Metaphor through Video Games: Braid

Most people don’t consider video games to be art, much in the same way that television struggled to achieve that distinction, but as the industry becomes more accessible and diverse, and less wantonly commercial, we are beginning to see games emerge that challenge not only our hand-eye coordination, but the way we think about our own place in the world.

Ironically, some of the more simplistic-looking games are fulfilling this ideal.  Braid is a two-dimensional side-scroller, in the tradition of Super Mario Bros. and other early 8 and 16-bit games.  The sprite, or character, moves through the world from left to right in an attempt to solve puzzles and advance through a series of tasks.

Where Braid differs from the norm, and many of the more “advanced” three-dimensional games on the newest hardware, is the gameplay, and how that relates to story and metaphor.

As the title of this blog suggests, the best learning happens when the learner is activated, or for the purpose of the blog, on fire.  As an adult, I find myself becoming engaged by a question, looking into the potential answers, usually through the internet, and when I’m truly on fire, following a systemic pathway of links and articles.  I sometimes even lose track of time when activated in such a way. 

Art should always have this effect on us.  The first time I watched the film Donnie Darko, by Richard Kelly, I was intrigued.  I immediately played the movie a second time, this time with the director’s commentary, even though it was already midnight.  The next night I watched it again with the cast commentary.  I went to the web, and read theories and posited my own.  I made a list of works from the film that were referenced, and went out into the world to get my hands on them.  I read Watership Down again, purchased the book and film versions of The Last Temptation of Christ, picked through the short story “The Destructor’s” by Graham Greene, and learned about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and how it relates to physical time travel.  All of this learning and consumption came about due to a movie about a guy in a creepy bunny suit. This is what good art does, activates us and invites us into the flow of ideas that the author lived in when they were creating; it enriches the art and opens us up to more of it.

Braid is comprised of a series of worlds, and within each world, time functions in a different way.  The function of Time in the game is tied to an overarching narrative that is richly developed at the start of each world.  After completing the game, I began to have questions about its meaning and development, and began to research.  I discovered that the game was based on 3 novels that the developer was intrigued by, The Cat That Walks Through Walls, by Robert A. Heinlein, Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, and Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman.  I went out immediately and devoured them. 

Einstein’s Dreams was an unbelievable find.  The basic crux of the novel is the idea that in order to understand how time functions in our universe, Einstein had to see the effect that changes to time would have on the human beings in those worlds.  He then looked at what we value in our societies, and determined how time works in our world based on those things.  It’s a stunning metaphor that shows the power of creative thinking in solving incredibly complex mathematical questions.

Braid’s first world is its best example of the effect that altering Time would have on our lives.  The text at the beginning of the level questions what would happen in a world where we could take back our mistakes.  How would it change the way we live our lives.  The gameplay mechanic in this world allows the player to rewind if they make a mistake.  As a learning tool, this allows for a great lesson to our students about risk taking and success, but it also provides teachers a valuable understanding.

Just because a student is capable of “doing something perfectly” right off of the bat, doesn’t necessitate they “know” anything, they may have simply gotten lucky, and this shows no strategic skill in problem solving per se.  Think of a maze.  A student runs through without making a wrong turn on the first try.  A second student resolves to take every right turn in order to create a system for success, that results in several dead-ends prior to getting through the maze.  Which experience was more valuable?  Which student demonstrated higher order thinking?  The obvious choice is the second student, but how often do our assessments and grades reward the first student with better marks?

Using Braid as a way to access this metaphor, and to begin implementing it into our instruction is, I believe, a valid and worthy exercise.  In what other ways can we create experience and metaphor as a way to help students privilege the journey as opposed to the end result?  As we move toward more 21st Century methods of teaching, the answer to this question should help to guide our instruction as well as our assessments. 

An Open Letter To Chris Christie

The debate surrounding Educational Reform in New Jersey is about to go national tonight at the RNC. Chris Christie will rollout his vision of the future, and most likely, set the stage for his own presidential run.

