The film has already been criticized from some corners for throwing fuel on the fire that has already led to more privatization in schools, and the regime of high-stakes testing that so typifies contemporary schooling. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I share similar concerns that the prominent placement of such figures as Michelle Rhee means the film will not be terribly critical of testing regimes, inordinately push Charter Schools as the best solution, and not fully acknowledge that, though Charters can be sites of innovation, many are not doing a very good job, either.

Possibly in preparation for the oncoming press around this film, or, who knows, maybe to plug the upcoming DML conference (in Long Beach, CA this February), the Macarthur Foundation has recently produced a glossy new video highlighting its laudable Digital Media & Learning efforts. (Full disclosure: I was employed under a Macarthur DML grant for three years as a doctoral student. Regardless, it’s an impressive set of projects aiming at shaping the future of learning, well worth checking out for yourself).

The video below illustrates a wide variety of approaches, both in and outside of school, to help change the discourse on what constitutes learning. John Seely Brown exhorts that we view engagement with gaming as a potential model for learning, Henry Jenkins argues that we take seriously that media can bring individuals into connection with communities outside those in a classroom, and Katie Salen illustrates that technology can be embraced and managed, not just outlawed.

[A brief aside about Twitter: @jseelybrown, @mizuko, @henryjenkins, and @katiesalen are all on Twitter. You can follow @macfound for the Macarthur Foundation and @dmlcentral for the Digital Media & Learning tweets. I'm @scd, by the way; read my tweets on the sidebar or just follow me!]

Do I expect that Waiting For Superman will provide solutions as wide-reaching as the ones explored in the Macarthur video? Of course not; the film appears to be a polemic that’s meant to stir up a mixture of shock and anger, not deep thought, and that’s useful to an extent. Waiting For Superman is a film that appears to be about detailing the many faces of the problem, and, if early reviews are any indication, is not very specific on the optimal solutions.

I’d love to be wrong, but films such as this are most often about mobilizing the populace to take a look at an issue they’ve been ignoring, and then drive them to action. But, it’s the form that this action will take that most concerns me and, I suspect, would concern many of the folks in the DML video. For, if we take seriously that the kids of today are growing up in a world vastly different than their parents’ world (not to mention completely alien to their grandparents’ world), then we need to find solutions that allow us to prepare young learners for the distributed workplaces, responsibilities of civic engagement, and the connected cultural lives of the coming years. And that just ain’t gonna be fixed by applying more testing — or, perhaps phrased a bit more politely, the 21st century learner won’t be well-served by our overreliance on assessment methods formulated in the 19th century.

Hopefully, digital media and learning advocates can begin to capitalize on the likely public conversations that crop up after the film’s release, and help shift our schools toward new models — models for the world that exists now, not the world some of us pine for.

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!

I’m not sure if I can link to the searchable program, but if so, follow this link to AERA’s site.

Or, just read the titles here:

Developing Community and Collaboration in Virtual Worlds
Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session
Unit: SIG-Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning
Scheduled Time: Mon, May 3 – 10:35am – 12:05pm, Building/Room: Sheraton / Grand Ballroom Section 2
Presenter on paper: Understanding and Fostering Online Communities For Game Design
Diverse Opportunities for Learning in Game-Based Fan Communities

Session Submission Type: Structured Poster Session
Unit: SIG-Media, Culture, and Curriculum
Scheduled Time: Sun, May 2 – 12:25pm – 1:55pm, Building/Room: Colorado Convention Center / Room 607
Presenter on paper: Scaffolding Design in a Gaming Affinity Space
How Teachers, Designers, and Fans Think About Games and Learning

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session
Unit: SIG-Media, Culture, and Curriculum
Scheduled Time: Tue, May 4 – 8:15am – 9:45am, Building/Room: Colorado Convention Center / Korbel Ballroom 2
Presenter on paper: Fandom for Fandom’s Sake: Games and a New Critical Media Literacy

Hope to see some of you there, and especially catch up with my pals and colleagues from Wisconsin, Arizona, and New York!

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!

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!

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.

As many of you know, I’ve had significant previous experiences at Miami, first as an undergrad in Miami’s (late) Interdisciplinary Studies program, then as a visiting faculty member there for several years, and subsequently as a staff member of Miami’s Project Dragonfly. When I heard about the position, I was initially reticent — would going back to Miami truly be the best fit for me? At the time, it felt a little early for me to be applying for jobs, but I gave it my best shot anyway, as I was very curious to find out how Miami was changing in recent years.

In the subsequent weeks and months, I learned a great deal about Miami’s new vision under President Hodge and Provost Herbst, and it began to sink in how exciting and innovative this position was for Miami (not to mention how amazingly good of a fit it was for what I wanted from a faculty position). I became more and more intrigued, and when I interviewed in February, I was completely blown away by the commitment that both the EHS (under Dean Carine Feyten) and AIMS (under Glenn Platt and Peg Faimon) had for novel staffing models and promoting productive interdisciplinary work. The Armstrong Professors (my position and one in the School of Fine Arts) do not sit within departments, the resources of both EHS and the AIMS program are top-notch (McGuffey Hall’s renovation was phenomenal!), and all of the faculty I met seemed committed to supporting my goal of figuring out how exactly new media and games should guide learning for future generations.

