MyWorld - Next Generation Wireless Ubiquitous Simulation Games

MyWorld builds on the TEP’s long history designing and researching mobile simulation games.  Our earliest body of work in this field was the development of a suite of Participatory Simulations (or “pSims” for short) for Palm OS handheld devices (http://education.mit.edu/pda).  Drawn from thousands of implementations with teachers all over the globe, we carry forward successful aspects of these Palm simulations.  We also utilize lessons learned about workable integration into classroom practice, usability and scalability, and practicalities of software and hardware distribution and management.  MyWorld extends this style of game play by adding wireless ubiquitous play, designed to be played in the “interstitial” spaces in life and in school to truly bring learning everywhere and all the time.

The first myWorld game, Palmagotchi combines the ideas of virtual pets (such as the popular Tamagotchi toy) and the evolutionary story of Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos Islands. Players maintain families of birds and islands of flowers. They monitor and feed birds in order to keep them alive.  They also mate their birds with other players’ birds in order to get offspring with desirable traits that maximize their chances of surviving various hazards in the game.
All of the birds and flowers in Palmagotchi are endowed with a number of genetically determined traits. Each trait is additively influenced by a small number of copies of the same gene. This means traits are not simply present or absent (e.g., red or white flowers) but rather they are continuous, spanning a whole spectrum (e.g., height of a flower). Flowers have genetic characteristics including color, flower length, and pollen type. Birds have genetic characteristics including size, metabolic rate, flight speed, beak length and flower color preference.  Some of these characteristics interact: for example, birds’ beak lengths determine which flowers they can feed from, according to flower length; similarly birds’ color preferences determine which flowers they can feed from.

All of the abovementioned characteristics use a simplified model such that they are determined entirely genetically, meaning there is no variation contributed by the environment. There are, however, dynamic attributes that do change over time. Dynamic attributes are influenced by a combination of time, random events, genetic traits, and the input and actions of players. For flowers, these attributes are amounts of pollen and nectar that birds can pick up when they forage. For birds, they are age and energy (depleted by mating and metabolism, and increased by foraging for nectar).

The game is paced to require interactions every three to four hours so as not to disrupt classes, yet create some sense that the players must be vigilant to keep their organisms alive and well. Each interaction is designed to present the player with data that she can use to inform her decisions, though the only way that the player learns how this data maps on to success is through experience.

In order to forage, a player looks across her current set of birds and decides which one needs to eat. After selecting that bird, she selects choose an island to visit. Once on that island, the player is presented with a list of flowers that she is able to “see” (only those flowers that whose color is close to the bird’s color preference).

Players quickly learn that with each foraging trip there is a risk of attack by predators and that they get more nectar by feeding from flowers with lengths matching their birds’ beak length.  They can reduce the number of foraging trips they must take by optimizing this match.  A bird’s metabolism results in another trade-off: higher metabolism results in faster flight and less risk of predation, but also burns energy faster, resulting in the need for more foraging trips.  Players selectively mate their birds with those of other players having desirable traits, based on what they think is the best trade-off for these traits. Birds also pick up pollen when they forage, which can be transferred to other flowers.  The flowers then reproduce, with offspring that combine the traits of the parents.
 
The list of flowers that the foraging bird “Little One” can see provides the player with a quick overview of available resources on the chosen island. Further examination can show individual characteristics of each flower. 

In addition to foraging, birds must also mate. Even if well tended to, the birds have finite life spans, thus mating and producing offspring are a regular part of the game. Players may initially mate out of convenience or just with their friends, but over time selection for desired characteristics becomes a key strategy for survival. Offspring possess genes that are a combination of the parents’ genes. In general this results in offspring that are near the average of the parents’ two traits, but due to the random assortment of genes in sexual reproduction, not all offspring will be exactly the same.

More information on Palmagotchi and MyWorld coming soon. 

In the mean time you can take a look at this Introductory Presentation or see some of the Early Research.