Liz will be starting as an assistant professor in IU’s Department of Communication and Culture, and I’ll be starting as an assistant professor in the Learning Sciences program, within IU’s Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology. We’re thrilled to be joining IU, an institution with world-class research, wonderful new colleagues, excellent students, and located in a charming college town we both fell in love with immediately. Two tenure track faculty positions at the same institution is pretty rare, not to mention at a University with the reputation and the opportunities of an IU. The stars really did align for us, and we’re very thankful for these exciting new career opportunities.

I am quite humbled to be joining such an amazing collection of scholars in Learning Sciences. The ongoing research in the program is quite exciting, and I look forward to working with them in the years to come. As someone who straddles multiple academic fields — Learning Sciences and Game Studies, specifically — it looks to be an environment where I can pursue my research agenda of understanding the intersections of game fandom and learning cultures, developing rigorous theories of informal learning with media. The culture of research at IU, from the faculty to the doctoral students, is exactly what both Liz and I were looking for, and we’re looking forward to future collaborations at IU.

I’d like to thank everyone at Miami University who has been supportive of my work in the two years I’ve been in Oxford. Both Miami’s School of Education, Health, and Society as well as the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies have invested wisely in games and learning, and I sincerely hope they continue to grow and develop the undergraduate Game Studies program further. Miami is an institution with a serious commitment to undergraduate education, and I’m very thankful for the opportunities I’ve had to build games and learning into the undergraduate experience here.

Again, we couldn’t be more thrilled about starting this new stage in our lives. We’ve already started prepping for living in south-central Indiana by recently rewatching Breaking Away and catching up on Parks and Recreation — those are pretty accurate, right? Right? Seriously, though, Bloomington seems to be a great town, and reminds us quite a bit of Madison, Wisconsin, where we met in graduate school. It’s perfect for us.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask in the comments, or just catch us on Twitter (I’m @scd and Liz is @trilliz)!

Please check out the site and consider registering for it. If you’re unfamiliar with the Global Game Jam, you might want to check out a few of my previous posts on our 2010 (parts 1, 2, and 3) and 2011 sites. It’s a fantastic experience, and one that anyone interested in games for any reason should consider being a part of.

The GLS Conference is the premier event in the field of videogames and learning. Now in its eighth year, this grassroots “indie” event is evolving to include innovative content formats and new programming. The GLS Conference is one of the few destinations where the people who create high-quality digital learning media can gather for serious discussion about what is happening in the field and how the field can serve the public interest. Our event is well-known for its exceptionally high quality of content yet “community event” feel. Each year, we foster in-depth conversation and social networking across diverse disciplines including game studies, education research, learning sciences, industry, government, educational practice, media design, and business. Our continued commitment is to reinvent learning both in and out of formal schools through the promise of games and simulations.

The full submissions page is here, with papers due January 31, 2012. I’ll be sending in a proposal or two, and hope you will as well!

The Brainy Gamer is the excellent, excellent blog of Michael Abbott, a Theatre professor at Wabash College — if you’re interested in games, it should be in your RSS reader. Michael’s got great insights into the current state of games, and is a wonderfully nice guy, to boot. I highly recommend both the blog and the podcast.

Oh, and with regards to my interview, I apologize ahead of time — my voice was shot due to too much talking, and I lost my train of thought a few times. Hopefully, though, it’s still interesting; I tried to argue why academics should be attending this huge industry event, and how some of the most interesting talks (to me, at least) were those where professional designers were really wrestling with what game are on some level. GDC is such an invigorating, fascinating event for anyone who cares about this crazy medium.

Hope you enjoy the podcast, and check out more of Michael’s site for more interesting writing and interviews about games!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The call for proposals has been released for the Games+Learning+Society 7.0 conference, held yearly in the historic Memorial Union on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Links: The conference website, the PDF call, and the submissions page. Here’s the entire call in text form:

CALL FOR PAPERS
Games+Learning+Society Conference 7.0
http://glsconference.org
June 15-17, 2011 Madison, WI

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is excited to announce the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Conference 7.0 to be held June 15–17, 2011 at the Memorial Union on campus.

The GLS Conference is the premier event in the field of videogames and learning. Now in its seventh year, this grass roots “indie” event is evolving to include innovative content formats and new programming. And after waiting lists for registration in past years, we’re now finally expanding our registration to reach an even larger and more diverse audience. The GLS conference is one of the few destinations where the people who create high-quality digital learning media can gather for a serious think about what is happening in the field and how the field can serve the public interest. Our event is well known for its exceptionally high quality of content yet “community event” feel. Each year, we foster in-depth conversation and social networking across diverse disciplines including game studies, education research, learning sciences, industry, government, educational practice, media design, and business. Our continued commitment is to reinvent learning both in and out of formal schools through the promise of games and simulations. And this year’s conference promises to be the most diverse, dynamic and biggest GLS event yet.

