Finally, official confirmation that I have the best job in the world…and that the hours and hours I’ve wasted spent playing Civilization IV have some redeeming social purpose…I got to play Civ IV in class!
I recently helped Nina Bakisian run a session of her graduate seminar on Games and Simulations in Learning. Ever since one researcher used Civilization to successfully engage inner-city middle school students, there’s been renewed interest in using commercial games for education (instead of the ‘educational games’ I had to play as a kid, like Oregon Trail).
vs. 
In class, we downloaded the free demo (good for 100 turns) and jumped right in–the tutorial is too slow for most. But with a bit of coaching, people had no problem setting up their first 2-3 city civilizations, choosing buildings and technologies, and encountering other civilizations. At the end, I showed them the editor which allows you to change anything in your world, and how to create and download new scenarios for students to play. I actually thought at the end, hey, this could work.
In my recent USF talk on Alternate Reality Gaming, I used ARGs as one example of the “uneasy relationship” between the community-based, self-organizing dynamics of today’s web, and ‘normal’ businesses. Classic ARGs are not even supposed to admit that they exist, making basic information that ‘normal’ business wants (like who’s playing) impossible to obtain. How much can business try to track and control self-organizing communities before they scare away the people they are trying to engage?
The slides from the talk (available below) only start to illustrate the issues, rather than provide the ’solution’. Thanks to Tom Grossman and the USF Faculty Development Committee for supporting this work.
The February issue of Communications of the ACM has our Alternate Reality Gaming article as the cover story.
ARGs are games that mix online and real-world play, where players (sometimes thousands of them) work together to solve challenges. The game’s story changes in response to what the players do. ARGs began as a kind of intense promotional tool for movies and videogames, but have diversified into ‘collective experiences’ for business, entertainment, and politics.
ARGs are hot (see the Wired article), but it’s difficult to explain exactly what they are, much less why they’re attractive or how to run one. The article (written with my main man Jeff Kim at U. of Washington, and Elan Lee of Fourth Wall Studios) describes the first two successful ARGs that defined this new type of gaming: the Beast ARG tied to the Spielberg movie AI, and the ilovebees ARG tied to the Halo 2 game release. Wikipedia and the ARG network are other good resources if you’d like to learn more about the games that don’t admit they’re games…
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 