News from the College of Arts and Sciences...

January 7, 2010

Faculty team lands grant to explore computer gaming

An interdisciplinary group of faculty at the University has won a $232,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to explore how serious computer gaming technology can be used in teaching and research. Duncan Buell, a professor in the Department of Computer Sciences and Engineering, is the principal investigator for the grant that includes Arts & Sciences coprincipal investigators Heidi Rae Cooley, assistant professor of new media studies; Randall Cream, post-doctoral fellow in digital humanities and associate director of the Center for Digital Humanities; and Simon Tarr, assistant professor of media arts.

The grant, from the NEH’s Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, will fund a three-week institute at USC next summer. The institute will familiarize some 20 faculty members and advanced graduate students from colleges and universities in the Southeast and nationally with game building, good applications of gaming, and what can be learned from a gaming experience. Institute participants will return to their host schools to implement what they learned in Columbia.

During the spring 2010 semester, the four professors taking part in the project plan to develop three fairly well developed prototypes of games—two for mobile phone platforms and one for a desktop platform—that will help give institute participants a head start with their gaming activities during the May institute.

Buell is hoping to enlist a core group of students from the University who will know the platforms technically and can provide examples of already developed games to institute participants. The technology from multi-player games and first-person shooter games such as war games is known as serious gaming and is already used at some colleges and universities for educational purposes, Buell said. Those uses typically create environments that gamers can see, similar to virtual reality. For example, UCLA has already created a rendition of King Tut’s Tomb that students can explore, and IBM has a guided tour of the Forbidden City of Beijing. Buell and his digital humanities colleagues are interested in how they can translate the technology into other viable educational experiences.

“Part of it is having the software that builds the environment appropriately, which is where the computer scientist comes in,” he said. “The other part is a good application of the software, which is where the humanities people come in. For example, how would you do a history game, a virtual reality kind of history?” The other part of the technology of interest to the digital humanities group, Buell said, is what players or students learn about themselves as a result of their participation in a game. The nature of gaming technology that makes it an effective learning tool is that it can more effectively fi re a student’s imagination and can be more engaging in learning situations or a research setting, he added.

“If you can get a game that works properly, students learn better because they are actually involved in the process and are more interested in being part of it instead of simply memorizing something,” Buell said. “Part of it is getting students hooked. If you can make the educational game work so that it isn’t just fun, but actually conveys a message, it is an excellent educational tool because you’re providing something like an internship or an experiential learning experience.”

Gaming technology can be used in research on several levels, including in psychological or management studies where people who are interacting with others can be studied in other than face-toface situations. Other applications might include ways to study how people react to the introduction of new technology into organizations. The use of gaming technology will be only one part of education’s future, Buell said, although he notes that it is similar to technology that allows for anatomical renderings of human beings that can “look beneath skin and muscles and watch blood flow, which is transforming education in all disciplines.

“I got interested in the digital humanities on campus because I thought it was a nice new market for technology,” Buell said. “One of the advantages of being in computing is that you get new technology very rapidly, and then somebody thinks of new applications for it. “With the coming WiFi access for the entire Columbia campus, we’re looking at how we can use that capability, and a lot of proposals are coming from the humanities,” Buell said. “There are a lot of people in my discipline, and others who look at my discipline, who are interested in the question of how we can use these things collectively.”