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; big debates about critical aspects of gaming and game design; hands‐on game play in the arcade; the “hall of failure”; a massively multi-player evening poster session over cocktails & hors d’oeuvres; an evening film 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: Michael Levine, Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman, and James Paul Gee.

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 March 7, 2011. Complete submission guidelines can be found on the submissions site at http://glsconference.org.

###

Sean Michael Dargan
GLS Conference Coordinator

http://glsconference.org

If you’ve read this blog for long, you know that I’ve been involved with this conference in several capacities over the years — as a student worker, as a reviewer, as a poster session coordinator, as a presenter (of posters, symposia, and solo presentations), and most recently as the editor of the GLS 6.0 special issue, to finally see print this spring in The International Journal of Game-Based Learning. It’s a conference very near and dear to my heart because of the wide range of folks who attend — high school teachers, cultural studies scholars, professional game designers, learning scientists, etc. — and the fantastic conversations that arise when you have such an interdisciplinary mix of folks all in the same room.

This year GLS is adding a number of new session formats that, frankly, I’m so excited about, I’m only submitting proposals in these formats. They include:

Well Played (NEW!): These sessions will focus on the experience of playing specific videogames, along with discussing the experience of designing and developing the games as well. Sequences from the games will be analyzed in detail in order to illustrate and interpret how the design of various components enable players to learn how to play through the game successfully, as well as how the design of the various elements combine together to create a fulfilling gameplay experience. Sessions will explore narrative development and game design, highlighting overarching themes and game play mechanics and providing a variety of perspectives on the value of games. These sessions are inspired by the ETC Press Well Played book series, and accepted proposals will also be considered for upcoming Well Played journal, that is based on this format of conversational scholarship. The goal of these sessions is to help further develop and define a literacy of games as well as a sense of their value. Videogames are a complex medium that merits careful interpretation and insightful analysis.

Micropresentation: Originally inspired by the wildly successful “Pecha Kucha” format from Japan, micropresentations are short talks designed to allow more people to present on a select theme while, at the same time, increasing the intensity and focus of the presentations themselves. Each speaker is allowed 20 slide images and given 20 seconds for each slide for a total of exactly 6 minutes 40 seconds for their entire presentation. (Oh yes — we will time you that closely.) The result is an action-packed ride through the core claims of each speaker followed by summative observations from the crack ninja discussant and direct conversation with the audience. It’s a fairly new format and all the fashion. GO GO GO!

Hall of Failure (NEW!): There is little incentive in academics (industry as well, although to a lesser extent) to share our failures, yet without such dialogue there is no way to learn from one another’s mistakes. At this year’s GLS 2011, we are hosting a special series of presentations dedicated to “interesting failures”. Highly competitive, the Hall of Failure will feature ideas that should have worked but didn’t, presented by the forward-thinking people who dared to try. Session discussion will interrogate why they didn’t work and lessons learned, and content featured in the Hall will be highlighted in a special section of the GLS Conference Proceedings.

Big Debates (NEW!): Our field is now at a point where key issues have emerged in the and, with them, identifiable positions on those issues. We believe it’s time to develop public, structured, moderated conversation on those key topics chosen by the community (e.g., transfer, embedded assessments). Participants will be asked to prepare position statements in advance and the debate events will be carefully moderated and interactive among participants with the goal of, if not necessarily settling the issue, then at least identifying its entailments and mapping its problem space.

If you work in some capacity on digital media and learning, game studies, games and learning, educational technology, literacy studies, interactive media design, or anything related, please consider submitting a proposal! Unlike most academic conferences, this one is both informative and fun.

If you’re unfamiliar with a “game jam” or the Global Game Jam, it’s a pretty simple idea — provide interested game designers with the space, some tools, and a theme, then… just cut them loose. Though I have very little in terms of game design skill, I have my students occasionally do this in my Game Studies class and out of class on occasion. It’s a valuable (and fun!) way to give literally anyone a chance to muck about and create a compelling experience for another person. I choose the word “compelling” carefully — as our Game Jam group determined over this weekend, this word kept coming up rather than “fun.” I happily have the bias that games don’t have to be and shouldn’t have to be “fun,” just meaningful in some fashion — check out Brenda Brathwaite’s amazing talk from last year’s Game Developer’s Conference on this very topic.

