GRAND 2011 Conference

I’m at the GRAND 2011 Conference. GRAND is a Networks of Centres of Excellence funded project that brings together researchers across Canada and across disciplines to study gaming, animation, and new media. I am part of two subprojects. In one we are developing smartphone augmented reality games for learning and health. In another we are developing gestural and performance games. Our fearless leader, Kellogg S. Booth (UBC), opened today’s events talking about the network.

Having organized large groups and participated in others, I’m impressed by how GRAND gently gathers us. We are coerced by the network, though we do have to report carefully.

See my conference notes for more on the conference.

David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain : The New Yorker

The other day I got into a fascinating discussion about cognitive science and whether the humanities might be replaced by neuroscience. (See my previous blog entry, Harpham: Science and the Theft of Humanity.) For example, the study of beauty (aesthetics) might be replaced by the study of how people think about beauty and what parts of their brain light up when they experience beauty. This conversation was with a neuropsychologist who was patient with my fumbling critique. Then Bethany sent us a link to a story in the New Yorker where the featured scientist says,

“There’s always an impulse toward phrenology in neuroscience—toward saying, ‘Here is the spot where it’s happening,’ ” Eagleman told me. “But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”

via David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain : The New Yorker.

Military Tests Apps and Other Digital Training Tools

From the New York Times an article about how the Military Tests Apps and Other Digital Training Tools (Andrew Martin and Thomas Lin, May 1, 2011). The article talks about the US military is trying various games including mobile games to train soldiers. The Army help a content for the best smartphone application that generated all sorts of apps including “Army Physical Readiness Training” and “Luther’s Small Catechism”.

The article also talks about VBS2 (Virtual Battlespace 2) which is a “battlefield simulation system.” It allows trainers and even users (in the field) to develop or tweak simulations. Developed by Bohemia Interactive Australia the simulator predicts a world where all army and responders have editable simulation tools for modeling their local environment for training.

Thanks to Steve for this. (I’m now down to 5 more articles from the NYT this month and I’m only on the third day … hmmmm.)

Issuu – You Publish

Thanks to Sharla I came across Issuu a site for publishing online magazine like documents. You get an account, you upload documents, and they create an interactive page-flipping e-publication out of it. When you “Click to read” a publication an application takes over your screen to give you a reading environment. They seem to have a lot of publications made available this way.

Game Pitches

Sean sent me to Game Pitches: The repository for video game pitches and design documents. The actual documents are in Scribd and they have about 35 documents at the moment. It is good to see such documents being gathered and made available. The site is aimed at helping game designers:

This site serves to be a free resource to game designers offering them the web’s largest single collection of game design documents and game pitches. Be they famous or obscure, big or small, successful or not, this site is intended to be a resource for learning how better to design and pitch games in the spirit of sharing information and improving the state of the art through freely available knowledge. Let’s make great games! 🙂 (From the About page.)

In the academy we also need to think about archiving such documents. We should find ways to help such projects.

Etherpad

I have just discovered Etherpad which lets you write collaboratively in really real time. The original code came from a Google project that has been wound down. There are, however, a number of projects that let you create public pads like iEtherPad and there is the Etherpad Foundation that is committed to maintaining the code.

I heard about this as an alternative to Twitter for a conference backchannell. The idea is that you create a public pad and share it with participants who can then edit a large responsive document together. In principle it sounds like one would get a better transcript and response to an event.

Gamifiying Budgets: Having Fun with Your Finances

From Boing Boing I came across this article by Mark Frauenfelder on Having Fun with Your Finances in Credit.com (April 25, 2011). The article reviews two sites that gamify your home finance goals, payoff.com and smartypig.com. It sounds like smartypig is the best, but is also still in beta.

I suspect we are going to see an explosion of sites gamifying things (and I’m actually working on one too.)

‘Alone together?’ exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games – PARC, a Xerox company

My vote for the best article on computer games in a long time is ‘Alone together?’ exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games. Ducheneaut and colleagues at PARC have found a way to gather data from World of Warcraft (WOW) and analyze it for social data. The paper gives a nuanced view of the social aspects of WOW summarized by the phrase “alone together.” Unlike some other MMOGs the game doesn’t encourage socialization. In fact playing solo is more effective for leveling up (until you get to the very top levels.) The social aspect of WOW has more to do with being seen as having achieved. You may not be actively playing with others, but players like playing alone in a game where there is an audience for their achievements and the potential for social interaction.

Interestingly, what seems effective in the design of WOW is the steady leveling. There is always another level achievable with a bit more work.

Education: The PhD factory

Thanks to Slashdot I came across two articles in Nature about the excess of PhDs in the West. Education: The PhD factory (you need a licensed login) says that the “world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?” This story is largely based on an OECD Working Paper titled Careers of doctorate holders: employment and mobility patterns (PDF).

The other Nature article is an opinion piece titled Reform the PhD system or close it down by Mark C. Taylor. He argues that the system should be changed drastically, at least in the US.