Playing with Reality at the Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum

I’ve just returned from the Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum (LEEF) in Harrisburg, PA. LEEF is a gathering dedicated to exploring games and simulations as tools for learning. It overlapped with Games + Learning + Society 7.0 in Madison, WI, and between the two twitter streams it was clear that excitement--and ideas--for using games to learn are still on the rise.

The opening keynote by Nathan Verrill, co-founder of Natron Baxter, set the tone for applied gaming as he pointed out that “For many people, fun is the f-word.” When we talk about bringing games or play into the classroom, there can be resistance on that very grounds--are we just just selling chocolate-coated broccoli? Why is there still a cultural trend towards fun and work as opposites that have to be tricked into coexisting?

The talk brought home some of the very tensions inherent in the forum’s name--learning and entertainment, two words that seem to imply different goals. To defeat that binary, conversations about educational technology, especially gaming, need to involve more people on all sides of the classroom. The games and ideas floating around LEEF definitely have uses for more educators and learners than the specialists conferences like this attract.

Some of the things I saw at LEEF, like the VirtuSphere, are still in their early stages. A ten foot hamster ball for “being” in virtual space is still too expensive (and odd) for general use. But the ideas surrounding the technology promise experiences that are nothing short of the Magic School Bus--for instance, imagine diving in to an artery and exploring it through a moving virtual reality set-up. Outside of VR, there’s already a case study game exploring that terrain: Immune Attack, a game on cell biology aimed at high school science students whose designers are currently working on gathering data on the game’s effectiveness at challenges like educating non-gamers.

This was just one of the cool technologies on our minds last week. Some were demos of tools, like the Resequence engine for serious and strategic games and simulations. Others were breaking in the news outside of LEEF, like the release of the development tools for Microsoft’s motion recogintion-based interface device Kinect. Even BuddyPress and CubePoints, the same platform I used for my gamified course experiment, got a mention from Natron Baxter among the list of tools he’s used to create applied games.

With that said, perhaps the most important takeaway from LEEF is that it’s not all about expensive toys. Learning games don’t have to be hi-tech to be effective. There’s a lot to be learned from Space Vikings, the conference’s ARG—that’s alternate reality game, not its augmented reality cousin. Unlike augmented reality, which requires technology to mediate an environment, alternate reality is a playful imposition of story onto a physical space. In Space Vikings, a number of us dedicated conference attendees were drawn into a mission to save our tribes from a “pedagogical wasteland.” How did we accomplish this feat? By hunting down “anomalies”--read masking tape clues, QR codes and posters--with answers to questions to submit in a digital educational games theory scavenger hunt. This is just one example of a conference ARG, and designers were at LEEF to report on lessons learned from others like DevLearn’s Zombie Apocalypse. (For more ideas on educational uses of Alternate Reality, check out Think Transmedia.)

These same ideas can scale and transform to a number of settings. For example, Melissa Peterson’s Elmwood Park Zoo ARG is currently a project conducted with paper (though imagined for smartphones), and it’s already doubling the engagement time of visitors to the local zoo. And on the other side, games like the Giskin Anomaly in Balboa Park are adding new layers of narrative to a popular and culturally rich tourist destination. And these games don’t have to be location dependent. Case studies like the Radford Outdoor ARG Outbreak, a social inquiry game that puts students on a quest for an antidote, demonstrate ideas that can be brought into a schoolyard.

Some of the best moments I had at LEEF were from just playing games: collaborating with my Uplanders teammates, trying out new learning simulations, and playing inventive card games around the dinner table. We as attendees were our own case study, playing our way to a more productive conference.

Have you played any learning games you’ve found inspiring? What role might learning games play in your classroom next year?

Photo by Flickr user arenamontanus / Creative Commons licensed

Updated 6/22: Edited to reflect Anastasia’s recent change of Twitter nickname.--@jbj