textuality.org tag:www.textuality.org,2009-02-27://1 2009-07-19T16:12:02Z Perambulations through digital texts: games, hypertexts, and their literacies. Movable Type Commercial 4.23-en Why Am I Here On This Blog tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.61 2009-07-19T16:11:14Z 2009-07-19T16:12:02Z Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter Why am I here (on this blog) and what do I have to say? 

I like to trace patterns.  I like to make worlds.  I like to poke at systems to see how they work.  And  I like to share all that with people, because I think a lot better when others are asking me to be clearer or telling me where I'm wrong or just off course.   

When I was in high school and living in small-town New York State ("Sparsely Populated - Drive Carefully"), the systems I studied were the seed-dispersion techniques of woody underbrush, drainage patterns leading into creeks, or the social networks of my classmates (one system I never 'got' very well).  Everything I learned from them fed into the worlds I created for storytelling and then for games of Dungeons and Dragons.   Maps got elegant ecosystems, towns had flavorful characters, and monsters fit their environments.  The game gave me a context in which to ground what I tried to learn.

The information went both ways, too-- I'd set up something in the game like a town and realize that I really didn't understand how an agrarian economy would affect travel patterns and population density, so I'd read up on medieval villages and look at maps of Krakow, Poland, across 500 years.  I didn't do this consciously, but the game's rich allusions to folktales and mythology led me out into the real thing.  I think that the first case was an epiphany reading Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, when I came across a character from the books in a D&D sourcebook and realized that Alexander (and D&D) hadn't just made it all up themselves.

So in the last few years, when scholars and writers like Katie Salen, Jim Gee, David Schaffer, and Steven Johnson say that kids learn well from games, that games teach systems thinking, and that games can provide a context for rich problems and situated learning, it's made a lot of sense to me.  I grew up on what they're describing. 

The words in a chemistry textbook are tied to a game, the game of chemistry.... If you played the game of chemistry, you come to understand why people use the words as tools to do things, to engage in actions, to label images. -Jim Gee, Edutopia interview

Study after study has shown that kids and adults alike assimilate information better when they are studying topics which they are interested in rather than things which they are forced to learn ...the advantage that traditional video games have is that the user inherently cares about what they are doing. This enthusiasm is (comparatively) easy to channel or transfer to other activities, which brings us to the topic of tangential learning. -James Portnow, Edge Blog

What I'm still missing, though, is the community *talking* about all this.  I bring it up sometimes at game nights, but it's not very helpful in keeping my friends from cleaning my clock in Citadels.  I go to the very excellent Games, Learning, Society Conference every year, but it's three too-brief days in a year 122 times that long. 

Also, honestly, I think that games, or at least ludic sensibilities and systems, are a lot more pervasive than many people think.  I like to look at how, beyond representing some small piece of the world in a game, people actually approach the world as a set of games all the time, every day.  I think  that we can come to understand a few more things about ourselves and our world by watching how we play, how we read, and how we make games and stories. 

And that's a pretty good reason for a blog.  ]]> Will Wright on Educational Games tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.64 2009-07-18T20:27:21Z 2009-07-18T20:54:27Z Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter
http://kotaku.com/5315098/will-wright-talks-educational-gaming-funny-money

