malvasia bianca

I’m at the Games, Learning, and Society conference for the rest of the week; here are my notes on today’s events.

I started the day by finally getting to meet Roger Travis in person! I’ve been hearing his disembodied voice weekly for ages now at the VGHVI gaming sessions that I feel like I know him rather well, but it was great to finally get to meet him in person! (Incidentally, I spent the previous evening hanging out with Jordan; great to see him where he’s now living, looking forward to seeing his family tomorrow.)

I then spent the rest of the morning at the Mobile Learning Summit. This was structured around coming up with a game idea; my table’s brainstorming sentence was: “create an engaging game about playing piano for parents in an artistic/social context”. (We ended up ditching the parent idea, though.)

And, after a fair amount of chatter, we ended up with a game idea, a sort of musical version of foursquare which we called Starter Culture Sounds. It’s location based; if you’re at a location, you can upload a snippet of music to that location. These pieces of music get classified (to detect similar themes, or even moods; we thought it might be cool to find a way to algorithmically merge them, though that sounded pretty hard to me), resulting in a visual representation of popular themes at that location. You can also vote for other people’s tunes, and upload edited version of people’s tunes; either of those actions increases the prominence of that theme in the visual classification. (Maybe those would feed into some sort of badges/achievement system, too.) Votes age over time. Once you’ve been to a place and contributed to hit (just voting is enough), you get a virtual mic that lets you later listen in on the music there. (But you can only contribute if you’re physically present.)

And, after that, Michael Abbott showed up; great to see him, too! (A pity that Roger is on the East coast, Michael is in the middle of the country, and I’m on the West coast…) We went off to lunch, where
Lunch keynote:

Sid Meier’s Pirates! as educational game. Good orchestration of time: don’t spend time lost wandering around town, spend time deciding where to go, what to do. Lots of short-, medium-, long-term goals. Several hours of goals are built in, linked to mastering the game’s various mechanics, and eventually leading to more free-form experimentation with those mechanics.

WoW and social learning.

Games and productive possibilities. MUDs. Story about 5th grade kids playing in a MUD, with a teacher who discovered this and watched them. (Jane Jacobs watchful eye, which the kids actually rather appreciated.) They ended up designing a version of the 100 Acre Woods in a MUD, and one of their school, huge amounts of modeling.

controls -> basic knowledge -> systemic expertise -> tools/tinkering -> fundamental design, plus a noter branch systemic expertise -> social control of play.

Rubric for quality of games:
. Interesting choices, good progression
. Enable systemic understanding
. Scope for transgression
. Immersive possibilities
. Room for socialization
. Does it inspire creativity?
. Smooth ramp from consumer to creator?
(One or two other things)

Some educational genres: microworlds, linear action, role playing, open-ended sandbox, persistent worlds.

Interesting discussion of Civ as learning tool, the biases it has: management is good, technology is good, people will attack you for oil, geography is destiny.

In education, privilege accuracy and authenticity; maybe should privilege desire for action? (Didn’t get all of that last bit.)

(Various other stuff: yay Montessori, game about saving the lake.)

2:00: WolfQuest.

You’re a wolf in Yellowstone, have to survive.

3:30: The Fastest Path from Idea to Game: An Introduction to Unity