To kick off the Global Game Jam, we watched an (IMHO) hilarious opening keynote about inspiration and creativity by Katamari Damashii and Noby Noby Boy designer Keita Takahashi, which you can watch here:

Following that, our site showed Ste Curran’s keynote from last year’s jam, then everyone was cut loose on the theme of this year’s jam — “Extinction.” All games created in this year’s Global Game Jam needed to be about extinction to some degree, using whatever sense of the term a group wanted to choose (most focused on a species-level consideration of extinction, but some focused on extinctions of neurons, or the extinction of a light source, etc).

Our site then had a group-building exercise to help participants determine the groups they’d be a part of — my group had formed well in advance of the jam, and so we set to work on coming up with a workable game prototype immediately. The other two members of our group were Kevin Rutherford, a composition and rhetoric doctoral student I’ve been advising, and Ben Sironko, an undergraduate advisee with game design aspirations who was enrolled in one of my courses last year.

The first evening was, in retrospect, necessarily rough. Only one of us had much experience designing digital games, one of us had some experience designing board and role-playing games, and then there was me. My skills have been in the realm of analyzing games as learning artifacts, studying gaming culture, with some (rusty) programming skills and a fair amount of informal graphical design and music-making skills. I was prepped for us to settle on a digital game design on Friday, and then devote much of my Saturday/Sunday to creating the art and music assets for it. So, perhaps unsurprisingly for anyone who’s participated in a group project like this before, we ended up gravitating toward board and card games almost immediately. Oops for me!

I’m not complaining; much of why we floated in this direction was due to Kevin and Ben’s interests as well as what had been occupying my thoughts the previous few days. The uprising in Egypt was in full force, with the world wrestling with the apparent certainty that the Mubarak regime was on its way out, but the uncertainty of who would eventually win out among the very loose coalition of leftists, centrists, and fundamentalists that were in opposition to the existing regime. We hashed out various models for a collaborative/competitive board game that could capture the essence of this event as it was happening. Various ideas were thrown around, and we wanted the game to also feature a digital game element, but it just never gelled into something that could work. Something like 7-8 hours of work on this single topic and we blearily threw it all out of the figurative window at about 3am. I wasn’t happy, to say the least, and considered just giving up entirely.

I take IGDA‘s Quality of Life whitepaper quite seriously, and believe that the industry norms of junk food, Red Bull, and staring at monitors for weeks on end can’t be doing anyone any good. Not sleeping is the worst thing one can do when trying to do, well, most anything creative or stressful. Despite suggestions for everyone to get plenty of sleep, most participants at our site were still quite young and had little problem with abusing their bodies with caffeine or energy drinks. I went home on Friday night, bummed out that we had hit a significant impasse, but showed up early on Saturday morning, awake and ready to look at the whiteboard with fresher eyes.

Ben was the only other team member on site at 8am on Saturday, and we looked back at the list of “achievements” (I prefer “diversifyers”) that the Global Game Jam organizers had thrown into the mix to provide designers with fun, optional constraints. And two struck us as interesting to try to combine — “Aggregation,” or using some existing web services and “Bits & Pieces,” or creating a game that featured both physical and digital elements to it. Ben idly mentioned that he used to play a kind of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” type game with a friend, using Wikipedia to see if one could navigate from one page to another in the shortest number of clicks. And then, suddenly, it dawned on me that incorporating something like this into a baord game would be interesting using mobile phones as playing pieces — a digital device as part of a board game.

Hooray! We had an idea! And one that, after all was said and done, appears to have been nearly unique. Only four games total incorporated “Aggregation” into a non-digital game (search games by format and diversifyer here), and while we stretched the concept a bit — it was clearly intended to be about procedurally culling data via a website’s API — we were fine with it. It was, to our knowledge, a unique approach to use Wikipedia as a secondary, virtual space to navigate in the midst of a physical game, and with that set, we revived the collaborative game idea from the night before. Taking inspiration from excellent collaborative board games such as Arkham Horror and Pandemic, we started to flesh it out.

For sake of space, I’ll abbreviate the next day or so — we playtested, playtested, and playtested the game, removing one type of complicating card, only to throw it back in later, adding new cards to the deck to try to lengthen the game, doing research on Wikipedia page links to see how many other pages actually linked to each of the topics we’d randomly chosen, and so on. For most of Saturday, we didn’t discuss “extinction” to any great degree, nor thought too seriously about the game’s theme (if it even needed one). We refined the game’s mechanics and, key for a collaborative game, tried to hone in at a difficulty level where a group of players could win the game, but only with a great deal of negotiation with other players.

