textuality.org

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. 

Kotaku picked up a video interview of Will Wright made for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  I try not to worship Will Wright, but I think he gets just about everything right in this interview. 

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.

This week's readings are all over the place.  After a talk by Clay Shirky, I read up on him; I missed a conference that I'd have liked to have gone to; and I followed up on some old topics of interest.

• The Story of Justin Hall, as "Putting Everything Out There" - The first chapter from Scott Rosenberg's book about blogging.  I went to school with Justin Hall, and everything I read in the article seems aptly described.  This should be required reading for anyone who wants to be knowledgeable about the history of writing on the internet.
  
  
• The Escapist Magazine - How a Board Game Can Make You Cry - "Serious games" done well, and well told.
  
  
• The Game Education Summit Schedule - The week after GLS, I couldn't possibly make this conference.  Too bad; it sounds like it was pretty interesting.
   
• Fiction Reaches a New Level - The upcoming game Dante's Inferno is going to set back the clock about 5 years on trying to get games recognized as artwork or even a storytelling medium.  We can do better than this.  The article is actually pretty kind, and mostly focuses on how exceptional this case is.
  
  
• twitter before twitter, by Clay Shirky - a remarkably prescient piece.  He doesn't mention twitter, but you might as well find/replace it in there.
  
  
• Ken Robison says schools kill kids' creativity - another TED talk.
  

Day three of my notes from the Games, Learning, Society Conference!

After the jump: A lot of notes.

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!

This is my first attempt at liveblogging.  The plan is to take notes on each session here in textuality, then to later write some entries in greater depth on particular topics.

After the jump: notes on the sessions!

This week I've been preparing for the Games, Learning, Society 5 conference coming up in a few weeks -- which, embarrassingly, means going through all the flyers, papers, and postcards that I picked up last year.  So this week's reading is GLS + links.

Beyond the jump: academics, academic papers, and transmedia.

This was the second year that I've run a game design workshop at the 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.

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 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?

Last weekend I attended I-CON 28, a pan-geek convention on Long Island.  Sci-fi, fantasy, anime, furries, you name it and they're there.  It's often odd not merely by design but because it's both large and small-- large enough to have been running for 28 years and to often get some decent Guests of Honor, but small enough to have an "e-gaming" track of six people and to include me among them.

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.