  • "We've gotten disconnected from the idea of play.... I don't think it's games so much as play.... we still think of play as a sort of useless, time-wasting activity.  When, in fact, play is a fundamental educational technology."
  • On Serious Games: "I think there's an environment they're emerging in, a certain garden, ecosystem ... in which they have to look serious first." "They could be a lot more fun than they are ... lot of them are maybe too specifically targeted." 
  • He offers Rod Serling's Twilight Zone and Dr. Seuss as examples of serious messages couched within a rich context or a playful presentation.
  • Perhaps motivation is a better goal than education, for games.  They'll educate anyway, but it's too serious a goal for most designers, who would do better aiming to motivate instead.
The Kotaku comments also have some good links to other material, including some TED talks.  It's a wonderful antidote to the representatives of the GIF Theory that you find on any Kotaku thread about one of the big three consoles.
]]> Recent Readings tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.63 2009-06-30T04:17:41Z 2009-07-19T03:32:35Z Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter
]]> Liveblogging the GLS Conference: Friday tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.60 2009-06-12T14:18:32Z 2009-06-12T20:10:40Z Day three of my notes from the Games, Learning, Society Conference!After the jump: A lot of notes.... Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter
After the jump: A lot of notes.
]]> Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America
  • Gee: "People are smart, but they are stupid once they're in institutions."
  • If you're inside the design process, you can't afford wholesale destruction.  You have to make do with what you have.  If you're outside the design process, you can give a thumbs up or thumbs down.
  • Talk goals: history of how schooling = learning.  the hopes of a technological revolution.
  • Knowledge as a rare commodity - with the ephemerality of knowledge throughout history, if you didn't pass it on, it was lost.  So we had methods for transfer of knowledge: apprenticeship and rote (repeat back) 'learning'.
  • "high schools are the weakest link - the rationale for learning in high schools is pretty shaky for the people in them, still."
  • Loose coupling model (between kindergarten, graded schools, high schools, vocational schools/apprenticeships, colleges, universities... makes the system adaptable, but resists changes to the core technologies.  (why?)
  • Burden of making people better, the hope of improvement, has shifted from churches in teh 17th century to schools in the 20th.
  • 1950s: Gardner, The Mind's New Science - computers as the source of the cognitive revolution in the 50's because you could model complex systems.
  • 1980s: Papert, etc. in 1980s *could* allow a personal version of that revolution - by allowing students to make dynamic representations.
  • Larry Cuban: Computers: Oversold and Underused.
  • The result of the 90's investment isn't the programs, the artifacts of the grants, it's GLS, the people that resulted.
  • Technology percolated, it just started to happen around school.  1.5M homeschooled students.  Virtual school, virtual charter, workplace learning,
    social networks, video games.
  • Why?
    • easy answers - lack of will, skill, or politics. too pat for institutions.
    • hard answers - technologies for learning vs. learners. (historic link to burden for improvement?)
  • public responsibility for access to schooling has become ingrained.  Brown: access to institution is not access to education.  War on poverty.  With investment comes accountability.  call for accountability became bipartisan as people want to argue and defend.  ADA.  Discussion shifts from access to schooling to outcomes.
  • NCLB: idea that standards and accountability will lead to outcomes.
  • accountability: WINSS.  NCLB has completely transformed administration - and made it conservative - only what is proven to work.
  • NCLB leads to common textbooks, common terminology (so they can compare and collaborate).  Low-risk solutions.
  • Compare: learning vs. learners.
    • schools adapt technologies to guarantee learning; out of school teck focuses on learners.
    • high-yield strategies vs. customization strategies.
    • reliable vs. eclectic
    • tested consequence of means vs. learning as a happy consequence of means.
    • (something) vs. adoptive models of implementation.
    • democratic model of learning vs. meritocratic model.
  • When you're in a game, you're defined by the rules/role of the game.  Who you are within the game and without the game becomes a topic for negotiation.
  • He's come up with a new argument against outcomes as a standard for policy success!
  • The drive for data is ambivalent: we want to understand the system; but we don't want to fetishize the data.  Response: it's about the level of customization - data enables customization, or "play", flexibility within the system.  We want to move it down the system toward the learner.
  • Do we really believe in educational system, still?  Yes: still biggest investment over roads, prisons, etc.  Look at WI data.
  • Could there be a game of being a school superintendant?  Rich is still uncomfortable with the generality of a superintendant's tools.  He's worried that a game would proliferate the bad methods rather than critique them.
  • What does a tool for learner look like?!
  • Increased documentation of high school dropouts ... his hunch is that that's directly due to NCLB.  
Session 1: Gaming the Future of Science Learning
  • AR games and science learning
    • They're thinking of "being and becoming", just like the Q2L.
    • We want to move from "effects on the learner" to meaning.  The best teachers are certain of their pedagogy and work in non-routine environments; the worst are uncertain (follow fads) in a routine environment.  Good to have teacher encouraging a 'growth mindset' at all levels.
    • That all works for good project managers, too.  ;)
    • AR game: wander the forest, meet the hawk, the cottonwood, have them all argue their case for ruling the forest?
    • Used MIT's Outdoor AR Editor (~5 yrs old) - AR Game Builder
    • Games tend to fall into "tour the town" or CYOA.  Can we get into a broader set of games?
    • Schools don't alway allow googling for images.
  • StarLogoTNG
    • StarLogo TNG website, resources
    • They want all students (not just science focused kids) to get systems, key popular issues.
    • Primary goal is a good one: Get kids to 'thnk scientifically" - use the tools of scientists and to develop the habits of mind of scientists.
    • They use a 'black box/glass box' metaphor for software.
    • Have students create a piece similar to an art piece - makes them abstract what's important.  Programming isn't the best tool for full reproduction.
    • They used game difficulty level design as performance assessment - in order to design to a specific difficulty, they have to understand the systems in play.
    • Give students a level with parameters, and ask them to balance the level.  The player will be a bunny that needs to meet others and get to safety; balancing factors in the fire's spread determines the difficulty of the level.
  • Programming and Game-building and Game-play
    • How to design a course where game-building occurs throughout the year?
    • Shout-out to diSessa, A (2000).  Changing Minds: Computers, Learning and Literacy. Cambridge MA: MIT Press
    • First challenge - program ducks to seek high ground in a small environment.
    • Another challenge - observe agents to see whether you can figure out their rules.
    • After showing kids how in the virtual world a set of rules (code) can direct the motion of an object/agent, bring it back to physics - how the set of rules (laws of motion) can describe and explain motion in the physical world.
    • Engineering Design vs. Scientific method of play vs. science in play
      • play/start
      • design vs. observe vs. observe/collect data
      • build vs. generate strategies vs. generate questions/ideas
    • The game ends up working as an excellent context for the science learning. They need to know how acceleration works.
    • Okay, seriously, folks: just make your screen the projector's screen.  Print your notes if you need to.
    • They have the kids make blogs throughout the units. !!!
    • Frustration + motivation = incorporation of analysis and reasoning into a process of trial and error
    • Takes a week to really bring the teachers in ... and its often the second year before they really do more than dip their toe into the water with the activity
  • This session was a really good set of case studies for all of this games/learning stuff in real classrooms.
  • OTB: On the Backchannel
    • This was just the awards for the game, and I was helping to video record and take photos, so I'll need to write up my thoughts more fully soon.
  • Grand Theft Childhood? Making Sense of Teenagers' Responses to Violent Videogames  - Lawrece Kutner, Ph.D.
    • Credit Mobilier scandal of 1873, when Comstock led raids on pornography. Comstock went after the "dime novel" (which often focused on independent women).
    • Horatio Alger as the next example.  Then gangster movies and the Hays Code.  Then crime and horror comics in the 40s and 50s (nevermind the Tales from the Crypt stories about victimized people rising from the dead for retribution). What Parents Don't Know About Comic Books by Frederic Wertham.
    • Nice quote from Bill O'Reilly perfectly paralleling Wertham.
    • 1200 surveys, 500 kids. Surveys were opt-out (everyone unless requested).  Assessed exposure: "list 5 games you've played a lot in the past 6 months".  Over half the games listed were played by only one child. (LONG Tail!)  Not a single kid listed 'thin' violent games like Manhunt or _______. 
    • Boys played: GTA: 44%, Madden: 34, Halo 3: 22.  Girls played: Sims, then GTA, then Supermario, Solitaire, and Tycoon games.  One finding: boys go on missions in GTA, girls use it as a sandbox.
    • Few (5-6%) play with parents a lot; 11-19% with strangers over the internet.  Boys were more likely to play with friends than girls... contrary to pundits or gender stereotype.
    • Why?  Over half said creative activities.  Kids listed plot - pure violence wasn't in it.
    • Emotional management - 62% of boys play to relax; ~23% for emotional regulation - forget problems, get anger out, feel less lonely.  These kids were much more likely to play a lot, defining an at-risk group who use games to self-medicate.
    • FBI figures show that youth violence has *declined* over the last 20 years while coverage has increased greatly.
    • ESRB ratings don't mention the *goal* of the violence in games
    • Kids who played M rated games (at 12-14 yrs old) were much more likely to play alone.  A console or computer in the bedroom correllated to the M rating players.
    • There's no evidence for links between games and major violence; but link for low-grade common violence.  There is a correlation (not a causal relationship) with low-grade violence: more M-rated titles corresponds to more incidents of violence.  For girls, those who play daily were more likely to bully and fight.
    • Statistical prediction cannot show causation - but it's a marker of risk, especially among girls.
    • Boys enjoyed fantasies of power, fame, and respect, but were clear on fantasy vs. reality.
    • What appealed to boys (action, challenge, variety, realistic environments, tests of behavior and consequence) were more common in violent games.
    • Boys would give same concerns about younger siblings playing violent games that parents give about them.  Boys were most concerned not about violence but 'swears'.
    • "What shouldn't you play at 13?" "The Sims, because ...." awkwardness "... they kiss."
    • "What's more terrifying to boys at age 13 than kissing a girl?  Zombies are easy."
    • Another marker: feeling worse after playing.  Most kids feel more relaxed when done with a game.
    • Major potential benefits of games: inspire new interests.
    • Proven benefits w/ computers and games for kids with disabilities (empowerment) and kids with ADD/ADHD (hypothesis: non-judgemental).
    • Virginia shooter: mentioned twice in police report: kid *didnt* play, only played Sonic in high school.
    • Couch potato factor: kids who play realistic sports games actually get more exercise than others.  Not true for other games, either pos. or neg.
    • Wonderful 'listening for" anecdote.
]]> Liveblogging the GLS Conference: Thursday tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.59 2009-06-11T14:20:22Z 2009-06-12T17:24:34Z Liveblogging yesterday's GLS conference went pretty well, so I'm back at it today! Today's a full da, so there's going to be even more after the jump!... Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter ]]>
  • Keynote: Soft Modding, Jim Gee
    • Anecdote about shut-in mother who made a purple toilet for her daughter in the Sims, got hooked on the modding community, and now has ~7M downloads.
    • Repeated, wonderful pattern - start with a dedicated community of players and they'll become designers, given a chance.
    • One way they do this is by giving each other challenges, like the Nickel and Dimed Challenge.
    • The book Nickel and Dimed is a simulation; so is The Sims.  The Sims isn't actually good for it - she has to add extra restrictions.  Lists cheats not to use.  Lists helping mechanics that aren't realistic for her challenge.  No quitting without saving.    She's got considerable technical understanding, but she's using it to build social engagement.
    • On argument from members about unrealistic restrictions, the argument is: it's not a full simulation, it's meant to capture the feeling.  It's a metaphor.
    • The player is fostering modding to require emotional intelligence.
    • We're losing to China in algebra?  The answer is not to teach more algebra... it's
    • "This sort of emotional intelligence ... is a future thing, either we get it or we go out of business."  It's not common now, in women or men.
    • Modding, and its communities, leads to new kinds of stories.  They incorporate and move fluidly between what the player does as a gamer; what the character does in the game; how the rules of the simulation or game affected the story (the context); and the story that results.
    • People wanted to keep the results of the game to show their kids what they lived through!
    • EA could never do the Nickel and Dimed challenge.
    • 21st century leadership.
    • No whining!  If she could turn the Sims into this challenge, well, there's no excuse not to make games about anything.
    • If you give people creative tools, everyone is creative
    Session 2: Leveraging Game Design for Learning
    • Gaming After School: Boys and Girls Clubs of America Game Design Curriculum
      • 9-13 year olds, 4000+ clubs, soft launch fall 09, hard launch fall 10
      • systems thinking, iterative design process, introductory programming concepts, game design principles, problem solving skills, and teamwork and collaboration.
      • PETLab, Education Development Center, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, AMD Foundation, and Todd Wagner Foundation
      • 30 min. think & design, 15 min play-test, 15 min. repeat = 60 min. total (this was the final, not the initial, time spread)
      • Tech: Gamestar Mechanic, Scratch, and craft materials.
      • First Playtest results: not college, not school... B&G Clubs. Needed to be sensitive to the culture of the community.
      • Learned: fit the culture.  modularize, and give "recipe cards" rather than literal readable instructions.  Flex with tech
      • Learned from round 2: kids don't like the deconstruction or working on someone else's game.  I wonder whether they need it, though.
