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!

On my last day in Denver, I took a few hours off from the conference to wander around the 16th Street Mall area and caught a few people playing chess on some public tables. There were only a handful of tables — nothing like Washington Square Park in New York or North Avenue in Chicago — but it piqued my interest. Looking for something fun to read on the plane home, I wandered over to Barnes & Noble and discovered David Shenk’s The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Science, and the Human Brain. A bit ridiculous of a title, yes, but it’s a readable, light history that runs the gamut from the game’s early prominence in the Muslim Renaissance through its role in early cognition research.

Shenk weaves together three interesting threads — first, a selective history of chess and its evolution as a game as well as in public affairs. Next, he spells out a personal history of sorts, as Shenk attempts to connect with his great-great-grandfather’s legacy as a prominent chess master in mid-19th century Paris. And, finally, he carefully steps the reader through that classic of romantic chess play, “The Immortal” game played by Anderssen and Kieseritzky in 1851. It’s a fun read, and I strongly recommend it.

This has me thinking about chess again, for the first time in a while. At AERA, a colleague of mine and I got into a great discussion about the utility of board games in games and learning contexts, and while I enjoy board games, I haven’t thought much about them. I played chess a fair amount through college and a little bit afterwards, but never had the discipline or aptitude to be very good at it, nor to really investigate why it was such a compelling game for so many.

One of the most tantalizing bits that Shenk described in his book were some writings of Benjamin Franklin’s on “The Morals of Chess” (from 1779). I was immediately struck with the similarity to much of the games and learning rhetoric of recent years. Here’s a lengthy chunk from Franklin’s essay:

The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions.

1. Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action; for it is continually occuring to the player, ‘If I move this piece, what will be the advantages or disadvantages of my new situation? What use can my adversary make of it to annoy me? What other moves can I make to support it, and to defend myself from his attacks?

2. Circumspection, which surveys the whole chessboard, or scene of action; the relations of the several pieces and situations, the dangers they are respectively exposed to, the several possibilities of their aiding each other, the probabilities that the adversary may make this or that move, and attack this or the other piece, and what different means can be used to avoid his stroke, or turn its consequences against him.

3. Caution, not to make our moves too hastily. This habit is best acquired, by observing strictly the laws of the game; such as, If you touch a piece, you must move it somewhere; if you set it down, you must let it stand. And it is therefore best that these rules should be observed, as the game becomes thereby more the image of human life, and particularly of war…

And lastly, we learn by Chess the habit of not being discouraged by present appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favourable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources. The game is so full of events, there is such a variety of turns in it, the fortune of it is so subject to sudden vicissitudes, and one so frequently, after long contemplation, discovers the means of extricating one’s self from a supposed insurmountable difficulty, that one is encouraged to continue the contest to the last, in hopes of victory from our own skill, or at least of getting a stalemate from the negligence of our adversary…

That is, the game of chess fosters “qualities of the mind useful in the course of human life,” not limited to planning and accomodation (Foresight), the assessment of potential courses of action and their consequences (Circumspection), and judgment (Caution), not to mention fostering motivation and perseverence.

Perhaps this is obvious, but why doesn’t the long history of writing about chess get brought up more often in the digital games and learning world? Digital games are flashy and shiny and new, that’s for sure, but if we take the ludologists seriously and assume that digital games share a long history with other games, then perhaps there’s some utility in bridging the contemporary games and learning discourses with historical ones about games such as chess. Chess is, clearly, the one recreational game that has had centuries of traction among elites in terms of preparation for strategic thinking (Napoleon used to play), the development of peaceful alternatives to war (Shenk describes a wonderful case where Ben Franklin used the game to illustrate the Colonies’ attitudes toward King George), and as use as the “drosophila” of cognitive psychology research. Chess shouldn’t be used unproblematically and uncritically, of course, but I fear that the pendulum swing toward digital media have left us disconnected from potentially interesting — and long-standing — discussions of games and learning that span many centuries.

Regardless, I’ve clearly been persuaded that chess is worth another look and have started playing again. I hadn’t played in years, really, and I was never any good to begin with. But, as a way to reacquaint myself with board games and this “pre-history” of games and learning, I’m dipping a finger back into the game, quite literally. For $2.99, I purchased the iPhone game Chess With Friends the other day, and am enjoying it quite a bit so far — you’ll see via that link that there have been a number of complaints in the comments that the game is buggy, but I haven’t run into a single problem with it yet.

Chess With Friends is a basic two-player chess app, created by newtoy, who made the hugely popular Words With Friends and designed We Rule for the iPhone. I’m not a big fan of Words With Friends (the way it altered the Scrabble board layout to avoid copyright problems is just too hard for me to adjust to), but I’m happy to support this company — there’s an interesting irony that after creating some of the best history-based games ever (the Age of Empires series), the creators of Chess With Friends now make an accessible, portable version of the game that many historical generals actually used to hone their strategic thinking.

This could become addictive for me; with chess in my pocket, I could end up playing all the time and will have to watch myself. I’ll admit somewhat sheepishly that I even played a few moves while driving yesterday — a bad idea for sure. But, for now, I’m still excited to play and would love to play with anyone reading this blog. There’s a free version of the game on the App Store as well, I believe, if you’d just like to try it out — I’m “scd” on there, so just start a game and I’ll play with you!

In graduate school the last several years, Lost was one of our only weekly “water cooler” shows — the days after airing were filled with questions about what had happened, theorizing about the show’s mysteries, and interpretation of the show’s meaning. Now, as a group of students studying and making games, this always struck me (and I presume my friends) as normal — there was something built into this show that seemed strongly about games. Incidentally, I found it odd that the media studies students I knew who studied television had, for the most part, long ago given up on the series, while nearly everyone that studied games still kept up with it, and wondered if this was more than just coincidence.

Since the beginning of the series, games have cropped up over and over again. Most prominent (and, it seems, prophetic) was John Locke’s first season explanation of backgammon to Walt, a game he described as featuring “two players, two sides — one is light, one is dark,” and one that was very, very old. As the series has come back to these themes in recent weeks, it’s drawn my attention back to how games have appeared during its six-year run.

Various things we put in the family of things called “games” have been scattered through the series, and in multiple forms — as abstract mind games (The Pearl station; most of Ben Linus’s storyline in seasons 2-5), sports (the Red Sox winning the world series; Desmond’s critical soccer game), computer games (Locke’s game of chess at The Flame), and board games (backgammon in The Swan; Risk played in the barracks). Games are a key motif that I’d initially missed, but seem to be one that the show’s returned to over and over again.

Games are, of course, more than just something the show’s writers are using as window dressing, and have been employed to useful thematic effect. Most notably, the metaphor of a game has been used repeatedly to show the struggle between two groups at a time competing on the island, hinting at complex strategizing that might underly an otherwise confusing set of events. As the series is wrapping up, these themes have come back stronger than ever, and we again see the “team conflict” that’s permeated the show since the first season. A “taking of sides” has cropped up over and over again, from the first season’s “man of science” (Jack) vs. “man of faith” (Locke) to the later conflict between the Oceanic survivors vs. “the Others” to the combined Oceanics and Others vs. the Freighter folk (Naomi and Keamy, primarily) — and now the currently brewing Team Jacob (Jack, Hurley, Ilana, Sun) vs. Team Smoke Monster/Man In Black/”Angry Man” (Fake Locke, Sayid, Claire, Sawyer) showdown.

At times, ludic elements of these conflicts have been alluded to, with constraints and rules being mentioned by the Man in Black vs. Jacob this season as well as Ben vs. Widmore in season four. Now, with this (potentially) final game between two god-like mysterious beings, “gaming” has gone from a subtext to being, quite possibly, the answer to the biggest mystery of the series — why is all of this happening in the first place? Games are moving from being purely subtextual to being oddly diegetic (if that terms works here) and is, I suspect, going to be a core aspect of the show’s narrative from here on out. That’s a fascinating twist to the series, if it comes to pass like they’ve been hinting.

Anyway, I’ve found myself reflecting on my watching of the show for the past few years, and considering that the appeal of the show all this time has had something to do with gaming — or at least, gaming-like practices as activities the viewer does (puzzle-solving, piecing together the narrative, trying to predict the next step of the story), something the characters are engaged in (increasingly overtly, as with Hurley’s recent vocalizing of fan theories), and something the show’s writers have most likely had to do just to draw all of the show’s strands to a satisfying conclusion.

It’s this last, behind-the-scenes bit that now interests me the most, perhaps because it’s all speculation: We can look at the writers’ task for the first three seasons as the creation of a set of “pieces” and a “board” for them to move around on, and the negotiation of the series’ end (during the show’s third season) meant the writers had to first solve the puzzle themselves. Or, to put it another way, the writers themselves were forced to do (at least somewhat) what fans have been doing — problem-solving, trying to take the narrative elements they’d set up in the beginning of the show and have it all make some kind of sense by the end — in order to choreograph the series’ final three seasons (an unprecedented task, as far as I know).

Though he hasn’t been directly involved with the series for a while, executive producer J. J. Abrams clearly loves games (note the t-shirt above). He discovered Michael Giacchino by playing games that Giacchino had scored, and managed to turn a print magazine (Wired) into an interesting game artifact for an issue last year. Alternate reality games (The Lost Experience and the Dharma game) have played a significant role in exploring corners of the story that couldn’t be explored easily in the show, and the otherwise execrable Lost: Via Domus (which I’ve purchased now an inexplicable four times — don’t ask) actually successfully foreshadowed events in the fifth season much more than I had ever expected a game tie-in to. Games are part of the set of paratexts around the show that make it work, but, I suspect, work because the show itself seems so fundamentally game-like. Or, at least, does the practice of watching it serially, in communities of friends who also care about and find themselves “gaming” the show (similar to my experiences reading the original Watchmen comics).

As tomorrow’s episode will show the backstory for Richard Alpert’s mysteriously long-lived character, I’m guessing we’ll see a revisiting of an earlier stage of the Jacob/Man In Black “game” and more uncovering of the show’s larger narrative. Games are as old as narrative itself, and while I’ve been teaching a course this term on the limits of understanding games as narratives, it’s the relationship in the other direction — games can help shape how we read and collectively make meaning of ongoing linear narratives — that I’m finding most compelling about Lost as it gathers steam and heads into the final few episodes.

On Monday, I’ll be flying out to San Francisco to attend my first Game Developers Conference. I’m thrilled to finally have the chance to see the hustle and bustle of this event, and will at the very least, be tweeting about it while there. I’ll be presenting within a quick “blast session” about Miami’s Global Game Jam efforts this year, which I helped out a bit with. Other than that, it’s just attending the conference talks, keynotes, networking, and hitting up one of the “summits.”

I was torn between the Serious Games Summit and the Indie Games Summit, and eventually chose the latter — while games designed for “serious” aims are much of what I do, I find myself more and more interested in the directions that the “indie” world is going in. How are games moving from being seen as a tool or delivery device (something I see as at least historically typifying “serious games”) to being seen as a valuable mode of expression (something I hope is underlying some of the indie games movement)? I have no idea if either of these assumptions were correct or faulty, and might see if I can bounce between the two while there — both of these summits have stellar line-ups this year!

If you’re reading this and are also going to be at GDC, please drop me a line either here, on Twitter, Facebook, or via email. I’d love to meet up with peoples, grab a beer or coffee, and get to know ya!

Art and sound assets were put into the games, games were playtested (as much as they could be in the little time remaining), and levels were tweaked.

After lunch, Johnny Wilson (who had been around to talk with the Global Game Jam attendees all weekend) gave his thoughts on the usefulness of these kinds of events and his impressions of where game design is going to go in the upcoming years — encouraging participants to think of themselves as the future of game design.

(By the way, my inclusion of this slide of Wilson’s doesn’t mean I condone all of the sentiments on it; take a look at the rest of my site to see that I think the “quibbling about unimportant details” that gamers do online is much more important and significant than Wilson apparently does. But that’s a debate for a different time).

So, this brings us to the games. Every team completed something they could show the Miami group as well as upload to Global Game Jam games gallery. This alone is impressive, but the polish on some of these games was, frankly, stunning. Here’s a bit on each of the games created during our Global Game Jam, as well as links to the games if you’d like to try them out.

Remember — as we were in the Eastern time zone, each of the groups was tasked with making a game that fit the theme of “Deception” while also incorporating as many of the three time-zone specific constraints (“Rain,” “Plain,” “Spain”) as possible. On top of that, each of the groups seemed excited by the chance to try to fit various “Achievements” offered up by the GGJ organizers, involving adding tweaks (e.g., creating a tutorial as part of the game, implementing an alternate control scheme to the game, etc.).

Spaniard in Space!

This won our “Best in Show” for all of the five games developed over the weekend, and is essentially a side-scroller in which you play a robot sent to Pluto by the Spanish government to claim the planet for Spain. I won’t spoil how “deception” is worked into this game (and I’m not totally thrilled with this part of the game), but this game has such polish, such humor, and such a good use of an in-game tutorial, that all of the judges agreed it was clearly one of our site’s top games. Beautifully rendered 3D backgrounds for a sidescroller and some clever level design, incorporating Spain (the origin of the robot), Rain (a rain gun wielded by the robot), and a few of the achievements. Very nicely done game, developed in GameMaker.

