Category Archives: York College Transformative Games Initiative

Opinion: Prejudice as a game mechanic

One of the most intriguing (and timely) features of Hangar 13’s forthcoming Mafia III, a sprawling open world crime game set in a 1968 New Orleans-stand in, is that it promises to accurately represent the experience of being a black man in the 1960s South through the game’s protagonist, the biracial veteran Lincoln Clay.

Studio head and creative director Haden Blackman said this on the matter in an interview with Game Informer’s Ben Reeves in November:

“Our end goal is to tell an authentic story and put you in a role that maybe you haven’t been before,” Blackman says. “That’s the beauty of games, right? Games can immerse you in these roles and identities that you would never be able to experience in real life, in ways that movies and novels can’t because you are making decisions and you are that character. You are inhabiting that character. We wanted to take advantage of that and put you in a role of a character that very few of us will have been or will be able to be. Being someone who is viewed as black in 1968 in the South is unique.”

It’s an admirable sentiment. The game, which features GTA style police-avoidance mechanics, has amped them up to reflect the real terror of being black in America while interacting with the police. Officers shoot to kill, will harass Clay if he’s walking through wealthier, white neighborhoods, and profile him. It not only adds an interesting layer of complexity and challenge to the experience of play but (depending on how successful its execution is) could be a landmark for creating a AAA-level ludic experience of racism in the United States.

It’s encouraging to see developers thinking about this in the first place because, as Blackman suggests, it opens up a wealth of experience through gameplay and poses new and unfamiliar challenges to players of all backgrounds.

So-called “empathy games,” games which allow a player to experience the subjectivity of a marginalized identity, are better known in the indie scene (even if the term is increasingly scorned there for how it ghettoizes such games). From Mattie Brice’s Mainichi to Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia to Star Maid Games’ Cibele, we have plenty of examples of games that immerse you in the subjectified character of someone whose identity is not usually explored in depth by games. In the process, its mechanics–how the games compel you to interact with the ludic environment–surface a lived reality that players may otherwise not have access to; they render through gameplay what it feels like to be a black transgender woman, or a teenage girl in an online game, for instance.

As ever, such games point the way to undiscovered countries in game design, and it’s encouraging to see more mainstream developers begin to explore that territory with their more lavish tools.

Mafia III is yet to be released, but Bioware’s Dragon Age: Inquisition contains a chapter that provides an interesting proof of concept for AAA developers who want to try their hand at modeling structural prejudice.

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Lest the jargon scare you off, what do I mean by “structural prejudice”? For our purposes, it stands in contrast to individual prejudice; for instance, calling someone by a slur. Structural prejudice creates a system in which a marginalized person’s behavior is hemmed in by narrowed choices and, to use a popular gaming metaphor, a higher overall difficulty-setting. It isn’t just comprised of individuals saying cruel things to you, but rather an entire environment where such beliefs hinder one’s very life in material, definable ways.

In Dragon Age: Inquisition about two thirds of the way through the story you take on a mostly non-combat quest, “Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts,” which sees your party attend a grand masquerade ball at the Orlesian Empress’ Winter Palace in order to stop a mysterious assassination plot against her.

Any effort to simply charge in and tell her she’s in danger–a fact she is already aware of–is rebuffed forcefully. Retreat from this party, which is also hosting a vital peace conference in the long-running Orlesian Civil War, is impossible. Instead, you must more delicately explore the high society gala for clues as to what’s really going on here. You contend, then, with a “Court Approval” meter for the duration of this lengthy quest, which models your overall acceptance among Orlais’ gathered elite; it goes up and down based on your behaviors throughout the quest, but also as a result of your very identity. It is through this relatively simple mechanic that Bioware manages to express a great deal about both its lore and the nature of prejudice.

