Let your kids waste endless hours on these video games - article in Wall Street Journal by Jurica Dujmovic. “Gaming is often seen as a waste of time or a fun distraction at best. But contemporary gaming is different. Online video games are increasingly learning tools that help gamers develop life skills. Here are three games that are unlike anything you’ve seen before.” Eve Online (MMORPG with advanced economics in space trader setting), iRacing (complex racing car simulation), Project Zomboid (resource management in zombie apocalyptic setting).
How to explain net neutrality – video clip from 'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver', referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “A case study in how to communicate a complex idea.”
Zork Post-Mortem (at GDC2014) - article on 'Adventure Gamers' website. “Dave Lebling, one of the founders of Infocom ... hosted a post-mortem to discuss the origins and legacy of 1977’s [classic text-based adventure game] Zork.... As enjoyable as the [1976] game [Adventure] was, Lebling and his colleagues also felt the game, and specifically the parser which the player used to interact with the game world, was fairly primitive. Adventure’s parser could only understand two words at a time and had a rather limited vocabulary. ... As the team continued to work on Zork the parser also continued to evolve, including being able to understand the difference between putting an object down, placing it under another object, or even placing an object inside of a container. The parser also began to understand the difference between the game’s different actors, from the player’s nameless avatar to a controllable robot and even the vehicles within the game. The team even added a timer to the events within the game world based on the number of moves a player would make. This timer might determine how long a match would stay lit, or which room the thief was currently occupying.”
Experience: I was an internet troll - first person anonymous article in The Guardian. “I was sick and tired of her getting all of this attention. And yet I would go on asking her all these questions that would generate even more, so I was fuelling my own hate. I kept on for about two months. Every time I criticised her, she would post screenshots and get more support, which would make me even angrier. I'd only do this anonymously. I ran a proxy on my laptop so it would appear to come from another IP address. I didn't want to be associated with cyberbullying, but at the same time I couldn't stop.”
Fast money: the battle against the high frequency traders - article in The Guardian by Brancesco Bongiorni. “Here was a market beyond human control, dominated by super-fast machines running complex computer algorithms that jostled and fought each other at the level of milliseconds, microseconds – and with no meaningful oversight.... Some of the most formidable minds in the world were now employed in a technological arms race, a hidden war stalked by million-dollar predator algorithms that could swarm those of the larger, slower players – typically, pension and mutual funds – in the same way a shoal of piranhas might an ox, cutting them to shreds and pocketing the profits. The regulators couldn't keep up. If they tried, the algos simply mutated.”
Minecraft: here’s one I made earlier – article in The Guardian by Tom Lamont. “The most popular computer games tend to license the unfeasible. Hey: you're an international footballer. An assassin in 16th-century Rome. In Minecraft, which celebrated its fifth birthday last month, with worldwide sales hovering just under the 50m mark, the fantasy amounts to stiff labour. Construction work. Players are cast as architects – resource-rich architects with the power of flight, granted, but architects nonetheless. Play Minecraft and rather than compete for the World Cup or plot to kill a Borgia, it's preferred you act like a groundsman, or a Roman town planner, willing to put in hard hours with blueprints and shovel. And somehow Minecraft has become a global sensation, prized by teenagers, adults and, in particular, seven- to 12-year-olds, whose parents tend to endorse the game precisely because it doesn't exalt unsavoury footballers or murder. … Digital Lego, virtual Lego, a Lego that doesn't hurt when you step on it: these are the terms used to describe Minecraft to the unfamiliar.”
Harry's Last Stand by Harry Leslie Smith and Austerity Bites by Mary O'Hara – reviews by Melissa Benn in The Guardian. “Right now, some inventive literary festival programmer is probably trying to set up a staged discussion between Harry Leslie Smith and Mary O'Hara. If not, they should – it would be fascinating. Smith, a mere 91 years of age, is boiling with anger at what he sees as the UK's return to the indignities of his Great Depression childhood. O'Hara, an experienced reporter, brings a cool head to her story of the impact of the cuts over the last four years…. Both books, but particularly O'Hara's, should be required reading for every MP, peer, councillor, civil servant and commentator. The fury and sense of powerlessness that so many people feel at government policy beam out of every page.”
The best way to win an argument – in MindHacks blog. “You are, I’m afraid to say, mistaken. The position you are taking makes no logical sense. Just listen up and I’ll be more than happy to elaborate on the many, many reasons why I’m right and you are wrong. Are you feeling ready to be convinced?... Research published last year on [the illusion of explanatory depth] shows how the effect might be used to convince others they are wrong. …Recruiting a sample of Americans via the internet, they polled participants on a set of contentious US policy issues [then divided them into two groups]… People who provided reasons remained as convinced of their positions as they had been before the experiment. Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues. Whether the subject is climate change, the Middle East or forthcoming holiday plans, this is the approach many of us adopt when we try to convince others to change their minds. It’s also an approach that, more often than not, leads to the person on the receiving end hardening their existing position. Fortunately research suggests there is a better way – one that involves more listening, and less trying to bludgeon your opponent into submission.”
Happy birthday Tetris! – blog post in MindHacks blog “As well as hijacking the minds and twitchy fingers of puzzle-gamers for 30 years, Tetris has also been involved in some important psychological research. My favourite is Kirsh and Maglio’s work on “epistemic action“, which showed how Tetris players prefer to rotate the blocks in the game world rather than mentally. This using the world in synchrony with your mental representations is part of what makes it so immersive, I argue.”
From the Bard to Bart: how Mr Burns challenges our common culture – review by Mark Lawson in The Guardian of the play 'Mr Burns' by Anne Washburn. “The opening act plays out on an almost dark stage, illuminated only by spasmodic flashlight and the flames of a campfire, around which huddle the survivors of a near-futuristic American catastrophe caused by the meltdown of nuclear power stations. This homeland Chernobyl has destroyed all electronic entertainment present and past, with the result that groups of survivors compete to recreate, through oral story-telling, favoured episodes of network TV shows such as The Simpsons. Seven years on, in the second act, these broadcasting restorationists have organised into a primitive industry. Rival troupes of travelling players, with names such as The Prime-time Players, The Reruns and Richard's Couch, tour the scorched states, performing by candlelight reconstituted adventures of Homer and Marge and their children – though one group resurrects instead The West Wing, with its now novel concept of national government – and buying extra lines of remembered dialogue from locals.”
See how borders change on Google Maps depending on where you view them – Quartz website, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “It’s hard to draw a map without making someone angry. There are 32 countries that Google Maps won’t draw borders around. While the so-called geo-highlighting feature—which Google uses to show a searched area’s borders—is unaffected by the locale of the person looking at them, the borders drawn on Google’s base map will look different depending on where in the world you are.” With animated diagrams.
9 reasons to learn another language – YouTube video by Lindsay Dow. “Number 1: so you don’t sound like a moron when you’re on holiday.”
