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Giant Bomb #14 | I'll Never Forget This!

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F

Falifax

Member
Antiwhippy said:
UntriedCoordinatedAntlion.gif


CAN YOU IMAGINE THE STEP.

IT'S GENIUS.
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HOLY SHIT TEDDIE CALM THE FUCK DOWN
 
R

randomlyrossy

Member
I'm sure it's been talked about already but that interview Austin did with the creator/director of Her Story is really good. Austin's a great interviewer, look forward to hear more stuff like that from him.
 
T

TheMrPliskin

Member
Xater said:
Yep, I already expect at least a 6 month delay for Europe. I will just buy some US PSN cards and download it this year.
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Won't be that long, Ultimax was just under 2 months and Persona Q was the same week. Considering P5 is the biggest game Atlus has I'd expect a quick turnaround.
 
C

CoolBatteryCharge

Member
G

Glitchesarecool

Member
Since we're sharing some academic stuff, here's something from correspondence I had with James Portnow from Extra Credits on the subject of adding game mechanics to school systems.

Great to hear from you! It really depends on what subject you’re tackling, but there are a few general areas of modern education that I believe could be improved with game techniques:

Grading
Right now we use a grading system that is essentially de-motivational and sets up a reinforcing feedback loop for failure. Today, most people when they first walk into a class think of themselves as having an A+ (at least subconsciously) and from there, there’s nowhere to go but down.

We need to recontextualize grading. In games we’ve learnt that progress encourages progress and the human desire for efficiency is a far stronger motivator than the fear of falling further from one’s goal. To this end, if you simply make all assignments worth points (let’s call them “EXP” for a lark), have all students start at zero EXP and always gain points as they go (continuously progressing towards clear and tangible ‘levels’ with their own benefits) each assignment and each test feels rewarding rather than disheartening… it’s more fun to gain stuff than to lose it. Additionally, this methodology never leaves a student at a point where they feel like they should just give up.

In doing this, one wouldn’t have to change anything about the way one actually grades an existing class. You’d still have the total number of possible points the class was worth and divide that in the manner that we normally divvy up letter grades to show what “levels” correspond to what end of the year grades.

A game designer at one of the game schools (his name escapes me at the moment, though he’s great designer/educator) did a basic version of this and found it to be highly effective for his class. The only thing I felt that he did wrong was not give the kids “skills” as they leveled. The system therefore was an arbitrary reward system that didn’t provide real value to the students and didn’t highlight the inherent value of education.

If you were instead to give students pickable powers every level and setup classwide achievements, you could teach lessons with the game system itself. If you set up class wide achievements such as “If one student gets to 25,000 EXP the whole class gets a free bonus 100 EXP” or “If five students get to 15,000 EXP the whole class get a bonus 150 points (or a field trip, what have you)” you encourage the class to be rooting for the people doing well and you encourage the best students to help out their classmates. You encourage them to function with camaraderie and as a team. The best kids can’t get the max score unless they can help their peers pull up their grades, but at the same time the kids who are struggling, rather than resenting the people doing well are cheering them on as their success will help them pass.

Agency
One of the biggest hurdles to overcome in education is dealing with kids who have no sense of agency over their lives.

What do we mean by students having a sense agency? Simply the idea that they feel like they control their own destiny, that their choices matter. A lack of agency can manifest itself as students feeling like they “don’t have an option to go to college” or “pregnancy just being something that happens” to simply feeling like they have no power over the life path and choices that their parents make for them.

Without agency, it’s almost impossible to be motivated. Rather than making decisions for the future, people without a sense of agency simply stumble through life day to day without any long term goals.

But a sense of agency isn’t a binary thing, it’s a scale; the more agency you feel over your life the better you tend to do and the more ambitious goals you tend to be willing to set for yourself (surprisingly I once read a study saying that people who had a high sense of agency were actually more resilient to external forces beyond their control messing up their plans too, rather than the expected ego shatter realization that they didn’t have agency, people with a high sense of agency just started off towards their goals again because that was the way to control their destinies).