In general, we practiced good, ol’ fashioned iterative design and refined the game as best we could in the time we had. Since our game involved digital elements but no coding, we were freed up to spend Saturday refining the game over and over again. Sunday was largely a blur of writing the rules, preparing the final release cards, and inserting a narrative spin to the game that better fit the “Extinction” theme (we’d veered somewhat far from the original topic of the jam, but didn’t mind as we moved toward a game design we actually enjoyed playing).

Is it a perfect game? Nah, it’s still got a lot of problems — the slapped-on post-apocalyptic theme being the biggest one, in my opinion (though my team members would likely disagree with me). But, at its core, the game is compelling and fun to play, engaging the player with the structure of knowledge as laid out on Wikipedia. Also, it’s fairly challenging! Do I wish we’d actually coded something? Only sort of, as in retrospect, perhaps these kinds of Game Jams are really most productive when participants aren’t having to use up a lot of time and energy programming, managing digital assets, etc. We took advantage of that and used the time to polish our game into a clear, fun, and well-balanced game.

We named the game Vanished and it’s available via this Global Game Jam link, presumably in perpetuity. The game only requires the PDFs to print out and combine with three mobile phones/PDAs, one pawn, and one 6-sided die. Give it a shot sometime and let us know what you think:

Through this experience, I’ve learned Game Jams are a venue for us to not just think and play and talk about and use games, but are a chance to experience them as some form of communication. Communicating a theme (“extinction,” in this case), but also a collective aesthetic (games as compelling rather than necessarily “fun”), a political goal (understanding the conflict in Egypt, in the aborted game), and an epistemological stance (the interconnectedness of knowledge on Wikipedia). The process of making choices — choices that will impact how your goals shape someone else’s experience — is what this is all about.

And that’s why I think more folks should participate in these. I don’t particularly care about preparing anyone for games industry per se, and don’t care about this as an experience for game designers to learn how to become better cogs in the machines of big game developers. I care about experiences such as the Global Game Jam because of how I think they can help everyone else — I’m graying, turning 40 in a month, don’t drink Red Bull, and have no game industry aspirations. Game Jams are nevertheless a valuable experience for me and all sorts of other folks: for kids, for teens, for retirees, for public servants, for insurance salesmen, for teachers, for anyone.

As an education scholar, I care about crafting valuable, compelling experiences for other people that help them to both embody and express some perspective on the world. If you can get past the problematic perspectives (military shooters) and done-to-death perspectives (rehashed Mario clones), games are among the most interesting means of doing this. Game Jams are one of the easiest ways to have a novice both learn how to craft a meaningful, compelling experience for someone else as well as gain some understsanding of how freaking hard it is to do it well (I certainly learned the latter this weekend). In my opinion, game jams shouldn’t just be about helping game-obsessed teenagers make copies of their favorite AAA titles, they should be opportunities for folks of all ages and all experience levels to make something for another person to play, to iterate that experience’s design, to occasionally throw it right out the window when it fails, and to pick up the pieces (literally) and put it all back together. Anyone who cares about fostering a variety of creative human endeavors should give the Global Game Jam a shot.

Plus, you get to present your game in a gorgeous lecture hall!

…

Finally, as a bit of a coda, I thought I’d discuss some other games from our site. Here’s a shout-out to the three other games I was most impressed by, all for very different reasons.

Dissolution was a competitive card game, set on a new planet that humans were colonizing after the Earth had been destroyed. It had extraordinarily well-balanced mechanics for something developed so quickly, with a number of potential strategies in play during a single playthrough. I playtested it and greatly enjoyed it (not just because I barely won in our playtest)! Two of my current students, Tim Russo and Amanda Smith, were on this team, which won the “Best Mechanics” award at our site.

Growth & Decay might have been the first game at a Miami Global Game Jam site to have been conceived, prototyped, coded, polished, and then released on an online distribution channel (the Android market) hours before the end of the jam. It’s a fun, competitive word game for Android devices that looks gorgeous, and … did I mention it was really available to download on the Android market well before the Global Game Jam had ended? Lots of credit is due to Bo Brinkman, who pulled a coding all-nighter on Friday to get it done. Growth & Decay won the “Venture Capital” award at our site.

