Missives from the Mob

Aims of Education speech at New School Convocation

2007-09-08T20:00:40Z

Thursday afternoon I had the distinct pleasure of speaking at Convocation for The New School, giving the annual Aims of Education address. I spoke about something called the 'architecture of persistence' and the roles games can play in helping us think about the new design of learning institutions. A transcript can be found here: Download file

Karaoke Ice in Los Angeles

2007-09-07T20:13:11Z

]]> Karaoke Ice went to LA this past week! LACE hosted the project for a two week tour and despite the challenge of a heat wave we managed to bring tinklepop to a whole new group of KI converts. We got a lot of good press, including a piece from the LA Times that had a huge impact on crowds as well as LA Weekly. Full project info on our myspace page

Gamestar Mechanic Goes to Minneapolis

2007-09-01T20:30:36Z

For a group of teens attending the Design Camp at the University of Minnesota last week, seeing the world as a potential game space took on new meaning. Eric Socolofsky and I—two members of the Gamestar Mechanic design team (a game we are designing at Gamelab)—spent the week working with the teens to design and playtest games in the alpha build of the editor we currently have for the game. As part of the game’s larger playtesting and assessment plan, design camp proved to be a remarkably fruitful site for learning about the kinds of games the teens were able to make. We worked with 12 participants, ages 14-17. Most were boys, 2 girls, some were gamers, some not. All loved to play, however, as evidenced in the many rounds of playtesting held throughout the week. Each teen’s experience varied widely but by the end of the week everyone had gained an enormous amount of confidence in their ability to design fun, playable games.

Eric and I ran the workshop as a conversation between two primary forms of games—Big Games, or games designed for play in physical spaces and Gamestar Mechanic games, created with our in-game editor. We wanted the teens to compare and contrast the experience of designing games for contexts with such different affordances and to find ways to explore a set of basic game design principles.

Over the course of 5 days the group designed 6 big games. Three were designed for spaces at the Walker Sculpture Garden (Bobbleball, Cradle, and Hex Runner) and three for spaces near campus (Save the King, SnareBall, and Treasure, Treasure, Treasure). Two of the campus games were very physical (lots of running around and strategic team play) and one was very slow and puzzle-like and perhaps not surprisingly, immensely popular with the less than active camp crowd. Eric and I were quite amazed at how playable and engaging their games were, and it was interesting to hear the teens make connections between the digital games they were designing in Gamestar Mechanic and their big game designs.
While we can’t release any images of the Gamestar Mechanic games just yet, here are a few images of the big games created by the teens.

One Nature, in Las Vegas

2007-06-10T16:39:11Z

Marina Zurkow and I just completed One Nature, a project on sustainability and water use in Las Vegas. It was a public art commission for the Americans for the Arts, and was weird and amazing. Read a related story or see pictures of the performance on Flickr.

here are some samples:

Introduction to The Ecology of Games

2007-03-10T21:33:54Z

The Ecology of Games is one of six volumes in the MacArthur Series on Digital Media and learning, for which I serve as editor. The book is wrapping up and I have just finished a draft of the introduction, which includes info on each of the nine chapters that make up the volume. Download pdf

On Tetris: mini essay for "Space Time Play: Architecture, Urbanism, and Computer Games"

2007-02-24T13:29:30Z

A small piece on Tetris for the forthcoming book Space Time Play: Architecture, Urbanism, and Computer Games (eds.) Monika Annen, Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger, Brinkmann Ulrich (Birkhäuser Publishing Basel, Berlin, Boston, autumn 2007). Download mini-essay

Introduction to "Gaming as a Technique of Analysis"

2007-02-24T13:23:39Z

"Gaming as a Technique of Analysis" was written in 1954 by two researchers at the Rand Corporation, A.M. Mood and R.D. Specht. Presented as part of a symposium on the use and value of war game methods the paper argues for gaming as a strategy for discovering optimal choice within a system of complex possible outcomes. I was asked to write an short introduction to the piece for a forthcoming volume out of North Carolina State. Please do not cite or reproduce without written permission. Download the introduction and paper here.