Who is behind Isis's terrifying online propaganda operation? – article by Patrick Kingsley in The Guardian. “When Isis stormed Iraq's second city of Mosul earlier this month, analysts say their propaganda made the fighting easier. In wars gone by, advancing armies smoothed their path with missiles. Isis did it with tweets and a movie.... And it works, Iraqis say. When Isis stormed Mosul, Iraqi soldiers fled their posts, apparently aware that they would face a gruesome fate if they were captured while on duty....In fact, Isis's use of social media is so slick that it has made the group seem more powerful than it is. Coverage of its menacing online identity may have both obscured the role other Sunni groups have played in Iraq's insurgency – and made opponents wrongly assume that Isis has all of Iraq within its grasp.... While Isis's Twitter presence first and foremost serves to frighten its enemies in Iraq and Syria, and to inform its members there, it may also help Isis expand its brand among jihadis outside of the Middle East. Nominally an offshoot of al-Qaida, Isis has been disowned by its parent organisation. As a result, it is now in active competition with al-Qaida's approved affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as al-Qaida franchises across the world.... analysts reckon no other group has as sophisticated a grasp of social media as Isis.”
Making algorithms responsible for what they do – John Naughton article in The Observer, where titled with the less clear 'How to wrest control of our data from spies and their networks'; referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. “William Hague thinks that the fact that we're 'only' collecting metadata and not 'content' means that there are no grounds for concern about bulk surveillance. But in fact this misconception – that algorithms are not 'agents' in the way that humans are – runs through the surveillance debate like the legend in a stick of Blackpool rock. The argument that although Google's algorithms 'read' your emails in order to decide what ads to place alongside them, they're not really reading them, is part of the same genre. So is the contention that the decision to refuse you a loan is not anything personal, just an impersonal decision made by an algorithm. And so is the claim that just because your clickstream – the log of all the websites you've visited – is collected by the NSA, it doesn't mean that the spooks are spying on you. This is legalistic cant and we could change it at a stroke by updating our legal conceptions of agency...."
Thursday, 3 July 2014
Seen and heard: June 2014
Veronese - exhibition at the National Gallery. Great furs, great fabrics, great faces. Also interesting comment on the audio guide from an opera director, about the organisation of a scene, whether on stage or on a dramatic canvas: the whole scene needs to tell the story, but an individual viewer's gaze may focus on any part of it, so every bit of the background needs to be interesting and relevant.
Episodes, Series 3 - not the same satirical edge as the first two seasons, when the core jokes were about the culture clash of British writers compromising and being compromised by adapting their TV comedy for Hollywood. But the scripting and the acting is still razor sharp, acid black, and laugh-out-loud funny.
The Pallisers - TV drama from the 1974, which I missed at the time but featured in the BBC2 50th birthday celebrations. Watching some further episodes on YouTube, I was gripped by the quality of the writing and acting, especially Philip Latham as the stiff but fundamentally decent and morally upright Plantagenet Palliser, and Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons as the more wayward men of the younger generation. Was it this partnering of Andrews and Irons which gave someone the idea of putting them together again in 'Brideshead Revisited'?
Brideshead Revisited - TV drama from 1981, watched on DVD, inspired by the above. Again, I never watched it properly on first transmission; working in a university as I was during the Thatcher-yuppie era, it was a political embarrassment and irritant to have university life depicted as endless round of decadent self-indulgence - which was what most people seemed to take from the show. At this distance in time, I have the patience to take in and appreciate the whole story arc and the ways in which its sad and tragic direction (with the tiniest final hint of redemption) is anticipated from the outset - in particular when Cara in Venice predicts Sebastian's self-destruction. What a great period for long-form TV dramas the 1980s was, just checking the DVD box sets we've bought in the last couple of years: not only Brideshead but Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Beiderbecke Affair, and A Very Peculiar Practice, not to mention Fortunes of War and Edge of Darkness.
Gypsy Fever - performing at the QuecumBar, Battersea, London, a couple of the band members being good friends. A great evening: infectiously energetic music, delivered with style and brio.
Stanley Spencer Gallery - the current exhibition including the enormous and uncompleted Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. Three things I learned about Spencer from this exhibition: (1) how good and striking his naturalistic paintings and portraits are, though he's more famous for his stylised forms; (2) when he painted biblical scenes set in contemporary Cookham, he'd already left the town, so for him Cookham was the past, his childhood; (3) in many of his paintings (Christ carrying his cross, the arrival of stretchers at a military hospital), he deliberately doesn't paint the suffering one might expect, which is either transcendence or denial. (I’ve seen many people for whom I’d suspect the latter, but I think in Spencer's case it genuinely was the former: finding the moment of peace, the still centre, in a situation of horror – as in, even more conspicuously, Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Crowned with Thorns, memorably discussed by Pamela Tudor-Craig in The Secret Life of Paintings.)
GTech multi - video review by Techmoan. A model of a self-produced video review: seemingly casual, but sharply focused with not a wasted minute, and professional quality shooting and editing. I wonder how much experience, practice and failed attempts lie behind such a fine final product.
The Exponential Horn – exhibition at The Science Museum, reconstructing the huge (27 foot) loudspeaker horn built in 1929 to provide the best possible sound reproduction - quite a novelty for a public accustomed to crackly and tinny wireless. Apparently they used to come there and eat their sandwiches while listening to the midday music broadcasts, so I timed my own visit to coincide with the live feed from the Radio 3 lunchtime concert. A less spectacular experience than I'd hoped; I suppose high-fidelity (as we used to say) reproduction is something we take for granted nowadays, and I was more conscious of the contribution of the original recording (they also played BBC archive extracts from the 1930s) and the acoustic characteristics of the gallery to the perceived sound. A worthwhile reconstruction to have made, though, offering a connection back to another time.
Electronic music exhibition at the Science Museum. You know when you're getting old when your past shows up in museum exhibits. I felt a wave of temporal displacement on seeing, in a glass case, the same model of synthesiser (a VCS3 from Peter Zinovieff's Electronic Music Studios) which I used in 1976 to create electronic music and effects for a school production of Dr Faustus. My supernatural sounds were a bit like the contemporary Dr Who music (mainly because the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used the same technology), but I'm still pleased with what I did back then. And that was all produced on a tape recorder (quarter-inch tape), using the three-head system to lay down multiple tracks one after the other ("sound-on-sound"), with no possibility of digital Undo, and cuts and joins being achieved with razor blade and sticky tape. So perhaps there has been some progress since the '70s.
Cognition: Episode 3, The Oracle. The tension is really cranking up on this great adventure game series, with a minor character from Episode 1 now taking centre stage and being revealed as the driving force behind much of what’s been going on. And the shock ending: whoa, I didn’t see that one coming! Can't wait to play the final episode.
Episodes, Series 3 - not the same satirical edge as the first two seasons, when the core jokes were about the culture clash of British writers compromising and being compromised by adapting their TV comedy for Hollywood. But the scripting and the acting is still razor sharp, acid black, and laugh-out-loud funny.