Finally, Rubicon, a solo game designed by Terence (whose last name I can’t seem to glean from his website). If I have any hope for Miami’s Global Game Jam site, it’s that we’ll get more games made here like Rubicon. Games that are about something, games that attempt to engage players in an emotive experience, and games that tackle themes that can shine in experimental games. Rubicon did that — stunningly, in my opinion — and gives me hope that Game Jams such as these can be spaces for designers to not just rehash the same old platformers/fighters/FPSes, but can help to push this medium forward. Rubicon won the “Aesthetic Award,” but, in my opinion as a participant, should have won much more.

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, which many schools are still based upon), 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 a long-gone world that some still 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!

First off, I really loved this episode — it was much slower and more ponderous than I expected, but it explained plenty. Obviously we now know who Adam and Eve were, but also the genesis of the donkey wheel, where the dagger that killed Jacob came from, who made the wells, how the Orchid well got filled up (in “This Place Is Death”), why Jacob and the Man in Black can’t hurt each other directly (thanks to Alison Janney’s Magic Touch™), etc. My favorite elements of the episode had little to do with these answers, however, and were much more about how a number of images/themes recurred from previous episodes (or, chronologically, how and why they show up after this episode’s events). Here’s a short list of some things I noticed:

• Claudia, pregnant, washing up on the beach = Rousseau and Claire showing up on the island pregnant
• Janney’s manipulating the kids as a replacement to protect the island = Kelvin manipulating Desmond as a replacement to man the hatch
• Jacob, the bratty, petulant, kind of dumb whiner with mommy issues = Jack, the bratty, petulant, kind of dumb whiner with daddy issues
• The Boy in Black’s specialness nurtured by a protector of the island (Janney) = Walt’s specialness nurtured by a protector of the island (Locke)
• The Boy in Black has a mystical conversation with his dead mother that drives him to the others = Ben Linus has a mystical conversation with his dead mother that drives him to the others.

So, there are patterns here… this works for me to glue together many of the disconnected events on the show. For instance, it now seems clear that Ben was manipulated by the Man in Black since he was very, very young, luring him to the others much in the same way that the Boy in Black himself was lured to a group of others two millenia earlier. Jack is an entitled, stupid brat who doesn’t want responsibility perhaps because everyone who gets this island-protecting job is someone who needs that arc of self-discovery, etc.

This, finally, gives the series the kind of synthesis I really wanted without being conscious of it — one of recurring images and themes, not of overt explanations. It’s not that we necessarily needed answers for “what the island is” in anything other than the metaphorical sense described in “Ab Aeterno,” it’s about having something tie together all of the events so that they make some kind of thematic sense. At least for me. I couldn’t care less if we ever get an explanation of exactly how the island turned the Man in Black into a pile of clickety-clackety smoke, nor do I understand why anyone really needs that level of explanation.

Yet, one big unanswered question for me with regards to the island’s mythology is the timing of when a “smoke monster” first appeared on the island. Claudia clearly washed up during Roman times (speaking Latin, her people had a Roman dagger that ended up with the Man in Black). But, many of the relics on the island that we see in the 19th century onward are apparently Egyptian — the Taweret statue, the vents for the smoke monster under the Temple’s wall and the underground wall that the Man in Black yanked a block out of this week. So, there must have been a previous smoke monster that predated Claudia’s arrival, right?

This implies, maybe, that there was a previous smoke monster that has since been dispatched somehow, or that the smoke monster itself is some other entity entirely and not simply a disembodied version of the Man in Black. Like all of the other bodies it’s appropriated over the show (from Christian to Yemi to Alex), the Man in Black might be just another one taken by whatever the smoke monster is. Fascinating development, if it’s true. This episode also continues to open up a whole world of narrative possibilities for spinoff materials — since it looks like we won’t get an explanation of Egyptian-era island, or who Jacob’s adoptive mom was (not to mention the 1800 years or so between the events of “Across the Sea” and “Ab Aeterno”), perhaps this creates new avenues for Lost to live on in some fashion past the end of May.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spaniard in Space!

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

A link to: Spaniard in Space.

Project Boondoggle

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

A link to: Project Boondoggle.

Alien Seduction

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

A link to: Alien Seduction.

Ellobro

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

A link to: Ellobro.

Dino-Quixote

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

A link to: Dino-Quixote.

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two weeks ago, I started my position as the C. Michael Armstrong Professor in Interactive Media Studies, as an Assistant Professor in Miami University‘s School of Education, Health, and Society and Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies. A bit of a mouthful, but a fun one! I’m still wondering how all of that will fit on my business card, to be honest, but thrilled to be here and starting a new chapter in my career. The folks at Miami have been supportive and excellent colleagues so far, and I’m looking forward to working with my fellow faculty in the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies.