A link to: Spaniard in Space.

Project Boondoggle

This group was probably the most ambitious of the set, attempting to incorporate “deception” into a real-time strategy game/god game mix. Players are essentially a capricious god that manipulate two sides (the “Skullys” and the “Leafys”) in a hopefully eternal struggle — like, say, a Tetris type game, the goal isn’t for one side to win, but for the player to last as long as possible in keeping the two sides fighting one another. An interesting idea, although “deception” got a little lost along the way: I suspect their plan was for you, as the capricious god, to be deceiving both sides into thinking the other is the enemy, rather than you, the player who is actually controlling their fate. It didn’t quite come together (they had difficulties getting it to work in the final presentation of games), but wow, what a great concept, and they have the beginnings of a very interesting, innovative game, also put together in GameMaker (which none of the group had ever used before Friday).

A link to: Project Boondoggle.

Alien Seduction

In this game, the player controls a kid whose school is being invaded by aliens. The kid quickly realizes that a special megaphone he has will lure the aliens toward him, which he uses to deceive and lure the aliens to their doom in specific areas of the map. But, if the aliens get too close to the kid, they’ll pounce and kill him. This game had my favorite control scheme of all the games, by far — using the keyboard to move and the computer’s microphone to control the megaphone. They designed it so that amplitude from the mic would control the radius of the megaphone’s impact, and thus made a great start at some novel game mechanics, implemented using Processing.

A link to: Alien Seduction.

Ellobro

In terms of implementation, I’m still a bit astounded at the technical task these participants took on … and succeeded. The game is essentially a stealth game (hence deception) in which the player needs to evade the Spanish Inquisition (therefore, Spain) through a number of levels without being noticed and caught. Implementing it in C# and XNA, they showed how much can be done using sophisticated dev tools in just a short weekend — this could be, potentially, exported out to run on an Xbox 360, something none of the other groups accomplished. Nice job!

A link to: Ellobro.

Dino-Quixote

First, an apology that I didn’t manage to get a picture of Dino-Quixote as they were presenting it. But, in some ways, this was my favorite implementation of the theme of “deception” as a core game mechanic — in this game, the player controls a robot sent to a planet of dinosaurs and needs to traverse the map, exploring the planet. However, dinosaurs block his way and through the use of a DNA replicating device, the robot can take on the appearance (hence, deception) of any of the different dinosaurs. What’s great about this is that deception becomes something you need to learn how to do in order to solve the puzzles of each level — some spaces are only traversable with a smaller dinosaur, some small dinosaurs are only avoidable if you’re pretending to be a bigger, scarier dinosaur, etc. Wonderful attention spent on level design and making deception a key thing that you need to learn how to do at specific times in the game, also implemented in GameMaker.

A link to: Dino-Quixote.

…

We all had a fantastic time and will definitely be doing this again at Miami, bigger and better next time! The support of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and other parts of the University have been phenomenal. This is going to be a regular event at Miami, and if you stumble upon this blog post and are interested in finding out more about Miami’s Global Game Jam efforts or our Game Studies program, please feel free to post a comment, email me, look me up on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Finally, I leave you with the opening keynote by Ste Curran for the Global Game Jam, which was put up by the GGJ organizers on YouTube. It’s a great introduction to why the Global Game Jam is a great thing, and why all of you who didn’t participate this year should give it a shot next time.

I showed up at a beautiful and cold Benton Hall just before breakfast arrived.

It seemed many of the teams had been working straight through the night; a few were asleep off in a corner while others quietly worked, with the remnants of more protyping on nearby tables.

I was impressed that most of the groups had, overnight, fleshed out a working skeleton for their games. Three of the games were being implemented in GameMaker, one in XNA, and one in Processing. The Processing game had a few particularly ambitious elements, including a control scheme based off of the computer’s microphone — overnight, they’d hashed out a basic structure for the gameplay and by yesterday morning, were working hard on implementing the audio control scheme as well as designing and applying sprites to flesh out the abstract design of the game.

At the same time, one of the groups went to town on GameMaker and, using the free set of sprites provided by the School of Fine Arts, had already begun designing levels for their game. Involving dinosaurs, robots, and DNA-theft to impersonate other dinosaurs, their game was the most developed by morning.

That is, of course, not to say they weren’t still very hard at work, using Maya to design 3D characters to turn into the playable sprites atop the 2D map of the game.

In the second day, most of the teams had started devoting a great amount of time to fleshing out the look and feel of their games — some of which began to look quite sophisticated. One team was 3D rendering the background of their sidescroller, while the team working on the real time strategy/god game began putting cute faces on the abstract units the game would contain.

Finally, by mid-afternoon, a number of the teams had playable levels for us to check out. We explored a bit of the robots/dinosaurs game, and gave some critiques for refining and shaping the game’s level design. But, not a whole lot! Some of these teams seemed like they were well underway and just needed to start working on polish.

I left for a few hours and came back in the evening to see if I could help out/playtest/offer any useful comments, but most all of the teams had their noses down in work. Time’s running out and the teams realize it — another all-nighter, perhaps, but one in which most of the teams were moving from working frameworks to incorporating all the visual and audio assets. I’m about to head into school and see where everyone’s at.

Our groups are going to submit their games to the Global Game Jam site by noon, Eastern (we hope). So, just a few more hours!

(By the way, this is my blog’s 100th post. Wow, that took a while, huh?)

We’ve got 24 people participating from around the state — a cluster of students drove down from Columbus College of Art and Design, a number of local area high school students signed up, a good chunk of Miami students (and Interactive Media Studies in particular), and one Miami faculty member is participating. Their five teams so far have run the gamut in terms of game style, implementation, and goals — this year’s theme is “deception,” and all participants need to make a game that somehow addresses this theme. We’ve got a real-time strategy/”god game” combo that’s in the works, a side-scroller in which players have to attempt to deceive nearby opponents, a game that’s using sound (via microphones) as one of the primary means of interaction, and a couple others that I haven’t talked to lately so who knows what awesome ideas they’ve come up with in the past few hours?

Our Game Jam started off yesterday evening with an opening chat with Johnny Wilson, of DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media and former editor of Computer Gaming World. Soon after, we split the crowd into clusters according to expertise (programmers, artists, and designers), and let them mill about for a while until they found a team they thought they could work with.

This quickly led to five groups being formed, and then the fun, crazy, sometimes contentious task of coming up with a game design began — for some groups, this came together quickly (far too quickly, which we tried to pull people back from. A group or two bounced around ideas for a good six or so hours before settling on something, which we prodded them into further developing. This led to some great ideas, some lousy ideas, and a number in-between being worked on through the night.

I just showed back up here about a half hour ago, and most of the groups seem to have something basic coded and playable — basic game mechanics have been settled on (at least a first pass), some basic sprites are being designed, some rendering of more complex game art is underway. Most of the Miami students seem to have gone home to sleep, with a number of the CCAD students pulling all-nighters, and a couple of the high school kids asleep in one of the classrooms. We have the entire first floor of Benton Hall and in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to use, with computers out the wazoo and dev tools ranging from XNA to Unity to Maya and GameMaker.

All the while, we’ve been trying to pay attention to other GGJ sites and see what they’ve been up to — most of the sites have been broadcasting streaming video, which we’ve had up on an HDTV screen in one of our classrooms.

And, of course, we’ve contributed with our own live stream of the same room — which, for a while last night, turned into a testament to caffeine consumption.

It looks like my pals at Games+Learning+Society in Madison have their own Global Game Jam site, and have had a couple of teams working late into the night (they also have a live stream, too, though it’s gone black at the moment). It’s great to check out what people around the world are doing as they’re doing it; the variety of people, places, and tools used in this game jam is phenomenal. Things like this highlight that gaming — and game design — are truly international and global activities. Glad we get to help put Miami on that map.

We’ve got a busy second day ahead of us, with a couple of visiting speakers and the students from Miami’s Video Game Design Club stopping in to help out, then hopefully some playtesting before the final push. I’ll update more as we move along here in Day Two!

Games+Learning+Society Conference 6.0

June 9-11, 2010 Madison, WI

The time has never been more right for the Games+Learning+Society Conference! The world is finally beginning to catch on: Great videogames can be great learning tools. This yearʼs conference will further the work we started six years ago, exploring the impact of games and game culture on learning and society.
Conference highlights include: keynotes by leaders in both academics and industry; interactive workshops on game research and game design; both individual and symposia presentation sessions; “chat nʼ frags” and hands-on gameplay in the arcade; an evening poster session over cocktails & hors d’oeuvres; an evening machinima festival in the playhouse theatre; fireside chats that enable thorough, cozy conversations among VIP speakers and attendees; and our signature Thursday night dinner and marquee presentation.

Confirmed Speakers include: Henry Jenkins, James Paul Gee, Drew Davidson, Allan Collins, David Wiley, Kurt Squire, Reed Stevens, and Rich Lemarchand.

We encourage the submission of traditional paper sessions as well as innovative talk formats which focus on game design, game culture, and games’ potential for learning and society more broadly.

Submissions are due online by February 1, 2010. Complete submission guidelines can be found on the submissions site at http://glsconference.org.

The Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Conference is sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For information on how to sponsor this event, contact the conference coordinator at gls(at)seanmichaeldargan(dot)com.
### Sean Michael Dargan GLS Conference Coordinator http://glsconference.org

I’ve been a student staff member and poster session coordinator at the previous few GLS conferences, and they are without a doubt the premiere venue for innovative games and learning research. This year’s line-up sounds even more exciting than last year’s, which was excellent, and the move from the (IMHO, boring) Monona Terrace to the (IMHO, funky and awesome) University of Wisconsin Memorial Union injected a twist of unique fun that made last year’s conference the best one I’d attended. June is the perfect time to hang out on the Terrace, drinking complimentary beer and eating bratwurst with games and learning scholars from around the world.

I’m really looking forward to this year’s conference; it’s good enough that I’ll be showing up even if I don’t get a paper accepted!

[Click on the image to see a larger version]

Unsurprisingly, the word “design” dominates my dissertation — I’m scared to do a search and see exactly how many times it appears within the dissertation, but as understanding the informal design practices that players/fans of games enact online is the central focus of the diss, well, yeah, it’s not a surprise. Taking a skim over the rest, you’ll see a number of my other interests and obsessions represented: games, learning, narrative, affinity, communities, science, practices, knowledge, and, of course, Zelda, Warcraft, and Kongregate. Not to mention some specific individuals that make it into the wordle, such as Schön, Ghostcrawler and GAMEFAN (a pseudonym for one of the players I studied).

Anyway, I’m running toward the home stretch now, so this kind of thing helps me to step back and think about “what it all means.” Just a few weeks to go; wish me luck!

So, I’m going to cast the course as a “Narrative in Digital Media” course more than a “Technology,” course, emphasizing narrative across a number of digital, interactive media. One of the major projects I’ll have students do is develop an interactive fiction (IF) game using Inform. I’ve posted about interactive fiction before, so I’ll spare you a lengthy definition right now, other than to say these are essentially the classic genre of “text adventure games” (think Colossal Cave and Infocom‘s games) which have, in the past 15 years, spun off into their own, fascinating independent game design community. (If you’re interested in the roots of the genre, please check out Dennis Jerz’s excellent history of Colossal Cave, another shoo-in for an assigned reading in my course this spring).

I’m still working through a readings list, but will definitely feature a “playings list” of good, interesting interactive fiction games. So, it turns out Nick Montfort has impeccable timing and has recently posted an updated list of recommended interactive fiction games for Fall, 2009. If you’re unfamiliar with Montfort, he’s the author of the interesting interactive fiction history Twisty Little Passages, as well as the co-author of the recent Racing The Beam with Ian Bogost, a fantastic analysis of the Atari 2600 through several key games for the platform.

Here’s a snippet from Montfort’s post, describing his thoughts on how he shaped this list of recommendations:

A good introduction to interactive fiction does not have to be easy or simple. A game that you have to restart several times, and that you can only scratch the surface of after a few hours of effort, may show you, by being intricate and compelling, why it’s really worthwhile to try to meet the challenges of IF. It seems most important to me that a piece of IF quickly gives a sense of the powerful, interesting play of simulation and language. Such a game might happen to be hard or easy. On the other hand, some good games rely on a player knowing about IF conventions and even particular earlier games, characters, or puzzles. These often aren’t good places for someone just starting. There are many good commercial games from the 1980s and some from more recent times, but in my main list, I’ve limited myself to games that authors have made available for free download.

I’ve played a number of these, and find the list to be generally a great, varied list of recent games for both novices and experts. But, some were still new to me; for instance, I was unaware that Dan Schmidt — one of the key designers at Harmonix responsible for Guitar Hero and the Rock Band games — had started off writing IF. So, lots here to play with.