I just got back from a brief curricular retreat with the AIMS faculty and am looking forward to working with everyone. Sitting on the faculty with engaged researchers who do everything from investigating high-end virtual reality spaces through developing models of how the humanities might be reshaped for the digital era made it clear that Miami is exactly where I should be. I know from my earlier experiences that Miami’s undergrads are also superb, and I’m looking forward to building an undergraduate research group on new media, games, and learning once I get settled in Oxford. With all of this in mind, choosing Miami was just, well, a no-brainer, I guess?

In a year in which the academic job market has withered, I’m humbled that I was able to get a job that’s so perfect for the kinds of work I want to do. I have high hopes that this position will serve as a good model for how novel interdisciplinary research can be fostered at the University level, and it’s going to be incumbent upon me to now do good work in the spaces I think need most addressing in understanding learning — bridging traditional educational disciplines and the fantastic new stuff going on with interactive, digital media. It’s a big task, but right now I just feel like I’m a very, very lucky dude.

Anyway, I’m excited and happy! In the next few months, as I finish the dissertation, I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the position and my move to Miami. But, for now, expect a few tweaks to the site in the coming weeks, and even some more regular blog posting (I’ll need to do something else other than write my diss, right?).

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!

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 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).

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?

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!

(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.

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.

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve posted — I keep meaning to redo this site so it’s less a blog and more a repository of my current research info, but I’ve been busy. I’ll try to get to that soon, but, hey, that might mean another month or so. Oh well, such is life.

Anyway, I’m flying out tomorrow for New Jersey and New York City, where I’ll be presenting a paper at the American Educational Research Assocation annual conference. My paper is entitled “Literacy Implications of Online Fan Debates” — a rather boring title for a rather fun paper. In it, I analyze the phenomenon of “timeline debates” around the The Legend of Zelda games.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, there has been a fair amount of discussion over the years as to the “correct” ordering of the stories in the Zelda series. That is, does A Link to the Past occur in the same timeline as The Wind Waker or in a different one? Does the original The Legend of Zelda occur after or before Ocarina of Time? These have been pretty esoteric fan debates, but are illustrative of how complex and “design-like” many fan debates are around games. I’m increasingly interested in how informal design practices evolve out of fan communities (around games, TV shows, etc.), and it’s looking more and more like this will be the core of my dissertation.

Anyway, here is a link to the PDF of the full paper, and here is a link to a PDF of the handout I plan on having for attendees of my talk to take with them. If you’re interested, please download and let me know what you think!

If you read this blog and will be in New York for AERA, please stop by and say hi!

P.S., I plan on going here:

A bit of background: To put it mildly, I have struggled with this game (and all MMOGs that I have tried). Previous to this semester, I had never leveled a character past the low 30s within WoW, and always had a great deal of difficulty in understanding how to simply play the game. This semester, however, our research team began our afterschool MMOG group with a set of 12-14 year old boys, and I was motivated to give it another shot. Playing with people seems to have made a big difference — not a surprise, really, but I’m pretty stubborn and prefer to solo whenever I can.

After a month and a half of diligent play on the warlock, I am up to level 42, and have my mount:

That’s my character, weeping atop his brand new “Felsteed,” hanging out in Dustwallow Marsh. (He’s weeping only because it makes for a more entertaining picture, he’s actually quite a happy zombie).

I noticed several things about my gameplay and the experience of working towards this goal that struck me as interesting:

First, the choice of character class made this much easier than it could have been — my character, an undead warlock, gets a “free mount” (costing 85 silver, as opposed to the going rate of 100 gold) at level 40. This altered my gameplay somewhat — since I knew that I wouldn’t have to earn a great deal of money in the game before being able to achieve the mount, I was able to focus on leveling the character through questing. This, I suspect, sped up the process quite a bit.

Additionally, though I had a lot of trouble leveling earlier characters past the mid-20s, I do appear to have internalized some basics about the game which I hadn’t consciously realized, ranging from interface issues (paying attention to the color of quests was something I hadn’t done in earlier attempts to play), as well as the geography of Azeroth (e.g., remembering that all of the troll-related quests in the blood elf areas are on the eastern coast of the continent). Read: “lol i, nub, l2ped.”

Finally, again, playing with that group of kids — a more-or-less persistent social group in which, by virtue of my age, I was positioned as an expert — helped to motivate me to continue playing. I genuinely enjoyed helping the kids learn the game and passing on whatever meager knowledge of it I had. This, I suspect, drove me to continue playing, as well as refining how I played by modeling it for the kids in the group. Some of them have now lapped me, but I don’t much care, at least I met my goal of getting past where I’d been before.

Yet…

Though I met the goal I wanted to reach for this semester, I still found myself wanting to explore a number of classes, and though making “deeper” progress within the game (by leveling past 40 on a single character) has been rewarding, I’m beginning to understand that perhaps I just enjoy different things than leveling in the game. My warlock (pictured above) is only one of my characters, and I have had fun recently playing other classes, rogues in particular. I’ll convey one odd story that seems to sum up, for me at least, the experiences I’m interested in having in this virtual world.

After my undead warlock was leveled to the mid-30s, I decided to roll a troll rogue, just for kicks. I found learning a melee DPS class to be challenging (given that I was so used to playing a casting class, and one which relied on pets), but terribly fun. Just the simple fact that you need to do more with an Assassination-specced rogue than with a Demonology-specced warlock made it immediately interesting, and a lot of fun (e.g., Gouge + jump + turn around + Backstab vs. pet + DoT + DoT + Drain; the jumping and spinning around is significantly more fun than just casting spells from afar, as I do with the warlock). I quickly leveled the rogue to the high 20s, and then began to flounder a little (I ran into the boring parts of the game, and was not thrilled with the idea of doing Ashenvale and Hillsbrad yet again).

