MIT

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.

A week ago we had the first annual Boston Game Jam at MIT in The Education Arcade. I've already written a summary of the game I created during the Jam (Conflict Diamond). Now, I've written a guest blog for Henry Jenkins talking about the role of game jams in the industry and summarizing this particular jam. We've been getting a lot of coverage for the jam, from Slashdot to Gamasutra to Blue's News to VH1 to Little Gamers. The success the Jam enjoyed this year ensures that it will become a tradition.

Crossposted at HenryJenkins.org

It's 9 a.m. on Saturday and about 15 professional video game developers from the Boston area are taking their seats in The Education Arcade lab at MIT. They've come alone or in teams of two for the first annual Boston Game Jam , armed with ideas for games involving the Jam's theme of "shifting." They are programmers, designers, artists, and musicians, and they've committed the next 36 hours of their lives to making experimental games. Though developing games is work and they do it every day, there's something special in the air this Saturday. It's an opportunity to leave behind the pressures of the game industry, with its years-long development cycles, escalating budgets, increasing team sizes and specialization, sequelitis, and publisher-developer tensions.

Download ConflictDiamond.zip (5.6MB Windows executable)

This past weekend we ran the first annual Boston Game Jam in The Education Arcadelab here at MIT. I've written a summary of the event as a guest blog for Henry Jenkins. In this post, I want to describe the game that I created, called Conflict Diamond. It's a game for change designed to draw attention to segments of the diamond trade that support violence. Here is the description of the issue included in the game on its About screen:

Crossposted at The Education Arcade.

This is an off-topic article (not directly about cross-platform or mobile gaming) about my experience playing World of Warcraft to learn Spanish. This is the continuation of my thinking with Ravi Purushotma at MIT about how to use commercial off the shelf games as language learning tools (see our GDC 2006 presentation video and Ravi's thesis). The basic premise with all of this work is that commercial games are already localized into many languages and that language educators and game developers can use these resources to cheaply create entertaining learning experiences. Blogger Katelyn Olmstead, a co-conspirator in this experiment, has already begun her own series on playing WoW to learn Spanish. Her first article focuses on the technical challenges we faced getting the Spanish version set up in the US.