For those interested in intersecting games and education, this year’s Games for Change Festival offered plenty to be excited about. A few hours into the festival, I realized that of the fifteen or so books I had lugged with me on the trip, about fifty percent of them were represented by their authors at the festival, so it was hard not to be slightly star-struck. Walking by Aaron Eckhart on the street was far less interesting than listening to Henry Jenkins and Jim Gee talk standards and communities or Ian Bogost and Clive Thompson talk games and journalism.
I took detailed notes (attempted transcriptions, really) of several of the sessions that I attended. These links are below, followed by some highlights and people I met doing projects similar to P4 Games (the games/education research project for which I work). You can see the full list of sessions in the program.
It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I found the Assessment, Fireside Chat, and Games and News panels most interesting out of the ones I attended. To boil the key takeaway ideas into a few bullet points:
Katie Salen reminds us that players LOVE assessment in games. They love access to stats that allow them to assess and improve, so why do schools sometimes withhold such data?
Jim Gee reminds us that players who finish Halo 3 on Legendary difficulty do not then need to take a “Halo Test” to see how good they are at the game. The game itself has assessed them. Also: Choice matters more than knowledge (Dan Schwartz’s research came up quite a bit here)
Kurt Squire: Gamers are good at deciding when they want high- vs. low-stakes assessment (e.g. raiding vs. play/expression in World of Warcraft).
Jenkins & Gee: The education system tells lies about people; learning shouldn’t be top-down UNLESS a student asks for it to be.
Ian Bogost: We need to get beyond infographics in journalism. How do these graphs and fancy presentations become meaningful? Possibly through game-like interaction?
Finally, I met people doing really interesting stuff, including Alex Games who talked about the Gamestar Mechanic project in the “New Designer Mindset” panel. What’s great about this project is that it allows players/designers to complete play and design missions in the same program, and both contribute to the overall goal of designing more complex scenarios. The Tincan and Globaloria projects both teach game design in schools at various levels. I’m hoping to make it to this festival again next year to connect with more people doing great stuff!
Check out a few photos of the event, including a few of the P4Games poster.
Here’s my distillation of 2D-Boy’s Global Game Jam Keynote Address. It’s been sitting in a text file on my desktop and deserves to be here (for myself and for you).
Adjust Expectations
Create a Low Barrier of Entry (Title the game as instructions, maybe)
Feel Something
Make the TOY first
Don’t forget about Audio
Remember Harmony
Don’t Fall in Love (Don’t care if the project sucks)
Videogames are most often approached as entertainment; like any medium, however, they can raise critical questions through their formal structure. Survive/Progress is a twin game made as a response to my own constraint: Make a game about the waiting. This constraint came from my simultaneous discomfort with and longing for waiting and stillness, as well as an interest in the strange half-life that is programmed into videogame characters while they wait for input.
What you see is two games that differ by one central parameter: the game’s response to the player’s movement. By pairing them I want to generate a dialogue about a cultural obsession with videogames, productivity, and progress. The games are intentionally basic, broken down into movement, control, and challenge; this is an experiment in making meaning through simple adjustments of rules.
Download links for the two games below. They might run slower on older machines. I’ll post source-code after some cleanup.
November 11, 2008 at 9:42 pm · Filed under programming
I got a notice today from Prof. Chris Coleman that Ben Fry, one of the creators of Processing, was giving a talk the Auraria Campus this evening. It’s the last week of classes and things are crazy, but I’m so excited by Processing and the environment around it that it was just the right thing to do. Having seen several of the projects he discussed before, it was still great to see him speak in person and give a short background on how he ended up working on Processing in the first place. He also showed some of the human genome visualization projects he developed as part of his PhD research at MIT (these projects were featured in Ang Lee’s Hulk – Photo).
