
Where are the learning environments that are just like games like Skyrim? - mikeleeorg
http://gettingsmart.com/blog/2011/11/skyrim-how-far-r-uu/
======
thenomad
Well, here's an idea for Skyrim: languages.

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.

~~~
qntm
This approach might be very useful once you've done some classroom work to
give you a running start. But seriously, without knowing _any_ of grammar,
word order, pronunciation rules, verb conjugation or vocabulary, you simply
cannot learn a language this way.

~~~
xiaoma
Why not? I've learned several languages to varying degrees as an adult, and
only had classroom instruction for three of them. I haven't used this method,
but I have gotten a great deal out of Chinese video games and I do know a
Finnish girl who has learned Japanese to a functional level almost entirely
through watching TV. She did some self study on the writing, but nothing
beyond what can be (and in fact is!) done in some children's edu games in
Japan.

Similarly, I have multiple friends who have learned Cantonese with no
classroom time at all.

~~~
qntm
Well, there's a bunch of mitigating circumstances there. You mentioned
classroom instruction for yourself. Many languages are similar so you could
have picked up one language quite easily because of its similarity to one you
knew already. You mentioned self study. A child (if that's what you mean by
"girl") is obviously going to pick up new languages faster than an adult. A
children's education game is obviously going to use slower, clearer, simpler
language specifically for the purposes of teaching the child. And without more
information, for all I know your Cantonese-speaking friends are actually
Chinese.

The main reason why I maintain that you do need some classroom time or
tutoring or book-learning is that we are adults now.

~~~
xiaoma
>A child (if that's what you mean by "girl")

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.

------
krallja
In games like Skyrim, I already do learn. For example, I can now identify
several different types of plant (potato, leek, cabbage) by their above-ground
shape and color. It's not tremendously useful, but I can imagine that this
sort of compressed pattern-matching experience could teach any sort of rote
memorization: periodic table, birdcalls, gross anatomy, musical chords,
geography, astronomy, run-time performance of algorithms, etc.... The hard
part is getting people to actually want to play your game, so that you can
"trick" them into learning.

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jerf
You can only interactively teach what you know how to make an interactive
environment for. That's the real problem, we're not very good at making
interactive environments, and we're _really_ good at making the interactive
environments look way more interesting than they actually are. See "through
the matrix" of an Elder Scrolls game and there isn't all that much behind the
graphics.

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.

~~~
karamazov
I'm not sure what you mean by interactive environments - there's actually a
lot going on behind the graphics of Elder Scrolls. E.g., in Oblivion, each NPC
exhibited goal-oriented behavior to better mimic what real-world people might
do, sometimes leading to amusing and unrealistic scenarios. There isn't a
highly developed physics engine in Elder Scrolls, but that's based on the
needs of the game; and there aren't lots of small parts to manage, but again,
that's based on the genre.

Do you have any other examples, real or hypothetical, of highly developed
interactive environments?

~~~
jerf
"in Oblivion, each NPC exhibited goal-oriented behavior to better mimic what
real-world people might do, sometimes leading to amusing and unrealistic
scenarios."

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.

~~~
5hoom
As mentioned by another comment look at the Assassins Creed games to see how
an interactive history lesson might look.

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.

------
choxi
"Legend of Zelda for literature"

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.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"And with that in mind, maybe games are already doing this."_

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?"

~~~
DilipJ
That's a great point. It is certainly possible to teach history through
interactive gaming.

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

~~~
stonemetal
There are several bridge building games, the oldest I can think of is called
Pontifex. In the original Pontifex when you went to test your bridge it would
dynamically color all of your beams according load and stresses and was my
first introduction to Statics and Dynamics. It gave me a chance to explore why
bridges are the way they are long before I learned calculus.

~~~
DilipJ
that's interesting. But I guess it's missing that fun factor...there has to
something else to it to attract the attention of kids

~~~
potatolicious
You don't have to lead players along by the nose - open-world games are
surprisingly attractive even to kids (maybe especially to kids, who haven't
yet been conditioned that everything needs to be structured with explicit
step-by-step goals).

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.

------
extension
It's hard enough to design a good game when the only constraint is that it has
to be fun. Designing a fun game that also covers an entire year of calculus
requires a stroke of genius. You have to find the fun that is _inherent in the
subject_. Unless you're the type of person who just naturally finds calculus
to be fun, it's unlikely you ever will.

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.

------
JabavuAdams
Remember that Skyrim's budget is probably something like 50-100 million
dollars.

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.

------
rit
Have we considered, frankly, the cost of a AAA title these days? IMDB
Estimates the budget of Skyrim at $100m
(<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814884/>). That isn't an unreasonable number –
there have been a number of recent games which hit that as well. Grand Theft
Auto IV had a budget estimated at $100m as well.

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.

------
matthias
X for math and Y for reading? Age 9 I obsessed over Civilization, Sim City,
Myst and the Journeyman Project. I distinctly remember playing these games and
wanting to "be smart", sitting at the computer with a dictionary in hand and a
jotter for working out puzzles. I have no doubt that the mastering of these
games played a significant role in my academic achievement.

------
tansey
At UT Austin, we've been building a 3-D interactive environment called Nero
[1] for some time now. The project's goal is to have an all-in-one, visually
appealing platform to teach and explain different concepts in AI. It was
started as a closed-source collaboration with a games company and has since
been rewritten as an open source project. I've been contributing to the
codebase for the last few months, so I have some experience here.

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.

[1] <http://opennero.googlecode.com>

------
bluedanieru
I love Skyrim, and in fact it has taken up way too much of my time over the
past week. And I will probably waste many days over the next few _years_ , if
Oblivion is any indication, both playing this and screwing around with making
mods. But the answer to this guy's question is really simple.

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

~~~
thebooktocome
"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."

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.

------
cshesse
<http://www.giantbomb.com/mindmaze/61-25465/>

