Roni Linser, Fablusi P/L [HREF1], Melbourne, 3000. Email: simplay.net@gmail.com
Albert Ip, Fablusi P/L, Melbourne, 3000. Email: albert@dls.au.com
Both role-play simulations and Virtual Worlds as pedagogy have now been around for some time and are both considered to be highly effective in creating effective and memorable experiences for learners. But whereas the rendered gaming model of virtual worlds seems to have captured the imagination of trainers, educators and researchers, the role-play model seems to have languished somewhat. This paper explores some of the pedagogic and psychological issues for learning associated with the rendering or non-rendering of virtual worlds. We argue that while rendered environments can contribute to learning, they are often too shallow for purposes such as fostering strategic thinking and problem solving. In such cases, non-rendered virtual worlds may be better in using and fostering the required imaginative capacities of learners.
For observers of gaming and simulations over the last ten years, the future is here. Virtual reality simulations and networked virtual environments have developed in complexity and proliferated across many fields. The rendered environment that puts 'the player' in 'the action' has become more 'realistic' and, at the same time, as Marc Prensky noted, purposefully fictional.
For educators and trainers interested in these developments, the working assumption is that simulated and virtual environments are useful for educational and training purposes because they enable the development of required skills by providing an experiential environment to practice these skills.
Ten years ago Paul Moore, a researcher from Wollongong University in Australia, concluded a paper on the implications of virtual reality (VR) for education by saying:
"Current theory and methodology therefore is based on what will most likely be future fact, when the technologies associated with VR are able to do what they are being designed to do: to develop accurately rendered worlds which can successfully create a complex illusion of cognitive presence. Once this is possible on a day to day basis, the concepts of learning through guided or self guided experience in virtual worlds of variable verity may be attained."
Today the "complex illusion of cognitive presence" is clearly available in many virtual worlds, games, simulations and networked virtual environments though not necessarily as an effect of "accurately rendered worlds" which Moore argued was the aim of VR.
More and more educators and corporate trainers are discovering the potential utility of the gaming model for education and training . However, as Fortugno and Zimmerman point out "educational games are something of a failure" - they have not yet ripened into the fruit that was expected from them despite amazingly creative rendering of the environments they utilize.
There may be many reasons for the widespread rush of educators to create rendered environments for teaching in virtual worlds. The fact that the 'gaming generation' has come of age, as both Aldrich and Prensky argue, may be one factor. Another may be that the tools for creating rendered virtual worlds have become cheaper and easier to use. Related to both these reasons we can also include the fact that educators are searching for a way to motivate students and use the ability of games to engage, capture their wayward attention and help them learn in rich and dynamic ways.
Fortugno and Zimmerman argue that the reason for the failure of games to take off as educational tools is to a large extent a failure of educators to understand game design and of game designers' failure to understand pedagogical concerns . While this may be true, a deeper and more specific problem exists. Educators fail to understand the structural constraints of the different media used in the games, virtual worlds and simulations they choose to use as instructional tools. These constraints have differential impact on the learning process and hence pedagogical outcomes.
The rationale and justification for using, or not using, any instructional technology, including games, simulations and virtual worlds, must lie squarely with the ability to articulate the advantage that such technology may have in achieving pedagogical objectives. Because instructional designs are "choices under constraints," the advantages and disadvantages of using a particular instructional tool or, more specifically, using a rendered virtual environment rather than a non-rendered environment, needs to be articulated so that the consequences of the choice can be clearly related to the pedagogical objectives to which they refer.
One of the distinguishing differences between the virtual reality gaming model and web-based role-play simulations is that the rendered environment characteristic of the gaming world is absent in most role-play simulations. The latter offers, at most, a few images, as the majority of the action is text based, whereas in the former, both action and participants are dynamically rendered. The constraints imposed by such rendering thus needs to be evaluated in relation to the pedagogical objectives that they must serve.