The Pallisers - TV drama from the 1974, which I missed at the time but featured in the BBC2 50th birthday celebrations. Watching some further episodes on YouTube, I was gripped by the quality of the writing and acting, especially Philip Latham as the stiff but fundamentally decent and morally upright Plantagenet Palliser, and Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons as the more wayward men of the younger generation. Was it this partnering of Andrews and Irons which gave someone the idea of putting them together again in 'Brideshead Revisited'?
Brideshead Revisited - TV drama from 1981, watched on DVD, inspired by the above. Again, I never watched it properly on first transmission; working in a university as I was during the Thatcher-yuppie era, it was a political embarrassment and irritant to have university life depicted as endless round of decadent self-indulgence - which was what most people seemed to take from the show. At this distance in time, I have the patience to take in and appreciate the whole story arc and the ways in which its sad and tragic direction (with the tiniest final hint of redemption) is anticipated from the outset - in particular when Cara in Venice predicts Sebastian's self-destruction. What a great period for long-form TV dramas the 1980s was, just checking the DVD box sets we've bought in the last couple of years: not only Brideshead but Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Beiderbecke Affair, and A Very Peculiar Practice, not to mention Fortunes of War and Edge of Darkness.
Gypsy Fever - performing at the QuecumBar, Battersea, London, a couple of the band members being good friends. A great evening: infectiously energetic music, delivered with style and brio.
Stanley Spencer Gallery - the current exhibition including the enormous and uncompleted Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. Three things I learned about Spencer from this exhibition: (1) how good and striking his naturalistic paintings and portraits are, though he's more famous for his stylised forms; (2) when he painted biblical scenes set in contemporary Cookham, he'd already left the town, so for him Cookham was the past, his childhood; (3) in many of his paintings (Christ carrying his cross, the arrival of stretchers at a military hospital), he deliberately doesn't paint the suffering one might expect, which is either transcendence or denial. (I’ve seen many people for whom I’d suspect the latter, but I think in Spencer's case it genuinely was the former: finding the moment of peace, the still centre, in a situation of horror – as in, even more conspicuously, Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Crowned with Thorns, memorably discussed by Pamela Tudor-Craig in The Secret Life of Paintings.)
GTech multi - video review by Techmoan. A model of a self-produced video review: seemingly casual, but sharply focused with not a wasted minute, and professional quality shooting and editing. I wonder how much experience, practice and failed attempts lie behind such a fine final product.
The Exponential Horn – exhibition at The Science Museum, reconstructing the huge (27 foot) loudspeaker horn built in 1929 to provide the best possible sound reproduction - quite a novelty for a public accustomed to crackly and tinny wireless. Apparently they used to come there and eat their sandwiches while listening to the midday music broadcasts, so I timed my own visit to coincide with the live feed from the Radio 3 lunchtime concert. A less spectacular experience than I'd hoped; I suppose high-fidelity (as we used to say) reproduction is something we take for granted nowadays, and I was more conscious of the contribution of the original recording (they also played BBC archive extracts from the 1930s) and the acoustic characteristics of the gallery to the perceived sound. A worthwhile reconstruction to have made, though, offering a connection back to another time.
Electronic music exhibition at the Science Museum. You know when you're getting old when your past shows up in museum exhibits. I felt a wave of temporal displacement on seeing, in a glass case, the same model of synthesiser (a VCS3 from Peter Zinovieff's Electronic Music Studios) which I used in 1976 to create electronic music and effects for a school production of Dr Faustus. My supernatural sounds were a bit like the contemporary Dr Who music (mainly because the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used the same technology), but I'm still pleased with what I did back then. And that was all produced on a tape recorder (quarter-inch tape), using the three-head system to lay down multiple tracks one after the other ("sound-on-sound"), with no possibility of digital Undo, and cuts and joins being achieved with razor blade and sticky tape. So perhaps there has been some progress since the '70s.
Cognition: Episode 3, The Oracle. The tension is really cranking up on this great adventure game series, with a minor character from Episode 1 now taking centre stage and being revealed as the driving force behind much of what’s been going on. And the shock ending: whoa, I didn’t see that one coming! Can't wait to play the final episode.
Friday, 6 June 2014
Seen and heard: May 2014
The Grand Budapest Hotel - lovely and crafty Wes Anderson film, its surreal visual inventiveness reminding me of the films of former animators such as Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Beautiful emotionally-grounding performances too from Ralph Fiennes and the unknown Tony Revolori, as the concierge and his young protege.
Voice - an episode from Series 5 of The Digital Human audio series from the BBC, presented by Alex Krotoski. The other episodes I've found only moderately interesting, but this one was founded on the obvious-only-when-you're-told-it insight that while social media are dominated by text, pictures and video, the exchange of audio (with the important exception of music) is far less significant. Why is speaking less important as a means of self-expression in the digital world? Discuss.
Talk the Talk trailer - promotional video for a FutureLearn MOOC about giving presentations, whose production I've been overseeing. Interestingly in the light of the above entry (Voice), the team have focussed on the speaking aspect of presentation, so that the course doesn't become just a primer in designing PowerPoint presentations. Great trailer, and it looks like being a great course; well done Mirjam, Helene, Marshall, Bill, Lee - and especially Liz, who's been holding it all together.
Cognition, Episode 2 The Wise Monkey - it's been a year since I played Episode 1, but I dropped back in to the "later the same night" continuation as though I'd never been away. Once again, great voice acting and very good gameplay, with clever use of Erica's psychic powers, as you take her on the trail of another serial killer. I was going to take Episodes 3 and 4 on holiday, but annoyingly they're not available on the iPad; I'll just have to play them on PC.
Stephen Cleobury training day for Polymnia, the choir in which I sing - great value, with the bonus of singing afterwards in King's College Chapel, as he encouraged us to higher standards of precision in tone production, vowel sounds, and continuity of melodic line (we were doing Renaissance polyphony). His advice included: if your part has got something interesting, let people know about it; if your part has got something ordinary, find a way to make it interesting. Good advice too for writers of teaching materials; it never occurred to me before how much the two activities have in common.
BBC Young Musician of the Year - the instrumental finals and overall final on TV. We had trouble understanding some of the judges' choices of winners, but there was no disputing the merits of the pianist (Martin James Bartlett) who won, and the percussionist (Elliott Gaston-Ross) who was our second choice. Astonishing to see such evident musicianship in performers so young (ages 17 and 15 respectively). There was also welcome encouragement and reward for approaching music-making in a collaborative spirit; perhaps the days of the egocentric soloist are coming to an end.
The Story of Women and Art - BBC TV series, presented by Amanda Vickery. There's a feminist political message, of course, but fundamentally this is about some great pieces of art which truly opened up new or different ways of seeing and representing the world - making their obscurity and occlusion all the more tragic. (There were several pieces which she had to call up from storage to make the programmes, because the galleries didn't think them worth having on display.) I found the final programme, on six influential women artists and designers from the 19th and 20th centuries, the most inspirational and the most moving.