Several weeks later (after neglecting the rogue a bit), the son of one of my colleagues asked me to run him through a dungeon in order to get gear for his rogue alt character. I happily obliged, as he’d done the same for me with his high level characters. The twist was that we played Horde characters and the dungeon he wanted to be run through was “The Deadmines,” a low-level instance deep in Alliance territory. In other words, an area I’d never really been to (especially not as a member of the opposing faction), and a dungeon I’d never run.

I ran him through, and found that there was a unique item that dropped in the dungeon — the “Red Defias Mask.” A “grey” drop, this item served no purpose other than a cosmetic one, and provided no additional armor, nor stats benefits. Yet, uh, it looked awesome!

I found myself excited about getting an item for my own troll rogue which was (1) was relatively unique looking and (2) to be blunt, indicated to people that I had to haul my characters to a hard-to-get area. Since the mask is “bind on pickup,” that meant I had to drag my level 28 troll rogue to the dungeon, ran part of it solo until the object dropped, and, voila, I had a Red Defias Mask within a few minutes.

However, here’s where the story got a little weird. Alas, the Red Defias Mask looks pretty stupid on a trolls. Given the way Blizzard designed the troll physiology (tusks, pointy noises), there’s an added patch of red cloth on the mask which makes it look … wrong? Oh, just take a look:

Isn’t that goofy looking? So, okay, I had the silly, useless object I’d been coveting, but it wasn’t terribly good looking after all. I couldn’t change the object, so I did the only rational thing and changed my character. I pretty much ditched my level 28 troll rogue, and rerolled an undead rogue last weekend.

Now, rerolling isn’t that strange of a thing for me — I’m quick at leveling characters from 1-20, and my major problem with the game is that I find myself wanting to do this more than many other players. I find the early levels to be enjoyable to do over and over again, just to see if I can do it better. My goals are odd, given the structure of the game leading players to level so they can partake in high-end play, but I found compelled to try a new race for a rogue, simply because I was enamored with the Red Defias Mask, and realized that it looked better on an undead character than on a troll.

I quickly leveled a new undead rogue to level 14 over an evening and a morning (around the level where it’d be difficult but possible to make the trek to Westfall, where the item drops), then researched online to see the best way to get the mask. The mask seemed to drop fairly regularly within The Deadmines, but at level 14 there was no way I could solo the dungeon, and getting low-level Horde players to go with me all the way to The Deadmines would be difficult. So, I decided to try to “farm” the item — which, if you click on the wowhead link above, indicates has about a 2% drop rate. So, I realized that for around every 50 Defias characters I killed, I should be able to get a mask.

Getting to the area where the Defias reside was a bit of a challenge. I’ll just dump out a lot of WoW locations and lingo here for anyone who already knows this stuff, as there’s no easier way to describe it — I had to take the zeppelin from the Undercity to Grom’gol in Stranglethorn Vale, and then try to walk up through STV, through Duskwood, and into Westfall, where The Deadmines and a number of Defias reside. The monsters surrounding Grom’gol were the most daunting part, as they were level 27 or so and up, and would be able to easily kill me at level 14.

So, after a number of tries, I figured it out and used this successful strategy: I took off all of my armor so that when I inevitably got killed, I’d minimize the damage on the gear a little (imagine a mostly-naked zombie running around amidst ravenous dinosaurs, and you can see why I’d enjoy this). My aggro radius at level 14 was huge, so I got killed pretty quickly, and then my spirit popped up in the STV graveyard. The nice thing was that this graveyard is on the border to Duskwood (to the north, the path I needed to take), so I just “spirit healed.” That is, I resurrected in the graveyard, which nearly incapacitates my character for a few minutes (I was happy to wait it out), and damaged all of my gear significantly. But, it was a shortcut past the high level monsters I had trouble with, and pushed me further on the path to my destination, Westfall.

I ran out of STV into Duskwood, and as long as I stayed on the road (and applied the rogue “Sprint” ability to get out of the way of the occasional monster), I did okay. I ended up in Westfall, then Stealthed (went partially invisible, another rogue talent), and worked my way up to a hidden vendor near the Deadmines who could fix the armor of Horde characters (a rarity in that area, which I discovered poking around WoWhead). I stealthed back out of the Deadmines town, and was set — now I could “farm” the Defias characters for the mask.

Long story somewhat shorter, after about six hours of farming for this thing (and killing around 100-110 Defias NPCs), I ended up getting it. I leveled from 14 to 16 just from the experience gained from killing those 100+ characters.

I commemorated the momentous occasion with several screenshots. Of the object dropping:

… and my undead rogue immediately putting it on:

So, now I have a Red Defias Mask. And a new rogue, which I’ve also now leveled up to level 28 after about a week of playing. I had no real reason to do this other than it seemed fun to do — but, really, isn’t that a significant reason? Y’know, it’s a game and all, and aren’t games supposed to be fun, occasionally? What’s ironic is how fun I found the most un-fun grinding I’ve done yet. Spending six hours killing the same NPCs over and over and over again is, on the face of it, the most boring thing one can do in a videogame, but I found it totally hilarious and strangely satisfying.