But, if you want the bleeding edge of text-based adventuring, the games in contention for the 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is also now up and ready to download! I haven’t played any of these, but this is the premier short-form interactive fiction competition, and if recent years are any indication, there will be a few excellent gems in the bunch. Looking forward to giving a few a spin in the coming week or two.

It’s amazing to me that this game genre is still alive and well, over three decades since the first text adventure was written. Here’s to IF’s continued success.

Here’s the text on the flyer:

In this new, three-credit course, we’ll be looking at digital video games — from World of Warcraft to The Sims to Rock Band — and investigating what they can tell us about understanding learning, both inside and outside of schools. Do games embed valuable learning experiences? How can we best understand the role that games and “new media” should play in educational systems? What can gaming and gaming culture tell us about how people learn?

We will assess a number of commercial games, independent games, and gaming communities for what they can tell us about educational practice, learning outside the classroom, and the changing nature of literacy. Incorporating theories from the Learning Sciences, New Literacy Studies, and recent Educational Technology literatures, we will investigate games both as a means to teach and as tools for the critical task of helping us redesign education to suit the needs of the 21st century.

There’s not a lot there just yet other than a description, but thought I’d mention it for now. In the coming months, I’ll be updating the site with a course syllabus and expected projects. Stay tuned!

Here’s a blurb from a recent Billboard article:

The Rock Band Network recently started a closed beta trial, which MTV expects to expand to a public beta test in August. The company hopes to open the Rock Band Network store before year’s end. Songs available through the new store, which will remain separate from the existing “Rock Band” store, will be initially available for download to users of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console. MTV expects to eventually make the popular tracks available for use on the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii game systems.

“We’ve figured out how to make it so anybody who owns and controls masters and publishing can put music into ["Rock Band"] at their own pace,” says MTV Games senior VP of electronic games and music Paul DeGooyer. “We’re talking about a set of serious professional tools to allow people on the front line of writing and recording songs to completely control their destiny with respect to interactive products and then giving them direct access to the download store.”

Rather than deal with Harmonix directly, artists and labels will submit songs to a community of Harmonix-trained freelance game developers and other interested programmers who will prepare the tracks for “Rock Band.” Additionally, labels can either hire trained developers or school their existing employees to do the work in-house.

Songs submitted through this process must then be reviewed by other developers to check for playability, inappropriate lyrics, copyright infringement and so on. Harmonix will post approved tracks to an in-game download store separate from its existing “Rock Band” store where creators can set their own price (50 cents to $3 per song) and receive 30% of any resulting sales. Gamers will also be able to demo 30-second samples of each track.

So, okay, I’m actually a little skeptical that this won’t turn into a flood of major-label songs — big companies have the resources to allocate staff to make playable tracks out of all sorts of stuff, while smaller indies and unsigned bands will have to do it themselves. The Billboard article goes on to say that this is a good thing, in that it allows much more content in general to be provided through RBN, regardless of who’s providing it.

But, I think what gets most people excited about this is that it’s a new venue for anyone to contribute (well, anyone in a band, or anyone who produces music which can be translated to a drum, guitar, bass, and vocal part). I’m dying to see how much good “unserious,” relatively uncommercial stuff will make it through the process. Will we see the next ridiculous “Chocolate Rain” come through here? Will we see countless versions of “Chocolate Rain” itself submitted through this?

Anyway, I’m excited for the possibilities. And, I might dig out my guitar and try my hand at recording something for this as well.

A few themes emerged over the different meetings, however, which I found heartening, given that they appear to sync up well with the directions that I want to take my work. First, at both G4C and GLS, Jim Gee gave impassioned keynotes on how the focus should shift from the game artifact to the productive “affinity spaces” around them, consisting of gamers enacting all sorts of sophisticated literacies and learning practices. I made essentially the same point in the G4C panel, trying to further some of Jim’s ideas by honing in on the idea of “design” as a way to better specify what it is that happens when players move from being simple consumers of games to being engaged in larger communities that can tie to specific social issues (the concern of many at G4C).

Even though I’ve been a graduate student working to help run the GLS conference the past three years, I’m still somewhat amazed at how well everything came off this year. There was a great variety of talks and voices at the conference, ranging from commercial game designers to high school administrators to theoretical linguists. The session I was in gelled in ways I don’t think anyone really expected — Ben Aslinger‘s talk on using Kongregate to introduce his college students to different forms of gaming was a great testament to the utility of Flash game sites to encourage discussions about games that are, frankly, harder for most people to have over, say, Far Cry 2 or Madworld. Similarly, Idit Caperton and Shannon Sullivan presented some fascinating work on their Globaloria program, geared toward helping rural West Virginia kids develop game design literacies, game design skills, and, specifically, Flash competencies. It’s one of the first sessions I’ve ever participated in where it was clear that the other people I’d been scheduled with would make great future collaborators, and I’d love to develop my work with online Flash communities such as Kongregate with both Ben and Idit/Shannon.

Finally, while I’ve found complex, 3D virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft to be terribly interesting and engaging (and clearly I’m not the only one), I’ve felt a bit out of place doing virtual worlds work. The work I’ve done with Constance in the past three years has been centered on World of Warcraft but, largely, in the communities that either emerge through play or are constructed around play. That’s really where my interests are at, and it was great to me to see that so many of the up-and-coming virtual worlds researchers are focusing on similar matters. In particular, it was especially great to meet Nathan Dutton (a PhD student at Ohio University, working with Mia Consalvo). His work on how Lord of the Rings Online players attempt to negotiate gender in the game (both through in-game actions, discussions in the community and with the game’s designers) is similar in spirit to the kinds of negotiations I’m looking at in World of Warcraft. While it’s different content, tackling how the designed nature of the game butts up against the fan activities and vice versa is, to my mind, one of the most productive areas of research for virtual worlds and I was happy to see the younger SoP attendees increasingly looking at this.

So, I saw several themes of how researchers of games are converging on trying to better grok the productive communities that arise around games, as well as looking at how these conflict with, operate in parallel to, or sometimes support the design of these games/virtual worlds. That is, the “affinity spaces” around games are impossible to dismiss as just simple fan activity (as if something like that even existed) — understanding how and why affinity spaces operate is key to creating games for change, for delving into the learning practices afforded by games, and better situating virtual worlds in larger, asynchronous communities of practice.

Maybe all this is just wishful thinking on my part or my perspective is clouded by being so deep into my dissertation right now, but sure feels good to see these fields increasingly focusing on those areas that I think need most focusing on.

A few Saturdays ago, Matt and I attended the Midwest Gaming Classic, down the road in Oconomowoc. It was a mixed affair, with a decent vendor room and a number of classic arcade machines to play around the place. There was a great “gaming museum” set up, with a series of classic gaming systems set up (old Pong machines, Magnavox Odysseys, and the more stranger bits of gaming arcana). Check out this bizarre Hello Kitty original Xbox from Singapore:

But, all in all, I suppose I wanted something where people talked about these old systems. The only talks at the event this year seemed to be about pinball, which is interesting enough but not something I’m dying to hear about. I love these old games, but after a point, simply buying game junk isn’t going to do it for me — I want to understand how people think about these old games, and what they mean. Perhaps I’m too much of an academic and not enough of a gamer. Matt and I stuck around a few hours, and then headed home with a pile of gaming stuff.

One of the nicest bits of the Midwest Gaming Classic was watching a random guy completely rock at Pac-Man Championship Edition (the recent Xbox 360 remake of the classic game). I’d tried my hand at it a few times, but couldn’t even seem to break the 200K mark — watching someone play for a few minutes completely changed how I approached the game, and helped fuel my (and Liz’s!) now raging obsession with the game. Here’s a video of someone getting over 500K points on the championship level:

Pretty great, huh? I’m struck with how fantastically the designers of this game balanced the original Pac-Man’s simple design elements, yet with a few tweaks gave it a lot of new life. Changing the role of the fruit from simply adding points to unlocking a new path of pellets was ingenious — now the patterns that need to be learned in the game are actually scaffolded for the player, building up in complexity as the time ticks down, and as the game speeds up. Stick with the video until the end to see how phenomenally tough it can get.

I suppose as a consequence, this has spilled over into an interest in all things Pac-Man this week — for this week’s GLS Game Jam, I suggested the theme of “Inspired by Pac-Man” and it was randomly chosen. Ryan and I whipped up a Pac-Man dice-based, tabletop game that was perhaps too literal a translation of the game, but was still fun to play around with.

At any rate, I’ll leave you with a recommendation for a recent game which, to my knowledge, is the first game that tries to model not just old game styles, but the experience of playing old games to some degree. Retro Game Challenge is a DS game in which you are transported back in time to the 1980s and are challenged to beat a number of games which are, in essence, riffs on old classic console games. Starting with a Galaga-like shooter and moving forward into other game genres, you need to reference cheats that come out of a Nintendo Power-like magazine within the game to beat a series of challenges (which, in many ways, feels a lot like hunting for achievements on the 360).

Michael Abbott’s review of Retro Game Challenge sold me on giving the game a shot:

Retro Game Challenge has shovelware written all over it. Another quick and dirty compilation of old school classics repackaged in a nondescript box with bad cover art. What’s worse, its 8-bit collection of retro games are all knock-offs: the Space Invaders/Galaga clone is called Cosmic Gate; Star Soldier is called Star Prince, etc. You could hardly be blamed for assuming Retro Game Challenge is yet another cheap, derivative attempt to cash in on NES-era nostalgia. If you saw this game on a shelf you’d walk right by it.

And that would be a very big mistake.

Retro Game Challenge is a wonderful mashup of games cleverly tied together by a sublimely wacky story in which you are transported back in time to the 1980s and forced to play video games by the vengeful Game Master Arino. You are transformed to a child, and your gaming companion is a friendly youthful version of Arino, unaware of the evil transformation that awaits him. Your only way back to the present is to overcome challenges Arino throws at you from an array of retro games, including 2D shooter, sidescroller, racing, and even a surprisingly deep RPG.

Here’s the trailer for the game:

A great review and a great game so far. Check it out!

Now, I’m normally not one to publicly flaunt criticisms of my work, but the exchange between this reviewer and Luke was rather interesting, and touched on the chapter Jim and I wrote a number of times. Here are selected posts by Luke and the reviewer, John Grusd (perhaps the same John Grusd who worked on the Super Mario Bros. Super Show!?). Warning, wall o’ text ahead, with a few of the more potent comments by both bolded by me:

Grusd:

There’s a section on the “controversial” chronology of the Zelda games that I found particularly ridiculous. Sorry, I did not pay to read some 13-year-old’s half-baked theory lifted straight from a random online forum, every mangled word faithfully replicated.

Cuddy:

John G. says that the chapters in this book are undergraduate quality. He even criticizes the inclusion of a timeline theory from the online forums. But he neglects to tell the potential reader that this chapter uses the creation of timeline theories to point out the similarities between the way knowledge is constructed in academic circles and the way Zelda fans construct knowledge (two seemingly disparate activities). This has drastic implications for epistemology and is actually saying something NEW. It does not fall under the category of simply introducing a philosophical idea and tying it arbitrarily to Zelda.

Grusd:

I stand by my criticism of the timeline chapter. I understand what the author is doing here and while I agree with you that this particular essay is not “simply introducing a philosophical idea and tying it arbitrarily to Zelda,” it is also extremely difficult to get through because of whose arguments the author is pasting in from online forums: the kids he quotes might as well be illiterate. Even if the massacred arguments were specifically chosen to support the essay’s opening thesis, that “it’s increasingly common for everyday people to ‘compete’ with experts” (p. 85), the Zelda stories’ chronology is such a mess precisely because there is a devastating dearth of evidence in the games (perhaps intentionally…). Literally, no more knowledge is going to be unearthed on subsequent playthroughs. It’s always going to be a combination of conjecture and wishful thinking, and in the case of a hole, a subjective whim to provide the makeshift continuity. This is epistemological heresy, in my view. In this respect, it IS a disparate activity compared to the way other knowledge is gained and formulated.

Cuddy:

I’m sorry but I have to again challenge what you said about the timeline essay. You write the following of the ordinary formulation of knowledge and of the formulation of knowledge in timeline theories: “In this respect, it IS a disparate activity compared to the way other knowledge is gained and formulated.” So how is other knowledge gained and formulated then? This, again, leads me to believe that the point of this essay escaped you entirely because of your annoyance with having to read badly-written timeline theories. As proof of their claims, the authors provide (on p100) criteria for the way knowledge is constructed in academic circles. It is the very fact that Zelda fans follow similar guidelines (unknowingly) that makes this interesting. Thus it is entirely irrelevant that, as you say, “no more knowledge is going to be unearthed on subsequent playthroughs.” That’s not the point. It’s the PROCESS the Zelda fans are going through that’s important, not the end result. If this is so far off from the way “real” knowledge is constructed, as you say, then how is real knowledge constructed? The authors give a good argument for the idea that knowledge in science and academia is constructed socially. This argument has also been made by other respected academics. What’s your argument that this is not true?

