal learning, first at Languagelab and then on my own. It was the right occasion for me to think on what I’ve been learning form all these experiences and share with others.

Here you can see the video summarising the workshop (thanks to Richy Ryba for the recording and editing of the video). For those who do not understand Italian, I summarise below the main points.

[Vimeo 10461171]

• The first thing you have to take into consideration when preparing a game is your participants SL skills. Don’t ask them to do something they do not already know how to do or you will spend the first hour explaining technicalities… and who feels like playing a game after that?

• If you are bringing your RL students in SL (and they meet on regular basis in RL) don’t organise games that can be played better in RL. The same kind of games can work pretty well if your students are on an online course (SL adds a socialising element to the game) but are a nonsense in F2F courses

• Use SL to organise something that would be too costly, too complex or too risky in RL.

• There are a lot of ready to play game in SL, mostly the kind of  “sitting around and clicking on a thing”. They can be ok but it’s much better if you make your own game (or you use them as part of a longer and more complex game).

• When preparing a game, keep in mind what make SL unique: social interaction, spatial interaction (it’s a 3D environment, isn’t it?) and visual strength. Ah, ok there is also the suspension of disbelief, but we all know about that. Think of a game that uses space, visuals and social interaction and it will be an hit.

• SL limits are as important as its strength: keep them in mind and exploit them. Sometimes they are more interesting and useful than strength points.

• In order to prepare your own game you do not need to be a builder or a scripter: there are a lot of objects you can use, and scripts that can be useful to prepare a game.

• The SL community is very supportive. If people see that you are working on something interesting and you ask a little favour (for instance, to modify a script that you already have) they will be very happy to lend you an hand. But do not pretend that they “make” the game for you, mostly of them have their projects in SL and are usually very busy.

• In my opinion, what works best in SL are scavenger hunts (clever ones, where you have to solve problems and discover things to finish the game) and games where you have to solve a riddle, answer a question or do something in order to get to the next point.

• And, last point: to collaborate people need to know each other. Don’t organise a game that need collaboration among the group without first allowing them the time (a couple of sessions) to know each other.

A big thanks to Astra Martian and Lisa Tebaldi for giving me the chance to run this workshop and meet their wonderful students.

*The original title of the workshop at Anitel was much better: Facciamo un gioco! that in Italian means both “let’s play a game” and “let’s create a game”.

Caccia al carnevale

Caccia al Carnevale is the second activity related to the Italian language and culture that Misy Ferraris and I organise together.

The first one was for the Italian Culture Week quiz, but this time we wanted to try something different. We liked above all to explore different ways of delivering information in a stimulating way. From our Collaborative Learning Tools we had learnt two lessons: keep it simple and, please, no long notecards.

It was the right occasion to put into practice what we learnt and try something new. In addition, since it would be during the Electronic Village Online, Graham Stanley offered to add the Carnival to the Virtualwords visits sheduled. For us it represented a wonderful occasion to test it with a large group of people and to be able to observe relatively new residents dealing with what we prepared.

As in previous occasions, we knew that very few of our participants spoke Italian, an that the focus would be on the culture/tradition rather than on the language. And as usual, we always tried to offer bilingual information and instructions.

We decided to prepare various different, short activities instead of a larger one:

a) Some boards with short description of the character and peculiarity of 4 Italian masks, to be matched with the relative images (a group activity)

b) Four easy expressions with adjectives describing the character of the 4 masks (i.e. io sono furbo: I’m shrewd), written on comic bubbles that could be worn by avatars and that, when clicked, “said” the sentence (and people were clicking so enthusiastically on them that I’m almost sure that may will never forget those sentences).

c) A scavenger hunt. We scattered around boxes with little presents and multiple choice questions on the Italian Carnival tradition. Participants had to answer correctly to the question to get the prize. We had a little problem here: the script in our inventories only gave the prize once, but our aim was that everybody could have the chance to answer the question (and doing so, learn something about the Italian Carnival). We then asked the SLED community, that helped as with its usual generosity, and in few days we had the right script and could start working.

The fact that we could run the event twice (due to different time zones of the participants) was very helpful because after the first Caccia al Carnevale we could sit down, analyse it, and make changes and improvements. For instance we saw that people did not enjoy the scavenger hunt as much as they can because the boxes were to difficult to find. My proposal was to keep the boxes all in a smaller area, but Misy Ferraris rightly observed that if we placed the boxes one near the other, the messages that the boxes were writing in chat would mix all together causing confusion. We needed to keep a certain distance between them, but she had the great idea of putting Italian flags beside the boxes: in this way participants could find it more easily and the game was more dynamic and everybody got its fair share of little prizes.