Where are the learning environments that are just like games like Skyrim?
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It's actually very simple: translate all the voice acting into your language of choice - let's say Norwegian. (Probably dumb the vocabulary down a bit.) Now add subtitles.
You're done. Go play the game. You'll absorb the language as you play, and because (unlike a film) you'll hear the same phrases multiple times, it'll actually sink in to a useful extent. I've only played about 20 hours of Skyrim so far, but I'm pretty sure if I was playing the subtitled version I'd already be able to say "Are you looking to defend yourself, or do some damage?" in Norwegian.
(Of course, I'd still have to add modern language to my knowledge after 200 hours, but hey, it's easier than learning the entire grammatical structure and all verbs.)
For a much more effective but much more offputting version - don't have subtitles. Have a few characters who can speak a bit of English, but have most of them only talk in Norwegian. You'll need to customise the dialogue a fair bit too so that the player doesn't miss important bits (essentially, have the NPCs periodically stop and say "WTF? Are you stupid? THERE'S THE GODDAMN DRAGON!"), and probably have the usual range of dialogue options - in Norwegian - plus a standard "I'm sorry, I don't speak Nord" which will get you all the really essential stuff.
That would be very, very hard to play - although surprisingly immersive if you're playing a non-Nord character, particularly if the other non-Nords were the characters who were likely to speak your language - but would definitely teach you the language.
On an anecdotal level, I can attest that some of the first English words my brothers learned were "load" and "save", for obvious reasons.
http://yle.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/2011/11/pojat_kiilaavat_tyttoj...
It's not an open world, but it's not entirely linear - the game is a 4-5 hour story-driven role-playing game in an immersive world designed to help teach French and the culture of Senegal. The game is intergrated with an online and social curriculum to learn French and is a supplement to the online course, not a complete replacement.
Mission to Senegal isn't Skyrim by any means. =) But it is fun and it does utilize gameplay.
Its actual effectiveness in helping players learning French is still being evaluated - the game is part of a research project - the Integrated System for Language Education and Training (ISLET) funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and performed by the Academic Consortium for Global Education (ACGE).
ISLET is being used in an active study with U.S. Navy and Marines to assess how they learn through the system. A goal of the research project was to assess learner behavior and how the game component might impact the learning process and motivation.
A brief article about the study's announcement is here: http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=60581
Similarly, I have multiple friends who have learned Cantonese with no classroom time at all.
The main reason why I maintain that you do need some classroom time or tutoring or book-learning is that we are adults now.
I think she got into anime in high school. It was definitely well after the critical period for language learning (which btw, many linguists believe is only a critical period for learning a first language).
>for all I know your Cantonese-speaking friends are actually Chinese
None of the Cantonese learners I mentioned were Chinese nationals (though 2 are ethnically Chinese). Even if they were Chinese nationals, it's still far from easy. Cantonese is more different from Mandarin than romance languages are from each other in terms of mutual intelligibility.
My own study history has been French classes with little effect in high school, Japanese classes with much better results in college, Spanish through immersion with mediocre results, many years of living in a bilingual Mandarin environment as well as some classes, and more recently, a bit of Taiwanese, Cantonese and Swedish almost entirely via media until learning enough to try some of it out on people. Taiwanese and Cantonese both have features that are totally alien to me, despite have some distant relationship to Mandarin via classical Chinese. Swedish is totally out there.
I'm 100% sure you can learn languages to a fluent level as an adult through large amounts of exposure to the target language. I've seen it first hand many times and I've essentially abandoned classes for any reason other than visas in foreign countries. That said, reading is great! It's probably the fastest way to build up your vocabulary, even in your native language. After getting enough listening input to have some handle on phonics, I'm all for reading as much as possible. Actually I think not doing that is why my Mandarin progressed fairly slowly until I got into... some video games!
Back to the topic of the article, I would be amongst the first in line to by a Skyrim-style game for learning Swedish or Korean or any other language I want to learn! Anything that's both a source of L2 input and fun is gold.
We do have some games like that: Civilization and SimCity, both games that teach the critical skill of resource management, which won't appear on any high school curriculum... but the deficiency there is on the high school side, not the game side.
The Settlers takes that a step further and emphasizes supply chain management, production bottlenecks, etc (and I thought it was a fun game, too)
Do you have any other examples, real or hypothetical, of highly developed interactive environments?