That means, yes, I finished the dissertation, defended successfully on December 7th, followed shortly afterwards by my graduation. The defense meeting went swimmingly; the comments of my committee were greatly appreciated and helped to shape the final document that I deposited in the University of Wisconsin’s grad college the following week. I feel honored to have worked with all of them (Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, Dawnene Hassett, Erica Halverson, and James Paul Gee). Their guidance has profoundly shaped what I hope will be a productive academic career.

On top of that, Betty Hayes (at Arizona State University) and I recently signed a book contract with Peter Lang for a book we’re editing entitled Videogames, Affinity Spaces, and New Media Literacies, to appear in Peter Lang’s excellent New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies series. The book will focus on the productive learning and literacy practices that occur in the spaces around games (if you’ve browsed the rest of this site, you’ll see this has been an emphasis of mine for the last few years). We’ve got a great line-up of cutting edge education research to present in the book, and are very excited! More on this as it develops.

In my online life, I’m still around. I remind readers that I’m on Twitter much more often than I’m posting to this blog. I just started as a contributing writer for a great new media and culture blog based out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called Antenna. And, like many online, I’ve recently started a photo-a-day photoblog. Check any and all out whenever you’d like to see what I’m up to!

And, oh yeah, one more thing: Liz and I are now engaged. I proposed on New Year’s Day morning, and she said yes! We’re planning on nuptuals in summer of 2011. I’m a lucky, lucky guy.

In the next few months, expect a redesign of this site — a new job and a new state deserves at least a visual update — plus, hopefully, a more regular posting schedule. I’ve promised that in the past, I know, but I mean it this time!

Games+Learning+Society Conference 6.0

June 9-11, 2010 Madison, WI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Click on the image to see a larger version]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the text on the flyer:

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

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

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

So, a major thrust of my work is investigating just this: How do these communities work? How can they support and challenge our assumptions of what learning is and what learning could be? How do we better understand the new digital media literacies that are arising with these technologies? As Armstrong Professor, I hope to have conversations on these topics with Miami faculty, students, and community members, and further understand how interactive media, design thinking, and online communities are intertwined in 21st century media spaces. Expect posts from me on this blog covering topics such as learning with “new media,” games and literacy, and the productive nature of online communities.

I’ll be posting there every few weeks on many of the same topics I post about here, albeit probably a little less informally. Feel free to add the AIMS blog to your Google Reader (or whatever you happen to use)!

Here’s a blurb from a recent Billboard article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that would be a very big mistake.

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

Here’s the trailer for the game:

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

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

Grusd:

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

Cuddy:

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

Grusd:

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

Cuddy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Emphases replicated from the original post).

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

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

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

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

Okay, I normally don’t make these kinds of posts to my blog, and I feel like I should preface this by form of apology. People (us nerds especially) tend to get very bent out of shape when someone decries or criticizes their favorite media franchises, and I’ll do that here — um, the criticizing, not the bending out of shape. I note that Andrew O’Hehir (and others, I’m sure), have recently referred to The Dark Knight as a “teenage boy’s idea of a serious film,” and have received plenty of ire (including creepy threats) from the rabid fanboy/fangirl contingent. So, sorry if this post offends, but I’ll be working through why the new film Watchmen — and its incessant hype — has been bugging me the last few days. (Oh, for the record, I liked Dark Knight just fine, but even as a long-time DC Comics fan, I have to admit that Iron Man was by far the better cinematic superhero experience in ’08).

Watchmen’s hype is, alas, long-standing; it is now regularly afforded the title of “best comic ever” in the same lazy way people give Citizen Kane the “best movie ever” crown. I read Watchmen for the first time back in 1985, when the comic was first released — I was a teenager, and bought each issue on the day it came out, devoured it, and waited (sometimes for months and months) for the next installment. I had been a fan of Alan Moore’s work on Swamp Thing and Marvelman, so I loved Watchmen; it was a genuinely revolutionary superhero book and one which, along with Frank Miller, Dave Mazzuchelli, and Lynn Varley’s The Dark Knight Returns marks a particularly innovative moment in mainstream comics history that’s undeniably significant.

Yet, it’s been the intervening years (and subsequent readings) which have given me pause in canonizing this particular book as the “best comic book ever.” During the early days of the comic’s inception, it was initially conceived as a way to re-use a number of characters that DC had acquired when it bought out the old Charlton Comics line, many of which have now been incorporated into the DC Universe.

