Playing With Engagement: Reality Ends Here

In August 2009, Elizabeth Daley, dean of the School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) at the University of Southern California, in conjunction with the SCA Faculty Council, hosted a faculty retreat designed to spark discussion regarding the School’s vision of cinematic arts education in the near future. The discussion centered on several broad questions, including

• “What’s next?”
• “What’s on the horizon in our ever-expanding field—in technology, culture, business and higher education—that we should be trying to anticipate?”
• and, perhaps most importantly, “Are we truly meeting the needs of our students?”

Following the retreat, these questions were taken up in greater detail by a cross-divisional faculty committee tasked with implementing curricular change at both the undergraduate and graduate levels to reflect the needs of a new generation of students and an industry in the midst of transformation. The group, titled the Envisioning the Future Group, began discussions regarding how best to address these needs and decided that one clear objective would be to create a mechanism to inspire greater cross-divisional interaction and engagement among the students.

The faculty group felt that this interaction and engagement was important for several reasons. First, the school is comprised of several specialty divisions devoted to areas such as film production, screenwriting, animation, interactive media, and critical studies. In the past, our undergraduates would experience their first semester within SCA as isolated members of their distinct divisions, and they would move through the School’s tremendous resources as if wearing blinders. The faculty believed our students required a broader vision, one enabled by cross-divisional contact and collaboration with peers, and integrative learning that would foster expansive thinking and inquiry across several areas of knowledge.

We also hoped to address another pernicious problem: with regard to curriculum, it is no longer sufficient to specialize only in directing, screenwriting, or game design. Instead, our students now require the ability to understand the methods and processes of diverse kinds of media production and an increasing convergence of media forms. We needed a means to address this problem and a way to encourage our students to engage with each other and to collaborate.

Initial discussions for creating cross-divisional interaction centered on creating a gateway course for all incoming freshmen students within the School, and many meetings were devoted to the design of that course. However, in January 2011, a new idea emerged. Jane McGonigal’s book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, had just been published.¹ In it, McGonigal argues passionately for the transformative power of games to create positive change. In addition, Frank Rose’s book, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, was also newly available.² Rose’s book documents a series of “immersive” media projects that clearly embody the transmedia ethos we were hoping to inspire in our students. With these books as a foundation, and based on the research on the topic of alternate reality games by a PhD student in the School’s Media Arts + Practice program, we decided to create a game that would bring our undergraduate students together.

Other research also supported this decision. For example, we were motivated by Randall Bass, Associate Provost and Executive Director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University, and his support for informal learning. Using the findings of the National Survey of Student Engagement that showed that undergraduates have the highest degree of engagement often in their informal learning experiences,³ Bass provocatively asks if we are in a “post-course era.” He first posed the question in a 2011 presentation at EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative titled “The Problem of Learning in the Post-Course Era” and argues that in fact, first-year seminars, learning communities, and collaborative assignments, as well as study abroad experiences, internships, and capstone projects play a significant role in student engagement, often impacting students more profoundly than formal classes do.⁴ These informal activities are so important to learning, Bass explains, because they encourage students to attend to underlying meanings, to integrate and synthesize, and to use the knowledge that they are gaining in many disparate situations. Indeed, this informal learning is to a large degree centered on deploying new knowledge within a new context.

Inspired by this research, we were encouraged to pursue the design of the game experience and to consider an informal learning experience as a means to achieve our goals.

Jeff Watson, then a graduate student in the interdivisional Media Arts + Practice PhD program, had conducted extensive research on alternate reality games (ARGs), and we initially considered creating an ARG for the students. ARGs are based in the real world, in real time, but make use of multiple media platforms and a fictional story structure within which the participation and contributions of players affect the outcome. Examples of large-scale ARGs include the educational games World Without Oil, a collaborative and social imagining of the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis,⁵ and Superstruct, in which players imagine themselves ten years in the future in a world facing daunting environmental, political, and health challenges.⁶ Museums also use ARGs as a means for engaging people in their collections in highly compelling and interactive ways – the Smithsonian’s Ghosts of a Chance ARG, for example, used a mystery structure and invited players to find and share clues, which were located both in the museum and its online collection.⁷

Watson and a design group began to design the game experience in the spring of 2011. The design group included several graduate students interested in game design, undergraduate students involved in the SCA’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, and faculty members, most significantly Tracy Fullerton, chair of SCA’s Interactive Media and Games Division and the person who worked most closely with Watson.

As the project began in earnest, however, it became clear that what was needed was not an ARG, but something far simpler. Indeed, what emerged was a mechanism for inspiring cross-divisional collaboration and engagement, or what Watson dubbed “a serendipity engine.” The design group created a game titled Reality Ends Here.⁸

The game itself is made up of a deck of more than 300 cards; on one side of each card is information about the history of cinema and game design, facts about the School of Cinematic Arts, or historically significant films, games, concepts, and tools that every student in the school should know. The opposite side of each card features a project to create or conditions for the project. For example, a card may read “comic book,” indicating that the project should be a comic book, or it may read “a moral dilemma” (fig. 1), indicating that whatever the project, it should include some sort of moral dilemma. Linking the cards using a color-coded arrow system builds a project prompt to create a comic book with a moral dilemma. The key to the project prompt is that students can continue to add condition cards, and the way to do this most effectively is to connect and collaborate with other students.

