Dr. Richard Bartle is a professor, writer, game-researcher, and design theorist who's widely recognized as one of the most influential pioneers in the massively multiplayer gaming industry. In 2003 he wrote Designing Virtual Worlds, a widely-read text which examines the history, ethics, structure, and technology of massively multiplayer games. Ten Ton Hammer's Cameron Sorden caught up with him at the recent IMGDC 2.0 conference to find out what he's been working on lately and pick his brain about a topic that's seen a lot of discussion in recent years and which Doctor Bartle is uniquely qualified to comment on: using MMOs and virtual worlds for education.

Ten Ton Hammer: So what have you been up to lately?

Richard: I’ve been treading water. I teach people at a university and I do consultancy for people, but I’m not actually working on anything myself. You’d have to give me money to do that, and I’m not very good at asking for money. I have two [consulting] projects going on at the moment. One of them is an academic based game, a quite good looking one, and another is a more traditional MMO kind of thing.

Ten Ton Hammer: A lot of big names in the industry seem to be doing MMOG consulting lately. What exactly do you do when you’re an MMO consultant?

Richard: Sometimes, they pay me to go and tell them what they really know themselves, and they just need someone to give some validation of what they’ve got. Other times it’s much more interactive than that and what I’m saying becomes part of the design or an influence [on the game]. Sometimes consultancy involves having a business plan which says, “Call in the consultant.” I come in, speak to them for a day, two days—sometimes several days. They all nod, check the thing that says “The consultant has come in,” and they do nothing. Sometimes it’s for a larger, better-organized company that needs a sanity check. Sometimes I get start-ups that have lots of ideas, but they don’t know how to do particular things and want me to recommend somebody. A lot of those start-ups are going to fail. That is why I always take payment for my consultancy and not shares in the company, because shares in a company that don’t go anywhere aren’t worth a lot, really. Besides, if they make a lot of money it won’t be anything to do with me—it will be to do with their business.

Ten Ton Hammer: You mentioned that one of the projects you were consulting on was an academic MMOG. As a professor, what’s your personal opinion of using academically-oriented MMOs for education?

Richard: There are academically-oriented MMOs?

Ten Ton Hammer: Er… well, Arden for example.

Richard: Oh, yes. Well, okay. The thing about Arden is… When you talk about academically-oriented [MMOs], the usual mechanism that people will talk about is using the game to teach people. Where Arden differed was that it wasn’t “We’re using the game to teach people,”—it was, “We’re using the game to learn things,” which is a very interesting idea. You’re using a game you developed with certain properties and which you can run multiple servers with different characteristics in them and see if predictions that have been made would apply to both. So Arden was the first of what could be some very interesting virtual worlds—ones that are built as a game, not as anything that’s trying to teach you something.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think that MMOGs could be a good platform for teaching something?

Richard: A platform? You can use many things as a platform. I could use this table as a platform to teach people things. MMOs as a platform to teach things… well, it depends on what you want to teach. People learn an awful lot from MMOs anyway. They learn an awful lot about themselves, they learn a lot about social relationships, and they learn a lot about the world that they’re in. I mean, if you’ve played Second Life, you can learn scripting from that; you can become a programmer ultimately as a result of having played that. So, you can learn things within them.

Now, the thing with educational games is they want you to learn particular things—not just how to be a good person, and not just higher order thinking and problem solving processes. They want you to learn how to integrate between 0 and 1, e to the x. That’s the sort of thing they want, and that’s not the kind of thing you can embed easily into a virtual world. You can use a virtual world as a platform to try to teach with your usually not very good mini-games, but it’s not making full use of the potential of virtual worlds. That’s just a lobby.

The more integrated it is, the more part of the gameplay something is, the more likely people are to learn something. So if you want to teach somebody multiplication, you can do that by creating a game where they occasionally have to multiply things together. They can work them out on a calculator or do them by hand, but eventually when they keep seeing the same sums coming up, they’ll remember it, and they know their times table. They don’t know why they know it; they just do.

Ten Ton Hammer: What kinds of things do you think games are well-suited to teach?

Richard: Games are very good at teaching two things: facts, and higher order thinking processes. If you have a game and you want to teach people facts, the way you don’t do it is to say, “Here is a game, here are a bunch of facts. See who can remember the most facts and you win.” But that’s kind of the level we’re at with educational games. “Which fact is it? Well, it’s that fact there. I’ll try and shoot it down with my space invaders.” If you want to teach people facts, you should have a game which has nothing to do with the facts, and then they learn the facts separately because it just happens to be there. Why can I name every country in Europe? Because I’ve played enough board games on Europe that it’s just come in—I just know what they are.

With educational games, there’s often too much emphasis on education and not enough on games. For the project I’m working on, the guy first of all knows a lot about games, and secondly, knows a lot about education. So this is really good—I don’t have to educate him about games or education. This is the kind of thing that’s a joy to consult on.

Ten Ton Hammer: So, do you prefer consulting on games with a stated purpose?

Richard: The people who design virtual worlds have to put their soul into them. If they don’t put their soul into them, then there’s no art. If there’s no art, then there’s just no purpose. People who create an MMO just because they want to make money… well, if you just want to make money, then go off and write software for nuclear power stations. It pays very well. However, the people who make MMOs aren’t doing it to make money. Most of them are going to lose money. They’re doing it because that’s how they articulate themselves—that’s how they can say things about the world that they can’t say in any other way. It’s their medium. When I’m talking to those kinds of people, that’s the best kind of consulting. I get to find out what they’re trying to say and help them try to say it.

You can read more of Dr. Bartle's writing at Terra Nova or at his personal blog, QBlog.

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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