The Circle, by Dave Eggers - interesting new novel, right of the moment. The Circle is a globally hegemonic digital company, like a combination of Google, Facebook and Twitter, seen through the eyes of a young woman who joins it full of excitement, initially at least completely buying into its vision of total data integration and universal connectivity. The arguments for its utopian programme are persuasively put forward by the company's leaders: total transparency of data, they claim, will end crime, oppression and political corruption. But right from the beginning there are hints that things are not going to be so unremittingly positive, outside the cult-like atmosphere of The Circle and its Circlers. (As well as the Moonies, The Circle reminds me very much of the glass city of continuous mutual surveillance in Vevgeny Zamyatin's We, the original dystopian novel; even its slogans - "Secrets are lies", "Sharing is caring" and "Privacy is theft" - sound Orwellian.)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Northern Ballet Theatre at Milton Keynes Theatre. Northern Ballet always deliver value for money (as I console myself, when hesitating over the price of tickets), but this was especially wonderful, with the Dream set into the story of a ballet company, riven with conflicts and tensions, whose collective dreaming on an overnight sleeper train brings them resolution and healing. The Ballet Master, who becomes Puck in the Dream, was a truly magical character, appropriately lithe and spirit-like in his movements, in both roles bringing about change and transformation with his staff, like Hermes.
Botanicula - wordless graphic adventure game from the Samorost team, who also produced Machinarium; in this, a team of little tree-dwelling creatures try to save their environment from destruction by a venomous predator. Endlessly inventive, with great visual and aural jokes and gags. It works beautifully on the iPad too.
9 Elefants - puzzle game, set in Paris. I suppose it's good to keep the brain active, and the hot jazz soundtrack keeps things buzzing along, but I'm not enjoying it so much now that I'm half way through and the puzzles are starting to get more difficult.
Music in the Mountains festival - based in the Alpujarra region of Spain, where it has run for some years thanks to the energetic organisation of musician and Alexander teacher Cat Jury. Polymnia, the choir in which I sing, gave three concerts under the Festival's auspices: in Granada Cathedral, the Cuevas de Nerja, and the church of Mecina. An admirable feature of the festival is that Cat makes sure the visiting musicians bring trade to local businesses; so as well as the Hotel de Mecina Fondales, we ate at the three local bars (the bar Aljibe, the Cuevas de la Mora Luna, and El Baranquillo) - as well as the beautifully located Chiringuito (Casa Emilio) on the seafront at Salobreña after our Nerja concert. The Archbishop of Granada publicly invited us to return to his Cathedral for another concert, and we'll be happy to do so.
Alhambra palace - the must-see site, which we duly visited on the afternoon of our Granada concert. Having seen it so much in pictures and on television, it was hardly a surprise (though the walking distances required to get through the gardens were daunting), but still very beautiful and impressive in its scale.
Bernard Rudofsky exhibition, at a gallery in Granada, just by the cathedral - filling in a spare half hour between the Alhambra and our rehearsal. His classic work, it seems, was called Architecture without Architects, and he sought to bring the humane qualities of folk design and construction back into the professional world. Interesting chance discovery.
Voice - an episode from Series 5 of The Digital Human audio series from the BBC, presented by Alex Krotoski. The other episodes I've found only moderately interesting, but this one was founded on the obvious-only-when-you're-told-it insight that while social media are dominated by text, pictures and video, the exchange of audio (with the important exception of music) is far less significant. Why is speaking less important as a means of self-expression in the digital world? Discuss.
Talk the Talk trailer - promotional video for a FutureLearn MOOC about giving presentations, whose production I've been overseeing. Interestingly in the light of the above entry (Voice), the team have focussed on the speaking aspect of presentation, so that the course doesn't become just a primer in designing PowerPoint presentations. Great trailer, and it looks like being a great course; well done Mirjam, Helene, Marshall, Bill, Lee - and especially Liz, who's been holding it all together.
Cognition, Episode 2 The Wise Monkey - it's been a year since I played Episode 1, but I dropped back in to the "later the same night" continuation as though I'd never been away. Once again, great voice acting and very good gameplay, with clever use of Erica's psychic powers, as you take her on the trail of another serial killer. I was going to take Episodes 3 and 4 on holiday, but annoyingly they're not available on the iPad; I'll just have to play them on PC.
Stephen Cleobury training day for Polymnia, the choir in which I sing - great value, with the bonus of singing afterwards in King's College Chapel, as he encouraged us to higher standards of precision in tone production, vowel sounds, and continuity of melodic line (we were doing Renaissance polyphony). His advice included: if your part has got something interesting, let people know about it; if your part has got something ordinary, find a way to make it interesting. Good advice too for writers of teaching materials; it never occurred to me before how much the two activities have in common.
BBC Young Musician of the Year - the instrumental finals and overall final on TV. We had trouble understanding some of the judges' choices of winners, but there was no disputing the merits of the pianist (Martin James Bartlett) who won, and the percussionist (Elliott Gaston-Ross) who was our second choice. Astonishing to see such evident musicianship in performers so young (ages 17 and 15 respectively). There was also welcome encouragement and reward for approaching music-making in a collaborative spirit; perhaps the days of the egocentric soloist are coming to an end.
The Story of Women and Art - BBC TV series, presented by Amanda Vickery. There's a feminist political message, of course, but fundamentally this is about some great pieces of art which truly opened up new or different ways of seeing and representing the world - making their obscurity and occlusion all the more tragic. (There were several pieces which she had to call up from storage to make the programmes, because the galleries didn't think them worth having on display.) I found the final programme, on six influential women artists and designers from the 19th and 20th centuries, the most inspirational and the most moving.
The Circle, by Dave Eggers - interesting new novel, right of the moment. The Circle is a globally hegemonic digital company, like a combination of Google, Facebook and Twitter, seen through the eyes of a young woman who joins it full of excitement, initially at least completely buying into its vision of total data integration and universal connectivity. The arguments for its utopian programme are persuasively put forward by the company's leaders: total transparency of data, they claim, will end crime, oppression and political corruption. But right from the beginning there are hints that things are not going to be so unremittingly positive, outside the cult-like atmosphere of The Circle and its Circlers. (As well as the Moonies, The Circle reminds me very much of the glass city of continuous mutual surveillance in Vevgeny Zamyatin's We, the original dystopian novel; even its slogans - "Secrets are lies", "Sharing is caring" and "Privacy is theft" - sound Orwellian.)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Northern Ballet Theatre at Milton Keynes Theatre. Northern Ballet always deliver value for money (as I console myself, when hesitating over the price of tickets), but this was especially wonderful, with the Dream set into the story of a ballet company, riven with conflicts and tensions, whose collective dreaming on an overnight sleeper train brings them resolution and healing. The Ballet Master, who becomes Puck in the Dream, was a truly magical character, appropriately lithe and spirit-like in his movements, in both roles bringing about change and transformation with his staff, like Hermes.
Botanicula - wordless graphic adventure game from the Samorost team, who also produced Machinarium; in this, a team of little tree-dwelling creatures try to save their environment from destruction by a venomous predator. Endlessly inventive, with great visual and aural jokes and gags. It works beautifully on the iPad too.