As for now, that’s where it ends. It seems like Grusd has probably let the conversation drop and hasn’t posted a reply since February 22nd.

So, where to begin? First of all, here’s a public thanks to Luke for a very impassioned defense of our chapter. He summarized exactly what we were trying to do: Provide an account of how the forms of discourse in the forums around Zelda mirror the kinds of meaning-making processes we often value in the rarefied air of academia. This apparent disconnect — that “illiterate” fans of videogames are enacting many of the same practices (at the very least, the same discursive forms) as professionals — is, to many, non-intuitive at best and deeply controversial at worst. But, as you probably know from reading other content on this site, it’s a central thrust of my research.

Grusd brought up a few issues that I thank him for raising, as they raise two broader implications of this work:

• Doesn’t replicating the spelling mistakes and poor grammar of forum posters undercut our argument? Doesn’t this mean they’re “illiterate”?
• Aren’t these “timeline debates” a huge waste of time for everyone involved unless there’s a definitive answer for the participants in these discussions to discover?

The answer to both of these lies, I believe, in a reconception of naive notions of “literacy,” as well as in attempting to understand what motivates passionate gamers to engage with one another online to begin with. In his excellent 2004 book, Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling, Jim wrote about the concept of an “affinity space,” or spaces (often online) where fans of a topic can come together, argue about whatever it is they care about (in this case, a game series), and begin to develop affinity toward one another and to the topic at hand. This encompasses many online fan communities from Zelda timeline arguments to fan fiction forums (like Rebecca Black has studied) to fantasy baseball leagues (as Erica and Rich Halverson have studied).

Now, are motivated, excited fans going to (sometimes? often?) jump into sophisticated kinds of affinity spaces before mastering basic spelling and grammar? Anyone who’s spent more than an hour on the internet knows this to be obviously true — however, I argue, this is a good thing. One of the things about games (and, I argue, “gamer” communities) that makes them so appealing for education researchers is the notion that we see “performance before competence” enacted in these spaces. Jim has written about (and talked about, even recently) his experiences learning to play Deus Ex, then having the embodied experience of play later informing his understanding of the text of the game’s manual. I suggest that something similar is happening in these forums — spelling and grammar can come later, after the participant has a context in which they find spelling and grammar meaningful. That is, shouldn’t we be focusing on the fact that the participants in these threads are enacting all sorts of complex reasoning practices in support of constructing timelines? Isn’t this a deeper, more advantageous form of “literacy” than the mechanics of spelling — a skills which is, to be honest, managed for the majority of us by Microsoft Word?

Additionally, the overriding sense one gets from these kinds of fan activities is that players are driven to participate because of their love of the material, and because of their desire to interact with others in hashing out a creative artifact of their own. Many view these timeline constructions as “theories,” but many are also critical — oddly enough, Grusd’s comments mirror quite well some of the comments of participants in the forums. Here’s a snippet of one:

In my opinion, the timeline is Fan-Made… the player decides how he/she wants the timeline to be. It’s pretty clear guys almost none of the games can relate to each other ((Except OOT-MM-WW and ALTTP-Oracles-LA)) it’s all fan-made. How many different timelines have been floating around that older thread anyway? In the end no one’s gonna be able to agree with the other because of silly contradictions, mistranslations or just random phrases you guys put in to better solve things.

(Emphases replicated from the original post).

That is, the above poster (and Grusd) seem aghast that there is a lot of activity in these discussions without a clear consequence for these actions. I agree to an extent — it’d be a shame if the participants in these threads only ever focused their energies at Zelda timelines — however, let’s not deny that there’s some potentially powerful identity play going on here! Fans of Zelda have to work in social groups to further their timeline theories, iterating proposals, developing arguments, and refining their reasoning. When someone repeatedly enacts the role of some constructing and designing “things” with others, what do they learn about how to be a designer?

I argue that it’s something akin to a designer identity that players are developing in spaces like this (and fan fiction communities and, yes, even fantasy baseball leagues). There is frankly no consequence that really matters other than that which the participants in these affinity spaces agree is of consequence — what’s important is the activity itself, of taking elements of a pre-existing system (in this case, the stories of the various Zelda games) and rejiggering them to work in new configurations. Players need not have a definitive solution for the activity to be meaningful. Why does it matter that we do not see this activity “paying off” with a definitive, final timeline?

Neither encouraging performance before competence nor allowing students to develop identities as designers is something we do well in schools, and should be of central concern for anyone interested in revitalizing and redesigning America’s lagging educational system. Of course, the topic of The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy was not about education per se, but if questions of educational import aren’t simultaneously epistemological concerns, then what’s the point of either education or philosophy? That sounds flippant, but it ain’t — why care about education if it doesn’t tell us something about how knowledge is made? And why care about how knowledge is made if it can’t help us to improve how knowledge is shaped?

Further developing accounts of how learning occurs in the affinity spaces that learners of all ages are increasingly drawn to means wrestling with underlying theories of meaning-making, and the stances on what good knowledge should be. Grusd and Cuddy’s exchange was helpful for me, in that it brought out a few themes in the work which (for various space limitation reasons) we couldn’t delve into in the chapter. Thanks to both Luke and John for their comments; they’ve helped me to work through some of this stuff again!

Anyway, riding my wave of interest in that, I went out and ordered this fun, pretty shirt from Glennz:

… which I wear proudly. Seriously, weirdest tank design ever.

And, just yesterday, I noticed a new Space Invaders-themed shirt became available at Threadless:

It’s just a hair too cutesy for my tastes, but I might still get it. And, atop that, just yesterday, I received in the mail an early birthday present from my longtime internet pal Rachel, who spontaneously sent me this fantastic Space Invaders hat (which she bought off of etsy, I believe):

I’m awash in Space Invaders! Space Invaders everywhere! Look at me, I’m covering myself in a 30 year old videogame!

…

Okay, I’m not an idiot, I can see what’s going on here. Just last week, I was rereading a few chapters out of JC Herz’s Joystick Nation.

It’s a generally good history of games, though it seems to be written for those that remember old classic games and don’t fully understand what’s happened since. What struck me on this read which had never been salient before was her age and how similar her gaming experiences were to mine — and how this has shaped her views of what “counts” as legitimate retro gaming fandom versus simplistic yuppie toy nostalgia. On page 71, she makes her position fairly clear:

Actually, there is considerable debate among videogame nostalgics as to what constitutes “classic.” Like most forms of popular culture, it boils down to “what was popular when I was a kid.” But underneath the thick, soggy layers of nostalgia, there is the legitimate argument that many of these game consoles and arcade machines were the first of their kind. One can justifiably argue that the Atari 2600 (1977) is a classic in the way the Nintendo Entertainment System (1985) can never be, because Atari’s machine was the first cartridge console to gain mass acceptance. Atari, Intellivision, and Colecovision are all from a period when videogames were breaking into the mainstream and creating a culture of their own, during the first rise and before the first fall of the videogame industry. Comparing a Pong console to a Sega Master System is like comparing a ’57 Chevy to a ’79 Mustang. One is from the period that created car culture. The other is simply a machine whose sentimental value will rise as its original owners wax nostalgic for their youth, the same way that Nintendo and Sega’s 8-bit consoles by twenty-first-century yuppies who have abandoned, rediscovered, and recycled their old toys into retro reference points.

Oh, snap. Now, I don’t agree with Herz’s assertion that there is any way to declare some period as being legitimately worth of nostalgia — the NES/Famicom and Sega Genesis/Megadrive are certainly, unequivocally important systems in the history of this medium and it’s just Herz’s provocative silliness to relegate them to the “’79 Mustang” heap. After the post-E.T. industry implosion, there’s no way one can argue that Nintendo didn’t just revive videogame culture, but reshape it around new franchises, new forms of gameplay, and a new prevalence that the Atari 2600 never fully had.

That said, Herz’s point about taking elements of one’s past and reshaping them into nostalgic touchstones is something that hits pretty close to home. I am of the generation that used to play Space Invaders at the laudromat, used to play Tempest at the Bowling Green State University union’s game room, used to spend quarter upon quarter at the Tron machine at the Toledo, Ohio Southwyck mall’s Red Baron. Though, ten years after Herz’s book, “gamer nostalgia” is now most closely associated with the home console, there’s an aging group of us who keep coming back to the iconography and gameplay from these early, first examples of global gaming culture.

In a final bit of interesting synchronocity, I came across an interesting blog post about neuroscience and nostalgia that was making the rounds yesterday. Here’s an interesting chunk:

One study has hinted that in some cases the positive feelings of nostalgia are actually just the positive sensation at having recalled an old memory correctly, rather than any emotional impact the original memory may have had. In my case, ELO’s music was instantly recognizable as sounding like the 80’s, while not being specifically tied to a particular event in my life. But while this nostalgia was a new creation, there are examples of more specific, neutral, memories becoming nostalgic with time.

I heard a lot of Duran Duran on the radio growing up. But I didn’t like them. I never bought their albums and if I thought of them at all, I thought they were just more disposable pop garbage. And yet, when I’m lazing back and indulging in VH1’s “I love the 80’s” marathon, I feel all reflective and pleasantly nostalgic when I hear “Hungry like the Wolf”.

So, maybe a lot of this comes down to me just feeling happy that I still recognize stuff from my youth? Perhaps my sense of nostalgia over old, classic arcade games is just a way of publicly flagging to everyone “hey, everyone, I remember something from a long time ago!”

Anyway, it’s been an interesting week in which my gaming, clothing, reading, and blogging habits have all intersected. Funny how that happens sometimes.

Yesterday, I attended the latest GLS “Game Jam” — again, it was a lot of fun, even if the development of this game was much rockier than the previous week’s. This week’s theme was “loneliness,” and our product was a game entitled “Lonely Face,” a card game designed by me and Moses (apologies to Moses for linking to his clearly as-yet-unconstructed site, but it’s hard to resist). We designed this one, like the previous week’s, in a one hour timeframe — sixty minutes from the naming of the theme, to finding a group to work with, getting materials to develop a game, hash out what the game’s rules are, and do any preliminary playtesting before unleashing it on everyone else.

After a brief but useful Keynote introduction by Kevin, Matt, and Ryan on some of the principles and design paths for us to make sure we consider when constructing a game, Moses and I decided to go for a card game this time, for no real reason other than we both seemed instinctively drawn to cards for some reason. I was interested in laying out the cards in a grid initially, and from there, we tinkered for a while with trying to use the cards as a gameboard somehow:

This didn’t really go anywhere, and started reminding me far too much of last week’s game, “Temptation Island.” Though that was with Kevin and not Moses, I found myself gravitating toward making the same game — after all, the end state of our game last week was to isolate one player on their own “island.” The game would have been perfect for this week’s theme!

But, fiddling around some more, Moses and I worked toward the idea of trying specify a working end state for the game in which the losing player has something which we thought to call a “lonely hand.” A decent idea, perhaps, but then defining what counts as a “lonely hand” (A hand with no face cards? A hand with no hearts?) became difficult, especially when trying to craft a game in which the probabilities were such that a “lonely hand” would be hard to achieve in the game.

We stuck with the grid, however, and developed a game which, like last week, involved ripping off a commercial game — this time, it was Bejeweled. We decided to go with a four by four grid and three cards in each player’s hand:

… and the central mechanic of the game is to either swap out cards from one’s hand with cards on the grid, or to flip cards (a la Bejeweled) with other cards on the grid, to match up pairs of face cards:

Hence the name, and hence the analogy to “loneliness” — the successful player of the game builds up pairs of “people” (face cards) and hearts to, y’know, make them less lonely. It’s a little clunky, but works.

We stumbled at the end state of the game, essentially adding in a few other mechanics (matching up Hearts and Spades) as a means to make the game still have meaningful play once all the face cards were gone. Moses and I only had time to briefly playtest it, and while it’s not terribly smooth, I’m happy that we were able to design something decent within such a short period of time.

Anyway, another fun couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon designing and playing games with the good peoples of the Games+Learning+Society Initiative. I’m certainly going to attend more of these “game jams,” but I’m going to have to start challenging myself — for two weeks in a row now I’ve crumbled under the time pressure and ripped off elements of other famous games (Apples to Apples and Bejeweled). I need to get the ol’ creative juices flowing, so maybe in the coming days I’ll cogitate on new, original, and interesting mechanics to try out next time.

I’ve been interested in this stuff for a few years, ever since my friend Dave gave me a copy of this 8-bit peoples comp:

That led me to a great short piece in Wired by Malcolm McLaren from way back in 2003 called “8-bit punk,” and I’ve since tried to track down the documentary Reformat the Planet, about a recent Blip Festival, but have yet to find a working streaming version. There used to be one up here at pitchfork.tv, but it doesn’t load for me. Regardless, here’s a trailer for the documentary:

I’m not sure if my attraction to this kind of music is because it’s repurposing old technologies or repuposing games specifically. I study games, but I’m too old to entertain the same degree of nostalgia for the NES/Famicom/Gameboy that these dudes clearly hold — these games systems were played by me sporadically during college, not obsessively during my childhood. Perhaps I’m interested in all of this because they’re unique and interesting sounds in a musical landscape which has been, for a long, long time now, full of very tired, boring music. It’s made me excited about electronic music again for the first time in years.

