G4LI Cornelia Brunner; Center for Children and Technology

Considerations at CCT–Pedagogy, domain, school, medium, and age
Designs for ordinary schools and teachers and reluctant learners
Working on 7th grade science and literacy games
Focused on educational need–what will help teachers in a classroom? In this case, popular misconceptions–the research will focus on can the game dispel a particular misconception?
Initial game designs for photosynthesis game permitted (accidentally) the player to succeed without ever learning abut photosynthesis
Next game idea focused on metaphors, moved away from reality, instead focused just on chemical change
All this is fodder for PFL, game produces a visualization and experience of a phenomenon that can be unpacked by a teacher

The role of the instructional designer is to take all these different interests and foci, see the affordances of the medium (in this case DS games) and decide how it can support current educational practices.

G4LI Alan Kay

He’s the “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – guy

In 1968, talked with Seymore Papart and drew a sketch of kids working on laptops designing a versio of Spacewar.–40 years later, here we are
Big A.C.’s bangin quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Most people basically use computers and the internet to admire their own reflections (like a monket with a shiny brass microscope”

Anthropologists have noted about 300 human universals–some of these universal cultural characteristics seem to be genetic
Make a technological amplifier for any of these universals and you’ll become a billionaire
Non universals: progress, writing and reading, deductive abstract math, democracy, slow deep thinking, model based science, etc.
We’re naturally inclined to remember and case based reasoning is universal, but other types of thinking are not universal
Schools seem to be designed to deal with non-universals–the things we’re not wired for
It may take a genius to invent a non-universal, but then almost anyone can learn them and think in that way once discovered

Science: the process of developing and testing increasingly accurate models
Looking at school we see a phenomenon like Guitar Hero, tech glommed on with no real learning.
Rocky’s Boots–amazing old Atari Game
Robot Odyssey–another amazing old Atari Game
Games today are generally the wrong pace and about the wrong ideas–too much about universals, not what education should be about (non-universals)

One person asking questions says that games based on feedback loops instead of branching structures may be better for learning

G4C G4LI Day – Microtalks: Research Innovation

Katherine Isbister – NYU Poly
Games are customiable, provide rich data, and are popular with kids so should be good for learning
Unfortunately, it’s incredibly easy to make terrible games
So, G4L! is trying to develop useful theories for making good learning gmaes
Trying to get best practices from commercial developers – interviewed 41 professional game developers and reserach-practitioners mostly at professional events
Focus on design tactics
Donald Schon’s “The Reflective Practitioner”
Found recurrent recommendations, and now has a massive archive of these interviews

Key concepts include:
Fun – hate the term engaging, and think most learning games are crap
Polish – most learning games not polished enough
Mechanics aren’t ‘bolted on’ – learning games fail to integrate learning and mechanics

Inviting commercial developers to critique learning games

Katie Culp – CCT
Looking at building research into the front end of game design–designing based on who the audience is
Looking at building inquiry skills in middle school students
Too many games make assumptions about student/player thinking skills without considering where kids are developmentally
Kids at this stage have trouble recognizing what they don’t know/what they need to learn
In order to understand this, formative research–a type of research pioneered by Sesame Workshop is useful.
The methodology is very early in the design process use activities and content that’s central to the game concept and bring it to kids to play with
This does not create broad understanding, is not like a RCT, but does allow particular insights into specific audiences’ specific thinking
Researcher may already have an understanding based on the literature about kid misconceptions, but formative research brings forth the specific language and cognitive associations and ways of thinking.

Greg Chung UCLA/CRESST/CATS
How can meaningful information be extracted from a high volumen low quality data set? (I’m paraphrasing, may be off)
Developing math game focusing on fractions and addition of fractions
Worked with USC to develop game ideas and what gameplay info will show player understanding of fractions

Sorry…Zoned out here

Jan Plass NYU/G4LI
Looking at design patterns for good learning
Building Augmented Reality games for science learning, Adventure games for science learning, math games,
Looking for general solutions to commonly occuring problems in learning game design
–Strong narratives provide sufficient incentive to solve hard puzzles
–One challenge is we don’t know how to measure engagement well–behavioral, cognitive, social, and emotional
Individual engagement–self report, survey, interview, biomentirs, video observation, user logs
group engagement–video observation, classroom observation, user logs
One challenge is that studies on a certain scale it becomes impossible to always observe

Requires Theoretical model of Interactivity – some paper with plass, schwartz, and another guy
Using a lot of bio data to measure enegagment
Important: triangulation–each measurement only measures a certain kind of engagement in a certain context, and a theorietical framework is needed to tie it all together–but it’s still setting, task, genre, and platform specific

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 Direct Action Games

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.

