This week, I’ve been back in Madison for the 6th annual Games+Learning+Society conference. I presented twice, served as a host/discussant once, and ingested a great amount of excellent food and knowledge dozens of times. That’s me above, in the glasses and black shirt, randomly assigned to an amazingly talented group of designers and learning scientists (including, pictured, Colleen Macklin, Reed Stevens, and Richard Lemarchand, co-designer of Uncharted 2). This was during Eric Zimmerman‘s excellent social game design workshop session, in which we paper prototyped “social games” that could be potentially implemented on Facebook.

I highlight this image because, more than in previous years, I felt like the prevailing attitude was one of cross-displinary collaboration, both in designing games for learning as well as understanding the larger cultural and political implications of games for learning. Eric’s session was a lot of fun and was illuminating with regards to the kinds of design choices one needs to make to successfully design a social game, as well as staying attuned to potentially problematic styles of play that arise from these kinds of games (e.g., everyone’s favorite or most hated Facebook game, Farmville).

At any rate, Liz and I wrote a quick summary of GLS 6.0 this morning, which you can check out over at Antenna. We discussed Kurt Squire‘s keynote, Drew Davidson and Lemarchand’s keynote, and Henry Jenkins‘ wonderful keynote in which he called on us to study the political action that can arise out of playful communities of gamers. Here’s a blurb from our summary:

Overall, we found it to be a wonderful experience, and one in which we were happy to see a broadening of scope and increased diversity in forms of participation. Conference chair Constance Steinkuehler reported that GLS 6.0 was significantly up in attendance over last year’s conference. We hope to see this growing community further come to understand how Squire’s concept of games as “possibility spaces” might be fruitful in developing educational reform, and also in foregrounding learning and literacy as critical approaches for media studies.

Antenna is primarily a media and cultural studies blog, so we’ve slanted our discussion of the conference a bit in that area, but not unduly so. There seemed to be a great variety of analytic and design approaches on view this year, and this is something I personally believe is one of the conference’s greatest strengths. I’ll be guest editing the GLS 6.0 special issue for the International Journal of Game-Based Learning, and I’m focusing on this diversity of sites of learning, methodological approaches to understanding learning, and incorporation of both critical media studies and design perspectives into the mix. Games and learning research are not (and never really were) solely the purview of the game designer nor the educational technology academic; as the conference grows, it’s wonderful to see a new influx of participants and perspectives.

It’s an exciting time to be part of the larger GLS community, and I’m happy I was able to take part this year — the only bummer is that I couldn’t attend the celebratory “booze cruise” afterwards. Oh well, perhaps next year!