Investigating the CyberCampus Engine, part 2

Back in 1998 business theorist named William F. Massy got together with the video game developer Trevor Chan and Enlight Software to make a university simulation game called ‘Virtual U‘ with a million dollars. This software was used to train dozens of administrators around the country, and is very important as an artifact of higher education management culture in the 1990s. This post is part of a series of notes concerning it and my continuing research into the informationalization of the modern American university.

The Simulation Engine: Labor

In its modeling of the relations between the university’s administration and its employees, “Virtual U” is strangely deficient. Part of this is due to the scope of the simulation: the “Virtual U” lives in an ephemeral present where some conditions change over time, but there are no emergent long-term trends. In addition, as with most simulation games, the player is dictator and is free to make any changes at whim. The only direct repercussions are pop-up messages that respond to some of the game’s many metrics such as “Alumnus complains about performance of football team” that can be easily ignored.

1. Technology

In “Virtual U” faculty behavior is governed by a complex model that takes into account teaching loads, research projects, discretionary time, and performance ratings in the three areas of teaching, scholarship, and research. As with most models, the details that underlie Massy’s simulation rely on assumptions that are not completely valid.

According to Massy, the increased use of ‘technology’ in the classroom can only have beneficial effects where things such as student satisfaction and faculty morale are concerned. Amusingly, as a producer of technology for use in the classroom, Massy might be slightly biased. While he separately accounts for the impact of distance learning on the total educational quality of courses, Massy ascribes his apparent technophilia to all those involved in the operation of the university. This is a common mistake on the part of many university administrators, who often believe that support for a high-tech agenda is as widespread outside their offices as inside of them. In that case, for what reason was there so much opposition to the advancement of the internet into the curriculum back in the 1990s? Faculty and students at UCLA opposed the implementation of the Instructional Enhancement Initiative in 1997 which proposed the creation of an additional fee per credit hour to improve electronic forms of communication between those teaching their courses and their students. A similar program faced opposition at the University of British Columbia. It turned out both groups had well-founded fears concerning the disguised commercial intent behind these actions. However, as David Nobel writes,

Nevertheless, administrators at both UCLA and UBC decided to proceed with the their agenda anyway, desperate to create a market and secure some return on their investment in the information technology infrastructure. Thus, they are creating a market by at, compelling students (and faculty) to become users and hence consumers of the hardware, software, and content products as a condition of getting an education, whatever their interest or ability to pay.

In “Virtual U,” players are not plagued by these fears and complaints. The simulation ignores this opposition, and both encourages and enables its player to do the same.

Massy also accounts for the stratified nature of the faculty body; in “Virtual U” professors are divided into various groups on the dual tenure and non-tenure tracks. However, in doing so, Massy makes the startling assertion that adjunct professors do no research at all. Today, it is fairly common knowledge that adjuncts are expected to contribute to the operation of the department and university in the same ways as are tenure-track professors: not only as researchers, but also as members of academic committees and as mentors to graduate students. Massy also does not account for the fact that many adjunct professors aspire one day to become tenured ones, and this is reflected in the rigid dual-track nature of the model. In Massy’s defense, however, adjunct professors were less common twenty years ago and faculty handbooks from 1998 still characterized the position as “unusual” or “special circumstances.”

2. Organization

At the University, academic workers outside the top-echelon of tenured faculty, face exploitative working conditions. For example, graduate students are expected to work as researchers and teachers, but are given none of the benefits of being employees. Even those with stipends are often forced into debt as a consequence of attending graduate school in high-priced areas such as San Francisco. Non-tenured faculty, as well, have seen their numbers rise as proportion of the academic force, while their salaries are commonly below those of public school teachers. Dean Ann Marcus, an opponent of academic unionization at NYU, summarized many administrators’ strategies on faculty hiring:

“We need people we can abuse, exploit and then turn loose.”

In “Virtual U” the possibility that there might be anything other than passive opposition to a player’s policies is not accounted for. Faculty will accept lower salaries, but lose morale and have a higher chance of leaving for other institutions. The consequences of raising tuition are similar for students. However, the chance that organized opposition might arise is conveniently left out of the equation. This is particularly glaring in light of recent successes in the unionization of graduate students (and non-tenured faculty). The same can be said for the many facilities workers and physical plant which work to keep the university physically running. In Massy’s model they are completely abstracted out of the picture, with the facilities maintenance cost accumulating in linear proportion to the space in ft² of buildings. Setting wages for this invisible labor is not a part of the game, and the actions of workers are left out of the player’s view.

This lack of representation is in contrast with the real university environment, where, for example, 85% of faculty of faculty at four-year public institutions are unionized (188). The organization of faculty is also not static, as seen in Massy’s model; battles of threats, dismissals, and denials of tenure are fought between university administrations and workers seeking to unionize. Despite the opposition of universities such as Stanford and Brown, a recent ruling by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that graduate students working as assistants must be counted as employees and allowed to form unions.

This once again loops back to Massy’s main failure in his depiction of the operation of a the University: the only entity with any agency is the player. This might be fine for a run-of-the-mill empire building game, but not for a training simulation aimed at future administrators. In ‘Virtual U,’ the player “always knows best.” Members of the various groups affected by the player’s policies, if they are even depicted, are depicted as markets. As individuals they cannot organize in opposition. It is small wonder that in the University today, attempts at unionization are feared by administrators. They simply do not seem to be trained for the possibility.

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Investigating the CyberCampus Engine

Back in 1998 business theorist named William F. Massy got together with the video game developer Trevor Chan and Enlight Software to make a university simulation game called ‘Virtual U‘ with a million dollars. This software was used to train dozens of administrators around the country, and is very important as an artifact of higher education management culture in the 1990s. This post is part of a series of notes concerning it and my continuing research into the informationalization of the modern American university.

