The Kokoromi Collective have an interesting invitational challenge – One Button games. Design a game with only one button as input. Neat.
Kokoromi is an experimental game collective formed by a rare union of Montreal gamemakers and curators to promote games as an art form and expressive medium worldwide. Based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Kokoromi produces events, develops games, and hosts a blog at www.kokoromi.org. (About Us)
The Graphics, Animation and New Media Canada Network of Centres of Excellence has been funded, see NCE News Release.
New Media, Animation, and Games — these technologies are the building blocks of the Digital Age. The Science, Technology and Innovation Council report in 2008 recognized this as a priority research sub-area within Canada’s Science and Technology Strategy. This application responds to the needs identified in that report. The GRAND NCE will undertake a comprehensive research program whose goal is to understand the underlying technologies and to make selective advances in a coordinated, multidisciplinary setting that lead to social, legal, economic, and cultural benefits for Canadians.
This brings significant challenges because the ability to access, manipulate, and disseminate information in its various media forms radically changes on almost a daily basis. The research program will meet these challenges through a dynamic set of interconnected projects built on a conceptual framework of five themes. Three themes focus on the technology clusters identified by the Science, Technology and Innovation Council: (1) New Media Challenges and Opportunities, (2) Games and Interactive Simulation, and (3) Animation, Graphics and Imaging. The other two cross-cut the first: (4) Social, Legal, Economic and Cultural Perspectives, and (5) Enabling Technologies and Methodologies. Thirty projects each explore a different aspect of selected problems. Fifty Network Investigators lead projects, with Collaborating Researchers and Partners from the public and private sectors participating as domain experts and receptors to exploit the resulting new knowledge and technologies. (Executive Summary)
This truly interdisciplinary NCE is led by Kellog S. Booth at UBC and includes network investigators from across the country. The U of Alberta lead is Jonathan Shaeffer. I’m one of the network investigators at U of A and will be working on serious games. Isn’t that grand!
Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks
The Onion has posted a story about a Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks. Now that’s realism.
The Federation of American Scientists held a National Summit on Educational Games that has released a report titled, Harnessing the Power of Video Games for Learning. This is not, despite the sponsor, a scientific report. It is a call for funding for research into educational games. The report, however, slides into hype about American competitiveness. I think the pitch is that games will save American education and keep the country competitive. So, for example, on the first page it reads,
The success of complex video games demonstrates games can teach higher order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change.
The phasing may be unfortunate, but I read this as suggesting that financial success demonstrates educational value. Does that mean that the success of Celine Dion demonstrates that pop music can teach higher order skills? Further on they write,
Many companies and industries have transformed themselves by taking advantage of advances in technology, and new management methods and models of organization. As a result, they realized substantial gains in productivity and product quality while lowering costs. No such transformation has taken part in education. Education is not part of the IT revolution. (p. 6)
How can scientists say that education is not part of the IT revolution? Have they been to a school or university recently? For that matter, where are the companies using computer games to teach management methods and models of organization? (Perhaps the financial sector was playing a bit too much World of Warcraft to worry about managing our pensions.) My impression is that gains in productivity have come through automation and inventory control.
My counter proposal would be to invest in board games for teaching higher order skills. Lets bring back Monopoly (or the Landlord’s Game it was based on) as a way of learning about property, mortgages, and bankruptcy. Board games would be cheaper and probably teach the same higher order skills.
I’m sure I’m being unfair, and they do call for more research into what skills games could teach which is needed.
Technically Personal posted a very useful list of 15 Stunning Augmented Reality Apps for the iPhone. This includes Layar which is now available for the iPhone (see image above.) These AR apps make it possible to start developing AR games.
Thanks to Sean for this.
Well we have started the first Intensity Challenge experiment for the Humanities Computing MA students and selected Computing Science graduate students. The idea of the challenge is that, working in teams, they have a week to to a challenge project. This year’s project is to develop an Alternate Reality Game. Next Tuesday we all gather and the teams present their games, designs, or whatever they do for this challenge. Let the team with the most points win!
The point of the challenge is to give incoming students an immediate experience of how different humanities computing is here – to orient them to doing team projects with multiple components using the resources at hand. Here is the FAQ from our instructions:
Do I have to be good at something to participate? Absolutely not, but you need to be willing to try. One of the goals of this is to help you figure out what you want to learn and how to learn with others.
