So, wow, the last few days have been interesting. I’m assuming that many of you are finding this blog post because I just linked to it from Twitter on the #ims211 hashtag. Here’s my take on how all of this came to be, and what I think about it.

If you’re new to my blog, I’m an assistant professor at Miami University, the Armstrong Professor in the School of Education, Health, and Society and the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies. I’m co-director of our new Games Center, I’m one of the core faculty for our Digital Game Studies program, and I run a small, mixed undergrad/graduate research lab. Feel free to poke around the rest of this site to read more about what I do — some of it is a bit out of date, though! I’ll try to weed it soon.

Miami University‘s in southwestern Ohio (no, not Florida), and has a two hundred year old tradition of excellent undergraduate education. As part of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies (or IMS), we get a wide range of students in our games courses, ranging from computer science majors who want to enter the games industry to psychology students who are interested in better understanding games and learning. This semester, one of my students is an architecture major who is starting his own game company as an undergrad, and I advise an anthropology major who is working toward entering his Flixel-based games into the next IGF. My goal is to infuse the liberal arts at a place like Miami with a renewed focus on games, helping students connect their interests to interactive media no matter what their career goals are.

We try to tailor our courses to be useful for students who want to learn how to make games, as well as students who want to better understand what games and gaming mean for understanding culture and society. So, IMS211 is the analysis-heavy Game Studies course (here’s this semester’s syllabus), and we offer a design-heavy Design of Play course (IMS212, taught by Lindsay Grace). My PhD is in Curriculum & Instruction, so I often focus on games and learning — one of my goals is to get students to think about how games foster learning and literacy, regardless if we’re talking about Darfur Is Dying or Pokémon Black Version.

All of this is just preamble before describing the last few days’ fun and humbling Twitter experiences, which went went a little like this — On Tuesday morning, my IMS211 class was in the middle of a seminar discussion about how gaming fans, developers, and journalists connect online. The conversation was a good one, but I think the students were getting a little tired of just talking, so I decided to try to shake things up a little. As one student raised that the internet has served to level the playing field, bringing “everyday” gamers into contact with developers and journalists, I took out my phone and sneakily decided to tweet up a little experiment:

At the time, I had around 750 followers on Twitter, with a small cluster of game developers, educators, scholars, and journalists following me. I figured we’d get maybe 10-20 tweets back at us, just saying “yo.” Then, I assumed, the class would get my point that Twitter is a simple and amiable way to connect with a variety of folks interested in games. What I didn’t expect was that my tweet would get retweeted as widely as it did — thanks to a number of folks (Darius Kazemi, Jason McIntosh, Ben Abraham, among others) for getting the ball rolling. That ball kept on picking up speed, and I think entered orbit sometime mid-afternoon on Tuesday.

As I write this, the number of tweets on the hashtag is nearing 3000 tweets. That’s just nuts. Do a live search on the hashtag to see what people are discussing right now, or check out the Twapperkeeper archive (thanks, Ben!) to read the hashtag from the beginning. I love the variety of tweets, from simple “hi!” tweets at my class, to unsolicited advice for my students (“make something every day”), all the way to announcing job opportunities. The number of late “what is #ims211?” tweets shows how it spread well beyond my initial group of followers. This has been blogged up on The Lazy Geek as well as Systemlink Alt.

Though activity on the hashtag has calmed down quite a bit, it’s still going, well beyond my wildest dreams. The community of folks on Twitter that make games, work in the games industry, research/study games, and write about games are a wonderful, generous, supportive, and friendly bunch. There really is a staggering variety of tweets on #ims211 — folks from every company or studio imaginable (Harmonix, BioWare, Rockstar, Lionhead, Insomniac, Zynga, Treyarch, Double Fine, Maxis, Crytek, Epic, PopCap, just to name a few), from every stripe of developer (XNA, Unity, Flash, iOS, Android, Facebook, PC, XBLA, PSN), from all over the world (Brazil, California, London, Austin, Germany, Argentina, Taiwan). Not to mention all of the amazing educators, academics, journalists, community managers, marketers, and recruiters that popped into the hashtag. No slight intended if I didn’t mention you in this paragraph or tweet at you in the past few days — it’s all been a bit overwhelming and a bit hard to keep track of everything that was tweeted!

You might be wondering what the students think of all of this (that’s them right up there) — some have jumped into the hashtag, and are excited to connect with whomever might want to contact them. Feel free to follow any of us on Twitter, we’d love to stay in touch. I’m @scd, and some of my students are @b_amf, @DenverCoulson, @Amanda_M_Smith, @Quirky_Dude, @kickinapouch, @loco_moses, @alvisjiang, @wjPossum, @elevanwhite, @hodgesmr, @OGDubs24, @andy_jackman, and @la417. [Check back later; if more students decide they'd like to get on Twitter, I'll update this list!] Suffice it to say, when presented with an opportunity like this, many are very excited to get to know folks in the industry — I’m suggesting that they read Darius’s excellent notes on effective networking in the game industry. If you haven’t read them, you should, too!

Regardless, the hashtag now has its own life, and we’re excited to see where it goes from here. We saw that Twitter user @giftinteractive set up a website at ims211.com. We’re not sure what’s in store for that, and it’s not something we have a hand in, but I remain hopeful something useful might grow there. On top of that, now there’s an #ims211 shirt:

… and, potentially, mug based off of one of the tagdef.com definitions:

Like I said, this is nuts. I’m not sure I’ll ever wear the shirt anywhere other than when I teach IMS211 again or perhaps at GDC, if people remember this hashtag that long, or if it’s oddly self-serving to drink tea out of a mug that has my name on it. But note that the organizer of the spreadshirt page and “designer” of the shirt, @DBHGamer, is using the this opportunity to raise money to donate to charity-to-be-determined. If you’re interested in following the shirt saga as it unfolds, please check out a new hashtag created for it: #charityshirt!

So, I guess this is just to say that #ims211 is obviously not about our little class anymore, and that’s one of the wonderful things about Twitter hashtags — we can’t control it, it’s whatever you all make of it. So far, what you’ve made has been a wonderful, supportive community. To quote the esteemed 2011 IGF Chairman, Mr. Brandon Boyer:

Yep. At the very least, my faith in the world of games is back at full strength. Thank you all for making my — and my students’ — week.

One last thought: If #ims211 helps even a single one of my students make a meaningful connection in the industry, with the world of games blogging/journalism, with an indie designer, or in some way further their academic careers, all of this has been worth it. Feel free to post in the comments if you have ideas of ways we can make this happen for my students, as well as for students elsewhere who want to better use Twitter to connect with the world of games.