THE GORGE APPROACH
Digital Game Control and Play for Playfully Developing Technology Competence
Klaus P. Jantke
Fraunhofer IDMT, Children’s Media Dept., Hirschlachufer 7, 99084 Erfurt, Germany
Keywords:
Technology competence, Serious games, Media didactics, Learning by exploration, Digital game design.
Abstract:
Playful learning is an old dream of mankind since Comenius’ early work on didactics (Comenius, 1628).
But playful learning should not be oversimplified and thoughtlessly identified with effortless fun. In contrast,
playful learning may be some fun, although being demanding requiring concentration, devotion and stamina.
GORGE is the name of a digital game designed for the purpose of developing certain technology competence.
It is in use with students of an age ranging from about 12 to 24. This poster surveys the concepts and the game.
Was wir
¨
uber unsere Gesellschaft,
ja
¨
uber die Welt, in der wir leben, wissen,
wissen wir durch die Massenmedien.
[ Niklas Luhmann, 08.12.1927– 06.11.1998]
1 INTRODUCTION
“What we know about our society, about the world in
which we live, we know it through the mass media.”
(see (Luhmann, 1996), original text in German above)
We surely know much from our parents, much
from school, much from our peer group, but there
is a large field of knowledge, indeed, which we gain
through the consumption of mass media. In earlier
days, there were press, radio and TV, nowadays there
is the Internet, in addition. Motion picture and digital
games are another relevant source of knowledge.
How and where from do children and young adults
gain technology competence? How does technology
competence evolve? How much are we in control
of the process of technology competence emergence?
In particular, what do children and adolescent persons
know about the reach and the limits of information
and communication technologies (IT), in general?
And more specifically, what do they know about the
power and the limitations of Artificial Intelligence?
Where does this knowledge, where are our fears and
our expectations coming from?
To a certain generation, Stanley Kubrick’s film
“2001: A SPACE ODYSSEE”, 1968, might be a key
source of fear when pondering the future of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) applications. To a later generation,
the TV series “CSI” might be a source of worrying
belief in the power of technologies able to serve as a
substitute of human skills and thought.
Technology competence has its foundations in
other disciplines such as mathematics, e.g. There is
no doubt that a good school education is fundamental
to technology competence.
But school would be easily overtaxed if we were
giving all responsibility for the development of tech-
nology competence to school.
The present poster publication asks for alternative
approaches complementing the efforts of parents and
school in the development of technology competence
of children and adolescent persons. Insights into the
importance of play and exploration (Power, 2000) are
driving the research, implementation, and application.
Play as exploratory learning is a well-established
issue of research, development, and–more or less
successful–applications for already several decades
(Reilly, 1974). Nevertheless, if you are addressing
specific questions in detail, they often remain open.
What does the term “machine intelligence” mean?
How does it work that a computer appears intelligent?
Can we program machines in a way to–apparently–
show emotions? Are there problems to worry about?
2 THE RESEARCH GOAL
At the end of the preceding section, the author has ex-
emplified a few questions of technology competence
411
P. Jantke K. (2010).
THE GORGE APPROACH - Digital Game Control and Play for Playfully Developing Technology Competence.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 411-414
DOI: 10.5220/0002779204110414
Copyright
c
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focusing the admittedly narrow field of perceivingand
understanding a certain feature of IT systems: AI.
A more comprehensive catalogue of problems and
related questions is beyond the limit of the present
short paper which, instead, aims at a poster providing
a visually appealing introduction of the game idea, an
illustration of the existing game implementation, and
a discussion of the game’s application for exploratory
learning. Before going into details, we need to clarify
the ultimate goal of the present work.
There is a first rather general research question:
Given a rather clearly defined area of technol-
ogy and a related catalogue of questions about
the perception and understanding of this technol-
ogy, how to design a digital game helpful to gain
technology competence in this area through ex-
ploratory learning?
Because there is not much hope for general answers
to rather general questions, we are going to attack a
sufficiently attractive instance of the question above:
How to design and implement a digital game
as simple as possible which supports players
in understanding of and becoming familiar with
some essentials of AI such as those listed below?
• Control of IT systems behaviorto appear anti-
cipatedly intelligent
• Effects of AI in complex systems
• Evaluation of AI behavior w.r.t. efficiency,
believability, and effectiveness
• Feeling of being able to master AI
To reach these goals, there has to be designed and
developed a game
• which substantially depends on AI components,
• in which the role of AI becomes obvious,
• in which players have the option to control AI,
• in which varying behavior of AI components is
essential to the game playing experience,
• and which is easy enough to be studied in detail
by students of a wide range of ages.
The present research goals are achieved by means
of the digital game GORGE to be introduced in the
three subsequent sections. Only a few first steps of a
qualitative evaluation–going beyond the limits of the
present poster presentation–are discussed in the clos-
ing section before a summary concludes the paper.
3 REQUIREMENT
SPECIFICATION
The digital game to be designed and implemented
shall meet the following conditions:
1. The game must be simple in the sense that any
particular game state may be easily described.
2. Game play must be sufficiently short to allow for
larger series of experiements.
3. Non-player characters (NPCs) must have an easily
tunable AI control.
4. The effects of different NPC AIs must be obvious.
5. Human players must have alternative choices of
the way in which they engage with NPCs.
6. Despite the clarity of all the requirements above,
mechanistic determinism of play must be avoided.
Under these conditions, one may set up largely
varying series of experiments in which students play
the game, experiment with varying variants of NPC
intelligence and perform exploratory studies.
