Panel on games in education

I contributed a chapter to a soon-to-be-released book, Learning, Education and Games (Volume One): Curricular and Design Considerations. I wrote about the potential value of video games  in music education. The book will be out in October 2014. Here’s the table of contents.

We’re having a launch party on October 9th at the NYU Game Center, with a panel on games, featuring the contributors to the series. In addition to myself, the panelists will include Elena Bertozzi and Gabriela Richard. The book’s editor, Karen Schrier, will be moderating.

Update: here’s a drawing of Elena, Gabriela, Karen and myself by Jay Boucher.

My chapter is about games in music education. I discuss three types of music games. First, there are the ones most familiar to most of us, the rhythm games: Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, SingStar and so on. Rhythm games have a ton of potential for music education, especially at the beginner level. The games teach an abstracted form of score-following, and they require the kind of close listening to master performances that non-musicians rarely do. (For that matter, plenty of music students don’t either.) While the experience of Guitar Hero is a weak simulation of guitar playing from the wrists down, it actually does a wonderful job of conveying the experience from the neck up. There isn’t yet a whole lot of research on how well these games teach transferable musical skills, but the early work looks positive.

The second category is the one you’re most likely to encounter in a classroom: drill-and-skill games. These are lightly gamified versions of traditional classical music pedagogy: reading and writing notation, instrument technique, tonal theory. These games are better than their pencil-and-paper equivalents in many ways: they give immediate real-time feedback, they can adjust their difficulty level to your ability, and they generally make some of the drudgery more palatable. The games can even tell if you’re playing or singing in tune. So that’s cool. The problem is not in the games themselves, but in the broader philosophy of music education they represent. If you read this blog, you know that I have a low opinion of traditional classical pedagogy. There’s a yawning gap between the skills and concepts you learn in most classrooms and the ones you need to make the music that kids tend to care about. Classical pedagogy privileges reading over listening and improvising, and its oppressive Eurocentrism scares way too many would-be musicians away. Gamifying bad pedagogy makes it more palatable but doesn’t really benefit anyone.

The third category of games are creative music-making apps that I call music toys: open-ended generative systems that combine the player’s improvisation with computer-generated sounds. Examples include Nodebeat, Bloom, Singing Fingers, and Toca Band. Music toys are not really games at all, however much they superficially resemble them. The apps tend not to have any win condition or goals. Really, how could they? How would you design a creative tool around winning and losing? Rhythm games and drill-and-skill games are fundamentally about score-following. You’re judged on how accurately you perform the tasks the game lays out for you. Music toys don’t judge you at all; it’s up to you whether you find your interaction musically satisfying or not.

Is it even possible to gamify creative music-making? I don’t believe so. How would you come up with an unambiguous rule set or a win condition? In my chapter, I discuss an experimental game that introduces an element of improvisation into a Guitar Hero kind of game. However, the game designer freely admits that the improvisation has no bearing on whether the player does well or badly in the game; again, how is the computer supposed to know whether you’ve improvised well or not? You could create a “game” that evaluates the player’s compositional skills against some rigid stylistic rule set, like species counterpoint, but that’s a pretty sorry version of creativity. Better to use games to teach technical skills like score-following, and use music toys for expression.