      • Now, more modular: Design 101 workshop, then Scratch, then "YOUR" game.
      • Technologies, finally: Scratch and paper.  Gamestar just wasn't readily available.
      • Questions:
        • through game literacy can you create issue literacy
        • how do you design for a culture other than your own
        • can the iterative process at the core of design transfer to other areas?
    • The Psycholingistics of Children's Game Design: Results of Year 3 of the Gamestar Mechanic Project, Alex Games
      • They designed GSM around teaching kids to think like designers.  But kids don't want to be taught, they want to be listened to.
      • Theoretical framework: designed to help children learn to adopt the discourse of game designers, with its asociated thinking and communication practices.  (Gee, 2003)
      • central to that is using the specialist "language of games" (in all its modalities).
      • I'd like to find out from him what 'gamer terms' kids used.  We wanted to work that into the world, but didn't know as well what terms kids use (now).
      • Made Alex Games 'just another player'.
      • Children don't learn to thnk *about* GSM, but *with* it, using three dialogues:
        • Material - through iterative trial and error, players learn the design grammar and the system's thinking.
        • ideal player - using the materials to express an idea of a game - creating an 'ideal player' which the game calls for through its design.
        • the real player - talking about how the game will need to play out with a player - through terminology referring to the player.
      • what's next?  what is the utilitarian value of the programming?
    • Learning Within a Nodal Ecology Activated by Gamestar Mechanic, Robert Torres
      • This talk focuses on what a knowledge domain is and how GSM fostered the growth of a knowledge domain around game design.
      • The domain wasn't conceived as nodal, but it was: discussion happened in the game, out of school, at home, on the forum, etc.
      • The context: 50% Black and Latino kids drop-out ... but then we want a program to teach despite that? 
      • Across nodes, there were architectural elements that all occurred in each node: social activity, specialist language, distnict physical or virtual spaces, behavioral norms defined early by participants, ways of being, time allocations...
      • This isn't novel-- it's "islands of knowledge"
      • "Quest 2 Learn" got a flurry of writing and typing.
    • Creativity in Videogame Programming as a Pedagogy
      • We're coming to understand that creativity isn't innate, a gift, but contextual, varied, and enabled.  The move from religion to science also witnessed a big shift in how creativity was conceived.
      • How does Scratch manage its community?
      • Learned to leverage the students' imitation of existing work, rather than fight it.
    • Q&A
      • Alex Games: we don't yet know how designers can and do talk to each other, what "expert practice" is.
      • Gamestar's not yet fully out there - so we haven't learned much from it yet.  Alex inserted some ringers - and it REALLY helped the kids.  Who were these people and users?
      • There's a bit of a suppressive nature in schools and clubs - no one wants to critique and risk seeming not to be a team player, or to imply to their funders that there are problems with what is being funded.
      • For a game being used in a workshop or school, it can be good to separate the developers from the mentor/coordinator - it lets the mentor be a peer rather than the vulnerable designer.  Alex Games wasn't the creator of Gamestar Mechanic, so he could be 'one of the players'.
      • ACME Animation mentioned as an excellent mentor community for animation.
    Session 3: Games Vs. Schools
    • I didn't take many notes this session because the room was set up very poorly - the setup required speakers to stand in front of the projector, or in front of me; the sound was low, and there were no outlets in the room.
    Session 4: Worked Examples
    • MacArthur put $50M into the field.  But how to assess, when the field doesn't exist yet?  One way is to require a "worked example".
    • Classic definition: take a well-solved problem and ahve an expert walk through it.  But how in a new field?
    • In a new field, look for exemplars.  Not the canonical example, but work that's clearly good and is probably central.
    • Shree Durga: literacy around coding in  Civ 4 forums.
    • Robert Torres: looking at systems thinking and challenging theories of situated learning.
    • Caro Williams: WoW, and using mathematics and narrative within.
    • Matthew Berland: Pandemic (collaborative board game) and how they collaborate to learn the rules and build strategies: distributed cognition.
    Evening Keynote: For the Lulz: How 9000 Internet Jackasses Took On the Church of Scientology and Redefined the Politics of Play
    • Was Julian Dibbell the person who gave on of my fave talks last year, in defense of griefers?
    • Politics of play: we usually think about laws against games, rules against games in schools, etc.  But he means to explore how play can be a driver for politics.
    • Presents the Anon "Message to Scientology" video not as an initiator, but the point at which the movement got it together, uniting the messy campaign from before the video and taking from illegal hacking back to a more traditional protest movement.
    • Moving to the playful aspect makes serious response from the church difficult.
    • Attempts a definition of 4chan.  And /b/: "freewheeling cacaphony of hilarity and stupidity".
    • Anonymity is NOT pseudonymity.
    • The perfect anonymity of /b/ leads to games.  This thing: go!
    • "You think you can get lost in wikipedia?  Go to 4chan and encyclopedia dramatica and you can get lost in a parallel universe where nothing is of use to you."
    • 4chan pwns Time Magazine.  Brilliant. Made an acrostic of the top people of all time.
    • "One of the important things about trolling is picking your target. Whcih means taking yourself too seriously."
    • Look up the Sekrit Code of Anonymous.
    • Precedents: seattle, 1999; phillipines, 2001; spain, 2004; moldova, 2009.  "Get people out on the streets and freak people out" is easy enough to do.
    • Anonymous : lulz :: linux : lulz.  A ludic motivation.
    • copyright is integral to "the tech", to Scientology's being - ostensibly because deviating from dogmatic technology would bring harm to people.
    • anon.penet.fi - useful in Scientology vs. the Internet
    • tech : memes :: fair game : trolling
    • general point: project chanology may not be generalisable because of the specificity re: information.
    • analogy to linux: if they don't stay focused on the code (lulz) but get caught up in fighting microsoft ("moralfags", by /b/ terminology)
    • more extreme and despicable acts, he says, are tactical, to police the moralfags. 
    ]]>     Liveblogging the GLS Conference: Wednesday tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.58 2009-06-10T19:06:27Z 2009-06-12T20:09:36Z Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter
    After the jump: notes on the sessions!
    ]]>
    • Embodying, Designing, and Learning Multimodally with SMALLab SMALLLab was used for the project
      • Okay, so there's some overhead for liveblogging.  I'm having a hard tim catching up to this session.
      • it's tough to get learners to think about writing as a process, and how to use writing to think, rather than as a static and faithful representation of thought.  That's a problem with wikis, too.
      • thnk about difference between games as tool to teach and games as spaces where learning is relevant
      • it's almost impossible to use smalllab to teach content ... so it's useful or getting users to think about it as a (physical *and* mental) space for learning.
    • In Retrospect: Outcomes of Cosmos Chaos!
      • Cosmos Chaos!- RPG that focuses on social studies.
      • Dang!  I just lost out on a prize because I didn't bring my DS!
      • worked with San diego school district
      • Berkeley Policy Associates - evaluator
      • Using the DS became a motivator to get homework done, and quickly ... of COURSE.
      • They'd like games to be good enough that schools require them.
      • Games on the DS are social ... how much of this is the physical mobility? 
      • They were surprised that much of the engagement was social - mentor roles among students, etc.
      • The game was designed for readers ... not to teach decoding, but interpretation.
      • How much the facilitators were game-players themselves mattered a lot - more engagement among kids because the facilitators encouraged community around play more.
      • When the weather improved, they lost kids to outside.  Migrant workers also disappeared by season.
      • Open questions - what about special ed and ESL?  Football players in American Samoa in high school ... really enjoyed the 4th grade-level game.
      • If we could do it again - only lost 2 DSes out of 300.  !!!
    • The Best of Both Worlds? Design Challenges for Developing Playable Historical Games for Classroom Learning
      • Mission America - an old-school adventure game in 1770 Boston just before the Massacre
      • yay, they're engaged.  But is it that it's a game (any game), or that it's interactive, or somethign made for them?  I wonder what it would be like if the teacher ran this as an RPG session.
      • The class stopped periodically and strategized about the game.
      • Penny whistle game that ripped off Guitar Hero and was a real success.
      • Corporation for Public Broadcasting American History & Civics Initiative Grant, with wNET/Channel 13 as a partner.
      • wanted to show increased student historical knowledge and historical thinking as well as enhances civic participation *AND* to create a process that is replicable for other topics/content.
      • Karen Schreier, producer.
      • Pedagogical Drivers - situated learning, ethical reasoning and reflection, identity formation, and media fluency.
      • Do kids get media fluency, or could they prove fluency, without media *creation*?
      • Historical Objectives - convey chaos, perspectives of eyewitneses, sense of Boston, and the role of ordinary people in the revolution (not just founding fathers).  showing different perspectives and the role of perspectives/experience in historical accounts.
      • Game Design - early on, game design defined playground; later, historical and pedagogical objectives drove game design.
      • evaluation - multiple choice exam?!? more richly, looked at engraving and judged how well students could see the engraving as a argument rather than fact.
      • Saw cases of (Jim Gee's term) "projective identity" ... separation between student's perspective and the student's choices for the character's actions.
    • Re:Activism NYC: Urban Interactions and Learning
      • Colleen Macklin, for Petlab
      • played at CO&P in 2008; also with students
      • game visits sites of activism in NYC.  semi-simple scavenger hunt ... go there, and answer questions that require the locale; many challenges would require re-enactment, with bonus points for pulling people in.
      • enact acts in the location to unerstand perspectives.  Shirtwaist factory fire enacted by doing chalk drawings of kids on the sidewalk.
      • learned from playtests that giving legit-looking materials really helped validate the game with passers-by.
      • a team that lost ... lost because they found some great people to talk to.
      • they revised the game to allow those rich experiences to pay off, so that it's not just about the quantity of sites.
      • big games are in the real world.
      • racing mechanic fought against the goal of deep engagement with sites.
      • levels of learning - the designers learned the most to build the game; players learned a lot; but public learned, too, watching the
      • next up: photopolis in beijing
      • would repeat for 20-40 people!
      • How do you deal with the contentious nature?  they send chaperones, esp. with kids.  warn about photographs.
    • my q: are these spreadable beyond the mediated context?
    Symposium: Emerging Models of Game Development & Publication
    • P is for Partnership: How A New Game Publishing Model Can Advance Children's Learning Across Settings
      • Levine from Koontz Center & Alan Gershenfeld from E-Line Ventures.
      • Levine: gap between formal and informal learning.  Getting industry to respond to the challenge, and to think about "24/7"
      • Gershenfeld: Activision had a rigorous greenlight process that included publishing, business model, portfolio, etc.  But in G4C world, there's little rigor in the business side or a holistic publishing strategy.
      • What does a 24/7 publishing model look like?  What models include moderated play (and what are the modes of moderated learning/play)?
      • E-Line: use the consumer market as the basis; if it won't work there, it won't work elsewhere... BUT, they want an organic connection between the model and the project and its viability in the learning community.
      • BrainPop (I don't know about this.)  They have light animations that are teacher-friendly, low tech requirements
      • Levine: We've lost co-viewing for television.  Can we get a version of it back?  How about intergenerational play?
      • Gershenfeld:  Intergenerational play is changing how they're thinking about Fab game design.
    • The Interactive Social Language Education (ISLE) Platform
      • Process network: organization of groups that do various parts of the project, but not full-time or all in the same place.
      • Labyrinth ... meant to help with algebra, though it's never mentioned.  icue, NBC's project on history and social studies.
      • g4gmib.org - wanting to create a space where kids could get involved in raising money for childrens' medical programs  "Generation Cures"
      • useful slide goes here outlining the "Generation Cures Process Network" and the order in which they gathered various groups.
      • central need.  vendor group. stakeholder group. knitting the two together.
      • designed the program not around getting money, but about incentivizing players/participants to build their own networks - to work with parents, friends, etc. by seeking sponsors and advisors.
      • It's a "game-a-thon".
      • yay, steampunk!  designed game  not to be completely brain-candy, but to do hospital-aligned activities, at least at some level.  They want the world to make the medical and scientific worlds appealing.
      • Kids are excited and involved, fine.  Getting parents involved and interested is tougher.  They ignore email!
      • This entire conference is jazzed about getting teachers the right games for their classes.  How do we do that?
      • XEOS-ISLE Process Network is very different.  grntor and grantee. Learning Games Network for design consulting, help; brough in implementation vendors; HP for platform, state department for activities within platform. GLS & South African group.
      • This model looks a lot like DYN, iremix.org.
      • You can't just build it and expect them to come; you have to get groups involved (stakeholders) and their users immediately.
      • Matches people who know the language with people who are learning the language.
      • Construct sentences using shared words on cards, then link them and people vote for the best sentence.
      • I played xenosisle for a bit.
    • Science Education-Fundraising Project
      • Muzzylane.com
      • Sandstone - deliver games in browser with java plugin, 3D
      • Setting immersive 3D as a goal feels like a mistake - expensive and a visual time-sink.  Why set the tech bar that high?
      • Smart to make multipayer built-in.
      • (nice slide showing the game service)
      • got a tour of the game... I checked backchatter.  *blush*