If your Inquisitor is a human warrior or rogue, you begin with the highest possible court approval level. But if you are a mage–a member of a class held in great suspicion and fear in Thedas–you start with a lower level. Even moreso if you play as an Elf or Dwarf, and you lose the most points right off if you play as one of the tall, horned Qunari. As the quest starts, then, racial discrimination becomes palpable in the mechanics.

In my last game I played as an Elf, a member of a race that primarily lives in segregated slums throughout the human world and who mostly occupy the role of servants and working class and I felt a great deal of pressure to overcome the Approval deficit that I did not have on my human noblewoman warrior, who better fit the Orlesian nobility’s expectation of who the Inquisitor should be.

There are many opportunities to increase your approval, of course, and so long as you know where they all are and what dialogue options or actions to undertake to acquire them, even a Qunari can end the quest with 100 approval with relative ease. But that’s the point. As a non-Mage human, you have more flexibility to make mistakes or skirt past approval-gain opportunities. You don’t need to get everything right in order to have enough approval to get an ideal ending for this quest–which, among other things determines whether you are believed when you ultimately accuse the would-be assassin in front of the entire Court.

As an Elf, I felt I was living the maxim of “you have to work twice as hard to be seen as half as good.” That deficit at the start of the quest meant I had less room for error. My character had to perform perfectly in the eyes of the nobility, a mirror of expectations I felt growing up working class and Latina and being suddenly thrust into an environment of privilege; nothing less than perfectly mastering this world of unfamiliar social cues and excelling at everything I did would have prevented me from being immediately pegged as a stereotype and an “affirmative action” student.

Bioware’s system is imperfect, very simple and relatively easy to game if you have the Wiki to hand. But the masquerade ball demonstrated very clearly what it meant to be an Elf in Thedas; in addition to the approval hits, many guests treat you like you’re part of the wait staff for instance, a common enough experience for blacks and Latinos in parallel real world scenarios.

It’s a start, and despite its relative simplicity, Bioware’s Court Approval mechanic helped make for one of the most interesting and unique quests in the game, modeling a non-combat challenge to boot. While there are a few moments throughout the long quest where fighting is inevitable, the vast majority of it is non-combat, pseudo-stealth and exploration, with dialogue being your primary weapon. Knowing what to say and when to say it is key to surviving the quest, which also nicely models all the lore Bioware built up around the courtly Orlesian nobility.

“Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts” presents you with a quest that you can theoretically fail if you don’t combat and adjust yourself to prejudice against your character’s race, ultimately costing the Empress her life. Even as you’re on a mission to literally save the world, you have to contend with the petty and irrational hatreds of those around you, and it can have a real impact on your goals if you don’t properly engage with it. That is what I mean by “structural prejudice.”

When you try to model such social challenges, doors are opened to that elusive property of games known as “originality” and everyone benefits. It might be worth a try in your next game.

Gamasutra – Opinion: Prejudice as a game mechanic.

Apple to train mobile devs with new App Development Centre

Apple will open Europe’s first iOS App Development Centre with a view to giving “thousands” of students the skills and training they need to develop apps for its ever-growing marketplace.

The Development Centre will be located in Naples, Italy, a country in which over 75,000 jobs are attributable to the App Store, according to Apple.

The Cupertino giant plans to support teachers and students with a specialized curriculum, and will work with partners around Italy to supplement its course and create additional opportunities for students.

Apple eventually expects to being the program to other countries, although Apple CEO Tim Cook believes Italy was the natural starting point.

“Europe is home to some of the most creative developers in the world and we’re thrilled to be helping the next generation of entrepreneurs in Italy get the skills they need for success,” said Cook.

Apple estimates that the App Store had helped developers in Europe rake in over €10.2 billion ($11 billion) since it launched back in 2008.

Gamasutra – Apple to train mobile devs with new App Development Centre.

‘A Bit Of A Montessori 2.0’: Khan Academy Opens A Lab School

In 2015, Khan Academy, which pioneered free, online video tutorials and lectures that have reached millions of students around the world, sought new ways of reaching new people.