Yes, but what does that lead to in terms of teaching? Is one going to go from autism to a deeper understanding of human motivations by playing Skyrim? No. It isn't anywhere near rich enough to do that, and it isn't because we wouldn't like to have characters in a game that rich, it's because we really don't know how to make them. It's all skin deep. Pretty much everything is.
Since my thesis is that we don't know how to make highly developed interactive environments that one can learn from, I am at a loss as to why you think I'm going to come up with an example of one.
We've invested an enormous amount of money into making things look good. There's nothing wrong with that. But we have, as a consequence, the ability to make something that looks almost photorealistic and looks like the real world, where in fact it's just a glorified toy, and it fools people into thinking we have a lot more power to create games than we actually do. At best we can manage tinkertoys or legos, as in the Civilization or SimCity examples I gave. But how would we build a game to teach History qua teaching History? To actually teach it and not merely allude to it, or merely wrap the game up in the stylistic ambiance? Or merely be a glorified flash-card simulator? Beats me, and I've been pondering the question and watching everybody else's attempts to answer the question for a long time. I don't see any evidence anyone has anything like an implementable idea at our current level of technology.
However it sounds like you are waiting for games that are "Reality++" before you can see a use for the medium as a teaching tool. That's just just crazy. We use books, images and video for that purpose despite their significant shortcomings.
Games are a product of the intentions of the developers. Edutainment is usually pretty low on the priority list therefore you don't see much of it.
There. That's the reason why. That game sounds boring as shit, and no one would buy it.
Learning in a game has to be implicit, if you make it explicit users will sniff out your agenda and run away. For example, you can't just make the gamer write an essay about Shakespeare to open the treasure chest, but if you somehow included subtle Shakespeare references in Zelda that could work.
And with that in mind, maybe games are already doing this. You're certainly learning something about economics in Roller Coaster Tycoon, and I definitely had to flex my brain muscles for some of the puzzles in Zelda. It has to continue to be implicit though.
They are. I'm playing the new Assassin's Creed right now, and as you explore the city of Constantinople you'll run into landmarks and people, each of whom have an in-game encyclopedia entry that you can quick-key into. It doesn't have anything to do with gameplay, and is merely there to satisfy your curiosity. The dialogue and story also make an attempt to communicate the political and economic intrigue of the era.
That and it takes place in a specific period of history that also touches on many famous people in that era, albeit fictionally. I have to say, every time I play an AC game I end up reading Wikipedia about the real-life people, places, and history that it depicts, because it's just so damned interesting.
I can't be the only one. But it certainly beats most "educational" games that smack you over the head. "Now, who can tell me when the Byzantine Empire fell?"
The question is, can we do this for science/engineering/math? Is there a way to make learning STEM material through interactive gaming? Perhaps a 3d gaming world where you put together atoms, or a minecraft-type game where you learn about physics or civil engineering principles...the options are endless, and it could do a lot of good in getting kids interested and skilled at the more technical subjects
One of the biggest problems of maths and science education is that they're useless and boring as hell. Or, at least that's how it looks like from kids' perspective. I think that a first step towards teaching them those skills in an interactive way would be to create an interactive environment where maths (or physics, or chemistry, or biology, or astronomy) could be actually useful. Some way for knowledge to give you in-game advantage, or at least expand your gameplay. A game in which you could actually read where's north from the trees and stars. Etc.
When I was in high school I did a lot of volunteering at the local science-museum where we had terminals set up with the Incredible Machine. They were always occupied.
Kids have an innate love for exploring, moreso than adults. We beat it out of them later, but in the mean time open world, unstructured games are some of the best ways to teach things to people. Look at SimCity, Incredible Machine, etc etc.
There are games that find fun in seemingly mundane things, like parking or washing windows, but these are very simple things. And even then, the game takes many liberties with realism in order to make them fun.
Another thing: Skyrim and current CRPGs in general are not skill-based games, like FPS'es. They reward for time-played, not for skill. This does not translate well to learning actual skills.
I teach game design and programming, and one of the huge problems is that new students think that making games is not much harder than playing games. Wat, I need to know math?
OTOH, I learned a lot of history through playing miniature and computer war games.
This points to the fact that the engine and the tools available are but a small part of what is needed. Granted, a big start would be getting publishers to donate their game engines to development teams for learning environments.
