G4C Rapid Fire Talks

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!

G4C Funding

Connie Yowell – MacArthur
Games are fundamental to the paridigmatic shift in education towards social, participatory learning. MacArthur is funding a variety of games and virtual world initiatives. To promote innovation MacArthur stepped away from metrics and accountability for a while and let grantees be more creative and unconstrained by 19th century evaluation standards. Thinking hard about public-private partnerships. One of her biggest fears is encountering a set of expectations that pull them back into 20th century paradigms. Games can be used to reinforce current standards just as well as expand our ideas and progress.

Kids have to be able to think in terms of systems. They need this more than discreet skills (well… I think they need balance. Discrete skills are valuable). MacArthur is Interested in getting game developers to open their platforms or make games with level editors to allow youth game creation. They’re less interested in individual games and more in trajectories of gameplay, how kids move to different games. Very interested in game companies partnering with learning scientists to develop new metrics.

Robert Torres – Gates Foundation

Games are good platforms for kids to develop expertise. Gates is focused on implementation of the common core and creation of formative assessments that actually tell us the degree to which kids make gains towards the common core. There is a belief that digital media tools can help us with this.

Interesting areas for possible funding:
Degrees to which learning environments create communities of practice.
Degree to which students are producing media that is endemic to the subject area in which they’re involved.
Learning standards that students own as users of wikipedia own their standards.

Tessie Topol – Time Warner

TW decided their philanthropy could have more impact if they focused on one issue that’s aligned with their business. Chose STEM ed. Launched 5 year $100 million initiative called Connect a Million Minds. They want to inspire kids to learn STEM to solve problems. Partnered with Coalition for Science after School and FIRST Robotics. Chose them based on their credibility in their domains, orgs with a footprint large enough to meet their needs, and had a need they could fulfill.

Priorities:
First: increase awareness of our philanthropic efforts
Second: some other stuff
Third: another thing.

Christine Adamczyk – US AID
Interested in using games as tools to improve international development focusing on youth
Agency has begin to use mobile tech, digital tech, but has not yet gone to games–including not just digital, but board and card games
In concept stage of developing a gaming intitative–not jsut developing new games and apps, but also adapting existing game sand apps to new countries and situations
Gov funding often focused on output results not outcome results
As was mentioned yesterday, making materials culturally relevant and appropriate is key.
USAID has seed funding, in country officers, large distribution network
US gove has drastically scaled back its development funding and there is now a major opportunity for private enterprise to fill this gap.

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Next MacArthur digital learning competition will be announced late summer or early fall

Sleep is Death is Death but Mario is Immortal

I’ve been playing around a little bit with Sleep is Death, Jason Rohrer’s new “game” and I really want to write a review of it here, but I have a minor problem. I can’t figure out how to use it. The game is a two player story telling experience where one player becomes a kind of dungeon master and the other player explores the story world created around him. The first time I tried it with a friend we couldn’t figure out how to make our routers play talk to each other and after 45 minutes of futzing around I got bored and started shopping for a rice cooker.

The next day, my friend came over so we could play over the wi fi and skip all the network connectivitiy issues. This time I spent 45 minutes trying to instantiate puppies into a cabin and wondering why my timer was showing -237 seconds. Eventually, we got bored and distracted and ended up discussing, I don’t know, lint or something. I’m not sure if Rohrer’s complete obtuse game design is some kind of high level commentary on the nature of personal narrative and representation of self in a world where sign and signified have been riven, or if I’m just too dense to decipher rules so obvious they need no explanation, like the man/woman bathroom symbols or something.

Anyway, I haven’t given up hope, and will read the message boards (there seems to be a massive fan community already) and try again next week. In the meantime, I am amusing myself with the brilliant, intuitive and addictive Mario Crossover. It’s Super Mario Brothers, but you can play as Mega Man, Samus, Link, and other NES heroes complete with proper music and unique character abilities. It may not be art, but it’s awesome.

*And here’s a link to an interview with Crossover’s creator Jay Pavlina. He’s a film maker and this is first game and used this game to teach himself programming! Judging from this quote, he is clearly a natural game designer:

Originally, the game was going to have a story where Mario got captured, so Luigi recruited his friends from other videogame worlds to help get Mario back. But I decided not to worry about the story and just focus on making the gameplay awesome.

Making the Most of the Medium: a Meditation (or a review, maybe)

Without a doubt the two best pieces of literature I read this year were comics. David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp and David B.’s Epileptic are simply brilliant pieces of storytelling that use the form of the graphic novel more skillfully than anything I’ve ever experienced before. I recently read (almost all of) David Shields’s book Reality Hunger, and while I don’t share his complete disdain for the traditional novel, I do find it’s rare that I find a current work of fiction very engaging. Experimental writing, bouncing from perspective to perspective, manipulating timescapes, or whatever, often feels contrived and frivolous rather than meaningful.

B. and Mazzucchelli, however, take advantage of the affordances of their medium in ways that genuinely enrich the story and deepen the reader’s connection to character, setting, and plot. In Epileptic, B. portrays his childhood, or something like it, focusing on his brother’s severe epilepsy and how it damaged the family. Through his illustrations, B. effectively conveys the confusion, insight, whimsy, cruelty, and caring that comprises childhood. His illustrations personify the epilepsy and also illuminate his own fantastical coping strategies. The book is tragic/beautiful and beautifully tragic and by the end I was almost crying (something no movie or book has come close to doing in over a decade).