They Must First Be Imagined

2007-02-24T12:57:31Z

This essay was part of a conference on games and architecture in Delft last March. The piece focuses specifically on the notion of conflict and games as contested spaces, within a grounding context of game technology. I am posting it here as the conference proceedings are not widely available, although look for them if you can as they include a number of terrific essays. (Game Set and Match II. On Computer Games, Advanced Geometries and Digital Technologies. Kas Oosterhuis and Lukas Feireiss (ed.) Episode Publishers, March 2006.) Download the essay here

Beyond 100,000 Sprites: Game Design and Technology

2007-02-24T12:51:39Z

From the side-scrolling mania of early platformers like Defender and Super Mario Brothers, to John Carmack’s invention of 3D first-person perspective and the birth of a PC game called Doom, game design and technological innovation have long gone hand in hand. But what are the particular technologies used by designers to expand and enrich the experience of gaming? More specifically, how have the limits of technology been harnessed by designers to transform the challenge of constraint into the play of possibility?

This essay was published last year as part of Macromedia's Think Tank series, edited by Alice Twemlow and David Womack. I have been doing a lot of recent writing around games and technology and thought this essay was worth revisiting. Download file

Game Design Glossary

2007-02-23T13:08:10Z

This abbreviated glossary was written in support of GameStar Mechanic, a game designed to teach kids how to design games, being produced by Gamelab through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. The glossary has been tailored to the specific framework of that project but can be used by anyone teaching courses in game design. Ideas for additional entries are welcomed. Download file

Second Life energy numbers

2007-01-21T22:40:11Z

Really, really interesting article on energy consumption and virtual worlds. Really makes me wonder how much impact The Burning Crusade will have on global warming.

las vegas and apocylptic urbanism

2007-01-21T22:23:08Z

Marina Zurkow and I are working on a new project for a public art conference in Las Vegas this June. We want to do something around the water issue there and have dug up some interesting facts:

--Las Vegans' overconsumption of water: 360 gallons daily per capita versus 211 in Los Angeles, 160 in Tucson, or 110 in Oakland.

--According to advocates of an ecologically sound urbanism, Las Vegas has (1) abandoned a responsible water ethic; (2) fragmented local government and subordinated it to private land-use planning; (3) produced a negligible amount of public space; (4) refused to use "hazard zoning" to mitigate natural disaster and preserve landscape; (5) dispersed land uses over an enormous area; (6) accepted the resulting dictatorship of the automobile; and (7) tolerated extreme social and, especially, racial inequality.

--The combination of waste heat and vast paved surfaces transforms the city into a scorching "heat island" whose nightly temperatures are frequently 5 to 10 degrees hotter than the surrounding desert.

--Las Vegas has been generating tens of thousands of new jobs in gaming, construction, and related services.

--In January 2007, Moscow recorded temperatures of 40 degrees, the highest ever on record.

**Mike Davis has a great piece on Vegas in Sierra Magazine called House of Cards.

This last fact is relevant only because we are seriously considering creating a piece which involves an out-of-work Russian ice sculptor displaced due to global warming. In a gesture of cultural good will we plan to bring him to Las Vegas to carve small replicas of the polar ice caps somewhere on the strip. These ice sculptures will melt and the water recycled and re-frozen into finger-size ice rings, which people can wear in a commitment ceremony to "be at one" with nature. While the ice rings can be sucked, nibbled, licked, or eaten, this only accelerates their dissolution. In the end, Arroyo Royal (potential working title for the piece) not only models a production cycle of sheherazadian dimensions, but also creates a context for reflection on urban renewal Vegas-style. More on this soon. CEArts Link is generously helping to fund the travel and visa of our ice artisan, if only we can find him!

perhaps he is here:

new machinima paper

2007-01-21T22:19:43Z

Also just finished a paper for The Machinima Reader, edited by Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche. I haven't written about machinima for awhile, and it was really interesting to step back into that space and speculate about what it all means. Download file

gaming literacies: new paper

2007-01-21T22:14:01Z

Just finished a paper for a special issue (16:3) on games and education for the Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. It will be coming out in the spring, but wanted to post a draft here. Download file

Gamasutra Game Design Education podcast

2006-11-10T15:31:12Z

Tom Kim has been running an excellent series of podcasats on games for Gamasutra and he recently moderated one on game design education that I took part in. It was a really interesting group, and we talked for nearly two hours! You can hear Tom's well edited version here.