9 Elefants - puzzle game, set in Paris. I suppose it's good to keep the brain active, and the hot jazz soundtrack keeps things buzzing along, but I'm not enjoying it so much now that I'm half way through and the puzzles are starting to get more difficult.
Music in the Mountains festival - based in the Alpujarra region of Spain, where it has run for some years thanks to the energetic organisation of musician and Alexander teacher Cat Jury. Polymnia, the choir in which I sing, gave three concerts under the Festival's auspices: in Granada Cathedral, the Cuevas de Nerja, and the church of Mecina. An admirable feature of the festival is that Cat makes sure the visiting musicians bring trade to local businesses; so as well as the Hotel de Mecina Fondales, we ate at the three local bars (the bar Aljibe, the Cuevas de la Mora Luna, and El Baranquillo) - as well as the beautifully located Chiringuito (Casa Emilio) on the seafront at Salobreña after our Nerja concert. The Archbishop of Granada publicly invited us to return to his Cathedral for another concert, and we'll be happy to do so.
Alhambra palace - the must-see site, which we duly visited on the afternoon of our Granada concert. Having seen it so much in pictures and on television, it was hardly a surprise (though the walking distances required to get through the gardens were daunting), but still very beautiful and impressive in its scale.
Bernard Rudofsky exhibition, at a gallery in Granada, just by the cathedral - filling in a spare half hour between the Alhambra and our rehearsal. His classic work, it seems, was called Architecture without Architects, and he sought to bring the humane qualities of folk design and construction back into the professional world. Interesting chance discovery.
Wednesday, 4 June 2014
Cuttings: May 2014
Net Neutrality in pictures - referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. 'Valiant attempt to explain something that most politicians don’t appear to get.'
Thomas Piketty's Capital: everything you need to know about the surprise bestseller - Paul Mason article in The Guardian 29 April 2014 ‘That capitalism is unfair has been said before. But it is the way Thomas Piketty says it – subtly but with relentless logic – that has sent rightwing economics into a frenzy, both here and in the US.... Piketty's argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. So the fact that rich kids can swan aimlessly from gap year to internship to a job at father's bank / ministry / TV network – while the poor kids sweat into their barista uniforms – is not an accident: it is the system working normally. If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, "dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labour by a wide margin", says Piketty. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.’
The Big Beasts who Shaped the BBC, Charlotte Higgins article in The Guardian, 15 May 2014, ‘It was Reith's great achievement to shape the pragmatic decisions that went into the creation of the BBC into an ideology, which he outlined in 1924 in his book Broadcast Over Britain. The BBC's powers as an educative tool were sketched out ("to have exploited so great a scientific invention for the purpose and pursuit of 'entertainment' alone would have been a prostitution of its powers and an insult to the character and intelligence of the people"). It was activated as an equalising, democratic force: "It carries direct information on a hundred subjects to innumerable men and women who will after a short time be in a position to make up their own minds on many matters of vital moment." (Reith importantly invoked women, newly enfranchised.) "The whole service … may be taken as the expression of a new and better relationship between man and man," he wrote, a wonderfully hopeful thing to say. Its purpose was, he declared, to carry "the best of everything into the greatest number of homes". This ringing statement has been refined and rethought over the years – as in Huw Wheldon's famous chiasmus about making the good popular and the popular good. As a founding idea, it lies deep in the BBC's psyche. Hall himself referred to it in his first speech as DG in October 2013. "At the core of the BBC's role is something very simple, very democratic and very important – to bring the best to everyone," he said.’
The art of noise: how music recording has changed over the decades - article by Christopher Fox in The Guardian, 17 May 2014. '[Today] listening [to music] at home is ... trouble-free, a laptop and headphones doing away with the need for all those records, cassettes, CDs, turntables, amplifiers, wires and speakers. So much time filled, so much space saved; never before has music been so available and yet so immaterial. Perhaps it's this immateriality that has provoked a revival of interest in older audio technologies, in ways of recording and listening that involve something more tangible than a stream of digital code. Tellingly, this is a revival led by people too young to have used these technologies when they were state of the art.... It's this generation that is buying vinyl, and it's musicians of the same generation who are making the records, experimenting with tape recorders and enthusing about analogue sound.'
How people spend their time online, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. Chart, based on 2013 data from 5000 Americans, age 18-64. 'Some interesting aspects: note how important email still is, despite all the talk about social networking. Note that online newspapers and magazines together only add up to the same time consumption as blogs or internet radio.'
Diary: first person account of psychosis - referenced in MindHacks blog. 'I met a woman called Margaret in Fairmile hospital. I assumed she was my link to the politician with the same first name. She explained periods to me. I wondered if the PM was angry with me for writing a story saying she deserved to hang for sinking the Belgrano. I tried to manoeuvre Margaret around to the front of the hospital so that a Rolls could pull in off the main road and take me to Mrs Thatcher. She didn’t seem very willing to comply. The shrink had been watching me and asked why I looked up at the sky when helicopters flew over. They were sent by Francis Pym to rescue me. Despite the massive grounds around the Victorian building the choppers never seemed to land. I soon realised I would do six months unless I staged a recovery. I stopped looking at helicopters and after only three months I was free.'
Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain) - article in The Atlantic, referenced in MindHacks blog. 'Someone points out something and suddenly a secondary interpretation of an image appears. There's something a little scary about this process, even when the images are harmless. We have a flash of insight and a new pattern is revealed hiding within the world we thought we knew. It surprises us. Ah! That's not a vine, that's a snake! That's an LG logo. NO—it's Pac-Man! But usually the image hasn't changed; only what we think about it has. What's going on here?'
Still running Windows XP? That's the way Bill Gates planned it - Observer article by John Naughton, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. 'On 8 April this year Microsoft released its final free security patch for XP. From now on, anyone wishing to obtain security upgrades for the system will have to enter into an expensive ($200 a desktop) deal with Microsoft.... In this country, the government has hundreds of thousands of PCs running XP. And of the 800,000 PCs in the NHS about three-quarters are running it. In those circumstances, the news that Her Majesty's government has forked out £5.5m for one year's cover looks like a rare example of government doing the prudent thing. But in reality it has just bought time: the awful moment when the public sector has to upgrade its computers is approaching inexorably. Think of it as technology's equivalent to the Scottish referendum.'
Politics or technhology – which will save the world? - article by David Runciman in The Guardian 23 May 2014, being extracts from his book Politics, from a series Ideas in Profile. 'The advent of widespread mobile phone ownership has allowed some of the world's poorest citizens to wriggle free from the trap of failed government. In countries that lack basic infrastructure – an accessible transport network, a reliable legal system, a usable banking sector – phones enable people to create their own networks of ownership and exchange…. But it would be a mistake to overstate what phones can do. They won't rescue anyone from civil war. …. In the end, only politics can rescue you from bad politics.' 'In the developed world, impatience with politics takes another form. We don't look to technology to rescue us from failed states. We look to it to rescue us from overbearing ones. Politics in the west can appear bloated and stale. By contrast, the tech world looks dynamic, flexible and exciting. It invents stuff all the time.... These failures [of government IT projects] help breed contempt for politicians not only among citizens but from the tech industry, which often assumes that government is simply an obstacle to be overcome, an analogue annoyance in a digital world. But there are some things the tech industry doesn't understand very well. Its blind spots include the story of its own origins. There would be no tech industry on the scale we know it today without government. This is not simply because every industry needs stable and reliable political institutions to uphold the property rights on which its dynamism depends…. It is because government investment is what made the information technology revolution possible in the first place.'