B.’s vivid imagery is often so dense it can take half an hour to work through a page or two, carefully exploring all the tiny chaotic epic battlegrounds that made up his childhood. It is the labored pace Epileptic demands that makes it so exceptional. By spending time with the imagery I found myself reflecting on the text, meditating on B.’s experience, considering experiences from my own childhood, and wondering how I would have acted in his place. It was in this forced lingering that I became empathetic to B. in a way that I don’t think a movie with its predetermined camera cuts or a book with its pure literary presentation could equal. B. creates something with a comic that could only be done with a comic.

Asterios Polyp is a very different story with a very different presentation, but like B., Mazzucchelli uses the comic form to its full potential. Every character is drawn in a unique art style and voiced with a unique font that expresses aspects of his or her personality. Throughout the story form, color, and dialogue interrelate to communicate. There is one section, however, that affected me more than any other. For a series of pages, the main character Asterios reminisces about his ex-wife. There are almost no words, but on those pages Mazzucchelli creates an experience that has more verisimilitude to the actual lived experience of wistful remembering than any film montage or book passage I’ve ever seen.

Viewing the comic, I was able to experience all the images at once, feeling them all lose detail but gain mass, and then sometimes linger on one image or another. The ex-wife is depicted in any number of mundane moments from sneezing to smiling to lying sick in bed. It is exactly this diverse collection of significant and insignificant memories that constitutes intimacy with someone, and when that person is gone, the experience of reminiscence is one of drifting through snapshots of beautiful banality interspersed with precious perfect moments. The remembering is bittersweet, virtually effortless, and irregular in its movements from memory to memory. Viewing these pages from Asterios Polyp was so similar to the actual experience of reminiscing that I had a feeling of mild claustrophobia. Too much, too close, Mazzucchelli penned Life but with darker outlines and more saturation, accomplishing the hyper-realism that only great art does.

Thinking about what these two comics accomplish makes me wonder how close video game are to this high standard. I think Heavy Rain, which I had the chance to play yesterday, is one of gaming’s most artful attempts. I have pretty mixed feelings about it, but fundamentally I congratulate the developers on trying to do something new with the medium of video games. Just as B. and Mazzucchelli took long looks at the comic and drew upon what it could do that no other medium could, I think the developers at Quantic Dream made a sincere attempt to tell a tragic narrative in a way that only a video game could.
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Ramapo Guest lecture

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to baffle a media studies class full of 19 year-olds by claiming that I was going to talk about video games and then rambling for an hour about magic circles, mancala, Yoko Ono, and the great sport of chess boxing. I had a good time anyway, and I promise that in the next couple days I’ll post a summary of my talk complete with a selection of the beautiful slides from my power point.

Run Jesus Run

With a keen eye for elegant, efficient ludic communication, Molleindustria has done it again. What is, on a the surface simply a deeply blasphemous mini-game by Paolo Pedercini is, in fact, well, not a nuanced meditation, but at least a thoughtful little statement.

In Run Jesus Run, you play as Jesus trying to save humanity in ten seconds. The concept of Jesus working against a time limit is actually quite accurate, and I think it humanizes Jesus to imagine that while he was wandering and teaching he sometimes felt the weight of the shot clock and wished for a little more time. In the game, the only two controls you have are run with the arrow keys and “do Jesus things” with the space bar. Walk on water with the space bar, multiply loaves and fishes with the space bar, fight the devil with the space bar. The simple controls fit with the game’s simple aesthetic, but there’s something more significant going on too. For Jesus, the son of God (or God himself, this relationship has never been really clear to me) every great crowd-awing miracle would be as simple as a keystroke. And one of his messages (if memory serves me right) was that such great feats as walking on water were within reach of his disciples too, if they could just take the simple action of believing.

Finally, after a brief sprint for salvation, the player wins and ends up on the cross, flanked by the two thieves. If you lose the game, running out of time, or falling into a pit at one point, the end screen shows the two crucified criminals with “Game Over” in place of Jesus. To win is to be crucified, to lose is to miss your brutal destiny. It’s an inevitable, but highly interesting end to the game. The player runs to his death, eagerly completing each little task for the privilege of being crucified.

This is not the first religious game that Pedercini has made, but it may be his best. Faith Fighter is amusing, but it’s point is obvious, and the fighting is clunky. Faith Fighter 2 is just an animated insult to everyone offended by Faith FIghter, but is not without it’s charms. Operation Pedopriest was briefly banned by the Italian government. It’s not a brilliant game, but it’s so shocking the first time you see it I think it’s an incredible statement. Run Jesus Run, though, feels like art. It’s not didactic, it’s subtle, and it gets better if you spend more time with it. Well done Paolo.

Jason Rohrer’s “Sleep is Death” coming soon

If you haven’t played Passage yet, go play it. Then sit quietly for a few minutes and play it again. Rohrer did something special there, and it looks like Sleep is Death will be even more impressive. I’ll be pre-ordering my copy soon.