Ushahidi – Crisis Mapping
Interested in using games to improve crisis mapping
So far the mapping has been massive manual information. Trains tons of people to use the platform, received info from texts from haitians and then crowdsourced translations.
Interested in how services can be microtasked, turned into Human Intelligence Tasks manageable through Mechanical Turk or WoW.
Wants to develop altruism scores, re-vision labs and going from crowdsourcing to playsourcing.
Richard Lemarchand lead designer for Uncharted 2
Charles Dickens knew first hand how crappy 19th Century London was. He wove comedy and tragedy, chifhangers, but he didn’t sermonize or offer solutions. As Orwell said, “He managed to attack everybvody and antagonize nobody”
Max and the Magic Marker
Good game story telling is very challenging-all the challenges of normal narrative plus the unique structure of games
Challenge is to align the peaks and troughs of gameplay experience with narrative peaks and troughs
Dickens of games is probobly not a single person but a collaboration
Jessica Hammer – game designer/reseracher
People tend to lie about who they are. Really, people lie about everything, like all the time. “Social desirability bias” We want to look appealing to others.
As a designer, you must take SDB into acount. With games for change we want games to be processing deeply. With SDB, though, people are often doing what they think they should be doing, behaving how they think they should be behaving, and so they will be less likely to really think about what your trying to communicate. If your game is about telling people what they should be doing, it will not be received.
Give people legit choices, make them balance one social good against another, give them challenges about how much, when, etc.
Ntiedo Etuk – Dimension U – a portal to educational games
“Student -Centric Learning”
Trying to make learning a lifestyle
Games are good for learning. Kids are not
African Americans and Latinos actually play games more than white kids
Games designed so kids need academic skills in game, but can access resources in real time to help their problem solving.
Brian Reich – Managing Director some media company
Why is what we’re doing not working? –good question
Expectations for what people have for games is determined by everything out there–shoe commercials, music etc.
We don’t understand our audience well enough
We need to understand why people play other games? Why do they like them?
We need to work with people of various skills.
We need to stop typing what we’re hearing because it seems inconsequential.
Too many words on powerpoint slides.
Jane Pickard–Foundation 9
Designing for the total limbic games
We used to ask what does the player do, now we ask what does the player feel while doing it?
Games are good at stimulating reptilian and neo cortex, but less good at stimulating limbic system (love, emotion)
In most games, if there’s love, it’s like discovering a love story written for you
Dragon Age is complex enough that it feels legit
Designing for love/What to do on a first date:
Make player smile
Adreniline-filled moments
Let the player express herself
Allow for vulnerability
Love is a battlefield and there’s a lot of room for conflict
Rob Dubbin – writer the Colbert Report
robdubbin@talkingpet.org
Aphorism = a constraint on reality
Game design is a constraint on reality
Any aphorism can suggest a game design.
Elegance can yield complexity if you poke it enough
Games 4 Change Korea
Running out of battery! Emergency Incomplete Post!
Direct Action games “organize real civic action using games”
Tracy Fullerton
Part of what she loves about games is that they’re a safe space to rehearse or transgress and thinking of them as ways to take real actions changes this. Definitely thinking that games should do this is problematic. Free Rice is the obvious example of a game having real world impact. Problem is that it’s not about rehearsing real activities, you’re just practicing sitting in your living room. This is the first example she can think of, even though she doesn’t think it’s a good one
Stephen Duncombe
Loves games, but fears that even the best intentioned social action games often end up being “ether activism” lots of sound and fury but signifying nothing. As an organizer working on traditional direct action like marches got bored with standard actions. These standard strategies often lost their efficacy. The standards protest actions can actually reinforce the status quo, and this is why he’s interested in alternative forms of organizing and protest. One common problem is that we lump together lots of disperate activities as direct action games that may in fact be very different actions.
Tracy
Organize these activies on a grid: Motivated by in game outcomes <--> Motivated by Social or Civic Outcomes; In games rehearsals as actions <--> Real world immediate actions
Scouts (Boy and Girl) is like role playing a civic life, and you have leveling, game-like rewards
Stephen
GTA San Andreas is the opposite of a Direct Action game (hopefully)
Critical Mass is an interesting example because it has a kind of magic circle, a “real world game” where your actions are in the real world, but the experience is largely symbolic “prefigurative politics”
Ben Stokes:
Civic “Player Assets”
Time (volunteering)
Material Assets (donating)
Political Voice (advocacy)
How could designers play with these affordances?
Tracy mentions Urgent Evoke, which is not clear how successful it really is
A Force More Powerful – also about rehearsing real world actions. My criticism of it has always been that it’s a top down model of organizing. Player is like an organizing general.
Rosario Habitat–using games to train people to be involved in urban planning process.
