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: Ive been treading water. I teach people at a university and I do consultancy for people, but Im not actually working on anything myself. Youd have to give me money to do that, and Im 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 youre 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 theyve got. Other times its much more interactive than that and what Im 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 dayssometimes several days. They all nod, check the thing that says The consultant has come in, and they do nothing. Sometimes its for a larger, better-organized company that needs a sanity check. Sometimes I get start-ups that have lots of ideas, but they dont 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 dont go anywhere arent worth a lot, really. Besides, if they make a lot of money it wont be anything to do with meit 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, whats your personal opinion of using academically-oriented MMOs for education?
Richard: There are academically-oriented MMOs?
Ten Ton Hammer: Er
well,
Richard: Oh, yes. Well, okay. The thing about
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 theyre in. I mean, if youve 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 thingsnot 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. Thats the sort of thing they want, and thats 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 its not making full use of the potential of virtual worlds. Thats 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, theyll remember it, and they know their times table. They dont 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 dont 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 thats kind of the level were at with educational games. Which fact is it? Well, its that fact there. Ill 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
With educational games, theres often too much emphasis on education and not enough on games. For the project Im working on, the guy first of all knows a lot about games, and secondly, knows a lot about education. So this is really goodI dont have to educate him about games or education. This is the kind of thing thats 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 dont put their soul into them, then theres no art. If theres no art, then theres 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 arent doing it to make money. Most of them are going to lose money. Theyre doing it because thats how they articulate themselvesthats how they can say things about the world that they cant say in any other way. Its their medium. When Im talking to those kinds of people, thats the best kind of consulting. I get to find out what theyre 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.