Abstract:

Video games have often been seen as incredible time-sinks and “wasted” activity from the “non-gaming” community. Even so, millions of people from all ages spend countless hours playing video games simply because they are fun, challenging, entertaining, and some fashion rewarding. If you add the social aspects that are added by massively multi-player on-line role playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft™ - which purports to have over 12 million enthusiasts playing the game and growing – it is not unusual to find individuals spending large amounts of their time over long periods (e.g. over 6 years) playing and socializing in these type of video games. Many of these individuals are highly intelligent and invest large amounts of their time modeling the game mechanics, optimizing their characters to succeed in the game, and reverse-engineer character, game, and team dynamics to be at or near the peak of the in-game performance curve. In addition, some of these dedicated gamers spend in excess of 20 hours a week playing these games. Largely, this is due to the individual’s innate capabilities, the spirit of competition kindled by the story-line, challenges, achievements, encounters in the game, and the social interactions, pressures, and expectations of the on-line gaming community.
What if the entertainment value and enjoyable aspects of the video game could be maintained but instead of learning “useless” information (in a real-world sense; from a non-gamer perspective), the gamer learns useful information from an academic and professional point of view? What if learning and applying fundamental, higher-level science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or other educational concepts were seamlessly integrated into the game environment so as to be a fundamental aspect of the game and required for the gamer to advance or excel? In other words, the gamer is self motivated to understand and apply educational concepts in order to advance his or her avatar in the game. By seamless, we mean that the game-play is still the focus of the gamer and the educational process occurs almost incidentally as the gamer plays the game. What if assessments and certifications could be non-intrusively incorporated into the game play? We asked ourselves these questions and took a systems engineering approach to evaluate the feasibility of implementing such a game.
We present a study wherein we evaluated several gaming engines that are extremely popular in the gaming community such as the gaming engine behind Sid Meier’s Civilization 5™ (Firaxis and 2K Games) , Oblivion/Morrowind/NeverWinter Nights (Bethesda Software and 2K Games), Half-life 2 (Sierra) and The SIMS (MAXIS). These gaming engines were evaluated for the feasibility of in-game integration of modular educational content through largely standard educational media such as MS Office products, Adobe PDF files, Matlab processing, inclusion of images and video, and adaptability of the in-game story-line. We started with stand-alone video games instead of MMORPGs because some of these stand-alone video games provide access to game editors that readily allow the user to adapt the game. Also, working with MMORPGs would require collaboration with the game developer. We see this as a possible next step. We also present a demonstration module implemented in Oblivion that demonstrates our idea and includes an in-game non-intrusive assessment capability.

Keywords:

Video Game Learning, Educational Video Games, Video Game-based Training, Learning, and Assessment, Video Game Knowledge Modules.