[Encore] How did it go?

[Jon Saklofske]

Hey Kevin (and everyone)-

 

My name is Jon Saklofske and I'm the faculty member at Acadia University
who instigated the project that Jean-Marc was working on this summer.
I've recently signed up to the consortium list as well, and on behalf of
Jean-Marc and myself would like to report that the result of the MOO
project have far exceeded our original designs.  Jean-Marc has been
working tirelessly at tweaking the encore database to suit our specific
needs and everything has come together extremely well...  

 

I'll offer a quick summary of the project:

The Golgonooza MOO (named after William Blake's fictional city of
imagination) realized a desire on my part to begin to involve students
in interactive, educational and intelligent gaming at the post-secondary
level.  enCore Xpress was the natural choice to use to create this
gamespace, because of its open-source nature, its flexibility and
because it doesn't require the budget or programming expertise usually
required for many commercial game designs. As well, using enCore allowed
us to host the gamespace in an architecture that also supports other
pedagogical projects and allows multiple students to participate using
minimum hardware requirements.  The main project that Jean-Marc was
working on this summer was a loose, situational adaptation of the
circumstances found in a neglected British Romantic period novel
entitled "The Natural Daughter" by Mary Robinson.  The book is quite
contrived, but its narrative exposes readers to the challenges and the
range of limited professions that a late-eighteenth century woman would
have experienced.  I wanted to see if students' reactions to this
experience differed if they were players as opposed to readers (and also
to get them to think about the various ways in which history is mediated
through fiction's rhetoric and technologies), so we constructed the
Natural Daughter MOOspace.  When you sign on, you are placed in the role
of a late-eighteenth century woman, and given a randomly generated
social class which then determines how much money you initially have,
and how other characters (called storybots) react to you in the MOO.
Your activities while in the gamespace can also affect your reputation
and further determine characters' reactions.  The storybots are
Jean-Marc's creation-they rely on conversation trees, as we found the
enCore bots to be a bit unreliable (we've kept the enCore bots but put
them in an asylum, where they can babble to each other endlessly).
Jean-Marc, at the moment, is trying to work on a user-friendly story-bot
creator for the MOO, which will be easily customisable by those who may
not be familiar with the finer points of enCore's programming language
(i.e. my students).  There's more to talk about here, but I'd invite you
to explore it for yourself...

 

Overall, the finished product is pretty amazing, considering we only had
3 months to put it together.  I'd like to invite everyone to try out the
result and send us feedback and suggestions:  Go to
http://playground.acadiau.ca:7000/  and create an account that
associates you with ENG 2386 (the class that the gamespace was
constructed for). Once you're in, proceed to the ENG 2386 section, then
the Natural Daughter section, then click on Bath to start the
experience.  If you become frustrated or find yourself trapped in
circumstances beyond your control, type @reset to reset your character
(this resets your class and your reputation) and returns you to the
entrance of the gamespace. 

 

Also-if you have the time, visit my virtual office and check out the
video room---a simple illustration that pasting a link to YouTube videos
in the Visual URL box of the multimedia content tab while editing an
object works flawlessly.  My students are excited about this, because
they can quite easily add their own videos to the building projects that
they'll be working on next term...

 

Thanks!

Jon

 

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