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.
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.
February 10, 2008 at 1:05 pm · Filed under games, musicking
Here are a couple experiments in using the sound effects tied to the in-game actions of videogame characters to approximate the background music of the same game. The first clip is from Super Smash Brothers Melee on the Gamecube; second is Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64. The second clip is more successful from a technical standpoint, but both are interesting explorations of the appropriateness of game sound.
February 7, 2008 at 1:00 pm · Filed under fear, games
From a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: “Stress levels are linked to subject focus on perceived social threats.” I just happened to find this article the day after I presented the project in the previous post. The study suggests that increasing exposure (in fact training people to recognize) positive facial images (genuine smiles) decreases the level of stress in those who experience high-stress situations regularly. The testing group was made up of telemarketers, but they might have done as well choosing graduate students. Another interesting point is that they conducted these tests by using games, trail versions of which you can play at MindHabits.
January 31, 2008 at 7:47 pm · Filed under games, meme
Here’s a collection of videos related to game art, machinima, and remediated games. I’ll be incorporating this into my artist presentation in a few weeks for my Seminar class.
January 30, 2008 at 1:01 am · Filed under games, mario
An amazing piece of advertising from the 80s featuring Jason Bateman and Alyssa Milano as anonymous teens and Mr. Belvedere (I mean Christopher Hewett) as Bowser. Bateman sells it as the “video prince.” Beyond the pure pop-culture joy, most fascinating to me is hearing the voices of the characters as envisioned then (real-world plumbers from Brooklyn and a hilariously provocative Princess Toadstool with obvious connections to the “real world”) and now (cartoon-like and pure fantasy). Thanks to Wired for the link.
January 29, 2008 at 10:15 pm · Filed under games, military
Army of Two is a new game from publisher EA that puts you in the role of a private military contractor, or PMC, or what lots of people call a mercenary. “Combat, camaraderie, country” is replaced with “Combat, camaraderie, cash.” It’s fascinating to me that with all of the focus on Blackwater and other groups that a game like this exists without any sort of political commentary. Here’s a bio for one of the main characters that is more than a little disturbing. Can someone tell me why nobody in the mainstream media is talking about this game in a social context and instead fussing over the sides of alien breasts in Mass Effect?