Twelve ways to fix British politics – column by Suzanne Moore in The Guardian, 28 May 2014. '3. The so-called "professionalising" of politics is widely despised. No one should become an MP without having done other jobs. The media doesn't count as a job!... 4. No one should stand for a seat in a place to which they have no connection. Why on earth should ambitious Londoners be helicoptered into safe seats? I have heard talk that the standard of MPs would drop if it were left to local talent alone. Yes, really. 5. Language: the terrible fear of actually saying something results in verbless slogans and expensive logos. Hardworking Britain Better Off, for instance, appears as if it were the result of a brainstorming session that had to be abandoned halfway through as a fire alarm went off. The making up of new phrases should always ring alarm bells. If you can't tell voters who you are and what you want to do with the pre-existing vocabulary and vernacular of the entire English language, surely that's not good.'
Thomas Piketty's Capital: everything you need to know about the surprise bestseller - Paul Mason article in The Guardian 29 April 2014 ‘That capitalism is unfair has been said before. But it is the way Thomas Piketty says it – subtly but with relentless logic – that has sent rightwing economics into a frenzy, both here and in the US.... Piketty's argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. So the fact that rich kids can swan aimlessly from gap year to internship to a job at father's bank / ministry / TV network – while the poor kids sweat into their barista uniforms – is not an accident: it is the system working normally. If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, "dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labour by a wide margin", says Piketty. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.’
The Big Beasts who Shaped the BBC, Charlotte Higgins article in The Guardian, 15 May 2014, ‘It was Reith's great achievement to shape the pragmatic decisions that went into the creation of the BBC into an ideology, which he outlined in 1924 in his book Broadcast Over Britain. The BBC's powers as an educative tool were sketched out ("to have exploited so great a scientific invention for the purpose and pursuit of 'entertainment' alone would have been a prostitution of its powers and an insult to the character and intelligence of the people"). It was activated as an equalising, democratic force: "It carries direct information on a hundred subjects to innumerable men and women who will after a short time be in a position to make up their own minds on many matters of vital moment." (Reith importantly invoked women, newly enfranchised.) "The whole service … may be taken as the expression of a new and better relationship between man and man," he wrote, a wonderfully hopeful thing to say. Its purpose was, he declared, to carry "the best of everything into the greatest number of homes". This ringing statement has been refined and rethought over the years – as in Huw Wheldon's famous chiasmus about making the good popular and the popular good. As a founding idea, it lies deep in the BBC's psyche. Hall himself referred to it in his first speech as DG in October 2013. "At the core of the BBC's role is something very simple, very democratic and very important – to bring the best to everyone," he said.’
The art of noise: how music recording has changed over the decades - article by Christopher Fox in The Guardian, 17 May 2014. '[Today] listening [to music] at home is ... trouble-free, a laptop and headphones doing away with the need for all those records, cassettes, CDs, turntables, amplifiers, wires and speakers. So much time filled, so much space saved; never before has music been so available and yet so immaterial. Perhaps it's this immateriality that has provoked a revival of interest in older audio technologies, in ways of recording and listening that involve something more tangible than a stream of digital code. Tellingly, this is a revival led by people too young to have used these technologies when they were state of the art.... It's this generation that is buying vinyl, and it's musicians of the same generation who are making the records, experimenting with tape recorders and enthusing about analogue sound.'
How people spend their time online, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. Chart, based on 2013 data from 5000 Americans, age 18-64. 'Some interesting aspects: note how important email still is, despite all the talk about social networking. Note that online newspapers and magazines together only add up to the same time consumption as blogs or internet radio.'
Diary: first person account of psychosis - referenced in MindHacks blog. 'I met a woman called Margaret in Fairmile hospital. I assumed she was my link to the politician with the same first name. She explained periods to me. I wondered if the PM was angry with me for writing a story saying she deserved to hang for sinking the Belgrano. I tried to manoeuvre Margaret around to the front of the hospital so that a Rolls could pull in off the main road and take me to Mrs Thatcher. She didn’t seem very willing to comply. The shrink had been watching me and asked why I looked up at the sky when helicopters flew over. They were sent by Francis Pym to rescue me. Despite the massive grounds around the Victorian building the choppers never seemed to land. I soon realised I would do six months unless I staged a recovery. I stopped looking at helicopters and after only three months I was free.'
Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain) - article in The Atlantic, referenced in MindHacks blog. 'Someone points out something and suddenly a secondary interpretation of an image appears. There's something a little scary about this process, even when the images are harmless. We have a flash of insight and a new pattern is revealed hiding within the world we thought we knew. It surprises us. Ah! That's not a vine, that's a snake! That's an LG logo. NO—it's Pac-Man! But usually the image hasn't changed; only what we think about it has. What's going on here?'
Still running Windows XP? That's the way Bill Gates planned it - Observer article by John Naughton, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. 'On 8 April this year Microsoft released its final free security patch for XP. From now on, anyone wishing to obtain security upgrades for the system will have to enter into an expensive ($200 a desktop) deal with Microsoft.... In this country, the government has hundreds of thousands of PCs running XP. And of the 800,000 PCs in the NHS about three-quarters are running it. In those circumstances, the news that Her Majesty's government has forked out £5.5m for one year's cover looks like a rare example of government doing the prudent thing. But in reality it has just bought time: the awful moment when the public sector has to upgrade its computers is approaching inexorably. Think of it as technology's equivalent to the Scottish referendum.'
Politics or technhology – which will save the world? - article by David Runciman in The Guardian 23 May 2014, being extracts from his book Politics, from a series Ideas in Profile. 'The advent of widespread mobile phone ownership has allowed some of the world's poorest citizens to wriggle free from the trap of failed government. In countries that lack basic infrastructure – an accessible transport network, a reliable legal system, a usable banking sector – phones enable people to create their own networks of ownership and exchange…. But it would be a mistake to overstate what phones can do. They won't rescue anyone from civil war. …. In the end, only politics can rescue you from bad politics.' 'In the developed world, impatience with politics takes another form. We don't look to technology to rescue us from failed states. We look to it to rescue us from overbearing ones. Politics in the west can appear bloated and stale. By contrast, the tech world looks dynamic, flexible and exciting. It invents stuff all the time.... These failures [of government IT projects] help breed contempt for politicians not only among citizens but from the tech industry, which often assumes that government is simply an obstacle to be overcome, an analogue annoyance in a digital world. But there are some things the tech industry doesn't understand very well. Its blind spots include the story of its own origins. There would be no tech industry on the scale we know it today without government. This is not simply because every industry needs stable and reliable political institutions to uphold the property rights on which its dynamism depends…. It is because government investment is what made the information technology revolution possible in the first place.'