    ]]>     Current Readings tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.57 2009-05-20T22:16:35Z 2009-05-22T03:40:55Z Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter
    Beyond the jump: academics, academic papers, and transmedia.
    ]]>
  • Giving Products a Good Backstory - Jeff Gomez is doing some really interesting work in creating narratives to help fans identify with a product.  I have mixed feelings about his work, sometimes, with my academic snobbery.  What he does is to carefully craft brands to be more appealing to me, like chocolate coating an olive (I don't like olives).  On the other hand, when done on something that I *do* like, it feels like taking something thin and making it three-dimensional.  So I think my occasional distaste is really just prejudicial snobbery-- when it works in my favor, I think it's awesome.

  • IGDA Curriculum Framework - initially started to create a template for creating lectures, courses, and degree programs in game-related fields, this changed to a "curriculum framework" with the goal of delineating all the topics related to games in an educational context - in other words, all the skills, topics, and material, but with the presentation left to the reader.  The result of the shift is that on reading it, I can't, for instance, say "this, this, this, and that are going to make up my course."  What I could do is take my existing course on a topic and look through the curriculum framework to see whether I've covered the bases, whether there are other elements that are "low-hanging fruit" which I could cover, and find some alternative contexts to bring up in class to tie in other topics that students find interesting. 

  • Operation: Resilient Planet - the Game - part of National Geographic's JASON Project.  I haven't played this yet, and so don't have much to write, but I'm curious to see whether it stands on its own without teacher interventions.  Many 'games' like this don't, or at least aren't fun without them.  Its developers, Filament Games, spoke at GLS.

  • "Engage Learning Using Simulations and Games" - a pamphlet put out by the Engage project introducing some basics of simulations and games and calling for grant proposals.

  • investiGaming - a gateway (portal) for research on gender and games.  It's a bit more than a blog ... interestingly, it's a lot like what I originally intended for textuality.org.  Each entry in the system is categorized and has a bunch of searchable metadata, as well as appearing somewhat like a blog and having entries that aren't just its subjects.  And that's not saying anything about its actual content, which could be quite interesting.

  • RezEd - "the hub for learning and virtual worlds," provides practitioners like educators, slibrarians, parents, and others with access to high quality resources and research in the field to establish a strong network amongst those using virtual worlds for learning."  These guys actually get it.  I found them through Barry Joseph of Global Kids, which produces RezEd, and I'm continually impressed by how thoroughly and authentically they get it. They run a lot of student-led projects where the students actually get to lead, and major parts of the project like the twitter feed and podcasts are written by students.  If you're interested in how education could be around games and virtual worlds, you should watch these guys.