But, since then-editor Dick Giordano was really enamored with some of these characters, Blue Bettle, Captain Atom, Nightshade, The Question, the Peacemaker and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt were all morphed into similar analogs (Night Owl, Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Rorschach, the Question, the Comedian, and Ozymandias, respectively). Moore took the basics of these characters (down to making multiple Night Owls, etc.), tweaked them into darker versions of the characters, and ran with it, inventing an alternate 1980s America where Nixon was still president, where superheroes were creepy fetishists more than moral paragons, and where “heroism” was relative.

It’s a great comic, one of the best superhero comic books ever. Moore’s writing was perfectly complemented by Dave Gibbons’s gritty art, and the unique (at least at that time) mix of comic book storyline, comic-within-a-comic (Tales of the Black Freighter), and prose (the text appendices at the end of each issue, e.g. Hollis Mason’s Behind the Mask) all combine to make it a work unlike any other seen to that point. I personally think other comics hang together better than this or are generally more interesting (in Moore’s work alone, I enjoy his run on Supreme quite a bit, and think From Hell is the greatest long-form comic to date), but I acknowledge that Watchmen was certainly great for its time.

One thing which shaped my enjoyment was the specific activity of reading this comic. As each issue was published, I’d talk about it with my friends, trade issues, and when we had access to it, we’d hop on the nascent internet of the era — basically, USENET newsgroups, such as rec.arts.comics — where other fans picked it apart, trying to understand the symbolism Moore and Gibbons were dropping, as well as the larger configurations of this alternate world. On USENET, the collaborative work of smarter dudes than me figured out who Rorschach was two or three issues ahead of the big reveal, discovered significant foreshadowing in the backgrounds of various panels, and made the practice of reading a wholly different sort than reading a “graphic novel” version is typically like today.

It’s this sort of social, knowledge-building activity that, to me, is what made Watchmen really fantastic as a comic book reading experience. Making sense of all the different kinds of storytelling in the book was a lot of fun — looking at the inclusion of the Black Freighter comic was evocative and served as a great counterpoint (and sometimes foreshadowing for!) what was going on in the main story, the details presented in all the prose work (Behind the Mask) were integral for understanding the larger story of the Minutemen and their legacy, etc. Piecing together a serial storyline with a bunch of other people, reading and rereading each panel, going online and trying to suss out various theories (and their justifications) — this is similar to the kind of joy I get out of watching (and trying to understand) Lost these days.

But, back to the present. There’s no way the film can mimic this kind of reading experience, so what’s this movie actually going to be? While as a teenager I thought the comic’s ostensible storyline — “whoa, superheroes might be kinda fallible and sometimes mentally unstable!” — was mindblowing, that holds basically no resonance with me as an adult. I’m perplexed; who really cares about the superhero storyline in this any longer? Isn’t it much, much more interesting the way that Moore and Gibbons use comics to tell us a story and what it tells us about reading comics?

Rather than mimic the reading experience, it seems that Zack Snyder has tried to be quite faithful to the comic’s look and plot, essentially using the original work as a storyboard for making the film. I suppose I can understand this as a pragmatic means of making a movie that will be under this degree of scrutiny (visual accuracy certainly won’t upset the fanboys and fangirls), but is also a fundamental misapplication of the art of comics — Moore (as seen most pointedly in works like The Killing Joke and From Hell) is a master of interesting visual juxtapositions that work best in static, discrete media. Take this scene transition from The Killing Joke, for example:

It’s evocative of the Joker’s mindset, clearly sexually creepy (note the “coin slot” location), and all intended by Moore — though Brian Bolland was the artist, Moore’s scripts are always spelled out in excruciating detail. There’s something about the language of comics can get lost when translated to a film, and I think it’s completely reasonable for Moore to distance himself from any cinematic interpretation of his work. Will these kinds of subtleties be captured in the film? And, if so, how does the switch to a motion picture change the effect of this? I’m not decrying the idea of attempting to adapt his work, just skeptical that the so-called “visionary director of 300” will be creative enough to handle it.

It’s also not encouraging that, because of time considerations and studio pressure, Snyder’s been forced to cut out the Black Freighter comic (though he’s releasing it as a separate DVD), there’s really no way to include Behind the Mask as anything but exposition within the film, the ending is significantly different in content if not in theme, and, in the silliest change, Laurie Juspeczyk no longer smokes (because the studio head hates smoking). I don’t much care about how the movie deviates from the comic except insofar as this movie seems structurally incapable of conveying a rich, multimodal mix of comics and other text that the initial work featured. We’re left with a movie that, rather than reference other superhero movies is, from all accounts, rather slavishly re-enacting Watchmen’s uninteresting plot about how superheroes are fallible, etc. Well, okay, great, if you’ve somehow made it to the 21st century without ever thinking about how silly the concept of superheroes is, I wish you an enjoyable experience, but I’ve been there, done that.