Photo courtesy of the Governor's Office/Tim Larsen

I have no desire to engage the Governor or other educational reformers, many of whom have no experience or contact with actual educators, in a debate about tenure, merit-pay, or pensions.  All of these things have been debated and screamed about, and retorted back and forth in various town hall meetings, and contested in the anonymously written comments that populate the online forums of our newspapers.  I have no desire to get into a screaming match with anyone, or be used as a campaign clip on a viral YouTube video.  I am simply concerned about the future of teacher quality in the state, and how any of the circus we have created around a group of issues that must be intellectually and effectively debated, might negatively impact recruitment, hiring, and developing new teachers.  In lieu of the Governor being chosen to give the Keynote Address at this year’s Republican National Convention, I’m very interested to hear his stance on the questions at the end of this letter.

The biggest concern I have about the culture we are creating, stems from two disparate notions of teachers.  One side will argue that teaching is a “calling,” a career that is magically ordained for prospective educators as their “life’s purpose.”  In the face of that idea, is the fact that almost half of new teachers leave the profession at or before their first 5 years of employment.  The other side of the argument believes that great teachers are simply those that follow a prescribed set of previously agreed upon lesson plans and drills, that if delivered correctly will create the resulting rise in test scores that define success.  Those that believe this method of teacher training and development very shortly reach the conclusion that as long as they are managed and extrinsically measured, that there will be quantifiable results.  There’s no reason to pay someone well for this type of job, unless they are one of the people writing the provided scripts.

By any rational measure, it’s clear that either picture is incomplete.  Great teachers can not simply “care” their way to success, without being skilled in delivering good instruction.  Likewise, following a paint-by-numbers approach to educating children, devoid of any strong desire to work with developing the future citizenry of the country, reduces teachers to robotic deliverers of basic facts and myopic views of a complex world.

I’ve been an educator for the past 10 years in this state. I have worked as a Classroom Teacher in a Special Education High School, and as an 8th Grade Language Arts Teacher.  Most recently, I became the Instructional Leader in our building, tasked with working with both new and established teachers to develop the new 21st Century Learning skills that will be vital to our children’s future success.

Sitting in these interviews, I’m struck by a few questions.  The first is personal.  When I was growing up, my father was (and still is) an Automotive and Technology Education Teacher in my high school.  My mother was a Special Education Teacher who was able to stay at home and raise me and my four siblings.  My father washed houses in the summer, and we were able to live in a Connecticut suburb of Hartford with relative fiscal safety.  I looked at the profession that my parents were engaged in and I saw it as a source of pride, it carried a sense that they were doing something “worthy,” despite the fact that we would never be rich, or be able to vacation at our own shore house.  I knew that I could do this job, provide for my family, and hopefully make a difference in the lives of young people.  As a Morris County homeowner and recent father of two, who works 3 additional jobs in order to pay the bills, and whose wife is also a teacher, I sometimes wonder, cynically, if I would have made that same decision upon entering college today.  Gov. Christie famously posited to teacher Rita Wilson, that if she was unhappy with her pay as a teacher, that she didn’t “have to do it.” He’s completely right about that, and people ARE making the decision to leave in large numbers, but what types of people WILL become teachers, and for the long haul,  if we continue this vitriolic debate that poisons the future pool of prospective “good” teachers?  How can we hope on one hand that our nation’s best and brightest students will become teachers, while at the same time expecting them to be martyrs?

I’m afraid that the current level of rhetoric, and the stigma that public education is being burdened with now, will have a devastating effect on the quantity and quality of people choosing to go into the profession over the next five to ten years.  

To Gov. Christie and the educational reformers on both sides of the aisle in New Jersey: What effect do you believe the nature of this debate is having on the students and professionals thinking about entering the field of education, and what are we doing to ensure that the BEST people are choosing to become educators in the schools and communities that need it most?  How do you plan to reverse the damage this debate is having on the way public education is being viewed, and how do you plan on attracting great educators to a state with a consistent history of strong academic success?  I believe that the the response to these questions will tell us infinitely more about the direction New Jersey Education is facing in the coming years, than any other attempt at reforming policy.