At any rate, the record I’ve lately been spinning (er, MP3s I’ve been streaming?) the most has been Adventure’s self-titled, which came out last summer:

Adventure, aka Benny Boeldt, crafts epic, almost orchestral tunes out of these 8-bit palettes (using MIDI instead of the actual old game systems). Here’s a video for the excellent tune “Poison Diamonds”:

It’s interesting to read interviews with the guy — he’s only 23-ish, it seems? — so, while I hear lots of similarities to old New Order, he labels them “cheesy.” Sure, I guess that’s somewhat accurate, but it’s amusing to me to hear kids reinventing the musical wheel in fun and interesting ways without fully understanding the debt they have to the music that came before them.

I downloaded his album from emusic (the best of the paid MP3 sites, in my opinion). Give it a shot.

We’ll be treating the entire series as the core text, as one might study the novels of Dostoevsky or drama of Shakespeare. Watching 5 episodes a week, we’ll be considering the show both as an aesthetic achievement and social argument, asking two key questions: what does The Wire teach us about the possibilities of television, and what does it teach us about contemporary urban America? I’ll try to post here regularly about the challenges and revelations about teaching a long-form television narrative in its entirety, something that I do not believe has been done before in this form (if anyone knows of similar models, let me know).

Mittell’s approach was, thus, to teach the entire television series, an episode at a time throughout the term. It’s a great idea, and he’s set up a blog for the course (check out the comments by who I presume are students in the course); I encourage interested folks to check it out. Also, he makes an excellent case for why a course on this particular show requires watching the entirety of the series right here in this short, three minute video put out by Middlebury:

Mittell and Middlebury seem quite aware that there’s a bit of audacious academic theater going on with a course like this (why else would the College release a PR video?), and that’s great. But, I’ll be honest: I haven’t watched much of The Wire. I own the first season on DVD, watched a few episodes and got thoroughly lost in simply keeping the characters straight. I’m aware that this is an egregious error on my part — it’s apparently really a great show, I know, I know. I just need to devote some attention and energy and time to it. Someday!

Regardless, what I’m most interested in here are the pedagogical implications of Mittell’s course for the kinds of media that I’m currently looking at — videogames. Games are, as most know, equally long-form kinds of media (e.g., something like Fallout 3 clocks in at around 50-60 hours of play minimum), albeit with much more variation as we’re talking about an interactive rather than filmic kind of experience. Would something like this work for studying games? And, if so, which games in particular would work? And for what ends?

The only course I’ve taken here which has done something similar is Constance Steinkuehler’s virtual worlds course. In it, we were required to purchase and play World of Warcraft throughout the semester, reflecting on our play as well as doing fieldwork within the space of the game. Now, this is quite different from what Mittell’s doing — Constance’s course was about developing critical skills to approach understanding a virtual space, while Mittell’s seems predominantly about conducting an analysis of a long-form text. The goals seem quite different for both courses.

Additionally, one gets into platform issues with something like this. For a television show, there are many, many ways to watch 5 hours per week (iPhone, laptop, streaming, or on a, gasp, TV), but with a videogame there are few platform-independent long-form works that have a large degree of narrative depth. I suppose something available on the 360, PS3, and PC, like Grand Theft Auto IV might be worth exploring. Or something free and available for a number of computer operating systems (e.g., Dwarf Fortress)? A critical issue would be how the few games widely available for multiple formats might constrain the educational goals of the course — Dwarf Fortress is a fascinating set of complex systems, but it’s not something with the narrative complexity of The Wire. GTA IV seems a better bet, and one that could induce some interesting reactions.

Anyway, just exploring ideas — my gut feeling is that I’d love to give something like this a shot, but I’d have to think very carefully about exactly what a detailed focus on a long-form game would buy me and the students. One thing that Mittell has captured with this is that the structure of University classes just doesn’t afford the in-depth, continued analysis of a media text very well (supplementing the course with a blog and out-of-class viewings). I’d be interested in further exploring how a class focusing heavily on a single game could challenge assumptions about more than what counts as worthy of study in a University course, but also the way one teaches the predominant forms of media in this day and age.

I’ve been on the hunt for good, prescriptive game design books — I know many of the current big name texts (Crawford’s, Fullerton’s, Salen & Zimmerman, etc.), and was happy to recently hear about Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. My interest was recently piqued thanks to an interesting rave review of the book by Daniel Cook on Gamasutra. Here’s a snippet of the review:

In my library of game design books, I see The Art of Game Design as the common designer’s pragmatic companion to a theoretical tome like Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals.

Both uncover the vast hidden anthill that is game design. Both describe dozens of ideas and tools a game designer should master. Both seek to provide a roof for all perspectives, no matter how divergent. Of the two, The Art of Game Design is considerably more approachable, with the trade off of being a lighter, and slightly less thought provoking read.

I tend to like Salen and Zimmerman’s book quite a bit, but would never teach game design with it, nor would I use it for much other than a reference — in my opinion, their Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology works much better for a college course on game design or game studies (which Kurt Squire’s done in several of his courses in the past few years).

But, back to Schell’s text, I poked around and found a review by James Portnow on Edge online, as well. After a number of high-profile gaming magazines have folded in the past few years, it’s the last standing glossy gaming magazine I find of any value (well, other than collecting the cute posters that come in Nintendo Power, but that’s another story). Edge is really not a magazine where you find authors waxing hyperbolic too much, so I was a bit surprised to see their review of this book titled “The Best Book On Game Design Ever.” Here’s a snippet from their review:

You know what? I’ve spent hours trying to write this review; trying to figure out how I’m going to preserve my precious journalistic integrity while reviewing Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. I’ve been looking for ways to pan it, to do what all good critics do: critique… I can’t. This is unequivocally the best book on game design I’ve ever read.

It’s not every day that this poor graduate student shells out $50+ for a book, but I think I’ll be ordering Schell’s book soon. Have any of the readers of this blog read it? Any opinions would be welcome.

I’m a little late on this one, but it’s good news for those of us that occasionally run late on things. The deadline for this year’s excellent Games+Learning+Society 5.0 conference has been extended by a few weeks to March 2nd. Check out the full CFP below:

Games+Learning+Society 5.0: Learning Through Interaction
http://glsconference.org

June 10-12, 2009 Madison, WI

CALL FOR PAPERS

Back by demand and now expanded to accommodate last year’s waiting list, the GLS conference this year will features substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how videogames –- commercial games and otherwise -– can enhance learning, culture, and education. This year’s theme of “Learning through Interaction” highlights the expansive nature of our definition of games & game culture to include research and design in areas including popular culture and fandom, interactive design more generally, and digital/visual cultures. This three-day conference will be held at the UW’s historic Memorial Union, overlooking downtown Madison’s beautiful Lake Mendota.

Conference highlights also include keynotes by leaders in both academics and industry, interactive workshops on game design and games research, both individual and symposia presentation sessions, “chat n’ frags” in the arcade for hands-on gameplay, an evening poster session over cocktails & hors d’oeuvres, an evening machinima festival in the playhouse theatre, and fireside chats that enable thorough, cozy conversations among speakers and attendees. We encourage the submission of traditional paper sessions as well as innovative talk formats which focus on game design, game culture, and games’ potential for learning and society more broadly.

Confirmed Speakers include: James Paul Gee, Doug Church, Kurt Squire, Drew Davidson, Lisa Nakamura, Alex Chisholm, Bonnie Nardi, Idit Caperton, Constance Steinkuehler, Steve Thorne, Mia Consalvo, Elonka Dunin, Eric Zimmerman.

Submissions deadline has been extended and all submissions are now due online by Monday March 2, 2009. Complete submission guidelines can be found on the submissions site, here.

I’m not an unbiased observer — GLS is run by the University of Wisconsin-Madison GLS faculty, staff, and students; I was the poster session coordinator last year and will be again this year. Regardless, I heartily recommend the conference as a timely, informative, and fun meeting that is unlike any academic conference I’ve ever attended. We feature a variety of talk formats (from traditional panels to “fireside chats” and “chat n’ frags”), an excellent mix of people (game designers and teachers in addition to academics), and some rad gaming (I think we had four Rock Band setups last year, not to mention a classic gaming area and a World of Warcraft LAN party).

If you do anything related to games, learning, or even just “learning with interaction” (this year’s theme, encompassing more than games), please consider sending in a proposal! Madison’s beautiful in June, and we’d love to see you here.

Yesterday fell on Valentine’s Day, so that became this week’s theme. As you can see by some of the initial ideas (my favorite is “we put the cute back in ‘execute’”), the initial ideas ran the gamut from relatively traditional (love, romance, relationships) to the gorily surreal (Valentine’s Day Massacre, decapitation), and what are probably the most common single person’s responses to this “holiday” (drinking, depression).

After a few minutes of milling about, it became clear that Kevin Harris and I had similar ideas about how to proceed — we both felt that doing something baesd around a love triangle could be fun, and appropriating elements of Apples to Apples could be a good place to start. So, we paired up and began hashing out the game; we started with Apples to Apples and built from there, trying a number of board game modifications, including using a chess board and making players “race” to one side or another, but it just didn’t seem to work. I grabbed a pile of hexagonal tiles from the game Polygon, and instead of making a game in which players moved around on a pre-existing board, started thinking of the game as something similar to Carcassonne, in which a board gets built by players as they proceed in the play of the game.

This opened up the idea that not only could players build the board (and move around on it), but that they could remove tiles as they went along. This ended up leading us to the game that would eventually be known as “Temptation Island” (apologies to Fox/Newscorp; please don’t sue me). In this game, the goal becomes to force one of the other three players onto their own “island” (set of tiles, disconnected from the other two players’ tiles), such as a configuration like this:

… in which yellow has lost, and the other two players have won. I’ve written up detailed rules for the game and posted it to the Game Jam’s website. Here’s a taste of the write-up:

This week’s theme was “Valentine’s Day,” and taking a little bit of a cynical view on all of it, Kevin and I wondered: What if what was important in a love triangle wasn’t hooking up with someone, but making sure you weren’t the one who wasn’t hooked up with? (Yes, that’s a double negative). This game is for three players — no more, no less — and requires strategically thinking about whose answers best “fit” yours, while also figuring out how to screw over (or not be screwed over) by the other two in the crazy love triangle.

It worked out okay! However, it turns out I’m also really terrible at playing a game I co-designed. After a playtest, it seems that a good strategy is to play the “long game”: Not remove any tiles from the board for quite a while, as there just aren’t many paths to escape being left on your own “island” without a larger board. Also, I think it would be interesting to see how this game might proceed if the central mechanic wasn’t one ripped off of Apples to Apples — what other ways of forcing a player to make a meaningful choice between the other players might be fun?

The other games were cool, too — Matt, Garrett, and Peter designed a rather violent card-based drinking game/”dating game” (?) which was both hilarious and disturbing at the same time. Ryan and Brendan made a dice-based strategy game based on a battle between the Queen of Hearts and St. Valentine, with tiles for different classes of characters (e.g., “assassins”), and mechanics for combat. But, we spent the most time working on John and Jim’s game — “Lust n’ Love”:

Those two have a lot of experience designing “local games” and place-based games with Kurt Squire, so it’s no surprise that they designed one which required a lot of running around in the Teacher Education Building. We tied up the elevators and the stairwell for a few minutes, running up and down the stairs, trading cards, making a lot of noise, and generally having a lot of fun. After running through it once, we critiqued and iterated their design as a group — changing the card-exchange rule, and clarifying a number of the other rules.

Overall, the Game Jam was a ton of fun, and if anyone in Madison is reading my blog, I recommend showing up on a Saturday (check out the site for updates on when and where; maddesigners.org) and giving this a try. It’d been a long while since I’d played around with designing paper/pencil/board games. When I get the chance to teach a games and learning class, exercises such as this will be some of the first things students will do — designing a game in this fashion helps one to learn how to design a simple but productive set of game mechanics before worrying about fancy graphics, or any form of technological implementation.

Also, it struck me later that the practice of getting your hands dirty designing a game for a theme also may give rise to all sorts of interesting ways to explore how narrative and ludic elements of a game interrelate. The ludologists were right — games are sets of rules, but what I found interesting was how they interacted with the story or theme of a game. In “Temptation Island,” the “strand one player on an island” endstate of the game, for instance, leads to a strange implication for the central conceit of the game: Successful “love” in the game ain’t a goal state, it’s avoiding being “unloved”! Playing around with game mechanics leads to sometimes weird, but interesting narrative implications.

Anyway, I’ll be showing up for more of these Game Jams, and probably blogging the results again. It was a lot of fun!

Update: John’s posted detailed rules for the “Lust n’ Love” game and some thoughts on yesterday’s jam at his blog. Check it out!