What was valuable about Watchmen for me was its use of comics (and prose) form in support of these themes, plus the way its serialized nature encouraged us teenagers to engage with the text of the comic, talk to each other about it, and puzzle-solve. Basically, we “gamed” Watchmen — an activity that this movie is, frankly, not set up to afford. I’m not saying that comics cannot or should not be made into good films. Rather, I’m arguing that the very point of Watchmen is really about comics form and creating new activities of comics reading, not about superheroes. It’s just a bad fit unless liberties are taken with the source material and it is rejiggered to somehow be about film form and film viewership. Everything indicates that Snyder has done the opposite of what he should have done, and made a film which attempts to lift an innovative comic directly into a medium it was never meant to be in.

The new Watchmen film will be “dancing about architecture” at best, or just another dumb big budget shit-blows-up film at worst. Either way, it’s a rental.

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 10-12, 2009 Madison, WI

CALL FOR PAPERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s an excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope you like it, and please let me know if anything in particular isn’t working like it should — as I get more time to tweak it over the holidays, I’ll address a few known issues, such as the block of text atop the front page being replicated on all the archive pages, as well as all the category pages (it shouldn’t really do that). Additionally, I’ll be on the lookout for some more interesting WordPress widgets — I’ve resisted using them in the past, but it seems like many WordPress blogs are relying on them more and more, so I’ll dip my foot into the pool and see what I think.

Any other suggestions/comments are welcome!

In the work I’ve been engrossed in these last few weeks, I’ve been writing about the weird and woolly world of internet discussion forums — how to best study them, how they may support “new literacy” practices, etc. — all in support of my PhD dissertation research. It’s probably old hat by now that online discussion forums feature some of the most complex (and, yes, sometimes the most distasteful) of discourse out there, but I’m currently most curious how much Internet media are really beginning to supplant traditional forms of media in the lives of everyday folks.

Dennis Jerz recently linked to an IFC/Zogby poll on the role of the internet in the world of news, especially during this last election cycle:

Results indicate that the Internet is the most trusted news source among all age groups, and overall, more trusted than newspapers and television news combined. FOX News is the most trusted news source on television and The New York Times is the most trusted national newspaper outlet. Three out of four people feel that news coverage is biased, and that media coverage influenced the outcome of the Presidential election.

(Here’s a link to a PDF of the poll’s press release).

Breaking this down further according to party affiliation, they stated that “94.2% of Republicans surveyed and 55.6% of Democrats surveyed believe media coverage influenced the Presidential election,” and, interestingly, “[m]ore than 90% of Republicans and 55.6% of Democrats do not feel the media is giving a true representation of what is going on in Iraq.”

This a Zogby poll, and there have certainly been issues with some of their polling choices and methods in the recent past. However, taking these results at face value, we see an enormous skepticism toward traditional media, yet it seems to be coming from an overwhelmingly politically conservative skepticism. Is this simply an entrenching of the same “conservative blog effect” that was so predominant in 2004, or something new? Is it too early to tell?

Obama’s made improving the US’s broadband adoption (we’re currently 15th in the world) a part of his jobs plan, and now that the iPhone is the best-selling mobile phone/internet device in the US, we’ll be faced with new questions of how and why people engage with these media in all sorts of contexts.

Spending my days and nights on the internet is such a part of my life that I have a hard time knowing how one “goes back.” I’m not really complaining — pulling out the iPhone at dinner to see what movies are playing down the street is certainly a convenient, useful means of looking up information for the particular kind of privileged, middle class lifestyle that I lead. But, what about more important issues — for instance, how is knowledge shaped by use of the internet? How are political positions going to be shaped by a President who uses YouTube for his addresses? How will the conservative movement change if it begins to take seriously the tools of the internet? How will I ever get my work done if I’m constantly drawn back to reading about this stuff on blogs, message boards, and the like?

So, yeah, this is more work procrastination couched in the form of a speculative blog post. It’s just all of this feels particularly salient to me lately, and I felt like I had to jot it down — any of us hoping to further careers studying internet culture in any capacity have to be both excited and perhaps a little unmoored by the rapid changes that the next few years might bring.