Underlying many of the reasons for the use of rendered world is the accepted common sense assumption that "seeing is believing." Consequently, the pedagogic advantage that rendered virtual worlds may have over non-rendered ones is an enhanced sense of being in the appropriate environment. Hence from the perspective of experiential learning putting the learner in an environment that has some association with the subject matter being learned is an advantage. Well, at least so it seems.
It may very well be the case that a virtual world in which the environment, the action and participants are all accurately and perhaps realistically rendered as images, avatars and movement may initially have greater impact on participants than a non-rendered virtual world where participants are confronted mostly with text. In other words the WOW!!! factor may indeed be greater in the former than in the latter. However in many cases such rendered environments may actually detract from the learning experience.
The argument is that the "complex illusion of cognitive presence" that is supposedly engendered by the rendering of virtual worlds can probably be more efficiently created in the imagination of participants using, let's say a text based role-play simulation rather than in a rendered virtual world with moving avatars and beautifully rendered graphics. For the same reason that the book is more often better than the movie, leaving room for imaginative elaboration rather than providing ready-made 3D imaging better enhances the illusion of cognitive presence in role-play simulations.
There are two critical issues involved in creating the complex illusion of cognitive presence necessary for educational and training purposes. The first is the suspension of disbelief. To think and feel as if one is in the world being modeled, players are required to set aside their knowledge that what they are seeing is only an illusion. Allied to this is the requirement that they must believe that their actions in the game have in some sense real effects. If they didn't, they would not bother trying to achieve the aims of the game and the whole point of modeling the particular skill, or appropriate field of knowledge, fails to achieve its goal.
The second issue related to the first is that players need to identify with the character represented by the icons, bots, avatars or just names of the role they are playing - the avatar is who they are, or in games and role plays they are a commander of a space craft or a principal of a school, etc. To identify with a role means that what the role/character is experiencing virtually is what the player in some sense is experiencing in reality. Only in this way can we talk about experiential learning in virtual worlds. Learners thus need to identify with the characters they are playing given the suspension of disbelief about the illusion or imaginary world in which they find themselves. If they do not, they would not bother taking what they believe is the appropriate actions that the roles/characters they are playing 'should' take; consequently, testing and experimenting with skills and knowledge appropriate to the field of study fails to achieve its purpose.
For teaching and educational purposes, to the extent that the experiential strategy for learning is being used in a virtual environment to achieve learning objectives, identification and suspension of disbelief thus seems to be a critical minimum.
Both suspension of disbelief and identification with a character also occur in reading a book or watching a movie. A good movie is not simply the technical effects, but rather the way actors make their roles believable. What enables identification of an audience with the characters and moves them to make that leap of faith to suspend disbelief is the emotional dynamic created through the narrative, acting, text, voice and music, etc. Thus the illusion of cognitive presence needs to be accompanied by an appropriate emotional dynamic for an audience to appreciate the quality of the movie.
In a book the suspension of disbelief occurs in proportionate measure to the quality of the writer. When the book is inside you and you are inside the book that is the point at which cognitive presence is enabled. Thus the words of Dickens can guide us through the streets of London and Paris and Mark Twain helps us experience rafting down the Mississippi River. Similarly identification with the character in a book is a function of the writer's ability to give that character qualities and emotions that the reader can recognize as applying to one's self, or at least similar ones.
The dynamic images, bots and avatars used by simulators, including the 3D effects are, like the rapidly moving image frames of movies, optical illusions that serve to provide settings and representations for the action. A rendered environment can certainly help in providing a context for action - seeing is still believing. But it is imaginative capacity that transports readers, moviegoers and indeed learners, across time, space and the actual, into settings that are not really present to the eyes but to the mind and heart.
There is no question that in an effective virtual world, users suspend disbelief or any question that they actually identify with these bots and avatars. The question is whether a rendered environment aids or distracts from the learning objectives for which a particular virtual world is used. Or put slightly differently, how much rendering do we really need to engender a particular learning experience? Is a particular pedagogic objective better served by requiring learners to use their imaginative capacity to envision the world or is it better served by providing them with a ready-made world envisioned by a graphic designer or the teacher?