So how do we impart agency? Games. Almost any game can help hammer home the idea that you control the future. In a game the cycle between choice and result is generally much shorter than that in life and much more clearly indicated. In a game the player tries something, fails, tries something new and keeps making new decisions until they succeed. Games train us that different choices have different outcomes, and we control the choices we make.

I don’t have much evidence but I’ve worked with some inner city kids and some high schoolers from suburban Pittsburgh (briefly, I don’t at all want to claim expertise here, this is something that really needs to be tested, but I believe absolutely to be true); in each case helping to draw the connection between the control they had in the game and the control they had in their own lives had a clear impact on at least some portion of the student body.

I had to do it with Mario, but games could easily be created for any subject that helped reinforce the idea that life isn’t something that happens to you while at the same time encouraging other skills.

External Motivator
At least here in the US, there aren’t enough teachers and there isn’t enough time in the school day to teach everything that children need to know. We need kids to remain engaged and continue to learn voluntarily once they leave the classroom. In the long run there are a lot of ways we can use games to do this, but I’m assuming that we’re looking for a solution that’s implementable right away and low to zero cost…

If you’re really ambitious and willing to put in the time a home run ARG is the way to go for students in middle school or up (see I <3 Bees or Year Zero). Use the information that you want them to have as the unlocks, in their search for this information they’re bound to stumble on and learn about lots of other tangentially related topics (the website http://www.deathball.net/notpron/ is also a good example of a more primitive way to do this). To do this well you MUST integrate it into the classroom and get everyone excited about progressing. The key here is to use mystery and make schooling more magical and wonderful by not really being schooling, but being part of something much larger. You can even pretend to not know about it or be on their side trying to work out parts of the puzzle specifically for you (your students will know, but you don’t want to shatter the fantasy of this other world). ARGs are about communal solutions and information scouring; your students should be holding after school ARG parties to go searching for information if you’re doing it right.

On a practical side, you must make sure that your unlocks are scattered across the board subject-wise, you don’t want the same kids getting the answers most of the time. You want the kid who is good at sports to be the class star the week after the kid who is good at history. This will get them sharing ideas and communicating. The very best problems are cross disciplinary problems that force the solvers to know about two very disparate fields, but when giving these problems you have to make sure that when a student figures out part of the answer they have some clue that they’ve really got part of the answer rather than just thinking they’re wrong.

(A note on this: while the initial time investment in creating something of this nature is high it’s not substantially higher than creating and grading a few good tests if you already know some basic HTML)

If you’re looking for something a little more simple you can always try what I call the “Plot Your Route” game. In this game you choose two arbitrary but interesting topics (or if your class is responsible you can let two different students choose them), let’s say “Sekighara” and “monarch butterflies”, and have students come back the next day with the series of links that got them from one to the other (this is easiest with Wikipedia but doable with any set of websites). Any student who does the exercise gets some EXP (let’s assume you’re using the system laid out above) but the ‘winner’, the student who can make the connection in the fewest links, gets some additional bonus (their homework that day is worth an additional 10% xp or they get a reward of 50 extra points or they get to choose a question on the next quiz that everyone in the class gets full points without having to answer it).

This exercise encourages curiosity, gets students to comb through information that they might otherwise not have ever examined and, by incentivizing the shortest path, you have a reason for students to go back over the information and explore new directions that that information could branch to. Most importantly though this exercise trains them in understanding the connections between information. It gets them to think about how ideas are linked. In the 21st century this will be vital skill for any adult and one that will help them contextualize their education and understand the importance of subject that they might not immediately be interested in as they continue through their education.
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S

stump sock

Member
Antiwhippy said:
Catgirls are dumb.

Why do most of them have human ears and cat ears? They shouldn't have human ears at all.
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see i always assumed that the cat ears were the unnecessary part of the package, even though logic would probably assume otherwise

also there's nothing upcoming on the schedule :\
 
A

Antiwhippy

the holder of the trombone
Well both sorts of SS are basically pushing the ideology of blonde hair people with greenish-blue eyes as the superior race.
 
S

Sleeping Lesson

Member
Morning folks.

Speaking of Dragon Ball, you guys recommended a while back that I stick with the DBZ abridged stuff because it gets better. It never got better, just got more self-referential.
 