It had already partnered with everyone from NASA to the Museum of Modern Art, and this past year Khan joined forces with the SAT’s overlord, the College Board. The goal, in the parlance of our times, is to disrupt the billion-dollar test prep industry.

Salman “Sal” Khan, founder and executive director of Khan Academy, is venturing into brick-and-mortar private schools.

As we’ve reported, students anywhere now can get free SAT test prep both online and in person at some Boys & Girls Clubs of America. The move may help level the playing field by improving test prep for less-affluent students to get them ready for the newly revamped SAT, which remains a pillar of college admissions despite the growth in 2015 in “test optional” schools.

It’s part of what Khan Academy calls its core duty to help provide “a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.”

But where does the new $23,000 a year ($25,000 for grades 6-12) brick-and-mortar Khan Lab School in Silicon Valley fit into that mission?

I interviewed Khan Academy founder and CEO Salman Khan on Here & Now, the live midday news show from NPR and WBUR, about the value of coding, ed tech and why education videos aren’t enough.

What inspired you to start coding when you were a student?

I was probably early high school or late middle school, and I had one of those TI-85 calculators. I just started reading the manual, and I realized I could make video games on it. And so that was my first hook. And that was back in the day when you didn’t have the Internet to look up things and to get help. But that immediately got me hooked, where you said, hey, you can create anything you want using a computer.

Hacking the calculator.

That’s where I started. I eventually convinced a local professor to let me use some of his computers. But that was kind of my first glimpse about how exciting it could be.

Why should kids, who may be struggling to learn the basics of addition and subtraction, learn the basics of coding?

I think in the next few decades, at least having a strong familiarity with software and what programming can accomplish is pretty powerful.

It seems like we have a long way to go, Sal, before coding becomes a foundational educational tool?

The hard thing about programming is, it hasn’t been there traditionally. So, you know, we’re trying to find space for it in the traditional school system. A lot of educators haven’t been exposed to it when they were young. So that’s the challenge. But there’s also an opportunity in that there isn’t anything to replace. It’s green field, it’s a new area, and there’s all sorts of incredible tools for people to learn. And when I talk about people, I’m not just talking about students — I’m talking about people of all ages. I encourage parents, teachers, people of all walks of life to start dabbling a little bit.

What benefits do you see for adults who might be deep into their lives to hit restart and start learning the basics of coding?

In almost any profession that you’re in now, software is starting to play a larger and larger role. And the folks who at least have a familiarity with how a program works, how does software work, what is it capable of, what is it not capable of, they’re going to be in a really great position to, especially if they wanted to start something, be entrepreneurial. You know, a lot of people have these phobias because they were in school, you know, they remember seeing the chalkboard and not knowing what was going on, mainly because they were pushed ahead while they had these gaps. But now you have all of these resources where you can go at your own time or pace, and what we hear over and over again is that they find it fun!

You’ve launched the Khan Lab School — a brick-and-mortar school in Mountain View, Calif., in Silicon Valley. To some, that’s like Amazon opening a bunch of brick-and-mortar stores. Why did you think it’s necessary?

A lot of people when they think about virtual anything, they do make that comparison of say an Amazon.com versus a Barnes & Noble. We at Khan Academy, we never viewed it that way. We view the virtual as something that can empower the physical — that if students can get lectures at their own time and pace, they can get exercises, they can have a programming platform, that doesn’t mean that the classroom gets replaced; it means the classroom gets liberated. It doesn’t have to be about a lecture anymore; students don’t have to learn at the same time and pace. Classroom time could be much more about Socratic dialogue, building projects, whatever else. So we wanted to prove it out. We’ve been working with a lot of great schools who have been doing aspects of this, but we started a lab underneath our offices, literally, where we have mixed age, it’s full-year, full-day. The students do mastery-based, personalized learning for kind of the first half of the day. We have a lot of focus on kind of meta-cognitive skills like entrepreneurship and creativity. The second half of the day — and they’re here until 6 o’clock — they’re building stuff, they’re making things.