Twelve ways to fix British politics – column by Suzanne Moore in The Guardian, 28 May 2014. '3. The so-called "professionalising" of politics is widely despised. No one should become an MP without having done other jobs. The media doesn't count as a job!... 4. No one should stand for a seat in a place to which they have no connection. Why on earth should ambitious Londoners be helicoptered into safe seats? I have heard talk that the standard of MPs would drop if it were left to local talent alone. Yes, really. 5. Language: the terrible fear of actually saying something results in verbless slogans and expensive logos. Hardworking Britain Better Off, for instance, appears as if it were the result of a brainstorming session that had to be abandoned halfway through as a fire alarm went off. The making up of new phrases should always ring alarm bells. If you can't tell voters who you are and what you want to do with the pre-existing vocabulary and vernacular of the entire English language, surely that's not good.'
Monday, 26 May 2014
How Costa prompts feedback
One difficulty, when asking for any kind of feedback, is to prompt people to think without pre-disposing them in any particular direction. Another is to get them to give positive feedback, instead of only giving feedback when they've a complaint to make! What Costa have done - as part of the poster design, not the overt message - is to provide a set of stems, so that they tacitly suggest ways you might start your feedback while leaving the actual feedback up to you.
The stems include: "We found ...", "We were ...", "I wish ...", "Glad to see ...", "Thank you for ...", "Hope it ...", "I really felt ...", "Could you ...", "Really enjoyed ...".
This reminded me of Andrew Ravenscroft's Academic Talk / InterLoc project, which experimented with an online discussion interface which forced students to contribute to the discussion using one of a limited set of stems. (For example: “I think that…”, “I disagree because…”, “Is there any evidence that…”, “Why do you think that…”.) Interestingly, students found the constraint of their responses didn't inhibit them but actually enabled them to engage in more and deeper discussion.
I like Costa, so I hope the poster works just as well for them. My own feedback: great graphic design, and a model of customer engagement!
Reference
Simon McAlister, Andrew Ravenscroft, Eileen Scanlon, “Combining interaction and context design to support collaborative argumentation using a tool for synchronous CMC”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 20 (2004), pp 194-204.
Share and enjoy
The draft text for some course materials I was producing included a section called "Share and enjoy". In a meeting for last minute editorial revisions, one of my colleagues proposed that the section heading should be changed because "Share and enjoy" was naff. I observed that a stronger reason for changing it was its use in Douglas Adams' 'Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. The blank faces around me suggested that this media reference wasn't as well-known as I'd thought, so it's worth exposition here.
It comes from the second series - Fit the Ninth, to be precise - which wasn't represented in the TV series or the film, which is probably why it's not as familiar as, for example, Vogon poetry, or Life, the Universe and Everything.
Reference
Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts (London and Sydney: Pan Books, 1985), pp 176-77.
It comes from the second series - Fit the Ninth, to be precise - which wasn't represented in the TV series or the film, which is probably why it's not as familiar as, for example, Vogon poetry, or Life, the Universe and Everything.
NARRATOR: 'Share and Enjoy' is, of course, the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to show a consistent profit in recent years.Once again, I'm astounded at the prescience of Douglas Adams. At a time when most commentators were forecasting either techno-utopia or techno-dystopia, he foresaw technology being used in the service of corporate blah, of marketing and PR. This is a universe in which the lifts not only welcome you but refer you to other buildings containing lifts produced by the same manufacturer, where the shoe companies use techno-military hardware to enforce sales of their unsatisfactory footware, and where the drinks machines threateningly command you, as they dispense their disgusting liquids, to "enjoy your drink". Yes, he saw the future all right.
The motto stands - or stood - in three mile high illuminated letters near the complaints department spaceport on Eadrax - 'Share and Enjoy'.
Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the underground offices of many talented young complaints executives - now deceased. The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read 'Go stick your head in a pig' and are no longer illuminated except at times of special celebration.
Reference
Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts (London and Sydney: Pan Books, 1985), pp 176-77.
Saturday, 17 May 2014
Investigation is the game
Realistic scenarios are a powerful way of teaching practice-based subjects, such as education, health care, social care, and business management. The difficulty with embodying them in teaching materials is how to provide feedback to the learner. You want them to make their own interpretations of rich and complex practice information and possibly come up with reasoned conclusions about possible courses of action; but how do you make sure that their thinking is along the right lines?
The simplest way of enabling learners to check their own thinking is a multiple-choice quiz, where you get learners to make a decision, selecting from a list of options, and then give them some kind of feedback on their answer. The problem with the multiple-choice format is that you have to include the right or optimal answer in the option list. Doesn't this make things too easy for the learner, by removing the need for them to think up the answer for themselves?
I've already commented on a multiple-choice scenario on OpenLearn, based on Richard Feynman's investigation of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. In this scenario, none of the choices are absolutely wrong and none are indisputably right; the learning comes from the carefully-written feedback which discusses the pros and cons of each. But sometimes there are particular answers you want learners to give, or particular things you want to make sure they've grasped before they move on. How do you test learners' understanding and interpretive powers in such a scenario?
I've recently played two adventure games which deal with this problem directly. Both are detective stories, so just as in a professional practice scenario your basic activities are those of gathering information, making inferences, coming to conclusions and justifying them by evidence.
The first game is Detective Grimoire, which despite its cartoon graphics and comedy setting actually supports some quite sophisticated reasoning. At various points in the investigation, you need to advance the story by following through the Detective's train of thought. For example, near the start of the game, just after meeting a mysterious little girl, he reflects that Boggy's Bog, the tourist attraction where the murder took place, seems to be in the middle of nowhere: to reach it, his sidekick Officer James has had to take him on a long boat journey through a swamp. Where does this thought lead? To answer, you need to drag-and-drop four multiple-choice elements to form a sentence.
Slot 1 options: That little girl / Boggy’s Bog the tourist attraction / The murder / The swamp / Officer James / My beard / My hat / Our boat
Slot 2 options: is too stupid for / is far too remote for / isn't warm enough for / is way too big for
Slot 3 options: (as Slot 1)
Slot 4 options: to have happened / to make any money / to be so smart / to murder someone
In keeping with the cartoon setting, most of the possible combinations are ridiculous (for example: "My beard it too stupid for the murder to have happened", and Detective Grimoire will tell you so if you select them. If you select the right combination ("The swamp is far too remote for Boggy's Bog the tourist attraction to make any money"), the story can move on. You could find the right combination by trial and error, but the number of possible combinations is so large you'd do better to try to work it out. (If you get three out of four of the options right, Detective Grimoire gives you an encouraging response.)
