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This weekend was the Global Game Jam , and the Boston site, MIT's GAMBIT , had about 25 developers.  My team of 3 made a game called move mouse to fulfill destiny.  We tied for favorite game of the devs in Boston, and seem to be picking up some good reviews among the blogs.  You can download it from the official site , or play it online here.  My wonderful teammates were: Will Jennings - Programming, Design, Art,  and Filippo Beck Peccoz - Music.

The press so far:
Independently Speaking - Best of Global Game Jam

Last Tuesday, I presented at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in the mobile track about the best ways of connecting mobile games and MMOs. Here are my slides (PowerPoint file). Gamasutra wrote a surprisingly thorough summary. The session was well-attended; among the audience were several large MMO developers who have yet to announce their mobile plans. It will be interesting to see which directions they go with mobile.

Dan Roy: Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions, Cardell. Let's jump right in. When working on Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), did you think at all about mobile (e.g. checking auctions via WAP or SMS)?

Cardell Kerr: Absolutely! The simple fact is that these games prosper off of continued investment from the player, and there are few mechanics that foster this better than allowing a person to ping an auction house, or allow for some form of online trade. Ultimately, we decided to focus on the heart of the game more so (questing and combat), knowing we could add more support for other options later.

Dan Roy: Thanks for participating in this conversation, Raph. Let's talk MMOs. Throughout your career with MMOs, did you think at all about mobile (e.g. checking auctions via WAP or SMS)? What possibilities with mobile excite you, if any?

Raph Koster: Every project I've ever been on except for the very earliest ones, there was the question of what, if anything, we could expose via mobile. Ideas like letting people check friends online, check status of auctions, do crafting, and so on, were always common proposals.

Personally, I suspect that mobile is going to rapidly grow into being more than just a minor adjunct in the sense that those proposals imply. I think there will be full-blown mobile clients to virtual worlds.

This Saturday I presented at MIT's Media in Transition 5 conference. The presentation covered identity construction, something I've been focusing on in my thesis. Gene Koo, Fellow at Harvard Law, summarized the presentation on his blog. Here's my own shorter summary for the conference program. I also moderated a panel:

Reimagining Identity
Anne Petersen, Perez Hilton and the New Star Production
Thomas Riccio, Trickster Reality
Agnieszka Wenninger, Deleuzian Perspectives on Ownership and Identity on the Web
Moderator: Dan Roy

Kyu C. Lee from Gamevil wasn't able to make it to his scheduled session on the mobile MMO Path of a Warrior (I interviewed Allen Lee last year about this same game). This was due to a scheduling miscommunication between Kyu and GDC, as Kyu had left earlier in the day (I later learned) for his own wedding. Since everyone in the room was interested in mobile MMOs, I couldn't let them just leave without meeting any of them and hearing their perspectives. So, with the blessing of the Conference Associates and the sound technicians in the room, I turned to the session into an impromptu roundtable. It ended up going very well. Read the summary on Gamasutra by Eric-Jon Waugh.

Among the many games presented this year at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions at GDC were the games we created at the Boston Game Jam at MIT back in January. Darius Kazemi ably summarized our creations for an audience of several hundred.

Here's a link to a talk I gave last Monday at the Serious Games Summit at GDC on the learning game I'm designing at MIT with Maryland Public Television and Fablevision. The talk was very well received by a packed room. We started the talk by describing the story, presentation, and gameplay, and ended it by letting the audience play a prototype level from the game as a group.

Here's a short write-up and podcast of me being interviewed at GDC about learning games.

Regarding my employment...

Throughout my time at MIT as a master student, I've worked with The Education Arcade. The project we've worked on for the last year (code-named Labyrinth) will help middle school students improve their math and literacy skills. It's a multiplayer, story-based puzzle game with a beautiful aesthetic. It's the first game coming out of The Education Arcade that will actually see commercial release and widespread adoption. As I near graduation (June 2007), my role in this project is coming to an end. MIT's involvement is also winding down, as we deliver the last of the design documents to Boston-based developer Fablevision.

My next project will be to spend the summer with The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Games Innovation Lab here on campus. Several teams of 7 Singaporean and MIT students will develop one small game each over 12 weeks, and it will be my job to help them navigate some of the technical and design hurdles. To prepare, we're testing the development cycle this spring with MIT undergrads. Some of my past work has suddenly become highly relevant, including organizing student game development projects with the Hi-Score Game Development Club I co-founded at UMass Amherst. Also, my experience with the Boston Game Jam and prototyping designs for The Education Arcade have helped me better appreciate the creative potential as well as inherent limitations of short, agile game development cycles.