The Simulation Engine: Admissions

There is much talk of the commercialization of the American university. One feature of this trend is the language used to describe university functions and institutions has become purely one of business. We can see this plainly in Massey’s works in his labeling of groups of people as ‘markets’ or as ‘stakeholders’. He goes a step further than defining the prospective student body as a single ‘market’, but I don’t believe using several ‘market segments’ is more accurate simulating the actions of individuals. You could argue he gets a pass for being an old guy using the technology of 1998, but agent-based modeling has been around since the 80s and at the time of Virtual U there were already mature examples of this sort of simulation. However, the agent-based modeling that came out of the Santa Fe Institute in the 90s was inspired by attempts to model life and its associated decisions. Massey is attempting to model a business, and agency is not a central theme to his work.

According to Massey, students can be sorted into seven different groups, based on their academic, extracurricular, and athletic qualifications. This is a fairly accurate representation of how things work at many university admissions offices. As revealed at Duke University each of those attributes are turned into numbers that are then used to determine offers of admission. However, Massey doesn’t seem to be factoring in economic affluence, which is an important measure of a student’s admissions chances, although to be fair his design document was created before the model was finished. In reality, athletic ability and parental income can be used to balance out poor academic or extracurricular ratings. Massey also does not seem to be concerned that some universities might have more holistic admissions practices, but this is in line with his practice of ignoring the individual student.

During the design process of a game, it is important to ask the question of just what experience one is trying to offer a player. What challenges will there be to confront? How can the player measure success? In ‘Virtual U’, success is measured by metrics: how does your institution compare in Category X and Y with peer institutions? How can you raise performance in Area Z over the next five years? In this way ‘Virtual U’ prepared administrators for a world ruled by U.S New World Report rankings, and ‘performance-based’ state funding.

However, it also helped to bring this world about. ‘Virtual U’ as a educational video game has many strengths, but it also has its failures. As we will see, Massey’s creation makes difficult decisions more palatable by abstracting or ignoring its human effects. The best video game experiences challenge how you think about the world, not help you accept it as it is. In designing a successor, or better yet, an alternative to ‘Virtual U’, it will be important to keep this in mind.

 

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Game Design: Starting from nothing

I made this blog so I would be motivated to keep a journal of sorts, but so far I have totally failed to do so.

So let’s see: what do I have to show for the past month?

A prototype for a dialog system.
A sort of game engine. (with graphics ripped from Civilization III for now) You can move around, aaaaaand yeah that’s about it.

11_4_game

There should be more art assets, but I created some for the wrong resolution (128×128 instead of 64×64), and I also managed to not save some others before removing the battery from my laptop. I will get around to posting more later.

The past month or so I have been putting my self through a crash course of introductory game design. I’ve been working through a textbook, watching a lot of videos, and most importantly, just going through the source files of Unity projects.

I’m going to list the main resources I’ve used here, mostly for myself.

  1. Alex Okita’s great book on Learning C# Programming with Unity 3D
  2. Lynda’s Unity 3.5 Essential Training (sort of outta date)
  3. A basic prototype of grid movement in Unity 2D
  4. Tutorial for Creating a 2D Roguelike, which really helped for learning the 2D side of Unity
  5. Paul Metcalf’s very helpful videos on creating a Turn Based tactics game

Not all of these resources are free but you should be able to find them with a little bit of creativity. However, in the end watching videos or reading books only helps so much. To learn you just have to be willing to sit down and play with Unity.

So far one of my problems is that my background is not Object Oriented Programming, and learning to use C# has been conceptually difficult for me. However, the main problem seems to be the scope of my project. At any given point I need to be working on the game engine, the UI, or any of the other art assets I need, all while still learning what I’m doing. Something they don’t tell you is that creating nice games by yourself takes real work and its overwhelming at times. People like Tobias Cornwall make it look easy.

More next week, I promise.

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Thinking about Narratives in Video Games

In this post I sort of just want to organize my recent thoughts about a game concept that I am thinking of working on. I’ve recently played some very good video games and this has inspired me to look into developing my skills as an artist and programmer to the point where I can actually produce games. I’ve been playing around with Flash games and the like since middle school, but I have come into some free time which I think would be well spent in this endeavor.

I’ve chosen to work in Unity for a couple of reasons. First it seems to have recently become the standard for production of Indy games. Things I learn in this project will be very applicable elsewhere. Second its free. Thats always a good thing. Third, I’ve fooled around with Object Oriented Programming before so scripting won’t be entirely unfamiliar. Hopefully.

Now, Unity seems to be primarily 3D oriented, and my plan is to make a mostly 2D game, however the previous points are still swaying me.

So onto the game itself.

Growing up, the games I most favorably remember are the Bioware titles: Neverwinter Nights 2, KOTOR, and now Jade Empire. These were not perfect games: Combat in KOTOR and Jade Empire had its issues, and NWN2 was buggy as all hell. However, what was memorable for me were the characters you encounter during the games.

Something about gathering a bunch of followers, listening to their ridiculous or hilarious takes on life, and bringing out their histories in side quests, was to me one of the most enjoyable game mechanics I have encountered. Treating video games like interactive narratives is what I think was/is Bioware’s most important achievement.

So I want Sunset of Aton (or whatever the name ends up being) to include something like this. Obviously a Bioware scale main plot and character development would be overly ambitious, but when I’m making a game, I want to keep in mind primarily that I am creating a story. Things like combat should be addicting and enjoyable but should be secondary to the plot.

Hopefully I will be able to pull in some of my previous experience as a cartoonist to write some entertaining stuff.

Some sort of motley crew is essential.
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