Figure 1 Examples of cards, one indicating an aspect of cinema technology, and the other dictating a project condition

At the start of each fall semester incoming students begin to discover strange clues. A student might find an odd list of numbers inside a fortune cookie at the annual welcome lunch, for example. The numbers could be a code that, when cracked, reveals a URL, which in turn might lead the student to the game website. Eventually, diligent and curious students will discover the Game Office. There, they receive a packet of 10 cards, and the game begins.

Students create projects based on assembling what are known as “deals,” namely a project prompt and as many conditional cards as possible. The larger the deal, the more points each participant receives. The deals grow in complexity as students begin to connect and collaborate. The finished projects are posted to the game website on a weekly basis, along with a video “justification” in which the student—or students—explains how each card was incorporated into the project (fig. 2). A team of judges selects a weekly winner who earns an unknown prize. The prize might entail being whisked off to the Museum of Jurassic Technology for a private visit, or students might find themselves enjoying appetizers in the home of the acclaimed cinematographer Dante Spinotti. In joining the game, the students bring any skills they have, and they are required to use only low-tech equipment such as cell phones rather than the more advanced equipment of professional filmmaking. Emphasis is placed on ingenuity, collaboration, and creativity rather than individual acclaim or project polish.

Figure 2 Still image from the video Dancing Drawings, a collaborative, drawn-on-film project created by students Aaron Ashby and Sarah Jones that used 31 cards. The project tied for first place for the Committee Choice Award, as well as the Movement Award

Reality Ends Here has been an enormous success since its launch in the fall of 2011. Each year, after its initial run, the game is augmented with input from undergraduate students who participated during the fall semester; they engage in this process formally with a design studio devoted to the game. These participants, in turn, help run the game for the new students the following year.

The game has increased engagement across divisional lines for several reasons. First and foremost, the game creates a particular stance or disposition within the SCA community. While many of our students arrive on campus hoping to be the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, through the game they learn that contemporary creativity requires not the focus of a single individual but the collaborative creativity of a group. The game fosters a sense of community and the ability to learn with one’s peers.

Simon Wiscombe, formerly a graduate student in the Interactive Media and Game Design program who helped design the game from the beginning, oversaw the game during the fall 2013 iteration. He attributes the continued success of the game to its integration with the School ethos. “SCA is all about unbridled creativity,” he said in an interview. “There is an attitude in the school that essentially making things is good.”⁹ The game creates a platform for making things and a recognition system that honors that creativity.

Game-based learning has also gained considerable traction since 2003 when scholar James Gee described the impact of game play on cognitive development.¹⁰ Since then, research—and interest in—the potential of gaming on learning has exploded, as has the diversity of games themselves with the emergence of serious games as a genre, the proliferation of gaming platforms, and the evolution of games on mobile devices. Furthermore, research on undergraduate education specifically shows that gaming related to course content helps student gain a fresh perspective on material and engages them in that content in more complex and nuanced ways.¹¹

Our students come to us with a desire to learn differently. They are accustomed to communicating quickly and widely with their peers and diverse “publics,” and they expect to learn as much in informal settings as in traditional classrooms.¹² Our students are mobile, networked, and almost always connected, and they expect education to support networking, collaboration, and participation. While many faculty members within the School of Cinematic Arts have enjoyed the benefits of project-based learning as a natural outgrowth of hands-on filmmaking practices, it remains incumbent upon us to continue to explore the myriad ways in which we can continue to engage new students most effectively. Using a game as the School’s introductory learning experience acknowledges new dispositions among students and has enhanced student engagement across the six divisions very effectively.

Bibliography

Bass, Randall. “The Problem of Learning in the Post-Course Era.” Presentation at EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative 2011 Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., February 14-16, 2011. http://www.educause.edu/eli/events/eli-annual-meeting/2011/problem-learning-postcourse-era.

———. “Disrupting Ourselves: The Problem of Learning in Higher Education.” EDUCAUSE Review 47, no. 2 (2012): 23-33. http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/disrupting-ourselves-problem-learning-higher-education.

Eklund, Ken. World Without Oil. Alternate reality game. 2007. http://worldwithoutoil.org/.

Gee, James. What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

———. “Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines.” E-Learning 2, no. 1 (2005):, 5-16.

Institute for the Future. Superstruct. Alternate reality game. 2008. http://www.iftf.org/our-work/people-technology/games/superstruct/

Ito, Mizuki, Sonja Baumer, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Rachel Cody, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Heather A. Horst, et al. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Living and Learning With New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262013369%20_Hanging_Out.pdf.

Jenkins, Henry. Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Chicago: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2006. http://www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF.

National Survey of Student Engagement. NSSE Annual Results 2008: Promoting Engagement for All Students: The Imperative to Look Within. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, Center for Postsecondary Research, 2008. http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2008_Results/.

McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin Books, 2011.

Rose, Frank. The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Ghosts of a Chance. Alternate reality game.2008-2010. http://www.ghostsofachance.com/.

USC School of Cinematic Arts. “About.” Reality Ends Here. Last modified 2013. http://reality.usc.edu/about/.