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.

• Issue Literacy
• Assessment
• Henry Jenkins and Jim Gee Fireside Chat
• Games and News
• Lucy Bradshaw, Spore Executive Producer, Keynote

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?
• Lucy Bradshaw: Division of Spore’s Design – 1/3 Play, 1/3 Create, 1/3 Sharing.

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.