  • Balancing an Open-Ended Game for Learning - an interesting paper from GLS, this focuses on assessing learning in a game that has many possible solutions or end-points.  How do you guarantee learning, or assess what was learned, if the game doesn't offer a single win condition as a sort of 'final exam'?  The game itself reminded me a *lot* of Plantasia, but apparently it was a bit richer in its biology and a bit thinner in the game design.

  • "Press Play to Grow! How Video Games Could be Designed to Facilitate Personal and Spiritual Growth Education" - a paper presented at GLS 2008, which seems to have gone on to become the basis of a full website including a blog.  The author brings a very carefully grounded approach to the issue. 

  • Selene - A Lunar Formation GaME - there's a lot about this online; the thing that caught me at the conference was the discussion of the hoops that they had to jump through to get a game-like project funded.  They couldn't call it a game, it had to be, at most, a Game-based, Metaphor-Enhanced (GaME) method.  However, in the course of jumping through all those hoops, they became very good at articulating why games game-like approaches work so well for education... and their methodology for "ensuring that your instructional game makes learning intuitive for players" is quite promising.
    • ]]>     ICON 28: Game Design Workshop tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.56 2009-05-17T17:00:02Z 2009-05-17T19:02:46Z Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter I-CON SF & Fantasy convention.  It was the second year, as well, that very few people showed up but that those who did seemed to enjoy themselves.  I've gone back and forth on the design of the workshop itself, but both years ended up with a similar setup due to the constraints of a convention.

    I think that it's worth doing a bit of a post-mortem on the workshop, the workshop within the con, and just generally posting this for comment.  I'd love to improve this for other events!

    Beyond the jump: Summary, Constraints of a convention, and possible revisions.
    ]]> Constraints

    The convention as a venue brings a set of particular constraints to a workshop.  These assumptions are pretty much given for a convention or conference:

    • You have little idea or control over how many people will attend.  Unless you're well-established in the field or the con, it's a big con with attendees likely to be interested in the topic, and the con will back you on limiting attendance somehow, you need to prepare for anywhere from 5 to 50 attendees.  This is even more variable given the vicissitudes of scheduling at a con.  If you are in a central location, at an easy time (not early morning), not scheduled against something popular, you migth get a lot of people ... but you don't control any of those things, probably.

    • Digital is a terrible idea.  I've attended several digital game design workshops at Otakon and heard about others.  They always disappoint.  The computers will have problems, taking time to solve and reducing the number of participants.  You will have to teach whatever software you're using.  You will not have enough time to set up a digital project from scratch, so you'll have to set something up beforehand and have participants tweak it - which will annoy a bunch of attendees who aren't interested in that genre of game, and greatly limits what you can teach about game design.  And then, at a con that can afford a room full of computers for you, you will also have way, way too many attendees for the computers.

    • You will not be able to describe what you're doing before people arrive.  Cons vary on how much info they give out about their events, but in the best circumstances you'll have 3-5 sentences in a program that no one will read.  Mostly people are going to skim the calendar and decide based on that (and what you're up against) whether to attend.

    • You probably won't have much time.  You're unlikely to get more than 1-2 hours, which really isn't that much, given that ...

    • You'll have no control or foreknowledge of the design experience of the attendees.  You've got to set up something that's fun for (in my case) a 13-year-old who likes space RTSes and a guy who's been making software for years and attends IGDA events regularly.

    Ideally, I'd give the better part of a day for the workshop, and would give out some readings ahead of time or could otherwise gauge the experience of the attendees and tailor the workshop to them.   With nearly a day, some setup time, and a way to be specific in the event description, I could even do something digital.  That's just not how a con works, though.

    Summary

    Given the contraints, both times I've used the Values@Play Workshop's Grow-A-Game deck for the workshop.  We talked a bit about design, then analysed games to get familiar with talking design, then did a mini design jam with the rest of the time.

    1. Design Primer - I haven't found a great way to do this, but there needs to be a way to get everyone speaking roughly the same language.  With only 1-2 hours, this has to be quick - I've given out a handout and run through it quickly (<10 min.) in order to familiarize people with the terms that I'll then be throwing around for the rest of the workshop.  The handout that I've used is below.
    2. Analysis - Everyone draws a value or a mechanic card from the Grow-A-Game deck, and then we go around the group naming games that use that mechanic or play with that value.  The value is much harder for people than the mechanic, surprisingly - I think because you have to be familiar with analysing mechanics in order to consider the values they encourage.  However, even being wrong is productive: "Sure, Final Fantasy includes buying things for money, but is that really teaching you trade?" If possible, there can be a second part of this - have everyone draw a game card and then discuss the mechanics or values that are present in that game.  
    3. Concepting - I floated around this, but the most successful system seems to be to jump right into the Grow-A-Game deck: each person or group draws a value and a mechanic (and a game if they get stuck), and then that group or the group as a whole comes up with a concept that seems to address the cards.  It's best to keep the concepting moving and to bring everyone back together quickly, because some of the ideas just aren't going to be workable or interesting.  And once you've done this to generate some ideas, you can move on to...
    4. Design - This depends a lot on the time available and the people.  Even with two hours, with a fresh set of people I couldn't get 'paper prototypes' going.  With a small group, we used this to close in on one idea to try to get it to a stage where it could be prototyped.  With a more experienced group and/or a few more hours, this has worked very well and created playable prototypes.

    Handout

    Grow-A-Game: A Game Design Workshop

    Formal Design Elements

    • Players (audience)
    • Objectives
    • Procedures (verbs)
    • Rules
    • Resources
    • Conflict
    • Boundaries
    • Outcome

    A different perspective: Play Elements
    • Mechanics
    • Verbs vs. Nouns
    • Uncertainty
    • Actors/Players
    • (Meaningful) Choices
    • Quantifiable Outcome
    • Narrative Space

    Forwards and Backwards Design:

    1. Core Emotion/Experience
      ... leads to ...
    2. Mechanics that foster that experience
      ... leads to ...
    3. Aesthetics or Content that match those mechanics

    Or,

    1. You've got Content
      ... which in the real world works by ...
    2. Mechanics that can be simulated/abstracted in a game
      ... which come down to ...
    3. A Core Experience or game

    Further Readings:

    Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.  MIT Press, 2004
    Game Design Workshop, Second Edition: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, by Tracy Fullerton.  Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2007

    Post-Mortem

    Overall, this structure has served well.  No one left halfway through, and everyone seemed interested rather than frustrated or disappointed.  That said, there are some things that I'd like to do differently:

    • The Analysis stage is too dry.  Right now it's just discussion.  I'd like to make it a bit more dynamic without taking too much more time.  It would be nice to do a "vote with your feet" setup ... if there are enough people, have each person walk around the room and stand near someone else whose game card uses the value or mechanic that they have, and when everyone has connected somehow, go through the group to explain their idea.  Or, closer to the vote-with-the-feet system, repeatedly choose games for areas of the room and have people go to the game area that most strongly utilizes their value or mechanic.

    • With enough people, it would be great to make a meta-game for this.  In each of the three stages, doing the analysis or design would net your group points, and at the end the top few scores would get a free game.  ... and then the group discusses whether that was really a game, a fun one, or how it could be made more interesting.  Set up like that, it's not really a game, though, more like a grading system for a quiz; it would be nice to give it some "meaningful choices" to make it a game.

    • I haven't yet been to a design workshop for newbies run by anyone more experienced than myself.  I'd love to see what Eric Zimmerman, or Tracy Fullerton, or Mary Flanagan, or Frank Lantz, or a hundred others, would do for this.
    ]]>     Current Links tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.55 2009-05-08T00:16:54Z 2009-05-08T02:36:20Z I set myself some criteria for random web readings about two months ago, as I was rebuilding this blog: if I write it up on the blog, I can read this. That's a pretty good way to go, if the... Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter if I write it up on the blog, I can read this. That's a pretty good way to go, if the time spent reading doesn't use all the time available for writing.

    Which I have let happen.

    So I'm going to make sure that I post those readings regularly, even if they're still queued up for reading and writing.  Starting now!