4 THE GAME IDEA
The author has developed some earlier game named
JOSTLE (Jantke, 2007) designed for the purpose of
studying particular behavioral patterns that show in
game playing (Jantke, 2006).
The JOSTLE idea has been slightly generalized to
a game concept named GORGE as follows:
• Players control a team of agents which have to
move along alternative paths to reach a certain
goal area for scoring points.
• Agents that meet on their way have opportunities
of jostling each other to gain advantage over their
adversaries.
• The paths are interrupted by gorges. No agent can
pass a gorge when left to his own devices.
• Any two agents may form a roped party. A mem-
ber of a roped party may step down into the gorge
to allow the other one to pass the gorge.
• An agent passing a gorge decides about whether to
rescue the other agent from the gorge or to leave
him behind.
• The player’s choices depend on some random
variable, but are largely left to his own decision.
The game shall be playable among humans and NPCs.
Whether or not some player is human may be hidden.
These ideas have been successfully implemented
and tested with players of an age from 13 to 18.
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5 EXPLORATORY LEARNING
WITH THE GAME ‘GORGE’
When the digital game GORGE is used for educational
purposes, players should first get an opportunity to
become familiar with the game and with the look and
feel of NPC intelligence.
Next, the players must be introduced into the easy
opportunities they have to set up and control AI.
Figure 1: For every AI adversary, characteristics may be set.
There are sliders (see figure 1) simply allowing the
player to determine the NPC’s preferences whether or
not to jostle, whether or not to engage in roped parties,
whether or not to climb down into gorges, and so on.
The adjustment shown in figure 1 determines a rather
aggressive and uncooperative NPC behavior.
When players learn about the characteristics of
NPCs, they are able to play with them and, even more
ambitiously (and really funny!), to fool them. How to
do so? For illustration, when NPC players have been
identified to be aggressively interested in jostling, a
human player may fool them by attracting them to
struggling where they waste their time and give space
to the player to unfold her strategy unmolestedly.
In the game case under investigation, the human
player is commanding the team with white bodies.
In the game state on display in figure 2, a member
of the white team turned right at the first branch of
the path. Aggressive players are lured into following,
because they are aiming at opportunities to jostle.
As a result, agressive players are preferring this
path. They find opportunities galore to jostle each
other. Meanwhile, the human player finds a separate
way (see figure 3 above) where not much struggling
is ongoing.
Figure 2: It is a big fun to play with and fool an NPC’s AI.
Figure 3: Attentive players draw benefit from observations.
Let us describe what is happening during game
play from a viewpoint of playful exploration.
• Attentive players identify different behaviors.
• Understanding the NPCs’ AI leads to tactics.
• NPC AI under control may be related to fun.
• It becomes obvious how intentional game settings
contribute to game playing experience.
• Attentive players experience the pleasure and the
satisfaction of superiority over programmed AI.
Naturally, it depends a lot on the individual human
player, on her experience and her interest in game
playing, on other preconditions, and on several con-
textual conditions such as, e.g., the current mood,
how (s)he is experiencing the game play and how
much (s)he is drawing advantage from insights into
the other (computerized) players’ behavior.
THE GORGE APPROACH - Digital Game Control and Play for Playfully Developing Technology Competence
413

Figure 4: The human player’s team scores 10 of 21 points.
The game reported throughout the present section
has been ending with the human player’s–in fact, the
author’s–victory (gaining 10 points out of 21 in total;
see figure 4) demonstrating the tactic’s success.
An a posteriori analysis of the game play–a key
didactic form of exploratory learning with digital
games–is usually very instructive. Players may learn
how the NPCs’ “implemented intelligence” unfolds.
This is leading to insights into the way in which AI
works, how it contributes to the experienced effects,
and how much it depends on further conditions.
The next key didactic form is in-depth explo-
ration. Learners have to set up experimental scenarios
for investigating the effects of tuning an NPCs’ AI.
They are no longer only learners, but are becoming
researchers elaborating own scientific hypotheses and
pondering adequate methodologies of investigations.
6 SKETCH OF THE
ACHIEVEMENTS
To invoke computers, in general (DiSessa et al.,
1995), and games, in particular (Reilly, 1974), is not
new to the community. But GORGE’s (i) focus on
technology competence and (ii) the opportunities to
properly control proper AI system behavior in a play-
ful setting are–to the author’s very best knowledge–
novelties in technology enhanced learning.
Players who have experienced GORGE do no
longer consider Artificial Intelligence a mystery.
A separate study (see (Gaudl et al., 2009), for
more details) has demonstrated that the AI in GORGE
is expressive enough such that tuning “the character”
of NPCs results in experiencingquite differentstories.
7 SUMMARY & CONCLUSIONS
The game GORGE introduced by means of the present
poster paper is a contribution to technology enhanced
learning, in general. More specifically, GORGE may
be seen as a “serious game” and the author’s approach
may be seen as a case of game based learning. The
underlying didactical concept is exploratory learning.
GORGE is used for dealing with extra-curricularly
topics such as technology competence with a focus to
the attractive, but often misunderstood field of AI.
Whereas the present submission concentrates on
motivating the game and its design, implementation,
and functionality, future work should address issues
of application, players’ perception and evaluation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There have been about two dozens of earlier GORGE
implementations by the author’s students. The present
version is a browser game; project supervision Chris-
tian Woelfert, graphics and animation Sandy Stehr,
development and programming Christoph Kutza.
This work has been supported by the Thuringian
Ministry for Education, Science, and Culture within
the project iCycle under contract PE-004-2-1.
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