Rerolling characters is a way for me to both explore different classes/races, but also to hone my skills playing (at least at the n00b level I seem to be mired in). Similarly, I learned more about how to play the undead rogue and really refine my gameplay via the “boring” activity of grinding than I had learned on my previous, troll rogue. What initially motivated me rerolling the rogue as undead was rather silly and cosmetic, but appearances apparently do matter to me in this game. I love playing undead characters not only because they have the best Horde racial abilities (“Cannibalize,” while disgusting, is literally a lifesaver), but because I like their shambly gait, their dances, and the design of their areas. I actually found the experience of getting the mask to be more fun than leveling to get my mount — even if that’s considered “spinning my wheels,” according to the design of the game.

The name “pop cosmo” might be a little opaque at first glance, but it’s short for “Pop Cosmopolitanism,” a term that Constance has been using lately to summarize the goals of our work. By focusing on the ways that popular media (in the form of persistent online virtual worlds) encourage various learning and literacy practices, we’re arguing that they’re preparing kids for the demands of 21st century workplaces, and the responsibilities of being global citizens (hence “cosmopolitanism”). Here’s Constance’s introductory post, which better explains what we’re doing.

I made a post last week about our research into science literacy and the World of Warcraft official forums. It’s been an interesting project so far, and now we’re in the process of writing up some of our results, as well as determining what to do next. Here’s the introductory paragraph of my post:

Following up on Constance’s post from the other day, I’d like to talk a little more about our ongoing research into science literacy practices in the World of Warcraft forums. Based on the results Constance posted, we found a staggering amount of “social knowledge construction” occurring in our sample of posts to the official WoW forums. Constance gave us a taste of what the typical post to these forums looks like, but what about exemplary posts, and what might those tell us about science literacy in these online contexts?

This coming Saturday, we’re going to start our first afterschool groups, introducing adolescent boys to World of Warcraft. It’s been pretty nutty trying to get everything prepared and ready for them, but I think we’re almost there, and we’re excited to get the kids playing. More on that as it develops.

If you’re interested in any of this, by all means, go check out popcosmo.org, and let me know what you think.

How can a paper about the first text adventure game (written somewhere in the range of 1974-1976) still be groundbreaking? Well, as Jerz showed, via a multi-methodological approach looking at the game’s original source code (long thought lost and recently recovered), along with interviews with the author’s family, and a first-hand exploration of the cave(s) that the original “Colossal Cave” game (a.k.a. Adventure or ADVENT) was based upon. To wit:

This is sure to be a classic in interactive fiction (IF) research, and is one of the best analyses and histories of any genre of game I’ve ever seen. Thanks, Dr. Jerz, for reminding me why I love studying this stuff. Please note the link to his blog in the first paragraph — it’s highly recommended for those interested in interactive fiction and literacy.

Oh, and Jerz is also the author of interactive fiction himself. He wrote “Fine Tuned“, a game which Emily Short described as “A light-hearted melodrama set ca. 1910 about a heroic manly autoist, his sidekick, and a beautiful young opera singer.” I haven’t tried it yet, but just downloaded it and might give it a whirl soon.

There seems to be a slow bubbling resurgence in academic interest in interactive fiction these days, and I’m finding myself increasingly interested in the literacy and learning implications of this medium. First of all, entirely text-based games are holding a new allure for those interested in creating interactive reading experiences. But, most importantly, in the day and age of large development teams and larger development times for videogames, a free, easy-to-use, and powerful programming environment such as Inform 7 is appealing for those of us who’d like to experiment a little.

I’m working this term (in a course taught by Kurt Squire) on developing a small IF piece (in Inform 7) which I’d like to use to foster critical literacy skills in teenagers — the idea being that IF allows us to play off of the ambiguity of text itself (moreso than graphical games), and might that ambiguity be used to help us understand the reasons why different people interpret common texts differently?

I don’t want to say too much about a game that I’ve barely developed just yet, but I’m angling to have the game written by late October, and actually run it in a classroom (or afterschool) exercise with kids before Thanksgiving. Text-based games don’t seem too hard a sell for teachers and school administrations (as the link to reading and literacy seems obvious), but will kids react well to these games now? Part of me thinks they’ll react negatively (e.g., “Aww, you mean I gotta READ?”), but part of me is also hopeful that the “Harry Potter effect” might entice some kids to actually get engaged in a text-based gaming experience — after all, it’s been two decades since this was a viable commercial game genre, perhaps it will look new and interesting again.

We’ll see, I guess. I’ll update more as my game develops.

Here’s the entirety of her letter, along with the parts I found most interesting in bold:

August 21, 2007

American Psychological Association,
750 First Street, NE,
Washington, DC 20002-4242

President Brehm:

I am writing to inform you that I am returning my Presidential Citation dated 2/02/06 and awarded to me by then President of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Gerald Koocher. I have struggled for many months with this decision, and I make it with pain and sorrow. I was honored to receive this award and proud to be a member of APA. Over the years I have spoken at national conventions many times and had enjoyed an excellent relationship with the APA and its staff. With this letter, I feel as if I am ostracizing a good friend.

I do not want an award from an organization that sanctions its members’ participation in the enhanced interrogations at CIA Black Sites and at Guantanamo.The presence of psychologists has both educated the interrogation teams in more skillful methods of breaking people down and legitimized the process of torture in defiance of the Geneva Conventions.

The behavior of psychologists on these enhanced interrogation teams violates our own Code of Ethics (2002) in which we pledge to respect the dignity and worth of all people, with special responsibility towards the most vulnerable. I consider prisoners in secret CIA-run facilities with no right of habeas corpus or access to attorneys, family or media to be highly vulnerable. I also believe that when any of us are degraded, all of human life is degraded. This letter is as much about us as it is about prisoners.

