Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
in MUVEs and is sponsoring development of a
massively multiplayer online game to foster sci-
ence, technology, engineering and mathematics
learning and career exploration is due in no small
part to the arguments presented here. This chapter
is intended to be an aid to the reader who has a
desire to use a MUVE for education and who
needs the support of others to achieve that goal.
Whether the people who need to buy in to the plan
are administrators, students, parents or colleagues,
there are likely to be objections that need to be
overcome. This topic is full of good examples of
uses of MUVEs for educational purposes. There
are cases of best practices and reports on the ap-
plication of MUVEs in other chapters. It is not
the purpose of this chapter to convince the reader
that a MUVE can be a useful tool for education.
The goal of this chapter is to help prepare the
reader to overcome external objections to using
MUVEs in the classroom. It proceeds from the
assumption that the reader already supports such
use and is seeking the means to convince others
of the value of that course.
was demanding and paying for greater power and
speed and better visual experiences from their
computers at home. Through the 1980s and 90s,
graphics moved from monochrome to 16 (CGA)
then 64 (EGA) then 256 (VGA) and eventually
reach more than 16 million (Truecolor) colors.
Game rendering technology advanced from 2D
to 2.5D to 3D by the late 1990s.
The first online, shared computer environment
was a text-based, fantasy realm called MUD
standing multi-user dungeon (Bartle, 1999). It
was written at the University of Essex in 1978,
and was run on the university mainframe until
1987. It was an adventure game of the swords and
sorcery type. What made it different from other
games at the time was that people could play to-
gether online, and that opened new possibilities for
online social interaction and community building
(Rheingold, 1993). Other text-based, multi-user
environments followed using the term MUD and
later MOO, and some are still available. Sometimes
the term multi user virtual environment is used
for these text-based programs, but often MUVE is
reserved for the graphically-based virtual worlds
that grew out of the merger of the MUD idea with
the increased computer power previously noted.
Today there are dozens of MUVEs available.
Some of them are massively multiplayer online
games (MMOG) like
World of Warcraft
. Others
are not games at all, but shared environments like
Second Life
without scoring, missions, character
classes or other structure features common to
games. Often the distinction between games and
non-games is hard to make even for those familiar
with MUVEs. There is also a lack of consensus
about both definitions and terms that further
hinders discussion and research.
Usually at this point in the background material
a well defined body of literature can be identified
as a solid starting point for the work presented. This
chapter is about making a persuasive case for the
use of MUVEs in education. There is not a con-
venient body of literature neatly pulling together
the obstacles the proponent of MUVEs is likely to
BACkgROUND
The rapid growth of personal computer ownership
and access in the last two decades of the twentieth
century led to many efforts to bring computers
into schools and to innovated education with
technology. Computer labs became a standard
feature in almost every school and personal com-
puters appeared in many classrooms and homes
as teachers, administrators and parents in with
schoolwork at home. While applications like word
process, email and spreadsheets drove business and
schools to buy computers, the purchase of many
home computers included “and to play games” on
the list of justifications. Demand for gaming on
computers helped drive the development of greater
processing power and better graphics capabilities.
While schools tended to focus on business-type
applications, a growing population of gamers
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