Intute has a nice summary page about serious games, Researching videogames with Intute. The page is just the right length and builds on records in Intute. I note that they don’t mention the Serious Games Institute that I blogged recently.
This is the first time I’ve noticed that Intute is publishing longer guides. They call them Limelights and describe them thus:
Limelight, from Intute: Arts and Humanities, is a monthly feature showcasing individual artists, topical subjects, new and noteworthy websites, or forthcoming events, exhibitions or festivals. Each feature gives information, links to related sites in the Intute: Arts and Humanities database and suggestions for possible searches.
I just stumbled upon the Serious Games Institute (SGI) at Coventry University. Their aim is, “to become an international centre of excellence for serious games and a model of best practice for regional development through technology innovation.” (About Us) They seem to be focused on developing games to teach business, and the games seem to be fairly sophisticated. (See their Showcase.) It is interesting how serious gaming is being used to revitalize a region. nGen (Niagara Interactive Media Generator), recently announced by Brock, is a similar initiative that is connecting with Silicon Knights to kickstart game development as a way of generating new industry.
The Serious Games Institute seems to use Second Life a lot where they have an island.
Two of my students have been getting attention for an original senior thesis they did for Multimedia. Calen Henry and Jacob Karsmeyer created a mod for Half-Life 2 to explore game physics. You can get the mod and read their essay on the history of game physics on the web site the created, Half-Life: Havoc. As of today, Sunday, April 13th they are ranked 5th on Mod DB. Kotaku has also blogged their project which seemed to have started a long thread about whether one can trust downloads not to have viruses (and some comments about the writing.)
My students in the Digital Games course have all finished their historic game character sculptures for McMaster University’s Gaming Sculpture Garden (see earlier post). Thanks to the Library who have paid for the island and supported this project. Thanks to Dave Marhal who set up the garden, taught the students how to sculpt in Second Life, and then helped arrange the garden.
The experiment went better than I expected. Even the students used to Maya, who found SL fairly crude as a modeling environment, enjoyed the social aspect of an assignment in SL. Come visit by using this SLURL and teleporting. Click on the sculptures for an introduction to the characters. Take a tour around the island and its surreal spaces. Could you teach or learn in this space?
It won’t come as a surprise that libraries are getting into gaming, whether to support game studies by making games available as they do books, or using games to teach information literacy. I came across na nice conference video report by Tom Peters of the American Libraries Association (ALA) TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium in 2007. I like how the video report is edited. It is a bit short of content, but it shows the atmosphere and people.
I’m less convinced by games to teach library and information skills. Here are some I’ve found:
Quarantined: Axl Wise and the Information Outbreak is from Arizona State and lets you play a student, Axl, who works for the student newspaper and who has to figure out why the university is quarantined. It seems rather a lot of irrelevant puzzles for a little bit of simulating searching for information, but could be fun enough.
I’ll Get It and Within Range are two games from Carnegie Mellon, neither of which are much fun, but that may not be the point.
I’ve been talking with Kevin Kee at Brock about the logic of serious games or educational games. I’m tempted to say that games can’t by definition be both playful and serious. I gave a paper to that effect at Playing the Gallery, but Kevin is convincing me that games are sophisticated enough a phenomenon that there can be all sorts of planned learning. I think the National Film Board The Cyber-Terrorism Crisis site (which Kevin was involved in) might be a good example of a playful web site for learning, though parts of it are no longer working. I’m certainly convinced that designing games can be serious work through which learning happens. I also accept that there are things one learns through playing like “problem solving”. I just find games created to teach certain skills, like how to file books, are neither games nor particularly good at teaching.
Stay tuned, Kevin and I are writing a dialogue where I will get to be a curmudgeon on this issue.
Carnegie Mellon is going global with their Masters in Entertainment Technology program. They have a campus in Adelaide, Australia and are adding new ones in Japan and Singapore. The High Concept is project based learning where people from an arts or technology background learn to work together and deepen their understanding of entertainment technology. It has the virtue of weaving arts and computing students together rather than segregating them.
The “high concept†behind both the Entertainment Technology Center and the Masters in Entertainment Technology degree is that we are based on the principle of having technologists and non-technologists work together on projects that produce artifacts that are intended to entertain, inform, inspire, or otherwise affect an audience/guest/player/participant. The masters degree is focused on extensive semester-long project courses. This focus allows us to tackle the much larger challenge of effectively bringing together students and researchers from different disciplines.
We do not intend to take artists and turn them into engineers, or vice-versa. While some students will be able to achieve mastery in both areas, it is not our intention to have our students master “the other side.†Instead, we intend for a typical student in this program to enter with mastery/training in a specific area and spend his or her two years at Carnegie Mellon learning the vocabulary, values, and working patterns of the other culture.
Is global programs simultaneously offered in different regions an answer to distance education? After all it is cheaper for instructors to move than students. Could faculty find they are part of multi-university programs instead of affiliated with one university?
The site also has a good list of similar programs elsewhere, which I think is generous. More programs should be honest about the alternatives.
So I’m teaching a course on digital games and I’ve asked students to create a sculpture of an historic character from videogame history in Second Life. In the picture above you can see the Sculpture garden that Dave Marhal has created on the McMaster Library island where students will place their sculptures. When its done, I hope you will visit.
The 2007 Video Game Report Card from MediaWise.org is out. It focuses primarily on ESRB ratings, whether parents understand them and how they are being used by retailers. The summary reports that,
this year, our findings suggest that the unacceptable negative impact of excessively violent video games on young people is a problem depicted in an ever expanding body of research. Increasingly, the companies which create and market the games, the retailers who sell them and the parents who buy them have become too comfortable with the voluntary standards they set for themselves in previous years.
Complacency, especially on the part of retailers and parents, appears to have caused a backslide in ratings awareness and enforcement.
The full report (which can be downloaded) has a fairly succinct review on the research about links between gaming and violence along with a bibliography. The report obviously takes the stand that children should not be playing ESRB M or AO rated games and that retailers and places that rent games need to train clerks better to enforce rules about who can buy games. There is some interesting stuff about blurred sequences in M (Mature) games. They go further and suggest that we need a common rating for all entertainment media:
A universal ratings system is needed now, more than ever, to increase ratings knowledge and reduce confusion. A majority of parents favor one rating system for all media.
Values At Play is a web site and research project to encourage the design of social values in computer games. The site has curricular materials, example games that registered users can download and research resources. It is led by Dr. Mary Flanagan of the Tiltfactor game research lab at Hunter College, and Dr. Helen Nissenbaum at NYU.
Our ambition is to harness the power of video games in the service of humanistic principles, or human values, knowing that their work can have a tremendous and wide-ranging impact on our world. The Values at Play (VAP) research project assists and encourages designers to create computer games that identify and promote human values.
I just gave a paper for the Playing the Gallery symposium organized by the McIntosh Gallery, The University of Western Ontario. My paper was on “The Problem with Serious Games” where I worked with definitions of play to work out the tensions between playing games and serious work.
Serious Games (not serious gaming) is a label being used to self identify and authorize games designed for non-entertainment purposes. In 2002 the Serious Games Initiative was founded at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. The CMP Game Group has been running semi-academic Serious Game Summits and a web site Serious Game Source.