    • The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving - several experts' take on the Chinese government's efforts to manage the written language.  I'm intrigued by efforts to standardize (and maintain) languages because it seems like such an important, significant, and fundamentally futile activity. Documentation, yes.  Archival, yes.  Management - doomed from the moment ink hits paper.
    • Google Chrome Tech Doc - I'd probably have read this regardless of its presentation, because every now and then Google turns the world on its ear and I'd like to see the thinking as it does so.  However, they had Scott McCloud illustrate this doc, and ... it helps.  I was skeptical by page 3, thinking that sometimes he was just coming up with cute illustrations that added nothing (making me wish the space had been given to more text).  By page 8 I'd been swung around.  The important text is there, and some of the concepts get just that little push into clarity with a bit of visual support.  Now I'm wondering what the process was for creating that document-- did he interview people there, or just work from docs and photos?  How many of the people illustrated are now using his drawings as their avatars?
    ]]>     "The Best Games You've Never Heard Of" tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.53 2009-04-11T15:06:18Z 2009-04-11T19:38:23Z Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter
    This year I was on a panel called "The Best Games You've Never Heard Of."  I've got some thoughts on the panel below the jump, but what's really worth relating is the list of games that the panelists made.  I *tried* to get every one mentioned, but I'm sure I missed a few.  Add your own!

    Beyond the jump: the list, and thoughts on it.
    ]]>
    • Space Giraffe -on XBLA - a trippy Tempest-like game where the visuals get so busy that you end up having to play with the barnyard sound effects.  How many iTunes visualizers have gameplay?
    • Internal Section- for the PS 1 as an import - described as Tempest + Rez
    • Love Love 2, or Love Love Mine - for the PS 1 - which combines the unlikely activities of mine cart racing, sandwich making, and a dating sim
    • MDK 2 - for the DreamCast - 1 was mentioned, but apparently was not One Of The Best
    • The Path - for PC - A Little Red Riding Hood horror game with an unusual focus on storytelling
    • Word Image Sound Play -  for PS 2 as import - a music toy as much as a game, though I can't find any good English-language pages for.
    • IGI - a supposed GameMaker game, which I can't find anything for.
    • Cursor 10 - webgame - every move in the game is recorded, and when you run out of time (which you will), you'll have to collaborate with your past selves.
    • Food Fight - Atari arcade game - I don't remember what folks raved about with this.
    • Shadow of the Colossus - for PS 2 - I'm amazed that people haven't heard of this, but a bunch haven't.  I'm not the only person who considers this one example of high art in video games.
    • BioShock - has anyone interested in games right now NOT heard of this? Many people might be fooled into thinking that it's not great, though, by the fact that it's ANOTHER first person shooter that's all about grit and gore.  Well, that and Objectivism.
    • GuitarooMan - PS 2 and now PSP - music action game in the vein of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan or Elite Beat Agents
    • Cool Cool Tune - for PS 2 - ironically, its music is terrible; it's the gameplay that rocks
    • Panzer Dragoon Saga, - for the Sega Saturn - makes the list for its ending.
    • Then we got talking about Lonely Games (which include Shadow of the Colossus) - I probably have an entry pending on these down the road, but for now:
      • Aquaria - for Mac - as the last of the Atlanteans Aquarians find out what happened to your people
      • Flower - for PS 3 - almost more an aesthetic experience than a game - fly through a landscape as the wind
      • Knytt - for PC - explore haunting and beautiful landscapes to find pieces of your spaceship to return home
    • Echochrome - for PSP - an MCEscher topological puzzler
    • Blastworks - for Wii - a shooter where everything you destroy can become part of you, and which comes with a level editor
    • Carnival - this was mentioned, but I have no idea which of many games with a title like this is One Of The Best.
    • The Maw - for XBLA and PC - super cute and with good gameplay and serial content?  Sounds good...  though lots have folks have heard about it since PAX.
    • Zombie Smashers X - for PC - River City Ransom plus Zombies?  I'm skeptical, but it was mentioned.
    • Achievement Unlocked - webgame - "Who needs gameplay when you have achievements?"
    • PacMan Championship Edition - on XBLA - a successful rethink/remix of the classic game
    • Space Invaders Extreme - for DS and PSP - a remix/rethink of the classic game
    • Unreleased - I have mixed feelings about listing unreleased games as "best anything", but they do look like they'll be interesting, and they were mentioned.
      • The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom - for PC - Control time in order to eat pies! A temporal puzzler
      • The Unfinished Swan - for PC - Use a paint gun to make terrain visible in a 3D puzzler.  Gorgeous, if as yet a bit unfocused.
      • Achron - for PC - a real-time strategy game using time travel
      • Fez - for PC - swap between dimensions to get from point A to point B

    So, looking back over that list, it's really more a list of "cool indie games" and I'd be reluctant to give it the credit of being the "best ever" that you've never heard of.  Some of them aren't even out yet!  But the panelists are a well-played group overall, so there were a lot of really cool games there that, indeed, the audience had never played.  So: success!

    I was a bit nervous, because I don't consider myself that well read on the history of games.  I've played my games, and over the last few years I've learned how to search out excellent indie games.  But often what older conventions want is a comprehensive historical knowledge that I just don't have in games.  I had an NES, and a SuperNES, but I did not have an Atari, or an intact Sinclair.  I don't know the catalog of Japanese import games.  Fortunately the audience didn't seem to mind-- there's still a couple months' worth of play in that list!]]>     Welcome, ICON(oclasts) tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.52 2009-04-06T00:18:08Z 2009-04-06T00:21:12Z Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter
    If you're here from ICON ... welcome!  You made it to the right place, though this site may not look like it's about game design just yet.  I'll be posting resources related to the panels and workshop over the next few days.
    ]]>     WiiFit to the boxes we put ourselves in tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.51 2009-03-22T21:36:18Z 2009-03-22T21:45:23Z The most common complaints I see on the Wii Fit are: 1) No one uses it after the first day anyway, and 2) it's a placebo - any benefit that people see from using it they could just as easily... Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter most common complaints I see on the Wii Fit are: 1) No one uses it after the first day anyway, and 2) it's a placebo - any benefit that people see from using it they could just as easily could/would have gotten from any other exercise.

    To both of these complaints I say: who are you to tear something successful down, and you're wrong, besides.

    If you know me, you know that I have very little time for people whose first reaction to success is to minimize and denigrate it.  Their efforts add nothing to the world and take much from it.  There is utility in analyzing a success to learn how it was done, and even more utility in looking at how something harmful has become successful and how to stop it.  But the arguments against the Wii in general, and the WiiFit specifically are not doing that.  Here's an example:

    Talk to anyone that actually works in fitness - it isn't actually Wiifit helping them get fit. Wiifit is essentially a placebo. You'd get the same amount of exercise trying to play with the dial on a measuring scale by shifting left and right.

    There were two paragraphs in this person's comment, but they both said just that: there are other ways to do this, the WiiFit is fake.  Now, there is nothing productive here.  WiiFit makes *some* people lead healthier lives, gives *some* people the little nudge they need to do that thing they'd been knowing that they should.  That nudge might send them to the gym, in other circumstances.  But in the cases under discussion, the nudge came from WiiFit.  And there is nothing *wrong* with that.  Additionally, if they're not misusing 'placebo', then it actually argues against them. 

    Now, my frustration with this has an element to it that is very relevant to textuality.org.  One thing that is very special about playing and about games as they promote play is the creation of a space, temporal and physical, where some of the rules of everyday life are suspended.  In that space, you get a chance to try something that you would not normally do.  The "magic circle" around games allows people to practice at things as well as to sublimate antisocial desires.  Sometimes the thing being practiced is useless, but sometimes it's very very useful, as in the case of WiiFit.

    I will, begrudgingly, admit that there's very little "game" in the WiiFit as people commonly use it.  There are mini-games within it, but they are by no means the focus, and there's no metagame around them.  