Will you tell us what to do? Absolutely not! You are a graduate student. Figure out what you want to do and how to do it. At the end we will tell you how we would have done things, if you ask us. There will, however, be times when you can meet with people on campus who can help you.
I will need to go to a class during the week – is that OK? Of course, work it out with your team. Managing the time of team members with differing commitments is a real challenge, and a skill we all need to improve.
I think this is neat, but have to work during that week. Can I audit? No, this isn’t for credit so there is no such thing as auditing. You participate or you don’t. The key is how you communicate the work you have to the team. Ask a team if they will include you. It is up to them.
I have a friend who wants to do the music for this, but she isn’t a graduate student. Can others help out? Of course. Like any real project, the more you can involve the right people the better. Just don’t exploit anybody.
How much do we have to write up? That’s something you have to work out. A Design Document can take different forms, but there are faculty members with this sort of expertise. Track them down!!! We will tell you some of the things you should include, but part of the project is figuring out its scope.
What do I present at the end? Present your game. Be creative. Perhaps answer some of the questions we asked at the end of page 1. Make sure you know how to present in the HuCo lab (Old Arts 112). If you don’t know how presentations are structured, then ask around.
Does the game have to be fun? Depends on your objectives. Is it a Serious Game? Is it a “game” at all? You might want to discuss “games” with your team. Perhaps your team could answer this question with a game.
Can we cheat? Sure, if you can figure out what cheating is. That doesn’t mean we will be impressed. What you shouldn’t do is anything illegal, unethical, dangerous, or academically dishonest (don’t plagiarize.)
Is this experience a game? Not really, it is designed to give you experience running a project all the way from conception to delivery, even if incomplete. This experience will inform the more detailed discussions in the courses ahead. On the other hand, there might be some playful aspects, and we might throw in a few curves as the week progresses.
Sean pointed me to another Augmented Reality implementation – this time an easter egg called Monocle in the Yelp iPhone Application. When activated on the iPhone 3GS it uses the compass to get direction and overlays business information over the image through the camera.
Twitter is so yesterday … I’m trying out brightkite.com a location-based social network tool. If you download the iPhone app then you can “Check In” so your friends (or everyone) knows where you are (were). Alternatively you can post a note to your (or a nearbye) location or you can post a photo.
I want to see if this can be used for geo-games or adding a knowledge layer to locations. I can get a “Placestream” by location, but the emphasis of the interface is on friends nearby (all five people in Edmonton that I don’t care about) and what’s happening (the inane “I’m here” posts of the terminally boring.) I want to create a quality layer of location-based knowledge that someone could subscribe to, like a “Local History of Edmonton” that people could turn on to get local history in the wild.
They seem to be collaborating with Layar, which is cool, and they do have an API …
From the Wall Street Journal online I learned about a restaurant in Soho, London called, inamo. The restaurant has projectors over the tables so the table top is an interactive screen. You can project menu choices onto your plate, change the mood, play games, and even order a taxi. I wonder if we are going to see a lot more table-top displays? Will advertising pay for interactive tables all over? What could we do with a seminar room?
The online journal Human IT has an issue on gaming with an interesting article about mobile gaming (or augmented reality gaming) for education. See Elisabet M. Nilsson & Gunilla Svingby: Gaming as Actions: Students Playing a Mobile Educational Computer Game. The article has a clear and short summary of the literature around serious games and education that points out that there isn’t yet much evidence for the theoretical claims.
The overall conclusion seems to be that even if several studies show effects on learning as well as on attitudes, empirical evidence is still lacking in support of the assumption that computer games are advantageous for use in educational settings. (p. 28-9)
The article touches on the problem we all have when we ask students to role play (whether as part of a game or simulation), which is how seriously they take it.
Some of the groups had a clear ironic touch on almost all of their utterances, at the same time as they were taking on the assignment with a serious attitude. When playing the game, they seemed to constantly oscillate back and forth between the imagined game world and their own reality. They played their alloted fictive role, and at the same time referred to their own personal experiences. (p. 43)
I’m convinced this irony has to do with how comfortable students feel playing roles before others. What does it mean in the web of class relationships to ask a student to act before others? Should they have a choice? Obviously they handle the uncomfort with irony as a way of preserving their identity in the class. That they can do both (play a fictive role and their ironic self) at the same time is impressive. On page 53 the authors suggest that a context where students can alternate (motivations) could make for an “engaging learning experience.”