In our Ethics Code we agree to promote honesty and accuracy. Our involvement in these projects has been secretive and dishonest. Finally, as psychologists we vow to do no harm. Without question, we violate this oath when we allow people in our care to be deprived of sleep or subjected to sensory over-stimulation or deprivation.

I cannot accept the August 19, 2007 Reaffirmation of APA’s Position Against Torture (Substitute Motion Three). Under this motion, psychologists will be allowed to continue working on interrogation teams that are not subject to the Geneva Conventions. This motion places our organization on the side of the CIA and Department of Defense and at odds with the United Nations, The Red Cross, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association. With this reaffirmation we have made a terrible mistake.

I know that the return of my Presidential Citation from Dr. Koocher will be of small import, but it is what I can do to disassociate myself from what I consider to be a heinous policy. All of my life I have tried my best to stand up for those with no voices and no power. The prisoners our government labels as enemy combatants are in this category.

I return my citation as a matter of conscience and in the hopes that the APA will reconsider its current unethical position. We have long been a wonderful organization that respected human rights and promoted tolerance, kindness, and peace. Nothing is more fundamental to our core orientation and professional service to others than our commitment to all people’s inherent dignity, safety and welfare. I hope my letter may be useful in restoring the APA to its long-respected and important stance as a beacon of integrity and kindness for all human beings.

Respectfully,

Dr. Mary Pipher

I question her last statement about APA’s “long-respected and important stance as a beacon of integrity and kindness for all human beings,” but the rest of it I buy. Rather than vote for a very simple statement denouncing the involvement of its members in torture, the APA overwhelmingly rejected this statement and crafted a new one which tried to list specific cases which could be ethically justified and those which could not. That is, tacitly condoned Guantanamo and these other “Black Sites,” and posited the ludicrous assertion that if APA psychologists were not present, more prisoners would be dying. Isn’t that a pretty huge problem in and of itself when psychologists are protecting prisoners’ very lives? Ain’t that a red flag?

I considered myself a “psychologist” once, or at least a psychologist-in-training though I was never a member of the APA. I’m embarrassed to have had anything to do with the people who don’t blanket decry torture, as this kind of thing taints the entire field. The APA have a responsibility first and foremost to promoting human safety and dignity, though this has obviously always been lip service rather than an actively-practiced policy by the group.

While the act of returning an award may be only symbolic, the symbol is a good one, and one that I hope to see repeated until the APA gets the point.

I’m working my way through the “Canon” currently, and in a rather haphazard manner. A bit over a year ago, I bought Leslie Klinger’s new annotated Holmes, and read “A Study In Scarlet” (which, frankly, wasn’t a very good story) and “The Sign of Four” (which was). Traveling Europe last summer, I picked up a beat-up old paperback of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” at an OxFam charity shop in London, and read that in Rome. And, now, thanks to discovering the Notorious Canary-Trainers, I have been slowly working my way through the short stories, reading whichever one strikes my fancy (or whichever story my friends suggest I read next). So far, in the past week, that’s been:

“The Bruce-Partingon Plans”
“The Veiled Lodger”
“The Musgrave Ritual”
“The Blue Carbuncle”
“A Scandal in Bohemia”
“The Man With the Twisted Lip”

… with probably “Silver Blaze” or “Mazarin Stone” up next (two stories I can’t recall ever reading). Additionally, I’ve picked up hardbacks of each of Nick Meyer‘s three Holmes novels (The Seven Per-Cent Solution, The West End Horror, and The Canary-Trainer), as well as a number of pastiches (The Bee Keeper’s Apprentice, Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon), and some reference books ( The Sherlock Holmes Compendium and Encyclopedia Sherlockiana). On top of that, I found my old copy of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (the paper version, not the computer game), and plan to try to get my friends to play it with me soon.

Speaking of which… wow, this Holmes obsession is hard to explain to my friends.

Sure, they’re nerds like I am, but there’s something qualitatively different about gaming nerds and the kind of person who finds Victorian sleuthing fascinating. I’ve raised several eyebrows of friends by describing my current interest in Conan Doyle, and even though I’m currently in a graduate program trying to incorporate research on learning with new media and fandom, this is difficult to explain. Academically, I’m finding Holmes to be interesting because of how, as scholarly and fan communities, they have refined “fan theorizing” to an art — the kinds of attention to detail and erudition required to create new knowledge in these communities is simply staggering. But, as a fan, I am finding the content of Holmes’ world to be equally foreign to my current life as any game’s fantasy world, yet more appealing. The deduction and reasoning at the surface of the Holmes Canon is, to be honest, much more appealing at the moment than the hack and slash world of many videogames. That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t many complex intellectual practices going on in and around games — that’s one of the central things I’m interested in studying in my research — but just that, for now, I’m finding Victorian detective work to be immensely satisfying and interesting.