    What there is, however, is a $70 peripheral, a console, and a whole bunch of software creating a "magic circle" ... around *exercise*.  Whether or not people get really into it, at some level they are role-playing a healthier person.  A home is a private place, which makes it excellent for self-conscious people to exercise in; the WiiFit gives them a structure to do that within.  It tracks their progress.  It lets them fail an exercise without embarrassment.  It makes them focus on the screen and their progress rather than on the jiggle of some body part that shouldn't jiggle.   And yes, I speak from experience.

    Sometimes the lovers need to wander off into the forest and be enchanted by fairies to sort out their squabbles.  Sometimes a White Wolf LARP is enough to teach someone to socialize.  Sometimes a "game" is all that's needed to change habits, because what's really needed is an excuse to be someone else for a little while.  Sometimes the placebo works, and that's productive.  ]]>     Conversation on Semantic Linking tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.48 2009-03-01T19:22:54Z 2009-03-01T19:44:20Z A while back, and spread over a year, two friends and I had a discussion of the semantics of links, spurred by some irritating automated dictionary linking. I tried to summarize the discussion in a couple of ways, but... Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter A while back, and spread over a year, two friends and I had a discussion of the semantics of links, spurred by some irritating automated dictionary linking. I tried to summarize the discussion in a couple of ways, but I couldn't do better than the original. Here it is.

    ]]> GH: Semantic Links 1 - QuestionMy friend GH posed this question in an email:

    2. Hyperlink Semantics.

    Or maybe that's not the right term. Here's an example:

    I was reading Information Week the other night (one of the only tech news sites that have balanced mac articles). I was there reading about GPLv3, that freak Stallman, and Torvalds' preference of v2 over v3. I read this paragraph:

    "Unless there's a radical reworking of GPL version 3 (GPLv3, in the programmer lexicon), a significant portion of the open source community will reject it, chief among them Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. "I will not sign on to GPLv3 if it limits how the code is used," Torvalds says in a lengthy E-mail [hyperlink] exchange with InformationWeek."

    I think, "Sweet!", interview with Torvalds, keeping it real! And I click the link named "E-mail" to read this phat interview. And instead I get:

    "Results found for: e-mail

    (electronic-mail)

    The transmission of text messages and optional file attachments over a

    network. Within an enterprise, users can send mail to a single

    recipient or broadcast it to multiple users. Mail is sent to a

    simulated mailbox in the network mail server or host computer until it

    is examined and deleted. The mail program (e-mail client) in your

    computer queries the mail server every so many minutes and alerts you

    if new mail has arrived."

    WHAT THE FUCK!!

    Don't get me wrong. Yes, these dictionary links are insidious and horrible. But that's not my problem. My problem is one of context. What informative content in the context of the main topic of this paragraph does linking to the definition of "email" provide? None. This is a huge problem on the web, and I see it every damn day. People link to things for the hell of it, because they can, just because there is a word that can be linked to something that is out on the web. As if the top priority in getting across an idea or in presenting a story is to be able to link to sites.

    Why? Is this just an outgrowth of the reductionist ethos that one tends to find in technology oriented people? It can't be only that, because this is a problem all over the web, not only in tech sites. Is this the result of the on-going breakdown of knowledge into information? I really don't know why. I just know that it is annoying and ill-conceived.

    (It's almost as if, on the web, there is no such thing as context, and instead we live in a world where words have one and only one informative meaning in any situation. Instead, of course, words have different **uses**, and those uses define their various meanings. Indeed, those uses **are** their meanings. By the way, for a really great discussion of this misunderstanding of language, see the "Philosophical Investigations." It's worth the read.)

    Scott, do you have anything on this over on Textuality? I did a brief buzz through, but wasn't sure how to look for this.

    (BTW, Scott, what was the term you were using when we were all over JL's? "Semantic Domains"? And what book was that in?)

    JL: Semantic Links 2 - The Philosophy

    My friend JL chimed in with this:

    Why? Is this just an outgrowth of the reductionist ethos that one

    tends to find in technology oriented people? It can't be only that,

    because this is a problem all over the web, not only in tech sites.

    Is this the result of the on-going breakdown of knowledge into

    information? I really don't know why. I just know that it is

    annoying and ill-conceived.

    I'm sure Scott has a bazillion thoughts on this, but having once upon a time done a whole shitload of research on semi-structured data, information organization and retrieval, etc., I have some intuitions and semi-informed ideas on why this is.

    1. 1) It's a general flaw in the way the Web was built. Links contain no semantic information at least partly for the same reasons HTML contains a blink tag and an "address" tag but no ability to explicitly place objects in relative positions to one another; the Web just wasn't originally conceived as including the variety of *kinds* of content that it does, so links weren't originally conceived as requiring more semantic information than, say, the text contained within them. Note that Tim Berners-Lee either quickly realized the problem there, or always thought of our current web as the first pass, because he's a major organizer of the Semantic Web project.

    2. Google has popularized the theory that you can extract meaningful, complex semantic information ("what is the relevance of this web page to some information need (i.e. web query) that I have?") from the structure of links into and out of a page (see: a million gallons of ink spilled about PageRank). This is at best a half-truth: that structure of links does have some predictive power, but we know that Google leverages an enormous amount of other contextual information about web pages to generate its rankings. (Besides, if semantic information was available, Google would presumably do much much better.)

    3. In general, the creation of semantics from syntax is a Great Mystery (possibly even "The Great Mystery") of human intelligence. The great frustration of building systems that perform tasks that we think of as requiring human intelligence is that, you know, in the end, everything is syntax. And yet we are able to extract meaning-heavy, context-heavy communication from each other and our signs every day, constantly. A huge amount of the history of building artificial semiotic systems (like the Web) is rather alchemical: it's about smushing together syntactic elements and hoping that meaning just somehow appear. After all, natural language is just a bunch of syntactic elements, but somehow meaning appears from it. Since we have not the first clue how that happens, we do a lot of coming up with sign-systems and then seeing what they can do. The basic flaw of Web links is that they are meant to be an unobtrusive "markup" of complex, ambiguous natural language that creates clear, unambiguous connections between documents. Just thinking about this, it seems obvious that we have no idea how the hell you'd do it, and if you could do it perfectly, you would have essentially solved the AI problem. Techies, however, are extremely fond of syntax-only solutions that place the burden of meaning-making on the end-users, who as humans have a better sense of how to create meaning than any computer system (that is, they have *any* sense of it). Thus, our current syntax-bound links on the Web are exactly as good or bad at communicating meaning as the humans responsible are at using them for communicating meaning. (In the case you cite, they did a shitty job.)

    4. So the problem with adding context to web links as a matter of their technical implementation is no one knows what the hell semantically-strong links would even look like at a systematic level. In a sense, the only naturally-occurring example we have of how to link one document to another document is with: natural language. Since the whole point of hypertext is to allow the "hypertextuality" -- the linked-ness of the text -- to be unobtrusive, natural language won't do; the point is to create something *more* powerful than an article with footnotes that contain cross-references, not *less*. So there seems to be a way in which context-free links are the best we've got for now, since we don't know how to do better.

    The general solutions I've seen to this so far have been:

    • Selecting a finite set of possible contextual meanings for a link, and using CSS to create a different appearance for each context. You can see this today in articles where, say, regular links that go to other similar information are underlined once in blue, but there are also links underlined twice in green that go the wikipedia article or dictionary definition of the word being liked. The NYT's bizarre system also applies here, in which there are visible links that are underlined as normal, but every single word in an article has an "invisible" link on it when double-clicked that takes you to a dictionary definition of the world. (I hate this feature with the fire of a thousand suns, by the way.) This solution clearly works okay, but it has immediate limitations: for one thing, if you had more than about two or at the most three different contexts you wanted to represent, your document would become a huge mess and hard to read and understand. For another, the set of possible contextual meanings is so huge that users can't depend on consistently applied markup across sites (although obviously standards could arise). So this doesn't really do anything for us, especially since all the implementations of this idea I've seen have been of the form of one kind of link that goes somewhere specific (dictionary) and one kind that goes "everywhere else."