But... what makes these games incredible is the millions of dollars that goes into voice acting, motion capture (as I recall much of the model rendering is informed via mocap. Look at things like the woodcutting animations in Skyrim to see where this benefits), model rendering, textures, etc.
What's needed is to figure out how to reduce the cost of these things, or get collaboration from professional teams/publishers willing to donate time and/or resources to projects.
Otherwise, you'll end up with a bunch of learning environments using the same game engine as skyrim but with none of the magic.
First off, teaching anything non-trivial is difficult. By non-trivial, I mean formal knowledge that requires you to actually have a deep understanding of the material, as opposed to rote learning or reusable strategies like most games involve. I haven't played Skyrim, so if there is some actual expertise you acquire through playing it, I'd be happy to hear about it.
Imagine you're trying to teach statistics. You start out with some gambling game to teach basic odds and probabilities, and that's great. Now how does that transition to Gaussian distributions and standard deviations, one of the most fundamental and comparatively simple concepts in statistics, without simply being boring? It's not so clear.
Second, is there any real money in it? I suppose if you can get lots of schools to use your game, then great. But of course we know how long those sales cycles are, and you can't really expect your game to look all that awesome in 3 years after you've finally worked your way up the organizational ladder and closed. So you probably need to either sell your game directly to consumers or give it away.
If you're going to sell it to consumers, you have to compete with other games in your market. This is tough because a game that requires little critical thinking will likely be more appealing to a broad audience. Again, maybe Skyrim requires truly critical thinking along the lines of understanding derivatives and integrals, and if it does please correct me, but I doubt it. Most people buy videogames to play in their downtime, so they want to relax. This means your market will be very niche and I just do not see the long-term potential.
The other option, giving it away, puts you in a similar situation to what we're doing at UT. If you are giving it away, you probably need to find people who will work for cheap because grants do not end up paying much for this sort of thing, enter students. Our situation is such that we have had literally dozens of people adding, changing, and branching the code with varying degrees of quality in commits (looking at you, undergrads), creating lots of technical debt. We also are not experts in game development, so the graphics and mechanics are a little rough. That said, it's a pretty decent platform for teaching and demoing different concepts in AI. But is it as awesome, polished, and fun as Skyrim looks? Of course not-- you get what you pay for.
I guess my main point is that there are plenty of legitimate reasons that such teaching environments are not pervasive in modern education. It's one of those ideas that is easy on the surface but quickly breaks down in practice. When it works, it makes for neat demos, but to make it work at the same scale as a commercially successful video game just seems infeasible in today's market.
There aren't learning environments that are just like Skyrim because you don't learn shit in Skyrim. The basic mechanics of the game are very simple and can be picked up in less than five minutes. It has enormous depth, more than its predecessor and arguably more than TES3 which is famous for it, but you can learn all of it in an hour (not playtime mind you, but an hour browsing some wiki). Its much-lauded lore, while compelling and among the best in video games, is comparable to any second-rate novel. When I say it has enormous depth I mean for a game. Compared to math, physics, programming, history, politics, or virtually any other intellectual pursuit, it is as shallow as an issue of Maxim. This is not an insult. It is entertainment.
Skyrim is not 'hard'. It is not hard in the sense that it could require athletic ability, and it is not hard in the sense that it could be difficult to progress in the game. A bright eight year-old could solve the hardest puzzle in Skyrim. If you play the game long enough, you will finish even if you are as dumb and incurious as a rock. You will not master mathematics by playing a mathematics game if you are dumb as a rock, or if you are naturally intelligent for that matter. Mastering such skills takes decades. And it is hard work. You have to do a lot of boring shit. And it is not always clear, the way forward. You can spend a lot of time on a thing where you later find out that most of your efforts didn't have much point, after all. It can become very tempting to give up, and if you aren't dedicated that's what you will do. Intellectual achievement is brutal and unforgiving, because you are dealing with reality and not a fantasy that someone else has created for you.
If I played Skyrim 8-10 hours a day, every day, I would get bored with it pretty quickly. There just isn't a lot of material to digest. I have been programming for 8-10 hours a day for years, and I still find it immensely rewarding and satisfying. No game can match that, and no game can provide the mostly self-directed exploration that true learning requires.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to playing Skyrim :-D
This, this, a thousand times this.
The worst part about it all is that because you only ever see other people's successes published in papers, textbooks, and etc., it can seem from confirmation bias that no one else makes mistakes or even really struggles with mathematics, but of course the truth is very far away from this.