Learning by game.

Most everyone even remotely interested in video games will recognize the picture on the right. It's Guitar Hero, the game where you get a controller that looks like a little plastic guitar and you can rock out to all sorts of tunes, getting higher and higher scores the more accuratly you press the buttons on the "guitar". It's wildly popular, spawning endless sequels and imitators, including those that include multiple guitars, a drum set and a microphone so you can create your own virtual band.

Except that anyone who's actually played Guitar Hero knows that it's not GH or any clone. (No preening virtual rock stars in the background.) Instead, it's a freeware program called LittleBigStar. The main difference? No plastic guitar. Use your real one. Play the real songs.

LBS and an unreleased commercial competitor called Guitar Rising are the first wave of games that have come full circle. Lots of people want to play music with friends, but learning an instrument is hard. So the game makers created Guitar Hero and its clones and proceeded to make money hand over fist. Millions of copies have been sold- in fact, they've sold so well they now bring in more money than the sales of actual digital music. Players have spent hundreds of hours learning Through the Fire and the Flames on expert.

But you're still playing with a cheap plastic imitation of the real thing. So why not skip it and just use a real instrument? You can still use the same idea- hit the right notes at the right time and you get a higher score. Even better, the computer can adjust the difficulty: if you can't play a passage, just slow it down until you can, then pick up the pace later. Think of it as a metronome, but a lot more fun. Unlike guitar Hero, LBS also includes a top bar that mimics guitar TAB, so you can learn the notation at the same time that you are trying to max out your score

I'm not sure what to call this: it's not a simulation, but it's still a game. The closest thing I can think of is comparing a shooter game like Quake to a game of paintball. It's not virtual anymore- you're playing (within the limits of not dying) as close as possible to real combat. As a rank beginner, it's also close to impossible for me since I still need to watch my fingers rather than a screen, but LBS will force me to break that (bad) habit that I need to dump anyway.

These real life games aren't there yet- they still have difficulty handling quick chord changes and LBS shows that it's a labor of love by a single person, but expect to see a lot more of these pseudo-simulations coming soon.

It is very dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue

Over the past few years, there has been a growing interest in using games as tools in higher education in a variety of topics. Much of the hype has gone either to virtual worlds built in Second life or massive simulations such as Mike Wesch's world simulation project for his introductory sociology courses. But these both have the same problem- the student is playing a game that someone else designed- it's either structured into the course itself with rules created by the professor or has a barrier to entry so high that only specialists can create content within the system.

So why not go back to the future? For any of us old farts who grew up typing "Go north" or "Oil door" into a text adventure, a couple of lines of text followed by a > prompt doesn't seem unusual, and for the digital natives of today it has a retro feel, much like seeing an old Caddie with shark-like tail fins. It turns out that you can create a text adventure without a huge investment in programming time using the latest version of the Inform programming environment.

Inform uses a very natural language-like syntax, so a typical set of instructions might look like

The Office is a room. The description is "An office, complete with peppy motivational posters on the walls, a couple of family photos and an aging PC."
The hallway is east of the Office. The description is "A Hallway. What more do you need to know?"
The computer is in the Office. It is fixed in place. Instead of using the computer, say "You need to know the password first"

You've now created two rooms that you move between and an object that you can (sort of) interact with. While you can get a lot more complicated if you want (making a fully functional computer takes some work) the base syntax for creating a world, adding descriptions and simple triggers shouldn't be beyond anyone, even non-programmers. This means that ordinary students can build a world of their own and let people play in it without the overhead (and expense- Inform is free) that you would need for more "sophisticated" tools.

Here at GBurg, Chris Fee in the English department is using Inform in his courses on medieval literature to have students build areas that other students can explore. In many ways, it's similar to an essay- they have to build a fictional narrative, characters and then flesh them out, but they have the additional capability to lead people to try various actions within the story to see what happens, all the while the author has to better their own understanding of the area they are developing to cover strange or unusual actions by their players. The project is ongoing - the first class to develop these is just now finishing up and the adventures will be passed down to a 200-level course next year for them to explore, so we'll see how this goes, but as an educational tool I think it shows a great deal of possibility- cheap to use, easy to learn and able to leverage the "play" aspect that is so effective in using games to teach people.