Respectfully,

Matthew Daly

Teacher

In the Face of Certain Destruction: An Exploration of Hope in Video Games

As you round the corner, you can begin to see the ashes descending from the sky.  You break into a run, avoiding the rubble falling from the exploding buildings that surround you; and even though this apocalyptic nightmare was a perfect and idyllic spring day not two minutes ago, your training tells you what is coming next.  The distant spaceship dominates the skyline.  Already, the pods have left the ship and are descending upon Central Park.  The invasion has begun, and thousands upon thousands of the alien legion will swarm the city streets by nightfall.  You face impossible odds, the only Space Marine to survive the off-world wars, and yet, a smile spreads across your face as you calculate the odds.

Somewhere in the ether, in another dimension even, the player that controls you shares your smile.

Promotional Still from Halo: Reach, copyright Bungie

***

The subject of gaming and its role in education is hotly contested on many levels.  At its basest, the argument most typically revolves around how and to what extent play represents “authentic” learning.  Rarely does the discussion broach the topic of Hope.

Hope in videogames is omnipresent.  The basic understanding when buying a game is that it can be beaten, mastered.  In fact, it has been designed to be completed, to create anything counter to this would doom the product to bargain bins.  With that knowledge, that the task is possible, failure becomes not a stigma, but a motivating challenge.  

The best games have mastered a subtle art.  They have balanced challenge with reward.  Earlier, when the local Arcade was the hub of electronic gaming, the harder the game was, the more popular the game became, as players attempted to reach and enshrine themselves as the “highscore” before eventually dying, allowing the next player in line to get a chance.  As gaming shifted away from the arcades and into suburban living rooms, the game design and intent changed.  When you look at how the use of “save” features, “infinite lives,” and “continues” have grown to pervade games, it’s easy to see that gamers are far more apt to take risks in this simulated environment.  Why?  Because they know that there is an answer, and that they will achieve mastery at some point, if they work hard.

A typical videogame is a relatively short experience when compared with the long weekly slog through childhood and adolescence that we call “school”.  We ask students to trust us that there is a greater goal waiting for them, but constantly restart them every new year with new rules and tasks.  Often, at the start of the year, the students are treated as blank slates.  Since the teacher is incapable of judging where each child is developmentally when they arrive cold, they start from the beginning to “guarantee” that they all get the same experience in the classroom.  This is misguided at best, and oppression at its worst.  By assuming that kids know nothing because there is no guarantee of what they know individually, educators rob students of the achievements they have accomplished in previous years, and they begin to see the process of school as a series of unconnected episodes, which are predicated upon satisfying an individual teacher, as opposed to developing a sense of their own mind.

Video games do the opposite of this.  They are tailor made for the ones playing.  Most games allow for “levelling up,” when the efforts put in by players results in a new power or skill that then becomes part of their persona.  Other games have collectible “achievements” or “badges” that the player displays on their personal viewable profile.  The game, and its subsequent sequels, never discounts the work done by players as they work towards the completion of the game.

I’m not sure that schools do this well enough.  In this metaphor, are grades the equivalent of “achievements” and “badges”?  By that rationale, do grade even represent what we are trying to engender in students, or are they simply a measure of compliance?

By the end of a school year, a students will have a variety of work-products from different classes across the subject areas that represent the “work” that they have done.  They know that almost NONE of it will be utilized ever again in subsequent years, and that come September, they will be starting over.  Is it possible that, after repeating this cycle year after year, students will begin to lose sight of why they are doing anything at all?  That there might not be an end?  That none of it is connected in any meaningful way?  If we were to overhear an adult expressing what I’ve just described as the way they view their life, we would call that person “depressed”.  And what is depression, if not a pervading feeling of Hopelessness.

