Sunday, February 18, 2007

Game Modding and Education

While their is much to be said about the use of game directly for educational purposes, such as playing a historical simulation to teach about history or a combat simulation that prepares a soldier for combat, two weeks ago we focused on looking at the literature regarding the use of game modding and construction in education. Kafai work is extensive in this area, and It is the area in which I have been most interested in since my first year as a graduate student, do to my involvement in a Game modding course. I have been using these tools to teach for a number of years now and I wanted to informally discuss these tools.

The first element that I personally found important for the students was the base structure and syntax of the environment. Environments that were capable of proof reading, and explaining compiler errors in a format that is understandable without a computer science degree. This is one of the reasons I enjoy using Warcraft III for my classes. The script editor describes each on of its functions in a sentence format, indicating undefined or incompatible values with red text. Also the student understand that blue text means this is a value that is cable of changing. Unfortunately, A better way needs to be designed to find the appropriate function for a specified task.

A library of content is of extreme importance when using a tool, as ones artistic resources effect the complete aesthetic of ones game. I greatly enjoyed the use of RPG maker XP for this point. The tool a great library of art and music to create the game, even if it was somewhat limited to a fantasy setting, there was enough variation in the art to do a variety of stories under the genre of fantasy. But this also suffers from a similar downside as Warcraft III's functions, as a large set of resources makes it hard to locate one resource. This is made worse by the fact that many of the resources have no indication of their content in their title, thus requiring the user to spend the time to familiarize themselves.

A element that has been incorporated recently into Half-life 2 SDK could help with both of these issues. Within the Half-life 2 SDK's Hammer editor, one needs to be able to select textures for map design. An innovated search tool allows the user to quickly access all textures with a matching keyword. Recently, this tool has been augmented to work with the tools 3d model reasources as well. While I do not see this getting implemented very soon into all environments for educational or hobby use, I belive is an important consideration for the previous reasons.

1 comment:

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