So, a few more short blurbs on things of Sherlockian/Holmesian interest that I’ve discovered in the past week:

First off, it looks like there’s going to be a new DVD set of the complete Granada Sherlock Holmes TV series from the 1980s and early 1990s, starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes. As a teenager, I was completely enthralled with these shows, and still have a few of them on musty VHS cassettes I taped off of my local PBS station. They were all released earlier on crappier DVDs with no extras to speak of, but now have been remastered from the original negatives (!) and come in a single, beautiful box with a few extras:

Bonus Features Include:
Sherlock Series Promo
Three commentary tracks
Daytime Live
Elementary My Dear Watson: An Interview with Edward Hardwicke
An Interview with Adrian Conan Doyle
Sherlock Museum Short
Spanish/English subtitles

So, the extras are a bit underwhelming, but an improvement over the original releases. And the transfers appear scintillant from the few images that are up on the Amazon page:

The only problem — it lists for $300?! Ugh, I might have to “rent and rip,” though I’m dying to buy this.

In other news, I’ve subscribed to Scott Monty and Burt Wolder’s new Holmes podcast, “I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere.” It’s not bad so far, though I only understand maybe a third of what they’re talking about. I’ve listened to the first two episodes so far, and it’s interesting to hear the history of Sherlockian vanity presses, as well as the history of the Baker Street Journal. I’ll keep listening, and am happy to hear someone’s doing this.

One thing I noticed, however — since there are a few Holmes-related blogs and now a Holmes-related podcast, why isn’t there an (English language) Holmes wiki anywhere? Perhaps there is, and I can’t find it, but I find this peculiar, especially when modern (and, frankly, much more complex) media have had wikis devoted to them. I’m thinking of Lostpedia, Memory-Alpha, etc. — community knowledge about a fictional world that is collaboratively negotiated, all in public. I’m interested in the ways that knowledge get formed online, and find it peculiar that the only Holmes-related wiki I can find is in French.

There are a couple of explanations for this — Holmes enthusiasts tend to be older than fans of newer fictional worlds, and thus are potentially less attuned with the latest, greatest Internet phenomena, but since wikis have been around for several years, this seems unlikely. Or, perhaps there’s an ethos of scholarly knowledge-construction going on here and thus people are more interested in seeing (and arguing over) what specific individuals have contributed to Holmes scholarship rather than the relative anonymity of a wiki. Or, maybe … it’s just that no one has bothered to do it yet?

A wiki could be a fascinating experiment — what if every Sherlockian had the opportunity to contribute their own annotations to the “Canon”? It would be a simple task technically to set up such a site, but a potential nightmare socially. Since I’m quite new to all of this, I can only suspect there might be clashes of egos and pet theories in play on a Holmes wiki. If anyone even used it! Anyhow, just an idea.

More later, as my Holmes obsession branches into different directions.

The meeting was rather low-key and convivial; more a relaxed, fun reading group than anything else. I found it really fascinating to see the wide variety of different Holmes volumes everyone brought with them to the meeting — one man brought the Klinger annotated edition, a few people brought the smaller Oxford editions, and a number of older “Complete Holmes” editions (I had the tiny Bantam editions, the man next to me had the Barnes & Noble editions, etc.) One thing I saw was missing and, I think, might have been helpful was that no one had the Baring-Gould edition with them, so I’ll try to bring that next time.

Is this terribly relevant to the way the meeting went, or what we did? Nah, but it’s interesting to see that in a small community of Holmes afficionados like this, that everyone comes at it from a slightly different direction. I’d love to find out more of what motivated people to join this group, and what motivates them to continue — how much they love Holmes? The community of the group? Family? Other concerns? I’m obviously interested in how fan communities work, and certainly don’t plan to study this group without their express consent, but I’d be lying if I said these kinds of questions weren’t interesting to me. So, yeah, what’s motivated me to join up with this group?

As often happens whenever I get obsessively interested in something, I start gobbling up other media related to it. In the earlier Holmes-related post, I mentioned the radio dramas I found on my hard drive, and I’ve also been Netflixing several Holmes films. I most recently watched Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the Silk Stockings, a very odd reimagining of Holmes and Watson, starring Rupert Everett as Holmes (yes, the Four Weddings and a Funeral guy), and Ian Hart as Watson (a.k.a. Professor Quirrell in Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone):

Not horrible by any means, it was also not particularly interesting either. Every age reimagines older stories through the lens of the times, and so it’s no surprise that someone would make a Holmes story set during the Victorian era, but with the sensibilities of the 21st century: Psychological profiling, sexual fetishism, serial killers, etc. Thus, it comes off as … odd. Everett and Hart are competent, even quite good at times, but ultimately this feels like it could have been an episode of “Wire in the Blood” or any other relatively-current British crime procedural.

I wish there were more creative reimaginings of the Holmes canon making it to film — next up for me is the 2007 BBC Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars, starring Jonathan Pryce as Holmes and, presumably, a bunch of kids as the Baker Street Irregulars. This seems a more promising approach to take, though still not quite as interesting as the heyday of film adaptations such as Billy Wilder’s Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Herbert Ross’s The Seven Per-Cent Solution, based on the novel by Nicholas Meyer. Speaking of Holmes’s “seven per-cent solution” (the dilution of cocaine he’d inject himself with), here’s a kinda cool t-shirt I’m thinking of getting:

… based on Sidney Paget’s original illustration of Holmes, after shooting up. Available via this link.

Okay, enough rambling. I have to go clean my house, as my father and stepmother are coming to visit this afternoon!

Well, I was on local TV last night.

It was, initially, what you’d probably expect from a local news piece on videogames — a sensationalistic ‘VIDEOGAMES ARE ADDICTIVE AND MIGHT HURT YOUR CHILDREN!” kind of spin (at least from the lead-in by the anchor). But, after the hook, it turned into a collection of short soundbites that actually tried to present a marginally more complex picture, so some credit should go to the reporter and producer for not trying to present a completely skewed piece.