Last week, Gamasutra posted a great preview chapter from Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton’s upcoming book, Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time. Focusing on Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set, they presented a great overview of a number of games which incorporated user-generated content, as well as software (such as Game Maker) for creating new games.

Here’s an excerpt:

As Budge recalls, “I was exposed to GUIs at Apple, and I had the pinball simulation from Raster Blaster. I saw that it would be a small step to do a construction set. This was the kind of program I liked, since there was no game to write. But it was a lot of work, since I had to implement file saving, a mini sound editor and a mini paint program.”

The player simply guided a disembodied hand, complete with pointing finger for selection, to draw, color, and drag and drop the various table elements onto the board.

As Armchair Arcade member “Rowdy Rob” recalls, “PCS was, back then, a groundbreaking program. It had an easy, intuitive, and Mac-like interface, and even without a mouse, it was a snap to place various targets, bumpers, and flippers on the table. The flexibility of the program allowed you to create very odd-looking pinball games, and was a great experimental tool. This ‘game’ was definitely a high point in the history of Apple II games. You could ‘snap together’ a cool pinball game in under an hour, and your friends could play your games for longer than it took you to create the game! How rare is that?”

I played with this quite a bit as a kid, on our family’s Apple ][ plus (48K of RAM, woo!), and it’s interesting to me how obviously influential games like this were in forming my personal interests in gaming, while also how rarely anyone ever talks about these games. These games, as Loguidice and Barton argue, were the precursors to many other games which involved “making” something within the context of a game — EA’s early Music Construction Set, through Game Maker, various text-based adventure design environments, and now with masterpieces such as Little Big Planet. One of my colleagues, Alex Games, is particularly interested in using games to teach game design language, focusing his work on Gamestar Mechanic, a game designed by Gamelab and developed from support by a recent Macarthur Foundation grant. (The game’s still a private beta, hopefully rolled out soon.)

I, obviously, am interested in how people use tools to learn how to make games as well — the focus in my work on understanding what’s going on in spaces such as the Flash game portal Kongregate speaks to this. What happens when you’ve got a community of people designing something together — and, especially, designing something with skills that are not limited to games, such as Actionscript — and what gets learned, exactly?

It’s interesting to me that the games and learning field in the past several years has been largely defined as trying to correct the problems with the emphasis on “edutainment” from a decade ago — bringing game players and professional game designers in to the conversation. However, some of the more elaborate and interesting games (such as Gamestar Mechanic and Little Big Planet) seem to be moving in the direction of user-generated content, design, and learning… y’know, the former purview of the better, very early edutainment such as the Music Construction Set and its ilk.

As with many academic fields, polarizing debates eventually resolve somewhere in the middle or at some third position which sidesteps the original controversy. It seems obvious that good games are not just instructional devices to deliver educational content — games have their own language, their own symbol systems, their own internal goals. But, as games become more pervasive and these tools become integral parts of play, players ain’t just simple consumers of games any longer as well — they want valuable experiences that allow them to tinker, to develop, and to make things (which, surprise, often involves learning).

One game genre I’ve been enjoying a lot lately has been the shooter — I frankly had never played many of these beyond the old classic standbys of my youth (Space Invaders, Galaga) and had, with the exception of Treasure’s amazingly hard Ikaruga, basically tried none of them. Recently, I’ve become interested in them again, and am slowly poking my way through a number of different games in this genre.

First, with the Xbox, I downloaded Galaga (yes, the original; easy achievements and I still love the game after 28 years). I also got Galaga Legions, the modern shmup style shooter version of the original. Here’s a beginning of a walkthrough:

Now, some of you know that I’m always going to be a sucker for anything Galaga-related, but I think I love Galaga Legions for a few of the specific ways it brings an old game player like myself into what can be a very disconcerting, alienating game genre.

Legions maintains the same general visual style, including the multiple-turret/multiple-ship mechanic of the original game, but flipping it — instead of having to pick up multiple ships (and sacrifice a ship in the process), here the main ship drops off turrets temporarily at any point on the screen (and aiming in any direction). Similarly, the game reverses another aspect of the original Galaga — instead of the Galagas capturing one of your ships, you can shoot this swirly ball thing to capture a number of their ships, and create a crazy swarm. It’s recognizably Galaga, but the simple tweaking of a few of the game’s core mechanics yields a ton of new possibilities.

Also, if you haven’t already figured it out, I’m a sucker for fun, modernized remakes of classic games. I’ve recently been poking around with Space Invaders Extreme which is absolutely phenomenal:

Again, taking a (the?) basic shooter and updating it so it works in 2008, tropes from a number of games over the years are incorporated into the basic Space Invaders iconography. Check out the video above, it’s quite fun, fast-paced and available for the DS and the PSP.

The heavy emphasis on music in Space Invaders Extreme in particular reminds me how much these kinds of games really feel like rhythm games (which, I suppose, Rez is the ultimate expression of, at least so far). I’ve long heard that expert Ikaruga players think in terms of rhythm of button presses (changing from Black to White, I suppose) and motion on the screen — what’s the best metaphor for expert play in a game like this, something like dance? Anyone know of any academic literatures which rely on dance metaphors to understand gameplay? In terms of games like World of Warcraft — and raiding in particular — it seems that these metaphors might have some kind of traction in terms of developing methods for understanding how expert play works in these spaces.

Speaking of Ikaruga, look what I found at the thrift for $2.50 last week!

The plastic in the frame is all scuffed and bent, but I’ll replace it with a sheet of real glass. Note that this is for the Naomi GD-ROM, a SEGA (I think) arcade version of the game. How in the world would this poster end up in a thrift store in Madison, Wisconsin? I wonder if it’s a remnant of the last arcade on UW’s campus? Regardless, it’s now mine and is going to look pretty in my office.

Finally, speaking of retro shooters and Ikaruga, I’ve been forced to download a ROM (gasp) for Radiant Silvergun, Treasure’s earlier shooter — Ikaruga is, in some ways, a sequel to RS. However, I can’t seem to find a good Sega Saturn emulator that will play it in OSX. Anyone have any suggestions? I’m dying to try it out, but am so far barred by the old abandonware problem of not having an emulator that will run it.

In other, happier news, it looks like a group in the UK is working on a general solution to this problem. But, until then, any suggestions? Are there good Saturn emulators that I can burn for the Dreamcast (formerly my favorite emulating machine)?

Yay! My author copies of The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy arrived today. I’ve mentioned this a bunch of times on the blog lately, so I apologize for spamming the blog with it — I’m just real excited to have this book chapter finally see print. I started working on this nearly two years ago (right around the time Twilight Princess came out and I discovered for the first time the weird and hairy world of Zelda timeline arguments). In our chapter, Jim Gee and I try to cast the fan debates around the chronologies of the Zelda games in philosophic terms, making a few references to the reasoning and argumentation present in these fan communities, and what that tells us about the social construction of knowledge (a la Latour). It was a pretty fun chapter to write, and I’m glad to see it finally hit print — and, soon, a Barnes & Noble (or Borders, or Books-A-Million, or whatever) near you! (Or, just pre-order it from Amazon).

And, since I’ve already linked (get it, Linked?!) to a picture from my Flickr feed here, I might as well offer one more:

My dear Lizzie has suggested that I get a cartoon-Link tattoo on my right forearm, and a few months ago, I tried Photoshopping a number of options. The one above was my favorite, but I’m still too chicken to get it done. Whaddya think?

It’s not much of a secret that I really enjoy the The Legend of Zelda series of games. Jim Gee and I have a paper in the upcoming The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy book (pictured above; click here if you wanna preorder from Amazon). It’s also not much of a secret that, while I love this series and have played at least a little of every installment, I have only played deeply into three of the games in the series (The Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Phantom Hourglass, with more than moderate dabbling into Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and The Minish Cap, I suppose). After all, with a few notable exceptions (Majora’s Mask, Link’s Awakening), most of the Zelda games feature roughly the same settings, the same puzzle/adventure game mechanics, and the same save-the-princess/kill-Ganon storyline.

It’s been almost two years since Twilight Princess was the Wii’s most anticipated launch title, and over a year since Phantom Hourglass made it to North America. What’s next for this series, arguably the most influential yet quite possibly most stagnant Nintendo series of them all? Last week, IGN had a feature on this topic, entitled “Wii’s Next Zelda Game.” It’s a good read — nothing terribly groundbreaking, given the lack of any real news from Nintendo (other than, surprise, they’re making a new one and, surprise, Miyamoto would like to shake things up a bit) — but, generally, they hit on some of the issues that will arise for the first Zelda game actually developed for (and not just ported to) the Wii.

Here’s a chunk that piqued my interest, about the potential of the upcoming Wii MotionPlus controller extension:

Zelda traditionalists may argue that Nintendo needn’t fix what isn’t broken and that mucking around with MotionPlus controls could ultimately damage a perfectly fine configuration. Take, for example, Wired’s Chris Kohler, who would rather the developer play it safe and remain cautious of dragging more motion work to the franchise.

“I’d absolutely hate for the next big Zelda game to be a Wii MotionPlus game that’s centered around 1:1 sword fighting, or something similar that throws the baby out with the bath water,” he says

Cassidy disagrees. “I can’t stop thinking about the possibilities of MotionPlus. I would be extremely shocked and disappointed if the next Zelda title didn’t use the device. The types of gameplay and movement that the MotionPlus makes possible would work perfectly into a Zelda game. It might be the best way to move the series forward, while still keeping things familiar. Everything from sword fighting to boomerangs would become a lot more engaging,” he explains.

With respect to Kohler, we tend to side with Cassidy on this one, but we definitely understand the point of keeping an eye on the dangers of overuse in regard to MotionPlus. Having waggle just for the sake of waggle is unnecessary and could even feel contrived or broken. Were, for example, the next Zelda to ditch the adventuring altogether for a MotionPlus-enhanced sword fighting game, we would not be able to contain our disappointment.

These comments all seem to miss the mark for me. If one thing typifies the Zelda games for me, it’s the variety of “tools” (boomerang, arrows, metal boots, hookshot, etc.) that Link has at his employ. If the next game incorporates the Wii’s MotionPlus (which I suspect it will), then ditching the (historically) core mechanics of Zelda in favor of overwhelmingly focusing on something like a sword-fighting game would be acceptable only as a spinoff (a la Link’s Crossbow Training), not as a “core” Zelda game. The problem is that creating a novel, innovative game with new mechanics may verge on making one which seems merely Zelda-skinned, thus alienating those players who expect the series’ standard puzzle/adventure mechanics.

This is a pretty interesting problem, actually. What are the essential elements of the Zelda genre of games? With fourteen official (Nintendo-produced) games, a number of “apocrypha” (the CD-i games, the BT Zelda games, etc.), a few comics, a cartoon, etc., there has developed a Zelda canon. In the paper that Jim and I wrote, we discussed this issue only tangentially, acknowledging that the question of what games count as being “real” Zelda games pops up in the debates over the games’ overarching chronology. But, as I have been focusing more and more on game design in the past year, I’ve begun wondering more about the implications of the fan base’s collective assumptions about what a Zelda really is. How might this affect innovation in this series? Is it possible to make a Zelda that “counts” as a Zelda but features completely different game mechanics?

The IGN piece also made me happy to see that the American gaming press has begun to reconsider their kneejerk reaction to The Wind Waker‘s visual style. Five years later, it seems that there’s a lot more respect for the amazingly expressive and beautiful visual style of the game — certainly, Phantom Hourglass showed that there’s viability in continuing the setting and story of The Wind Waker, and I find it interesting to see that IGN advocated updating these games with a teenage/adult Link. Ideally, this would be a way to continue to innovate the artistic styles of the game (frankly, it’s easier to do this with a cartoony look than a “realistic” look), while also providing an excuse to explore the games’ stories on multiple platforms (the DS, Wii, and whatever comes along next).

What doesn’t get mentioned much, however, is how The Wind Waker attempted to radically change the landscape and story of the Zelda series, setting it several hundred years after the earlier games, above a sunken Hyrule. This seemed a clean break from the older Zelda games in theme and, to me, signaled a potential way out of the old Zelda tropes. Unfortunately, given the initial poor reception by American gamers, it seems like they took a step backwards to a more familiar Hyrule with Twilight Princess, while adding a number of new, interesting twists (Midna, switching to wolf form, etc.). Time has already, I think, been kinder to The Wind Waker than to Twilight Princess — I hope Nintendo appreciates the ongoing changing of opinion on its cartoony classic, and continues to innovate while keeping the best parts of the series.

Both of us are very interested in the learning opportunities within Flash games as of late and we’ve decided to dip back into Social Impact Games, a great clearinghouse site of games and game mods which use games towards non-entertainment goals. (Though, of course, I’m skeptical that there really are any games designed for “pure entertainment” without a significant learning component). Given the economic downturn, Alex and I thought it might be interesting to highlight a few games which feature explicit financial components, which may be used for teaching financial literacies.

