Learning

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

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.

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.

I gave my presentation Wednesday at Future Play 2006, as part of the Student Perspectives on Issues in Games panel. I call it, "Multiplayer Gaming v. Board of Education," because it relates to MMOs, school, cross-platform gaming, and what I'm calling positive identity construction. Here's my own summary.

The Education Arcade

I spent the first half of the talk introducing Comparative Media Studies, The Education Arcade, and the Learning Games to Go project.

Comparative Media Studies is what you make of it, and it's different for every student, but for me it's a game design program that encourages me to think historically, culturally, interdisciplinary, and internationally.