At the very least, I’m happy they included Kurt‘s quote about how those clamoring for videogame addiction diagnoses understand virtually nothing about what games actually are. However, it sure would have been nice if they’d have let me know exactly what the topic of the piece was — instead, it was presented to me as “Hey, can we record you playing games? Do you mind telling us why you like games and how much you play?” kind of thing, which was disingenuous and slightly unethical.

And, oh yeah, I’m the guy playing Guitar Hero. My shirt looks ill-fitted and weird because the lapel mic was stretching it. Plus, my hair looks like ass. And I look fat. But, what’s done is done. I should probably dress less like a slob, even on days in which all I’m expecting to do is sit in my office and write. Ugh, oh well, live and learn?

Here is a link to the news page, along with the piece’s copy. There’s a Flash video player on the right side of the page, and a clip should be accessible to watch from there.

I’ve been interested in role-playing for a while, though I haven’t done any form of it (or any acting whatsoever) since an abortive attempt to play the tabletop RPG Call of Cthulhu with Scott Mongeau back in college. Friends of mine and I had planned on playing a few tabletop RPGs in recent years, but nothing really came of it. So, when we were asked to observe and record a naturally-occuring learning environment for this course assignment last Fall, I looked for something game-related. Thanks to my officemate’s knowledge of this stuff, I was introduced to an interesting LARP group on campus, playing a variant of the White Wolf game Mage.

I’d never witnessed a LARP before, but now find this stuff surprisingly interesting. There’s a stereotype that LARPers are “geeks with no lives” who like to dress up and escape into fantasy worlds, but I found this group of LARPers to be great — they were sociable, very friendly, and quite creative. The amount of work that goes into inhabiting a role and actually playing one of these games is frankly enormous, more reminiscent of an ever-evolving, collaborative improv game than the navel-gazing that LARPs are stereotyped as. While I didn’t find the game of Mage to be all that personally engaging, there are many others out there and I might give one a shot soon.

At any rate, here is a link to my paper, entitled “‘Bullshit your way through this!’: Learning to LARP through revoicing.” Disclaimer: Like with the Guitar Hero paper, this was written for a class and has not been vetted by the local IRB. I’m presenting it here as an example of a paper I wrote for a class, and am not presenting this as ongoing research.

Additionally, it also had rather strict guidelines — the reliance on O’Connor and Michaels is indication that we had to try to contrast it or tie it to a particular course reading, and I lucked out in that my fieldwork data seemed to match O’Connor & Michaels’ theoretical stance fairly well. At the very least, the phenomenon of revoicing seems key in the learning and enculturation going on in this particular LARP. I may be interested in following up on this result in the future, but for now, I present it as just the result of a class project.

As per usual, any comments are welcome. Post ‘em.

I’ve spent the past few days trying to get back into games again. Though I’m surrounded by many interesting games and lots of interesting gamers, I’ve found myself so busy with other work that a lot of the joy of playing games just… disappeared? I’m burned out on WoW (and never much liked it to begin with), and there doesn’t appear to be any must-have DS game for me this summer (unlike last year, when I played Brain Age and New Super Mario Bros. quite a bit while taking public transportation around England, Italy, and Turkey). So, it’s back to the basics: I’m going to blast through as much Zelda as I can this summer.

This isn’t just for fun, as I’m currently working on a paper with Jim Gee about some aspects of Zelda (more as that solidifies), but I’m faced with the fact that I’ve (gasp) never actually finished a single Zelda. I know, I know, but I have attention deficit issues, I think, and have never been good at completing games that take longer than 50 hours of effort — and, given how inept I am at most games (other than Guitar Hero), I’m rarely motivated to go the whole way through. I’ve lied in the past about this, so I’ll just admit that I’m a terrible gamer (at least at Zelda) and will do whatever it takes this summer to rectify this egregious situation.

I started up with both The Wind Waker and The Minish Cap in the past few days. I had only ever gone as far as the end of the second dungeon in The Wind Waker (pictured above), back when the game first came out. While I loved it, I think I was just still too new to console gaming and had a hard time figuring out how to even use the controls. On Tuesday, I picked it up and blasted through the first two dungeons pretty easily, so we’ll see how this goes. The Wind Waker is notoriously “easy” for hardcore Zelda fans, and while I know the whole story, I’m still finding some of it to be challenging.

The Minish Cap is one of the most recent (the last?) Gameboy Zelda game, which I borrowed from Chris (who borrowed it from Kurt) the other day. It’s much more the “classic” style (perspective from above), and according to some timeline theories, it’s actually the earliest Zelda game in the chronology. I’m not so hot for it just yet, as I’m really caught up in The Wind Waker, but it’s something to do on the bus.

I’m really looking forward to Phantom Hourglass; The Wind Waker at least tried to do something new and different with both the game’s visual style and the setting (sinking the land of Hyrule beneath a new “Great Sea” that one had to navigate via boat). I love The Wind Waker so much, I’m actually looking into finding some ridiculous swag from the game to decorate my office. Right now, it’s a bit heavily Twilight Princess oriented — funny, considering I haven’t played more than 3 or 4 hours in that yet. Well, posters were easy to find, as they seemed to come in every publication there for a while last fall. I’ll take a pic later and update this post with it.

Anyway, while I really, really, really dislike the “realistic” look of Twilight Princess, Ocarina of Time, and Majora’s Mask, those three are next on my list to play. Any suggestions from people on the proper order to do them? I’m assuming Ocarina first, then Majora, then Twilight? Opinions?