Rendered environments may be technically brilliant and bots and avatars realistic, amusing or graphically interesting but that may simply not be enough - though it does tap the imaginative capacity of graphic designers. In the act of choosing these to represent themselves in a virtual world learners identify with them. In manipulating their movements from a limited set of possibilities and either choosing or providing textual messages or using voice in a 3D active world, they enhance this identification. But in comparison to role-play simulations where choosing a role, imagining and requiring players to develop their roles' profile, characteristics, agenda, strategy and possible modes of action, the identification process with an avatar in a virtual world seems rather shallow. Identification with the character in a role-play simulation requires learners to be intellectually and emotionally active in the construction of the role. Rather than providing learners with ready-made, out-of-the-box possibilities, learners engage their own imaginative capacity (rather than designers' capacities) to create the character and consequently a deeper emotional bond is established with the character. Amazing as the rendered properties of a world maybe, without identification and utilization of the emotional and imaginative capacities, we cannot achieve educational and training objectives beyond simple routine skills.
For educators to overly indulge in what is technically possible, rather than on the experience to be engendered is more likely to miss pedagogically salient learning opportunities. Moving an avatar in a 3D virtual environment may serve the learner to identify with the avatar and thus to 'experience' being in the environment and perhaps even indicate choices in moving in a particular direction, or even indicating a strategic or tactical choice, e.g., selecting to sit at the head of a table in an office boardroom setting. But is it not more advantageous to better achieve exactly these outcomes in the non-rendered (or less rendered) environment of a text-based role-play simulation - where learners have to imagine the office space, where the choices and strategic and tactical alternatives are textually articulated, but identification is deeper as a result of the active construction of the role and, consequently, has greater impact on the learner? Which experience better achieves the results intended?
Perhaps, we cannot yet adequately answer this question, as more research and depth analysis into specific cases is required. What is clear, however, no matter how technically exciting the rendering may be or graphically enticing the avatars are - once we know what actions to take to discover some hidden key that will give us more points or capabilities - repetition sets in and the action becomes routine. What is learned is a sequence of actions to get to a certain point. This may be enough to learn certain skills, but is it enough if our objectives are complex decision making processes, or multiplex strategic problems? These latter pedagogical objectives require analysis and imagination.
What we learn from these cursory observations is that while rendered worlds may be useful for certain purposes, they cannot and should not substitute the essential capacity of learners to imagine the world that is possible and create that possibility in a virtual reality. To do this, the virtual worlds created for educational purposes need to leave room for learners to be not simply user-players as in the gaming model from which highly rendered virtual worlds have taken their impetus. Rather, what we want to achieve are creative learners who are able to identify with the characters and interaction within the imagined world and to imagine how that would appear in reality.
Chee, Y. S., & Hooi, C. M. (2002). C-VISions: Socialized Learning through Collaborative, Virtual, Interactive Simulations. Paper presented at the CSCL 2002: Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning,, Boulder, CO, USA,.
Marc Prensky, Digital Game Based Learning, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2001, p.62-63.
Paul Moore, 1995, Learning and teaching in virtual worlds: Implications of virtual reality for education, Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 1995 11(2), 91-102.
Fortugno and Zimmerman Learning to Play to Learn - Lessons in Educational Game Design online [HREF2]
Linser, R. Naidu, S. & Ip, A. 1999, Pedagogical Foundations of Web-based Simulations in Political Science, ASCILITE Conference, QUT, Brisbane, Dec. 5-8, 1999.
David Wiley, presentation at Plugfest 9 online [HREF3]
Linser, R. & Ip, A. Creating Learning Opportunities Using an RPS Authoring Tool AUSWEB04, The Tenth Australian World Wide Web Conference, Seaworld Nara Resort, Gold Coast, 3rd to 7th of July 2004. online [HREF4]