G4C Future of Digital Media

OK, so for this panel we have two hipster/nerd white guys and a woman in army fatigues. Interesting.

Kurt Squire
There’s a gap between the legacy institution of schools and modern technology. Handheld devices will radically change schools. The Generation Mobile study is significant in terms of explaining how pervasive mobile device use is among kids. Kids today almost all have mobile devices and access the internet via them, and multitask on them to cram more media activity into less time.

Right now, schools ban mobile media (which is an unsustainable decision) and the solution is instead to encourage media multitasking and different educational tasks for different students.

Squire and his team worked in an alternative school with 12-18 students, but with that caveat, the experiment was very successful,they saw very pro-social behavior, the devices amplified learning.

Devices amplify subject interest, self, social network and learning.

With mobile devices students are multitasking in interesting ways and combining the affordances of different apps in creative ways.

Students talked about using Facebook to escape from school clicks. Kids use mobile device to take advantage of teachable moments and participate in the adult world in new ways (give directions to mom using gps when she’s lost).

Games!
Neighborhood game design project–integrated course in a design studio context

Started with place based inquiry, game design, and collaboratively building an ARG. Used the context of working with city planner, learned about the challenges of this field, and then went to game design studio–learning game design process, then applying it to their city. Kids decided to make a game about a bike path behind their school being paved. Interesting process was that while they disliked the change before starting the process, by the end they understand why the government did what they did.

Devices can leverage learnign not anywhere anytime, but rather specific places.

Arisgames.org–platofrm for developing iphone arg games.

Made a game about Lake Wingra, and tried to build in some transgression, but in fact none of the kids wanted to transgress (destroy the lake) only wanted to save it.

Kids in 5th grade made a game about a destroyed neightborhood and then drafted and got passed a city resolution

Interested in helping kids learn to be community organizers

Ken Perlin

“We have an entire society dedicated to putting people into pigeonholes” “You’re an artist, scientist, engineer, designer”

We establish dialectics between exploration and implementation, analytic and asesthetic, when in fact all people have these abilities within them.

Maybe in the future we’ll all be more in virtual reality.

Just called an iPad a book. We’re seeing the proliferatino of digital books, which eventually will all have cameras so that they can facial recognition.

Technology always ends up converging with magic. devices shouldn’t take over our lives. Future shouldn’t be about the machine, but about how we can connect.
People who ask the right questions get to the future first.

Shit yeah! talking about Diamond Age. In the primer, the book only works because there’s a person behind it–not AI. Kids love toys and games but will always respond best to mentors and humans.

Humans are wired in some way to diferentiate between human and not human but acts human–we have limited/no empathy towards artificial intelligence.

As long as you create a compelling charachter, media will converge around it.

All tech has an exponential phase, but eventaully levels off. Whatever is exponential now wil llelvel off and what’s interesting is the things just starting.

“In the future we will still play with plastic dinosaurs, but my hope is we’ll get to keep doing it all our lives.”

Army Brigadere General Lorree K. Sutton

I’m having a hard time. We’re getting some “next greatest generation” stuff here about the nobility of service in the military.

“Perhaps the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.” Sebastian Jung. “If that’s true, perhaps the ultimate war game is the one that compels us to return to the scene of the battle,” and acknowledge that wound and move towards healing. “Being together virtually is far more real than being together face to face.” Really?

This lady is hoo rah! all the way. And yet, believes that mental health for soldiers requires moving from “suck it up” to treatment and ommuninty involvement, and reaching out for help is an act of strength.

Sesame Workshop working with the military to help families grieving or adjusting to suffering.

“Theater of War” bringing Greek warrior ideals to life in a way to help soldiers.

Honestly, I have no idea what the hell is being talked about here. We’ve heard the phrase “down range” about a dozen times, which seems to indicate a place where armed conflict takes place. I understand that there are games trying to help soldiers deal with mental health issues, but I know that going in to the talk and I’ve heard virtually nothing of any substance about these.

Sutton has been following war games over the years (down on one knee speaking into the mic like Elvis on stage). Is scared by the latest generation of war games. Brainstorming with Alan Gerschenfeld about how to make war wounded characters from these games and bring them to a space where they can learn about psychological health. Say what?

I got nothing against individual soldiers, but let’s be clear here: These wars we are engaged in (which are not even official wars declared thourough Congress as is mandated in the Constitution!) are tragedies justified by lies. They are destroying millions of lives, they are economically damaging our country, they are perpetuating a culture of fear and justifying the loss of our civil liberties.

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.