I’ve been working on final papers/projects the last few days, and have finished up most of them. I’m relatively proud of one, so I thought I’d share it with the readers of the weblog.

It’s entitled “Chunking a Pull-Off,” which sounds like some kind of sexual innuendo but is really just about Guitar Hero II and how experts perceive visual structures in the game that novices do not. I ran a very small pilot study for a class project (Educational Psychology 796, taught by David Shaffer), and these are the results. In a nutshell, experts appear to encode the visual information presented by the game in similar ways to how experts code other visual game information (such as chess) — they “chunk” the elements on the screen much the way that chess experts perceive meaningful relationships between pieces on a chess board (e.g., pawns in a defensive relationship).

I should note that this paper was, in fact, written for a class. This is not ongoing research and hasn’t been vetted by the local University of Wisconsin IRB boards, exempt because this was for the purposes of a class project. I’m not “publishing” these results by putting them on my own personal website any more than someone posting pictures of their kids constitutes publication of those images. I enjoyed writing this paper, and I’m now sharing it with whomever wants to read it.

Click here for the paper. My apologies for the rather ugly style of the paper page, I might pretty it up at some later date.

Today’s Mother’s Day, and I’m going to make a rather unusual post, combining several topics: How much I miss my mother, how tiresome I find the “Your Mom” joke, and what I think the predominance of that joke in some social settings means.

First of all, my Mom passed away over five years ago now, but there’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t think about her. She’s the little girl on the right in the picture above (the original photo was taken on a boat in Turkey in the early 1940s; the adults are my grandparents, the other little girl is my aunt). Most people would, of course, feel a sense of loss at losing a parent, but for me, I think I lost one of the only people in the world that I could really, openly talk to. On days like today, I think a bit more about her and what she meant to me. I miss my Mom.

Also, it’s been a rather frustrating year socially, in Madison. In the groups I have run around with, I have felt pretty alienated at times — one annoyance is that many relatively normal adults use the “Your Mom!” insult, and quite freely. You know what I’m talking about; I’ll ask something relatively innocuous like “Who’s going to go play basketball this weekend?” and will get “Your Mom!” as a response from adult colleagues, over and over again. I quickly got out of the habit of using this particular joke after I was 13 and unthinkingly used it in front of a kid who had recently lost his mother — the pained look in the kid’s eyes will always stick with me and I’ve felt awful about that ever since.

Anyway, the “your Mom” joke just doesn’t make much sense to me as an adult, as it’s not terribly funny. It continues to persist around me even though everyone who uses it knows that my mother passed away a few years ago and I interpret this differently. I think it’s notable that the social sphere is predominantly white, as well, and I’m distinguishing this from the very stylized ways that “your momma” jokes play out in African-American culture.

Obviously, this kind of ridiculous trash talk isn’t intended to insult but it’s still going to strike a nerve with me that it won’t strike with other people. But, that’s exactly what I find curious about it — it’s juvenile and just not funny, so it must serve some kind of alternate purpose, right? The rise of these kinds of quasi-ironic verbal memes has always interested me, as they clearly signify something social to the speaker that people from outside the group might not be clued into. And which I’m having a hard time understanding.

My guess is that the genesis of use of “your mom” jokes in our little corner of the planet fits the concept of Border Discourses to some extent. That is, at the intersection of two kinds of disparate Discourses which are unable to communicate, participants form a third Discourse to bridge the discussion. In this case, I suspect that falling back on juvenile wordplay is one of the easiest ways to bridge between the specialized Discourses of academia and games. Since our program operates on the cusp of both the worlds of curricular design and game design, relatively academic discussions among adults occasionally get punctuated with the kind of talk you’d expect from 14 year olds as a means of deflating the foreign nature of the specialized lingo. Though there are all sorts of quasi-academic Discourses forming at that intersection (since both areas deal with kids and the kinds of competitive talk that occur around games), I assume that the “junior high speak” gets fallen back upon out of some deeper commonality — we were all 14 at some point, and nearly all found this kind of humor amusing once.

This feels like the opposite of the ways that other Internet-savvy technophiles use tiresome terms such as “mashups,” “blogosphere,” “Web 2.0″ and the like. Instead of trying to create buzzwords that alienate the uninitiated, the use of the “Your Mom” kind of humor — and “gamerspeak” such as “QQ,” “GTFO,” “ftw,” “lawl,” etc. — indicates a desire to revert to the kinds of languages used by what it is we study. There’s a desire to emulate the gamer going on here, perhaps, and the underlying assumption that to view games from the gamer’s perspective is something that we should be striving to do. Nurturing our “inner 14 year old,” perhaps?

Regardless of if I think that’s a good idea, I won’t be putting up with the “Your Mom” jokes anymore. I’m still very new to this academic field and the field of games, but I don’t find appealing using a kind of wordplay that might offend others — the gamerspeak uses of the words “retarded” and “gay” are equally problematic, and I won’t partake in that, either. I’m simply not here to be a gamer, I’m here to be an academic who studies games. It remains to be seen if that’s possible without being active in this particular kind of Discourse, however.

On Mother’s Day, it’s odd that my thoughts turn to stuff like this. I’m sure my Mom wouldn’t have really cared — no one is seriously insulting her, after all — but I care, simply because Discourses matter, and the ones I choose to actively be a part of say something about who I am and how I view the world.