He highlighted the concept of sketching and showed a beautiful visualization (by Robert Hodgin aka flight404) as well as an initial concept sketch, which was a very simple experiment. Because I’ve been feeling very stuck creatively as of late, this was an inspiring reminder to just make stuff and iterate. Processing is made for sketching, and for being one part of your current workflow, another point that Fry brought up. He doesn’t want Processing to be the both the beginning and endpoint of your work.
A couple ideas he highlighted were important enough for me to write down (and circle a couple times):
Consider the shape of data
Make visual transitions meaningful (not just the data at transition endpoints)
He’s teaching some workshops at Metro tomorrow and taught today and yesterday. I’m bummed that I couldn’t be a part of those through some kind of collaborative visiting artist arrangement between DU and Metro. Maybe next time.
October 26, 2008 at 5:32 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
In the case that the title to this post doesn’t make any sense, see here. I’ve made no such promise. I won’t be putting my face in a cake because my last post was 3 months, 24 days ago. What I will do is blog about my summer, and other projects, soon. This week is busy with the election coming up. I’m planning to vote tomorrow at my early vote location. I can’t wait! Have you voted yet?
July 2, 2008 at 10:11 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Part of my job as a research assistant for the P4Games project is to assist with putting together a human game design curriculum. I’ve assisted Rafael in the “Play” (which translates to game design in our language) sessions by helping teachers brainstorm game ideas, observing and recording questions, answers, and discussion, and asking guiding questions during game design and playtesting.
My goal as part of this project is to encourage the creation of humane games as an exercise in learning, research, teaching, and play. You can read about the class sessions on my P4 blog and about Humane Games at this link (which is the top Google hit for “humane games” – w00t!)
Two of my video art pieces (Layers & Waiting) will be showing at FILE Sao Paulo in August! I’m still trying to figure out if I’ll be able to make it there myself, but the news is great either way.
I’ve been out of the posting loop for a while, but as an effort to get back into it I’m posting some links that I’ve been holding onto for a while. Some advice: if you want to blog regularly, don’t make a toblog tag on del.icio.us and fill it up to the point that it’s totally overwhelming.
Wired recently reported on the US Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) use of what I would call Serious Games to train incoming and current intelligence officers. One of my close childhood friends was involved in these games and works in DC. With all of the game blogs I read, I’m surprised I didn’t come across it myself, but she excitedly sent the link and interestingly called it a “toy my team developed.” These toys, according to Wired, teach agents “how to think.”
I haven’t laughed this hard in a while: a Team Fortress 2 Mod that plays Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On (from Titanic) karaoke style. Yes, the players all attempt to sing while fragging.
Not least, Retro Sabotage is a great collection (updated every week for a while, now it’s when they can) of sabotaged (remixed) versions of old-school arcade games. So far they’ve taken on Pong, Xevious, Breakout, Pacman, Tetris, and Space Invaders. Standouts are Autopsy of a Battlefield, in which the Xevious landscape is already devastated and the player simply surveys the devastation, and Compromise, in which the player’s moves affect two separate Tetris games simultaneously (this one reminded me of DeHackEd’s Mega Man X & Mega Man X2 speed run dual-playthrough, although this one was created with emulator save states).
More to come soon (i.e. I’m not going another 2.5 months without posting).
February 19, 2008 at 7:59 am · Filed under games, video
For those who’ve followed this blog for the past couple weeks, you know that I have a newfound appreciation of (obsession for?) work that blurs the line between videogame player and author. While most of the videos I’ve found do extra manipulation outside of the game (e.g. video effects), here’s a video that turns the available tools from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater into a space for composition. Normally, it’s a stealth action game; in this video it’s a photography sandbox. The author manipulates soldiers in the game, either by tranquilizing them or scaring them into submission.
Many of these moments highlight the more obscure programming decisions in the game – more than one shows the guards’ total distraction by the placement of adult magazines in their midst, for example. At their best, however, these moments show the game as a compositional space and the intimate understanding of the game engine necessary to create something like this, especially when the game engine is not open for modification.
