The new King has arrived
On Sunday night I was watching TV and a Burger King commercial came on and peaked my interest. The fast food giant has teamed with the gaming industry and is offering three Xbox/Xbox 360 games for sale during the holiday season. The titles include Pocketbike Racer, Big Bumpin’ (where BK characters engage in bumper car action), and Sneak King (a stealth game where players sneak up on hungry customers and offer them BK products). Each game can be purchased for $3.99 with the purchase of any value meal. (And for those interested, you can also get various Dance Dance Revolution toys with the purchase of a Kids Meal.)
Bios for David Williamson Shaffer
Short Bio for David Williamson Shaffer
David Williamson Shaffer is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Educational Psychology and a Game Scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. His most recent book is How Computer Games Help Children Learn.
Medium Bio for David Williamson Shaffer
David Williamson Shaffer is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Educational Psychology and a Game Scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, he was a teacher, teacher-trainer, curriculum developer, and game designer. Dr. Shaffer studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn, and his most recent book is How Computer Games Help Children Learn.
Long Bio for David Williamson Shaffer
David Williamson Shaffer is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Educational Psychology and a Game Scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Shaffer taught grades 4-12 in the United States and abroad, including two years working with the Asian Development Bank and US Peace Corps in Nepal. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he taught in the Technology and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Shaffer was a 2008-2009 European Union Marie Curie Fellow. He studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn, and his most recent book is How Computer Games Help Children Learn.
Epistemic Games get Serious
The organizers of the Serious Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference 2007 have asked David Williamson Shaffer to speak in two sessions.
Why Epistemic Games are like a Fish
Research just published in the PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, Chang Liu, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (summary here) looks at how fish locate objects in the water using a special line of sensors along their side–and uses that research to build an “artificial lateral line” for underwater sensing. The natural lateral line has more sensors, but the principle of detecting objects by the disturbances they make in the water is the same.
The idea has obvious use in submarines and other underwater applications. But what makes it interesting to me is the process itself: looking to an already existing model–particularly one that evolved over time–for a solution to a problem.
Cultural selection, like natural selection, ruthlessly eliminates some ideas and keeps others. The ones that survive solve some particular problem, so if we can expand the reach of existing cultural forms, we may be able to solve new problems without working from scratch.
In a very important sense, that’s what epistemic games do: they look at existing learning environments where people develop important ways of thinking and copy them, Like Dr. Liu’s artificial neural line, an epistemic game is a simplification of its natural (in this case, cultural) model.
But the value of drawing on an exiting solution to a complex problem is similar.
Epistemic games really are like a fish–or like a simulated fish, in any case.
Introducing Madonna the blug
To prepare himself to be a Design Advisor for the upcoming Digital Zoo game, Padraig has been playing with Sodaconstructor, an online game where players construct creatures and subject them to the forces of gravity. Digital Zoo players use it and love it. Anyone can play with it, and he encourages you to try it.
His first creature (so don’t be too harsh) is Madonna the blug (part bear-part slug):