F

Freedom = $1.05

Banned
But really, Jojo just ended its 3rd arc and my god was it epic. I found that the final battle was better done in the mid 90s OVAs but it was still fun to see it play out more closely to the manga than the OVAs did. You folks should check it out.

If it's good enough for Neo Anime Editor Austin Walker then it's good enough for you too!

as an aside, the first arc kinda stinks but if you watch it like you're watching an anime adaptation of Castlevania it aint half bad.
 
M

Megasoum

Banned
Hey guys, fun fact.... Coming back to work on a monday morning after a 2 weeks vacation fucking suuuuuuuucckkkksssss.


I wish I was home playing Batman right now.
 
C

CoolBatteryCharge

Member
Freedom = $1.05 said:
But really, Jojo just ended its 3rd arc and my god was it epic. I found that the final battle was better done in the mid 90s OVAs but it was still fun to see it play out more closely to the manga than the OVAs did. You folks should check it out.

If it's good enough for Neo Anime Editor Austin Walker then it's good enough for you too!

as an aside, the first arc kinda stinks but if you watch it like you're watching an anime adaptation of Castlevania it aint half bad.
Click to expand...

I thought Part 1 was great, just a rough start. Stuff like
the Ripple only works when breathing properly, being trapped under water, then anime logic air pockets underneath some rocks to Ripple with the water he's trapped in,
being bitten by venomous snakes and he just flexes the venom out of the cuts,
and
dude's head getting cut off, but head's still alive to bite a rose and spit it in Dio's eye before it freezes.
 
J

Jintor

Member
the weird thing about what jojos i've watched so far is that it's outlandish, but since there's been literally decades of anime based off it that have been even more outlandish, it doesn't feel nearly as outlandish as it is
 
M

Megasoum

Banned
Sleeping Lesson said:
I feel you Megasoum. I forgot my headphones today and I don't know what to do with myself. Life is arduous.
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Ah man that sucks.

I managed to get my boss to buy me a super nice pair of headphones for my office (I sit in a somewhat noisy room so argued about that lol).


So right now I'm listening to some Led Zeppelin while going through the 1683 unread emails I had in my inbox this morning lol.
 
C

call_kotaku

Member
All DBZ says about blonde and green-eyed people is that they're easier to draw, especially if you do it everyday for several decades

It's like saying the Bleach author prefers a world that's a white desert wasteland that can be represented by a single horizon line
 
F

Freedom = $1.05

Banned
SirAndroidTV said:
I thought Part 1 was great, just a rough start. Stuff like
the Ripple only works when breathing properly, being trapped under water, then anime logic air pockets underneath some rocks to Ripple with the water he's trapped in,
being bitten by venomous snakes and he just flexes the venom out of the cuts,
and
dude's head getting cut off, but head's still alive to bite a rose and spit it in Dio's eye before it freezes.
Click to expand...

Dont get me wrong, i really like the first arc. It's very old school shoenen in its style but you can see some of what makes Jojo crazy popping up around the edges. It was more of a warning for those who expect Jojo to start poppin' off from the getgo: it doesn't. It's not really until part 2 that you start getting the Jojo you expect.
 
S

Sleeping Lesson

Member
Megasoum said:
Ah man that sucks.

I managed to get my boss to buy me a super nice pair of headphones for my office (I sit in a somewhat noisy room so argued about that lol).


So right now I'm listening to some Led Zeppelin while going through the 1683 unread emails I had in my inbox this morning lol.
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Holy crap! I had all of 2 emails this morning when I came in. This place shuts all the way down on weekends, though, and we don't deal with any external clientele. Headphones are a life saver will all the downtime, though. At least I brought my Kindle today.
 
A

Antiwhippy

the holder of the trombone
Jintor said:
the weird thing about what jojos i've watched so far is that it's outlandish, but since there's been literally decades of anime based off it that have been even more outlandish, it doesn't feel nearly as outlandish as it is
Click to expand...

3 is where they only just started introducing the concept of stands.

Wait till they get REALLY crazy with stands.
 
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