All ages mixed together. That’s a core ideal of Montessori. Is it a kind of Montessori-esque program?

Yeah, you could almost imagine this is a bit of a Montessori 2.0. I mean, the whole principle of Montessori is students learn by exploration, play, they learn at their own time and pace, they have mixed age. And mixed age allows older students to mentor and younger students to get that mentorship, and what we’re doing is exactly that. But Montessori has historically struggled as you go into the more advanced subjects, as you get to your algebra and your physics and your chemistry, and that’s where tools like Khan Academy come into play. Because now students can still learn at their own time and pace, and they can still explore, and they can pull the information they need to solve real-world problems. So we are inspired by Montessori, and I would like to think that Maria Montessori would be pretty excited if she saw what was going on.

Aren’t you at risk of creating a two-tier system with your free lectures and your pricey private school?

You know, Khan Academy is on track, and hopefully it does reach hundreds of millions, billions of students and empowers them where if they have a low-cost cellphone, they can start to self-educate themselves. But we think the opportunity now is not just online. We want to catalyze change more broadly. You know, what does a physical classroom look like? Break out of this kind of Prussian-factory model of education. And what we said was we needed to create a lab school, but we don’t just want to create another one-off, progressive private school. So everything that we’re doing in this lab school we’re sharing — we’re sharing with local public, private schools. All the curricula, we’re going to open-source it and figure out what works, what doesn’t. And when you figure out things that do work, share it with the rest of the planet.

You’ll openly share best practices learned out of this lab school?

Yeah, that’s the exact reason. The reason we did it as an independent school is so we could really push all of the boundaries. Fully mixed age would be very hard in any other context. Every six weeks, we kind of look at what worked, what didn’t work, and we kind of reset it and reboot it and we try new things. So it really is in the spirit of innovation of Khan Academy. If we really want to understand what’s possible in a physical classroom, we need a lab.

You’ve spent a lot of time perfecting your online lectures. But there’s been criticism, including of methods and the format itself — Khan Academy’s “sage on the stage” lecture format. Some see that as outdated, whether done online or in person. Has your own understanding of what makes a good educator changed since you launched Khan Academy?

Well, I think there’s some reality to that notion that these lectures are lectures. And if you look at a Khan Academy video, they’re these kind of traditional chalk-talk explanations. What’s different is how someone consumes, or the attitude. You know, if you go to a traditional lecture hall, it’s pushed onto you. While a Khan Academy-like video, you only watch it if you need to watch it. You’re like, “Hey, wait. I don’t quite get that. Let me go get a 10-minute explanation, and now I want to learn the next thing.” So when you have lectures on demand, it really just kind of takes them off the table. They’re there and they are useful sometimes, and then it allows you to work at your own time and pace, and you only watch the videos if you want an on-demand explanation.

The man who’s pioneered the online lecture is admitting there are deep limitations to them.

I think they’re valuable, but I’d never say they somehow constitute a complete education. If I’m confused about something, hey, to get a 5-, 10-minute explanation of it, I think that’s valuable.

The research shows that students learn best when they work through challenges together, stumble around, try to find answers and come up with solutions themselves with help from a good teacher. That’s hard on a one-way lecture online.

Everything we advocate — and this was some of the ideas of the Lab School — is that students should work on problems. [That] could be traditional problems or more open-ended inquiry-type projects, and while they’re working through those they say, “Hey, wait, I need to figure out how fast this thing is gonna fall. I need help here.” So, yes, I agree with that — the best way to do it is look at it from a problem-solving point of view, try to struggle with the problem, and then pull the knowledge as you need it. It could be an on-demand lecture, it could be looking at a reference book, asking your friend, asking a teacher, finding an article on the Internet. Whatever it is, it’s going to stick much more than when it’s pushed on to you.

‘A Bit Of A Montessori 2.0’: Khan Academy Opens A Lab School : NPR Ed : NPR.