Meet Me at the MUVEES

Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies the Harvard Graduate School of Education

simSchool: When did you first become aware of the potential of games/simulations for learning and what was it that piqued your interest?

Chris: Growing up before information technology entered the market, I was very interested in different types of board games and card games. For example, a company called Avalon Hill produced board games that were various kinds of battle simulations. I had the game called Gettysburg and enjoyed playing not just with other people, but also competing with myself. I found that I was varying the rules to see how that changed the outcome. This was intriguing intellectually because Gettysburg was based on a reasonably complex model of Civil War combat.

	The range of games in which I was interested gave me a feel for the relevant advantages and disadvantages of various design approaches, the affective and social dimension of games, and the different nature of multi-player games.

On the other hand, it was cumbersome to do the calculations underlying that model and to maneuver pieces around the board so the game required a high amount of overhead to play. The game board was pretty elaborate, set up in a hexagonal grid so that each piece could move in six different directions. Both sides’ army units varied in type and strength, and a timetable showed where units appeared and when. So calculation tables might show one side had a unit of a particular type up on a hill and the other side was attacking at a 30-degree angle with a unit of a different type down in the valley. The player was forced to calculate the losses and gains for both sides and then move the pieces accordingly.

The model was flawed because units were limited in not having fractional strengths; they could only be thrown back or completely eliminated without gradually losing potency. One can understand why board game designers would do this given the limitations of the medium, but it was frustrating. The complex and wonderful forms of graphical representation now available in digital games were also missing, so players had to use lots of imagination to visualize the battle from the simple physical artifacts of board and pieces.

I was also involved with a variety of card games, including poker and bridge. What intrigued me was how these games were capable of sharpening generic reasoning skills. Along these lines, I came across the game Queries and Theories, which was explicitly educational and used physical counters to teach logic and reasoning. Again, beyond the fun of playing the game I found its design interesting. Q&T was a game in which the player had to infer the rules that underlay a sequence of colored counters. The most interesting form of play was with two people: One person would set the rules, and the other person would attempt to infer them by forming sequences of counters that were accepted or rejected as conforming. The fewer the sequences required for correct inference, the better the score.

In the mid 70s, I was ripe for the inroads that Information technology began to make with games and simulations. I was delighted to see that Information technology offered opportunities for dealing with the logistical and intellectual overhead required to keep track of a complex underlying model.

simSchool: So your early experience with games opened up your thinking to what would come next.

Chris: Yes. The range of games in which I was interested gave me a feel for the relevant advantages and disadvantages of various design approaches, the affective and social dimension of games, and the different nature of multi-player games. For example, Poker and bridge have a strong affective dimension in contrast to Queries and Theories, which was a formal reasoning game that you could play alone or with another person. Getting a sense of the dimensions of design, and the strengths and limitations of various combinations of those dimensions, is good background for creating one’s own games and simulations. ...continue