In the Call of Duty series, a collection of heavily popular First-person shooting games that utilize a multiplayer match format, most players have “died” literally THOUSANDS of times.  In fact, the average player has a Kill/Death ratio that is in the negative, which means their character is killed more than they kill.  The series boasts 30 million players online across all iterations.  The second-newest game in the series, Call of Duty: Black Ops, has been played for over 600 million hours so far.  An outsider would look at the seemingly repetitive nature of the game and see no distinction between the tediousness of modern schooling and the hundreds of hours of gameplay an AVERAGE player puts into this virtual world.  They would miss the subtle nuances that make it far different.  Call of Duty uses a multi-tiered achievement system that is made up of levels.  Players accumulate EXP, or experience points, from kills and other in-game achievements.  Once they reach a new level, they are granted access to better or varied weapons, and “perks” (customizable enhancements that make the player better).  Upon reaching the highest level, players are offered the chance to “prestige,” which is a fancy term for starting over.  The caveat?  When they begin the process again, they will be viewed by others as a “2nd Prestige”,  or “3rd Prestige” and so on as they negotiate through.  The ability to move upward in the game is limitless, requiring an almost ridiculous amount of time, with very little physical reward, and yet, it is one of the most addictive experiences in youth culture today.  Why is this? What does it supply that differentiates it from schooling?  Simply, they know that success is possible, viewable and transferable.

As a teacher, I’ve been in situations where a student who clearly knows the answer is succumbing to some form of institutionalized apathy.  It became fashionable at some point, or maybe it was something I read, to further question the student in that scenario:  When a student says, “I don’t know,” teachers were to respond with “But what if you did?” or “Well, (Student’s Name), what would you say if you DID know?”  While I understand the conceit, I’m not sure if it is enough to truly change that willingness towards giving up and asking for the answer to be supplied.  “But what if..” is a question that transfers ownership to the student, but if it exists in a structure where there is no guarantee of success, and where the easiest route to success is to succumb to being told what to think, I’m not sure it is enough to change the trajectory the children are on.

Gamers, on the other hand, think about this all the time.  The difference is the situation in which they are engaged.  The presence of Hope is what drives this method of thinking.  When gamers are faced with a seemingly impossible task, such as an unscalable wall, or an undefeatable enemy, they ask themselves the following question, “In a perfect world, what would I need to solve this problem?”  Most often, the answers generated from this type of questioning will solve the player’s in-game issue.  The question can not exist outside the framework of a completable task, the understanding that no matter how difficult something seems, that there is a solution.  Gamers know that every task they are given is doable, eventually, if they work and think harder.  Isn’t that the type of student we are trying to create in our schools?  And if that is true, how do we better accomplish it?

As teachers, we are tasked with occasioning a classroom space that is best suited for learning.  The systems we create in our classrooms must be optimized for this end. Our classes contain boys and girls, Jocks and Nerds, The wealthy and the poor; but they also contain Starship Captains, Warlords, Farmers, Questing Knights, Puzzle Masters, Flying Dragons, Aspiring Detectives, and Cowboys avenging their past wrongs (things most of us as teachers have only read about).  At anytime during our day, we are teaching children that have saved planets, rescued damsels, and survived the Zombie Apocalypse; children that have faced absurd odds, and through their own wits and skill, smiled in the face of the seemingly impossible.  Every single one of them had an understanding, both tacit and explicit, that no matter how difficult the task, that it was attainable.  The way we provide Hope in our schools must change, if we desire to tap into the fierceness and voraciousness with which our students are capable of learning.

Introduction and Welcome

Hello, I'm Matt Daly, a teacher living and working in Northern New Jersey.  This year, I will be investing as much of my time as possible in creating an open classroom environment that truly activates children in authentic ways.

This blog will serve as many things.

It will become a journal of the successes and failures of the school year.

It will feature discussions and videos surrounding student engagement and progressive methodologies.

It will host guest bloggers and links to interesting articles in education.

Please follow and check in regularly to participate in this ongoing discussion!