Gaming the Network Poetic – Video from the Opening
via vimeo.com
Insider Moment at the Denver Art Museum
Here’s a fun photo of our artist group which is producing the 39N – 104W installation (sans Brigid McAuliffe, who could not make this photo shoot) at the Denver Art Museum as part of this fall’s Embrace! exhibit. From left to right: David Fodel, Joshua Fishburn, Nick Meyers, Timothy Weaver. Today (Tuesday, October 20th) at Noon there will be an “Insider Moment” with Timothy Weaver, who will be available to talk about the work and answer questions, as well as show the work in progress. The piece is being installed in the Fusebox space on the 4th floor of the DAM.
I’ve been building a software component in Max/MSP that selects and arranges audio based on years of Denver weather data. In general, the piece is a creative interpretation of the ecological history and memory of the point on earth that the Denver Art Museum now occupies.
Gaming the Network Poetic – Galleries from the Opening
via flickr.com
via flickr.com
Thanks to Natalie’s Mom for taking the photos and videos in the first set. The second set contains photos from the opening and from my visit to the gallery this week to document the piece itself. More news, photos, and video to come!
Gaming the Network Poetic – So Far
via flickr.com
I submitted Gaming the Network Poetic to the Prospectives.09 International Digital Arts Festival call earlier this week. Part of the submission process was putting together the Flickr gallery linked above for documentation. I wanted to post it here for those interested in the project, as it shows the progress of the project from concept to (near) completion.
Updated MFA Thesis Exhibition Flier
I’ve updated my flier with the full dates of the show – it’ll be up at Plus Gallery through November 14th, so if you miss the opening this Friday there’s still more time to check it out.
Games for Change Festival Wrap-up
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.
How to make a game in 48 hours
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)
Survive/Progress – Experimental Games in Processing
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.