    • The Semantic Web solution, aka Jeff Bezos's Stupidest Idea For Amazon, in which a massive ontology of knowledge is created and built into a computer system to be used for "artificial reasoning" about links and contexts. We've talked about why this is a terrible idea for Amazon, and it's an insane idea for the Web at large. I could go on and on.

    ...That's about all we've got.

    So I feel like the reason for your frustration, GH, is essentially that links suck, but they're basically all we've got for now.

    To take a more positive view, links are exactly as good or bad as the people implementing them, and the web is such an incredibly young medium that part of what we're seeing is just the thrashing around of trying to figure out how we'll use these new media tools we've come up with.

    I like your mention of Wittgenstein, mostly because I've often felt like the history of people using software to organize languages has been a desperate 60 year effort to prove Wittgenstein wrong by successfully engineering a system that couldn't work if Wittgenstein was right. Since I pretty much think Wittgenstein is right, you can see why eventually I had to leave grad school. :)

    Scott: Semantic Links 3 - Some Examples

    GH asked about links and context, and the pernicious laziness of automated linking to dictionary words. JL's elegant and concise reply is above.  Now for my rambling and verbose discussion of examples.

    First, JL had a great answer regarding the base problem of web links. To be more prosaically technical: In standard HTML, even today, there's no standard way to include context, largely because as Josh describes we just can't get computers to do context in any useful way. HTML doesn't include context because ... how the hell would it? What would a browser do with that tag attribute? Would *everyone* agree with that, or be willing to read in that manner?

    I'd like to emphasize the "standard" part there, though. Numerous hypertext systems have addressed rich context in various ways. As Josh described, various sites do their own thing by styling links differently depending on whether they're dictionary links vs. links to other articles (many news sites) or by whether the link goes to another page within the site vs without the site (wikipedia).

    The pre-web hypertext system Storyspace let an author set conditions on links-- if you'd been to certain lexia, a link would go one place, but if you hadn't, it would go another. That is a bit of a roundabout way of trying to ensure context without forcing the user to articulate it, by the way-- a reader doesn't have to *say* that they're following a link while thinking about a certain theme, but if they've just been to three other certain pages about that theme and then follow the link, there's a good chance of it. Obviously, even that system can't guarantee context. You might have read the last three pages tracing an argument because you are trying to get what the author means or you might have read them because you think the argument is horseshit and are jotting down points to debunk; you'll be hoping for very different things from any link under those two circumstances.

    Tinderbox, which is a software package intended in part to adapt Storyspace to the broader world of non-narrative hypertext authorship, simplified that system and tried to make it richer at the same time. Tinderbox documents don't assume a linear ('narrative') reading; they might be rendered as a website or even used as a text-heavy database. So Tinderbox gives an author a few metadata fields for links and an arbitrary number for lexia themselves. You could have Tinderbox render out only links of a certain type (context) or list links with their contexts as a pop-up window on mouseover of a link.

    Note as well that there *is* a standard in HTML now that can greatly help with context for links, but it is almost completely unused: the tooltip. As people become more sophisticated hypertext readers, they generally hit a point where they preview a link. They'll mouseover it and look at the URL that pops up in the browser window. That'll often tell you whether it goes to the NYT, to someone's blogspot account, etc. That's really useful for the Penny Arcade comic, for instance, where they write really well and link very well except that you often can't tell which link goes to the comic of the day. I am rarely interested in following the political fights that inspire a particular Penny Arcade post, so I'll mouseover the links to see which one is a link to their own site rather than some player forum. Since standard HTML includes a tooltip attribute for an anchor tag, so we could take that behavior to the next level and put a link's context into the tooltip. It wouldn't be *responsive* to context, but it would at least communicate the context the author had in mind when forging the link.

    A bit of fantasy that I've indulged in on occasion: it would be pretty awesome if we could include reader-defined context into hypertext, something that I call Tiered Engagement. I think that the ultimate tutorial system, be it in a game, the next version of Word, or The Perfect Digital Projection of a Textbook, would be one that would respond to the learner's level of experience. Imagine opening Photoshop and telling it that you're a novice user, you're really only retouching some photos that your aunt took at your cousin's bar mitzvah. It hides all the burning and dodging and masking tools and rearranges the Help feature to be really basic for you. Then later your wife opens Photoshop so that she can do her freelance colorist work, and she gets the full interface and a help system that basically shrugs its shoulders and sends her directly on to the Adobe forums. I'm getting a bit off by looking at Photoshop as a hypertext, but you can imagine a similar system within a more traditional text: the fifth grader gets different links from the chapter on Volcanos than the 12th grader, and the geophysicist gets another set entirely.

    The trick is, as JL notes, getting the reader to define the context in a way that the system will understand. He spent much of grad school watching his professors beat their heads against the fact that it's hard to get readers to define context for themselves for something that they don't yet know, and trying to second-guess them by essentially modeling their knowledge is, really The Problem of Artificial Intelligence. In the very limited domain of "using Photoshop" or "reading this specific article in a particular reference", you can assume a lot of the reader's perspective, and just have to determine the level of engagement that the reader wants. On more open-ended work, though, there are too many perspectives or levels of understanding for that.

    JL noted that techies like to leave the burden of defining context up to the end-user. I'm probably a techie, but both my techie and my literary sides say this is okay if you include the author as an end-user. In a traditional printed book or article (still far and away the primary model for most online writing), you rely on the author to arrange their words in such a way that their point is comprehensible to the reader. If they do it well, they're a "clear" or "good" reader. If they don't, they're either "bad" or "difficult". I don't see why writing hypertexts should be any different. Jerry Parkinson is a good writer, and so includes links smoothly within his sentences in a way that, generally, means that if some link text interests you, you click on it and get something that tells you more about what interested you in clicking on the link. The author of the article GH read, or their publishing website, is a poor writer, linking text in a pedantic, patronizing way rather than in a way that expanded their argument.

    That's a lot of words for what JL meant when he said that hypertext is a new medium, and we're still learning its conventions. I don't think that it's inherently related to technology or to a reductive techie mindset, though, beyond the hubristic idea that the formation or assessment of meaning can be automated.

    I don't know jack about Wittgenstein, but now I'm interested, at least in the stuff that touches on this. Got any links? ;)

    ]]>     Hello, World tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.2 2009-02-27T19:51:13Z 2009-02-27T19:53:42Z Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter The Long Winter tag:www.textuality.org,2009://1.16 2008-12-23T19:20:15Z 2009-02-28T19:28:51Z As you can see from the post below this one, I haven't posted here in a very, very long time. And, just as damningly, it was a long, long time before there was a post before that. I started... Scott Price http://www.grendel.org/hunter

    As you can see from the post below this one, I haven't posted here in a very, very long time. And, just as damningly, it was a long, long time before there was a post before that.

    I started this blog to walk through hypertext, to teach myself the field by doing a survey of its works and its objects. As I did so, I began to conclude that my original survey would result in a Museum of Curiosities rather than a coherent collection. As I was entering this hiatus I decided, though it's a bold statement to throw out without time for defense, that what I was interested in within the field of hypertext had moved elsewhere, and has become instantiated in, largely, games. Perhaps games and blogs and wikis. That's where the interesting work of multilinear, non-linear, reader-responsive, 'yielding' text is.

    And then I got a job in the game industry, and stopped posting.  Learning a new career is hectic, and when I enjoy my work, I dive into it headfirst.  In this case, I have only just come up for air for the first time.

    I'd like to start this back up again, largely because I've now been in the game industry long enough to have some articulate thoughts about my original interest. I've also got a lot of things that I was interested in back when I was writing this blog that couldn't make it in-- things which squeezed out into the occasional entry like the last. Education. Infotainment. Edutainment. Role playing games and epistemic frames. Getting children, or users, or players, to approach their world like authors of an intertwingled, multilinear narrative.

    So, I'm hoping to bring this back. I tested, first, whether my Tinderbox posting system still functions through all these cobwebs.  It doesn't, and after two years, finding the documentation that I would need to fix it without upgrading would be difficult - Tb's docs have never been very accessible (I should know, I spent time trying to fix that situation), and they're certainly not good across time.

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