INTERRoBANG – service learning game. Real world actions that you document and earn points for
Stephen–One thing you have to keep in mind when discussing ethical games is “Who’s ethics and how are they applied?” “How do you make a fun game to play in which what players learn from playing is how to take democratic action?”
Oh Dear God–Microsoft tester proposing “Patriot Points” so you get points for doing “patriotic” acts.
Tracy responds that actions need context, so scouts works because there is a rich context, advancement is meaningful within a community.
Stephen–Democratic games are not just those that promote democracy, but are actually created through democratic processes.
I’ve been banging my head against Jane McGonigal’s TED talk for the past week and a half trying to think of something intelligent to write, but I’ve just been stuck with a vaguely unsatisfied feeling and no coherent analysis. As someone interested in game-based learning and the transformative power of games, it seems wrong to just write, “Aw, that’ll never work.”
Considering Play was co-written by Eric Zimmerman, the biggest Ludic Century advocate I know, the short film presents a remarkably ambivalent vision of the future of gaming. Almost nothing in the film is clear, and it revels in this ambiguity to good effect. The viewer is left with space to play with the plot even after multiple viewings. I’ve seen it three times and still can’t figure out who the protagonist is, what the game being depicted is, or what kind of “real” world the film is set in. And all that, maybe, is the point.
Play is a film featuring virtual reality games. Each scene turns out to be a game played by a player character in another game. Each time the viewer thinks she’s watching the player end a game, the world starts to come undone, and the supposed player is revealed to be yet another avatar in another challenge. The film opens with a GTA-esque urban rampage game followed by a Japanese school girl pillow fight fantasy. Higher levels include a man in a restaurant meeting a series of blind dates trying to discern the proper opening lines and a senator navigating an onslaught of pushy reporters questioning him about various scandals.
The film takes a confusing turn, however, when in the next scene we see a woman lying on a psychiatrist’s couch describing her experiences in the different game sequences we just watched. In this situation, however, it’s the psychiatrist who is now the player, selecting appropriate questions from a digital clipboard.
Eventually he prescribes the woman a placebo and moves on to play his own video game. As he looks through his game cartridges we see a number of titles that clearly identify the games seen earlier in the film. It’s a confusing moment. Was he the player all along and his patient merely referenced games he’d played, or are these simply common games which the patient was struggling with and which he also plays? Read the rest of this entry »
So according to Kotaku, everyone is (or at least was) talking about this presentation by Jesse Schell from the recent DICE convention. Not wanting to be excluded from the “everyone” category, I’d like to offer my response, even if it is a few days late.
For those who haven’t seen it, I’ll summarize briefly. First, Schell asserts that the success of Facebook, the Wii, Guitar Hero, Farmville, Webkinz, etc. blindsided most industry experts and reveals a marked change in the desires of players and the strategies of designers. The world, Jesse says, is awash in artificiality and the masses are weary. We crave the real, and so corporations have responded with real Angus beef burgers and cell phones that let us be our authentic selves.
Game and toy makers, at least this handful of insightful innovators, understand this change and have developed products that discard the old notion that game should be immersive, instead designing games that blend reality and fantasy. Webkinz are physical objects with a related virtual world. The Wii and Guitar Hero create situations where people enjoy both the game and the spectacle of others playing the game. And social networking games take advantage of our desires to compete and collaborate with our real friends.
I think the first part of Jesse’s talk is fairly sound. Yes, people have grown tired of all that is “fake” but the fact that they’re being satisfied by corporate supplied solutions is proof that this isn’t a genuine shift in behavior and desire. An Angus burger from McDonald’s is still about as far away from a slab of grass-fed beef as a plastic plant is from a redwood. Farmville is not farming and it is precisely its differences from real farming that made it successful. People may crave authentic experiences, but they still want those experiences to fit within their generally comfortable, sanitized life. The “adventurous” among us go on eco tourism trips; they don’t bushwhack the Yukon navigating by the stars. Read the rest of this entry »
OK, so we have another non-educational gaming post here, but I have a soft spot for zombies. While the Skittles product placement in the game is a bit odd (unless they were chosen strictly for their physical properties) overall it’s a really interesting concept. I can imagine this evolving into an ARG board game that could be one of the few non-gimicky mergers of technology and analogue games (I’m looking at you here new Monopoly). Also this game has zombies. Did I mention the zombies?
Jane McGonigal has a new ARG coming out next month that has players tackling problems in Africa. I don’t have many (any) details yet, but the trailer is quite impressive, and McGonigal’s last game Superstruct was an ambitious if at times frustrating creation. I didn’t get the change to play Superstruct long enough to really evaluate it, but I appreciate it’s attempt to take on real world problems. Superstruct was a forecasting game, essentially crowdsourcing possible solutions to near-future global crises. That’s very exciting. How successful it was, I don’t know, but a daring experiment nonetheless. Hopefully Evoke will add more momentum to games that help players reach beyond the magic circle to affect real systems.
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