An early and interesting example is that of Cyberbudget, a game sponsored by the French government In it, players attempt to balance the French national budget, avoid deficits, and present budgets to a virtual parliament. Unfortunately, I don’t know very much French, so I haven’t been able to get far in the game — but it’s apparent that a lot of work was put into making it an engaging simulation, with excellent graphics, both complex enough and gamey enough to actually be fun. The game appears to work like many excellent Flash games work, by providing a deep gaming experience with enough glitz to avoid making you think it’s a boring lesson on fiscal responsibility.

Now, compare it with the only working American budgetary game I could find on Social Impact Games — the New York City budget game. This thing’s a total miscarriage, as far as I can tell. While certainly a complex simulation, the interface issues render it approximately as interesting as, well, being a city employee actually balancing a budget. That’s to say, the game isn’t actually much of a game and appears to be simply a calculator for determining the impact on a budget deficit of one’s choices. For kids, especially, there’s nothing here to draw them in, nothing to scaffold their learning of how to make fiscal choices, and no rewards whatsoever.

This is exactly the problem I’ve had with some of the educational learning environments I’ve come across in the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning literature — systems which provide excellent tools for supporting tasks, but are rarely engaging without some kind of curricular, organizational frame around it (okay, okay, I’ll say it, without school forcing students to use them). There’s a lot of skepticism around the rhetoric of games being the shiny, new savior for education, and I’m certainly sympathetic to those who complain about the hype around gaming and virtual worlds. But, it seems obvious that without the graphical, narrative, and interactive expertise of professional game designers being put to use on simulations like this, we’re just going to end up with more New York City budget calculators, and fewer interesting simulations like Cyberbudget. Polish matters in developing learning systems, and the apparent frivolity of looking like entertainment is not necessarily the enemy of learning serious content.

The global economic outlook seems, at best, uncertain in recent weeks, and increasingly bad just this morning. While these kinds of games obviously won’t get us out of the mess facing us right now, they do point toward a long-view way out of it — we’ve had decades of people “gaming” the market poorly, for personal and short-term gain, and now that’s coming back to collectively bite us. More regulation is one answer, in my opinion, but so is instilling a new approach to “gaming” economic systems. Honing resource management skills, better understanding the dynamics of multiple economic factors, better showing the potential social impact of economic decisions — games do all of these things, and better utilizing games to teach these skills seems a no-brainer for designing a preferable long-term economic future.

I’ve been a fan of Kongregate for a while now, and was pleasantly surprised to see the rollout of their newest feature — Kongregate Labs. If you’re unfamiliar with Kongregate, it’s probably most easily described as a “YouTube for Flash games,” though with added achievements (a la the Xbox 360 and Blizzard’s games), a leveling system (which seems to translate mainly into fun bragging rights), and social networking functions (chatrooms, player/designer profiles, discussion forums, etc.). I’ve long been interested in Kongregate as the potential next step of online game design community, but with Kongregate Labs, they’re beginning to show that the next step is already here.

Kongregate Labs adds a number of interesting new features to the site — Flash tutorials (okay, “shootorials”), game customization tools, and game design contests (with cash money rewards, woo). Simultaneously providing “scaffolding” for new designers to learn how to make Flash games, as well as providing tools to implement new tweaks to games and means to earn revenue from game design, I know of nothing quite like this on the web currently. Kongregate is a fascinating community, bridging the world of “Web 2.0″ sites with game design.

Interestingly enough, this is exactly the realm I’m trying to better understand in my dissertation research. The predominance of Flash games makes it a worthwhile area to study in and of itself, but the ways that Kongreagate in particular adds community tools is stellar. What kinds of lessons can we learn about how to teach design skills, and what kinds of implications do sites like this have for everything from learning how to program through learning how to be an online entrepreneur?

Check out Kongregate Labs!

The ever-insightful Timothy Burke had an interesting post on TerraNova on the “state of the Diku” several months ago. Summarizing the overwhelming prevalance of the old DikuMUD mechanics in current MMOs, Burke stated:

It is well understood that the game structures and mechanics that undergird most commercial virtual worlds today draw their underlying DNA from Diku-style text-based MUDs, though many contemporary players have only experienced the latest iterations or forms of those game mechanics. Many of these features are now so familiar and expected, so much a part of the grammar of play activity, that developers seem to implement them without asking what purpose or role they will serve in a particular gameworld. Moreover, precisely because these features have become so foundational, it seems difficult to think of new approaches or game mechanics, even those that offer only a mild twist. But even a single such innovation can do a lot to spark new interest among players.

I’m frankly not terribly interested in the new kinds of lipstick put on the old pig that is the “kill a bunch of monsters, pick up X number of items, get better gear, lather, rinse, repeat” that is the mainstay of this genre of game. This is occasionally a fun, often very comfortable (though sometimes very boring) means of progressing one’s character in these sorts of games. However, new game mechanics and radically different conceptions of what it means to be in a virtual space are increasingly interesting to me.

About a year ago, I gave Uru Live a shot — the game is, essentially, an MMO though of a decidedly non-Diku variety (no leveling, no combat, no “drops,” etc.), set within the world of Myst. I’m old enough to remember when Myst was a surprisingly innovative (at least in visual imagery, if not in core mechanics) game, and I was curious to see how a Myst world would even work with multiple players. At the time, Uru Live was on its second lease on life — it had originally been cancelled during beta, then revived by GameTap. GameTap kept it alive during this next “season” of story (more on that in a bit), and then it was unfortunately cancelled again.

One of the striking things about Uru Live was how to transfer a puzzle game into a 3-D MMO space. One begins the game “instanced” within what is, essentially, the original single-player version of the game. After a bit, you end up getting an object which opens up the social components of the game — chatting, friends lists, taking snapshots within the game, etc.

I didn’t get much further than this, but did find the idea appealing that there were multi-person puzzles (including levels designed by players, I think?) within the world, and that the game designers both roleplayed within the space, and took developments within the player world to craft the next “episodes” of the game. (Not to mention the rich and interesting online communities that arose around the game!) Played out over a “season” (or set of “episodes,” a linked chain of rollouts of new narrative), it appears that the game designers wanted there to be a role for both player developed narrative and the overarching storyline determined by the designers of the game. Imagine how likely somethig like this would ever happen within something like World of Warcraft — first of all, does anyone truly play a Diku-based game for the narrative, anyway?

I’m excited by the news that Uru Live is coming back yet again, as I don’t think I ever got far enough into the game to fully understand how it worked. It’s certainly a bit of an insular, “boutique” MMO, but perhaps that’s exactly what I need right now — though it’s inescapable that the huge, mass-marketed games (like World of Warcraft) make enormous impact in the gaming world, these smaller games are where unique (and vibrant) online cultures can evolve.

In other non-Diku MMO news, the new Animal Crossing game drops on November 16th, and Parallel Kingdom (an iPhone-based MMO mixed with an augmented reality game) is out on Halloween. I’ll give these a shot in the interim.

(Yes, yes, I forgot where the camera was at the beginning, go ahead and laugh).

My task here was simple — at the beginning of most of our face-to-face meetings in Madison, we’d start off with getting the kids to talk a bit about what they’d done in the past month (since the previous meeting), as well as some of the goals they’ve set for themselves for the next month. We happened to be sitting near a map of Azeroth (the fantasy world where World of Warcraft is set), and this turned out to be the perfect touchstone for the kids to talk about their progress. As you can tell from the video, the kids jumped at the chance to both brag about where they’d been (which is, basically, coding their progress in leveling their characters within the game), and this led to discussions of what they cataloged in the game and how.

In particular, focus on the boy who I talk with about writing maps near the end of the excerpt — I find this to be one of the most interesting parts of the video, and a good example of the kinds of skills that can arise out of engagement with games. His approach to learning how to play the game better was, in short, to take screencaps of maps that he saw within the game, print them out, paste them to the wall behind his computer screen, and annotate them. I note that this is what us “old school” gamers had to do decades ago (I still have reams of graph papered Zork maps in a box somewhere), but it’s notable in that it ties to a variety of literacies that could extend out of the game.

This “game-based cartography” is more than just copying down maps: It involves making judgments about which maps are important for gameplay, figuring out how to annotate them in a way which will help him solve whatever problem he has at hand (in this case, tracking non-player characters in the world), and is the externalizing of cognition into paper-and-pencil tools. These are all hallmarks of being literate in these games, and all critical for his path to solving the problems that faced him in the game.

But, I note, wouldn’t we like to see kids understand the real world’s geography in similar ways? The game has worked as a gateway for this kid’s use of tools to help him make sense of the virtual world; I’d be interested to see how we could leverage these skills to better impart knowledge about geography, global economies, animal migration, etc. So many content areas feature grappling with maps and graphical representations of some kind of phenomenon, and I suspect that honing one’s skills in map-making — and seeing one’s self as a producer of knowledge and not just a map-reader — might lead toward useful applications of these game-based skills to real-world skills.

Finally, it’s interesting to hear the kids talk about the different people they’re meeting inside the game. In my opinion, it’s the distributed nature of online gameplay — and online communities around games — which may reap the greatest rewards for game-based learning in the future. I think we’ve only barely scratched the surface of the potential of games for this purpose, and we need to focus on how people collaborate, compete, and design together online. In part, that’s what I’m trying to do with my dissertation work, and hopefully as it progresses, I’ll have more to say on that.

Pretty wonderful, huh?

I’m very intrigued by Little Big Planet — it’s basically a sidescroller/puzzle game, but, as you can tell, has a phenomenal degree of customizability. As a consequence, this is the first game that I’d consider getting a Playstation 3 for. There’s a vibrant community building up around the game already — and it’s not even out yet! — making me wonder what’s in store when the game’s officially released. (And, incidentally, I wonder if this will be the first game to make people go out and finally buy the PS3, two years after its release).

As someone who purports to study “design” with games, I’m naturally interested in digging up the communities in which level design in Little Big Planet is discussed. And, especially, I’d love to see more things like this math case — examples where people have taken a game and pushed it beyond the simple notions of level design (something for other people to play through), and have developed new games, virtual machines, or other complex mechanistic “things” inside the game. Design practices in which players redefine what a game is even about are the most intriguing to me, though I have, as of yet, not figured out how to study them.

I was a privately a critic of Ms. Rich’s “R U Really Reading?” article. Beyond the unfortunately snarky tone of the title, she clearly comes at this topic from a decidedly traditional perspective. A telling quote from the earlier article:

“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

Not to disparage Mr. McCullough, but, really? While certainly accomplished, McCullough’s not an education researcher, and has no experience in studying learning in any context that I know of. Also, isn’t it ironic to read this kind of thing off of a computer screen? (I can’t recall the last time I picked up a paper version of the Times).

Rich’s beat is clearly books, books, and stuff related to books. This isn’t really a criticism, just a statement that her background and focus have been on print media and all this digital stuff seems to be, at best, problematic for her. Rich reports widely on publishing industry developments — including the kinds of (valuable!) learning that can come from immersion in books. I’m certainly not criticizing that emphasis, but acknowledging that her standpoint was, at least initially, one in which “new media” (online culture, games, etc.) were viewed as threats to an established medium (not to mention business).

Thus, it was quite refreshing to see games positioned in today’s article as something which could potentially encourage reading. Here’s a nice snippet featuring one of the kids from the Madison afterschool group:

For the past year, Ms. Steinkuehler has been testing this hypothesis with a group of teenage boys who play World of Warcraft.

Noah Tropp, 14, who participated in Ms. Steinkuehler’s program for several months this year, regularly reads sites like gamewinners.com and supercheat.com. While looking for hints online, he read about “Death Note,” a novel based on a Japanese video game. Over the summer, he read it.

Noah also wrote about the games and other pastimes on a group Internet forum. “I was so surprised because he does not like writing,” said William Tropp, Noah’s father. “I said, ‘Why aren’t you like this in school?’ ”

In one posting, Noah recommended “xxxHOLIC,” a graphic novel based on Japanese manga cartoons.

“You should check it out if you get the chance,” Noah concluded, “and it is a good book!”

Here, we used the forums to give the kids a place to both discuss World of Warcraft and, simply, to talk to one another about anything else that they wanted to. In this case, Noah got a fire lit under him and started talking quite a bit about Japanese manga (Death Note, xxxHOLIC). This is exactly the kind of thing we know as gamers, and which we’re trying to encourage in our programs — using the game to foster social connections between people and to open doors to academic content (reading, writing, math, science, art, etc.) that may not be obvious, even to players of the game.

However, the emphasis (for Rich) is ultimately still on books. In the first article, online culture and online text seem to be impediments to getting people to reading books, while, in the second, she seems to have tempered this a little. Still, books are the happy outcome of playing those darn games, and games are useful for “hooking” kids into reading. For Rich, it seems that games are useful insofar as they drive us to learn using stuff written on dead pieces of paper. Again, I don’t question that books are an important and valuable tool for learning, but what about the unique affordances of interactive, dynamic media themselves? Books are fantastic, but can’t games give us something unique that books cannot?