The second game is Cognition, which has a very different feel. You play Erica Reed, an FBI agent with psychic powers, who in the first episode is investigating a hanging murder which leads to the trail of a serial killer. Near the beginning, Erica investigates the crime scene, using her special powers as well as talking to the other specialists, before being summoned by her boss Davies to give a report. After each of Davies's questions, you get a series of options for Erica's reply. There's nothing difficult about giving the right answers; the purpose of this interaction within the game is to make sure that you've understood the situation before you're allowed to move on.
The simplest way of enabling learners to check their own thinking is a multiple-choice quiz, where you get learners to make a decision, selecting from a list of options, and then give them some kind of feedback on their answer. The problem with the multiple-choice format is that you have to include the right or optimal answer in the option list. Doesn't this make things too easy for the learner, by removing the need for them to think up the answer for themselves?
I've already commented on a multiple-choice scenario on OpenLearn, based on Richard Feynman's investigation of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. In this scenario, none of the choices are absolutely wrong and none are indisputably right; the learning comes from the carefully-written feedback which discusses the pros and cons of each. But sometimes there are particular answers you want learners to give, or particular things you want to make sure they've grasped before they move on. How do you test learners' understanding and interpretive powers in such a scenario?
I've recently played two adventure games which deal with this problem directly. Both are detective stories, so just as in a professional practice scenario your basic activities are those of gathering information, making inferences, coming to conclusions and justifying them by evidence.
The first game is Detective Grimoire, which despite its cartoon graphics and comedy setting actually supports some quite sophisticated reasoning. At various points in the investigation, you need to advance the story by following through the Detective's train of thought. For example, near the start of the game, just after meeting a mysterious little girl, he reflects that Boggy's Bog, the tourist attraction where the murder took place, seems to be in the middle of nowhere: to reach it, his sidekick Officer James has had to take him on a long boat journey through a swamp. Where does this thought lead? To answer, you need to drag-and-drop four multiple-choice elements to form a sentence.
Slot 2 options: is too stupid for / is far too remote for / isn't warm enough for / is way too big for
Slot 3 options: (as Slot 1)
Slot 4 options: to have happened / to make any money / to be so smart / to murder someone
In keeping with the cartoon setting, most of the possible combinations are ridiculous (for example: "My beard it too stupid for the murder to have happened", and Detective Grimoire will tell you so if you select them. If you select the right combination ("The swamp is far too remote for Boggy's Bog the tourist attraction to make any money"), the story can move on. You could find the right combination by trial and error, but the number of possible combinations is so large you'd do better to try to work it out. (If you get three out of four of the options right, Detective Grimoire gives you an encouraging response.)
The second game is Cognition, which has a very different feel. You play Erica Reed, an FBI agent with psychic powers, who in the first episode is investigating a hanging murder which leads to the trail of a serial killer. Near the beginning, Erica investigates the crime scene, using her special powers as well as talking to the other specialists, before being summoned by her boss Davies to give a report. After each of Davies's questions, you get a series of options for Erica's reply. There's nothing difficult about giving the right answers; the purpose of this interaction within the game is to make sure that you've understood the situation before you're allowed to move on.
Davies: Now what have you found? How did the victim die?
(1) Broken neck;
(2) Shot in the head;
(3) Suffocation.(Correct answer: 3.)
Davies: Who is our John Doe?
(1) Can’t identify, victim fingerprints have been skinned;
(2) Cannot identify, no fingerprints in the database;
(3) Al Williams.
(Correct answer: 2.)
Davies: Any leads on the killer?
In this first test, at the start of the game, there's no penalty for giving incorrect answers - except that Davies will giving Erica a telling off ("Just from standing here, I can see what a load of crap you told me!"). Towards the end of the game, however, there's another test in which correct answers are required. At this stage, Erica has assembled all the information she needs to crack the case. A photograph found at the crime scene leads her to re-open a previous case, the hanging of a women named Sarah Goodman, which was judged a suicide at the time, despite the protestations of her husband Robert who maintained that she was murdered. When she tracks him down, Robert recognises the new hanging victim, and with some help from Erica's psychic powers is able to recall his name: Antony Longmire, a worker on the Boston public transport system. Searching Longmire's apartment with her colleague Sully, Erica discovers a safe containing a collection of documents and photographs on a number of women: apart from Sarah, there are two others in Boston, three in New York, and three in Tennessee, all except one having died from hanging, with all but one case being judged to be suicide. By talking to Sully, Erica now has the opportunity to state her conclusion, and Sully will press her for details. If Erica gives a wrong answer at any point, Sully will say that he doesn't buy her explanation, and you have to start from the beginning again.(1) Terence has a lead based on DNA;
(2) The killer was smaller than the victim, the killer struggled with the hanging of the victim;
(3) There were fingerprints all over the place, we’ll be able to identify the killer soon.
(Correct answer: 2.)
While each question on its own could easily be answered by guesswork or eliminating the distractor options, the requirement to get all the answers right in sequence poses a significant challenge. Even if players only discover the correct answers from seeing them in the list of options, rather than working them out for themselves, still the question-and-answer format forces them to work through the detail of the story. In this way, the designers ensure that players understand what's going on before they proceed to the game's shocking denouement. Like the multiple choice sentence building in Detective Grimoire, this is a question-and answer structure which can easily be implemented in an online scenario, as a way of enabling learners to test their thinking and encouraging them into active learning rather than just reading their way through the materials.(1) Why did the killer change his pattern and kill a man?
(2) Sully, Antony Longmore was a killer!
(3) Sully, it’s Robert!
Erica: Sully, Antony Longmire was a killer!
Sully: You think? What’s our evidence?
(1) He worked at the train station;
(2) He was a lonely man;
(3) Those women from the safe are his victims.
Erica: Those women from the safe are his victims. He took those photographs, and he’s been doing it for years until someone stopped him last night. He was in Tennessee first, and then in New York. He killed these women, and he had a pattern.
(1) He kills in groups of two;
(2) He kills in groups of three;
(3) He kills in groups of four.
Erica: He kills in groups of three.
Sully: How do you know?
Erica: Two reasons.
(1) He was staying here;
(2) He was moving out soon.
Erica: He was moving out soon. And...
(1) He’s killed three victims in every state;
(2) He killed three victims in every state except New York.
Erica: He’s killed three victims in every state except for New York. Look at the boxes, You mentioned the landlord said he was moving out. He was done here, ready to go on to the next city. He killed in threes all the time.
Sully: But what happen in New York? Why is Nadia Schwartz still alive?
(1) Because of Emelie Karlsson;
(2) Nadia Schwartz was his accomplice;
(3) He was fired from the Transit Department.
Erica: Because of Emelie Karlsson’s case. They almost caught him. He fled New York before his work was done there, and he could never get to Nadia Schwartz. It’s clear even in the way he met his victims.
Sully: How?
(1) He was a photographer;
(2) He cleaned their lawns;
(3) He met them through public transportation.
Erica: He met them through public transportation. He worked there. That’s where he targeted his victims.
Sully: Yeah, yeah. You’re right! But if this piece of shit was done last night, killed in the same way he killed his victims, who killed him?
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