I always enjoy hearing Jim Gee’s thoughts on how we should be looking at games as games — not simply as a delivery device to encourage some other kind of medium. His quote in today’s article was right on the money:

“Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices,” said James Paul Gee, the author of the book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” “You can’t screw up a Dostoevsky book, but you can screw up a game.”

In my personal work, I want to see people “screw up” in environments in which they can learn from their mistakes. Learning from errors and iterating strategies until a successful one is determined are valuable learning experiences that games have at their core (unlike books)… not to mention how they encourage the building of complex mental models of the game systems in order to even play them! In a world which seems to be falling deeper and deeper into a state of economic crisis, we need more people who can think in terms of dynamic systems, as well as design robust ones for the future.

Despite my misgivings, both articles are definitely worth a read. I’d love to hear what other people think!

Looks like Constance’s research group has had some more press. A few days ago, an interview that Constance did with Live Science went up, discussing the latest on the afterschool gaming programs that we piloted last year (and which she’s now expanding), the science reasoning in World of Warcraft forums paper that Constance and I recently had published in the Journal of Science Education and Technology, plus some interesting comparison experiences dealing with the game and “unschooling.”

Here’s a link to the video tied to the Live Science report, by Jeremy Hsu. It’s generally accurate and favorable, though with a few errors (including a cringeworthy mispronunciation of Constance’s last name).

This story has subsequently been picked up by WoWInsider — making it, by my count, the third time that this paper has been referenced on that particular blog (another mention after all the APA press, and another after Constance’s interview with Wired). Impressive, eh? This paper is the research that just keeps on giving!

I’m also excited to see that the Live Science article tackled the “unschooling” issue. I’m assuming that the interviewer made the connection between our work and World of Warcraft as an unschooling tool due to seeing a post I made on this topic on our research group’s blog last winter (itself, surprise, a commentary on a post from WoWInsider — everything goes through WoWInsider at some point, it seems).

It’s an interesting (and pressing) issue: How should gaming practices like World of Warcraft be related to traditional schooling — incorporated into schooling, as formal instruction (yeah, good luck with getting schools to agree to that)? Presented as an completely alternative experience to formal schooling (as in unschooling)? Creating spaces (like Constance’s afterschool groups) which are neither school, nor exactly free play? With respect to unschooling, I wrestled with this issue in last winter’s blog post:

Proponents of unschooling would likely say that games like WoW are rich enough environments that one doesn’t need to craft instruction “around” the game, but I disagree. The constraints of this particular virtual world are going to make some kinds of learning very difficult, as is the case with any learning environment; WoW itself might be a fantastic venue for encouraging collaborative play, apprenticeship, and leadership within the game, but is much more difficult for encouraging, say, critical readings of texts or even learning how to do science within the confines of the game itself. While we firmly believe that these latter literacy practices can evolve out of games such as WoW, it is rare for them to evolve without some explicit structuring or apprenticeship. While the unschoolers are laudable in their goal to provide the space for kids’ to explore and learn “naturally” within these virtual worlds, there’s a role for explicit instruction and gentle prodding by adults.

The question then becomes, what kind of “prodding?” And how much leads to the playing of videogames — often a transgressive enterprise, generally unapproved by parents and teachers alike — being considered “school” by kids? In my personal work, I have the hunch that online discussions (forums, blogs, etc.) might be critical for providing spaces which are appealingly ambiguous in this regard (not school, but allow for the incorporation of instructional scaffolds), and would love to explore these issues further.

These are all hallmarks of scientific thought. Indeed, the conversations often had the precise flow of a scientific salon, or even a journal series: Someone would pose a question — like what sort of potions a high-class priest ought to carry around, or how to defeat a particular monster — and another would post a reply, offering data and facts gathered from their own observations. Others would jump into the fray, disputing the theory, refining it, offering other facts. Eventually, once everyone was convinced the theory was supported by the data, the discussion would peter out.

“It blew my mind,” Steinkuehler tells me.

And here’s the thing: The (mostly) young people engaging in these sciencelike conversations are precisely the same ones who are, more and more, tuning out of science in the classroom. Every study shows science literacy in school is plummeting, with barely one-fifth of students graduating with any sort of sense of how the scientific method works. The situation is far worse for boys than girls.

Steinkuehler thinks videogames are the way to reverse this sorry trend. She argues that schools ought to be embracing games as places to show kids the value of scientific scrutiny — the way it helps us make sense of the world.

I quibble with some of that — Thompson states it was “(mostly) young people,” but unfortunately we have no evidence to argue that point (as the forums obscure poster ages). I suspect that many of the participants actually are quite young, but would find it interesting to see if age is correlated with how one uses this particular resource. Regardless, whether or not the participants are old or young isn’t really the point, however, as I’ve discussed on Constance’s research blog in the past.

Anyway, nice to see some more, favorable press for this work. I’m currently in the stages of planning my dissertation, and am thinking of ways to develop these ideas further, especially looking at the ways that participants in the forums engage in design-like practices. The big unanswered question for this research is why are people engaging in these detailed arguments online? Is it simply for the instrumental goal of playing better? Or do some WoW players have even larger goals than that?

In July, I presented several times at our own Games, Learning, and Society Conference — first, a talk on expertise in Guitar Hero (based on this paper), next a poster on a taxonomy I’m working on of the different kinds of design practices that go on in online gamer forums (which won a poster award; you can check out a PDF of the poster here), then, finally, a talk about how I see studying fan design in online gamer forums — focusing on two case studies from The Legend of Zelda and World of Warcraft.

That last talk was part of a symposium entitled “Design, In and Around Games,” which also featured talks by my talented friends Alecia Magnifico, Mingfong Jan, and John Martin (check out the links — Alecia’s doing poetry with Twitter, Mingfong’s a phenomenal photographer, and John’s got a lot of info on his site). Our session is available streaming online via Sonic Foundry‘s excellent Mediasite service, which allows you to follow my Keynote slides while watching me talk. The session was pretty good (other than the guy who interrupted us to find out when the bus was leaving for dinner!), and it was interesting to see how much similarity there is in the ways me, Alecia, Mingfong, and Jim approach issues of “design” in games, even though we ostensibly study very, very different kinds of things — commercial games for me, writing on social networking sites for Alecia, and augmented reality handheld games for Mingfong and John.

So, check it out if you’re interested, and I’d love to hear what people think. This stuff is, as always, work in progress, and I’d love any suggestions people have on new and interesting ways to study the kinds of “design” that fans do online around games.

It’s actually a pretty interesting watch for anyone currently into computer and/or videogames, just to see how little has changed in the past 23 years. Yes, little… though the technology has improved, so many of the same preconceptions, arguments, and tensions are still around.

In the post-Atari, pre-Nintendo industry cooldown, attention turned back to computer games, as well as speculation toward what the role of games would be in the industry. Taking a definite “they’re back to being complex toys for hobbyists” stance, the late Gary Kildall certainly didn’t have the long view for the eventual social and cultural significance of games (and, one could argue, he didn’t for operating systems, either).

Anyway, check out the episode in its entirety:

It starts off with demos of Sargon and Millionaire for the (then brand spanking new) Macintosh, then moves into a very awkward demo/interview segment with Lebling and David Crane, co-founder of Activision. I mean awkward in about three senses — Crane and Lebling seem uncomfortable around each other as wings of very different kinds of games (Activision leading the way with graphical games, Lebling’s Infocom still trying to compete with text-only games), Crane seems giddily happy with all the dumb, silly eye-candy around the Ghostbusters game, and, of course, it was Activision who would later buy Infocom about one year later. I don’t know how far Infocom’s talks with Activision had proceeded by the time this was filmed — or if they’d even started — but with hindsight, we can see the eventual end of Infocom right there on that table (with a bouncing ball highlighting Ray Parker, Jr. lyrics).

So, sort of depressing, I guess. Lebling argued that their games would eventually move beyond the short form to more “novel-like” games, and that clearly didn’t happen (at least in text games). Rather, it seems that the short form has exploded and flourished in the past 15 years, with the advent of Graham Nelson’s (and collaborators’) Inform, among other interactive fiction platforms.

Also be sure to check out the amusing commentary by Paul Schindler on why Candyland is superior to videogames (because, of course, videogames cause people to “lose human interaction”), not to mention the news summary at the end about the rise of 15-lb. “lap portable” computers, computerized shoe customization, and how “the end of QWERTY” was supposedly near.

So, okay, maybe a few things have changed in 23 years.

The forums present that gamers are “creating an surround in which epistolatory scientific thinking practices are state learned,” said Sean Dancer, a student intellect who worked on the “Humanity of Warcraft” informing with guide communicator Constance Steinkuehler. The stuff is set for publishing in the Leger of Science Teaching and Profession.

We are the only visitor in the domain that has been as flourishing in all the markets where we participate. We hump a spherical strain. Usually, [when fill say they screw a globose labor, they] honourable impart they deceive in Nippon. But we’ve got creation crosswise Accumulation. No separate complement has been competent to do that. We hold collective a orbicular expertise that none of our else competitors hit.

And, it continues. This has made Mr. Dancer’s day, week, and month. I’m considering starting a whole new section in my vita called “Incomprehensible Vietnamese WoW Gold-Seller Spam,” with this as the first, glorious entry.

I presented a paper called “Informal Scientific Reasoning in Online Game Forums” by Constance and myself, discussing our work studying informal science reasoning in the World of Warcraft forums. If you’re unfamiliar with this work, check out a pair of older blog posts on Constance’s research blog by Constance and by me on the topic.

Unfortunately, Constance couldn’t make the meeting, so she graciously sent me along to deliver the paper, which has received some media attention. Though the message of “Hey parents, games aren’t all bad!” is certainly not a new spin (nor a terribly interesting one anymore), it was nice to see the press jump on the APA’s press release. I’ve been having fun tracking where the AP wire piece (by Steve LeBlanc) has ended up, so here’s a partial list of site/media outlets that have picked up either the state wire report or the later revision, which went national yesterday.

• CNN
• MSNBC
• NPR
• USA Today
• Fox News
• The Guardian
• Kotaku
• SFGate
• WoWInsider [Hm, does it undercut our findings when the biggest WoW blog completely misreads the press release and combines our study with Gentile's?]
• Gamepolitics [Are those commenters named "Jack" just fakes or is the real Jack Thompson commenting on our symposium?]

… and a bunch of other newspapers, TV stations, etc., including at least one in Spain, and one in Hong Kong. Pretty nice!

Again, it was a worthwhile experience. I’m interested in further challenging the discourse among psychologists (a profession I once considered myself training for, sort of) that surface depictions of violence in media outweigh the learning practices that people get from playing with these kinds of interactive environments. It’s pretty much incontrovertible at this point, and it’s nice that the media are still finding it worthwhile to write about.

Of course, I’d still prefer a day (hopefully soon) in which the simple fact that “games involve learning” is common knowledge, and thus no longer newsworthy.

Ignore the ugly splash page, Frotz is pretty simple and fun — IF games are rendered completely in text and you only interact with it via text-based inputs. So, “go north” or “get lamp” or “burn pants,” etc. If you’re unfamiliar with the genre of game (which was, incidentally, the first ever genre of commercial computer games), check out Emily Short‘s excellent PDF explaining how to play IF.

Frotz comes with several games installed, and some great ones, too:

Anchorhead, Varicella, Curses!, Lost Pig, Photopia, Spider and Web, Slouching Towards Bedlam, A Change in the Weather, and even the old, original, MIT version of Zork. Additionally, it links to the IFDB, so you can check out new games:

The only difficulty (and this seems rather minor) is getting my old Infocom games (Zork, Planetfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, etc.) uploaded onto the iPhone, but apparently there are now legit FTP clients that will make that happen for me.

At any rate, now I have more games to carry around in my pocket. Awesome.

Also, over the last few days, it seems that Cryptic has finally unveiled a little about Star Trek Online, their new Trek MMO. Cryptic makes City of Villains and City of Heroes (neither of which I’ve played), and they’re shooting for releasing the Trek MMO within the “next 3 years,” which sounds unsurprising. But, of course, I’m gonna have to try this thing out… whenever it arrives.

They’re making a few odd design choices, which I’m curious about — each player starts off by commanding their own ship in the game (either Federation or Klingon, the initial first two factions, with Romulans and Dominion to come in expansions or patches, presumably). One’s bridge crew are then, basically, pets in the game. How this will work, I have no clue, but it’s certainly an inventive way to simplify the third-person MMO style of player development (you develop your own character through his or her command), while also allowing for ship battles. I’m not sold on the idea, but I’m at least a smidgen receptive to it.

Here’s an introduction of the game at the big Trekkie convention in Las Vegas this weekend:

I’ve already registered on the site (my username’s “scd” there), and will soon probably start recruiting a Klingon guild on their forums, just for kicks. (Yes, they really do have a guild/fleet recruitment forum already). I mean, if I’ve got three years before this thing comes out, I might as well try to get the best, smelliest, ugliest group of Klingons I can possibly get, right?

What should I name my fleet? Fleet “Targ Breath”? “Bumpy Heads”? “Sto’vo’kor”? “No Kill I”?