since I started blogging using a blogging site. (actually hand-coded a travel blog in 2000 while my bro and I were biking across the country)
All posts by markdangerchen
Somehow I’ve become a good alum
So, a couple of weeks ago, I hung out with 5 Reed College students, hosting a week-long “externship,” a new program Reed is trying this year. The basic idea was to let them job shadow me for a week before Paideia.
When I was originally approached about this back in October, I had just finished my postdoc position at UW, so I told Brooke, the career services person, that they’d basically just be hanging out with me at an internet cafe designing, reading about, and playing games. She still thought that sounded interesting, so I wrote something up and posted it:
A statement on games and expert gaming, the tl;dr version
- games are systems of constraints and particular goals
- play is exploration of these systems
- expert play is pushing at the boundaries of these systems
- gaming is engaging in play within a larger sociocultural context of gaming culture
- i.e., building social and cultural capital while engaging in legitimate gaming practice and participating in affinity groups
- expert gaming is doing this well
- i.e., it’s much more than just interacting with a game
Gee, Stevens, et al. basically said the same things at GLS conferences. Gaming takes place in *context.* Research and design should account (if not focus) on that context. It can matter more than the actual game in the story of learning and activity.
Extending the statement on games, I’ve more recently added that the true responsibility of educators in the games for learning space is to help players cultivate a gaming attitude to everyday life. Since being an expert player is pushing at the boundaries of a system, and since the world is basically made up of interrelated systems, why couldn’t game play be extended to life play? This is sort of what McGonigal is pushing at, but I think the difference I’m thinking of is in scope. She’s interested in huge global problems. I want people to be critical in all aspects of their lives, but I prob focus more on the local.
A statement on games and expert gaming
I wrote this with Theresa Horstman a while ago when we were launching AGILE (Advancing Games in Innovative Learning Environments) at UW. Sadly, we didn’t really do anything with AGILE, but I thought this statement should be salvaged.
First, some definitions:
- Games are systems of rules/constraints that present players with goals that can best be accomplished by exploring and pushing at the limits of these rules/constraints.
- IE. Games can be understood through systems thinking with a focus on the interrelatedness of objects rather than a focus on the objects themselves.
- The exploration is interactional, associational, and emergent; it is not static nor inert.
- Game experience is open to player interpretation and influenced by out-of-game context.
- It’s self directed (and self-discovered) and problem based.
- Exploring the associations in the system is our definition of “play.”
- Encouraging players to push at these rules necessarily also encourages subversion and destabilization.
- This decenters power, challenging top-down approaches to leveraging games (i.e., many gamification models).
- Pushing at the bounds of a system is our definition of “expert play.”
- There is little distinction between the make-believe of games and the projected identity or role taking people do in their everyday lives in settings where they imagine a future possibility. (cf. Gee, McGonigal, Sutton-Smith)
- This realization allows us to merge pretend problems and pretend identities with authentic problems and identities and move onto the question of “so how does that affect how we design learning experiences/environments?”
- Yes, everything is a game. More precisely, every domain/discourse can be thought of as a game world.
- This includes both what Jim Gee calls the little g game and the big G Game (akin to Gee’s little d discourse and big D Discourse).
- Little g: A particular domain/game has its set of rules or grammar about how objects in that domain interact with each other. Think of this as content.
- Big G: Domains/Games also exist within a community of (literacy) practices that govern how to be within that domain. Think of this as setting, context, or ecology.
- This includes both what Jim Gee calls the little g game and the big G Game (akin to Gee’s little d discourse and big D Discourse).
- Participating in this broader view of games discourse is our definition of “gaming” or “gaming practice.”
- Therefore, “expert gaming” is not just mastery of game content but also the ability to participate authentically and the possession of well-above average social and cultural capital in the broader discourse.
- The practice within this broader discourse can be thought of as a mangle.
- As with any culture or community of practice, what determines capital production changes over time and is in constant tension.
- Different parties in the actor-network are constantly renegotiating what it means to “game” and the division of labor within the landscape of gaming.
Assassin’s Creed 3 bullet list
Spoilerish.
- The Green Dragon a nod to The Hobbit?
- Sometimes lockpicking is misaligned, to get a weird visual glitch.
- The safe running is welcome, for sure, but it introduces the (less annoying) problem of running up every goddamn lightpost or market stand when I just wanted to run past it.
- The story is suitably ludicrous; this *is* Assassin’s Creed, after all. Throughout the Ezio stories and now with Conner, I kept wondering what would happen if the Assassins and Templars actually sat down with a beer and talked things over. There’s some nice gray areas, but too bad the protagonist and enemies are all so stabby happy rather than, “well shit; let’s just talk about it first.” As usual the most lucid moments are right after you’ve stabbed someone. “Well, damn, sorry I stabbed you; why didn’t you say earlier?”
- The Desmond story bits are also kind of crazy. I assume they ran out of money to CGify the massive solar flare and world seismic activity, etc., and maybe they thought to themselves, “well, let’s just make another game and render those scenes in its intro instead.” Also, the Cross story just sort of fizzled.
- Not enough stealth; too much running, and it wasn’t even good pakour running since the rooftops felt slower and jolty, not to mention attracting the guards.
- I liked the naval battles and wish there were random encounters instead of just the set ones.
- I feel like I learned a lot about colonial America and got some good background on the Seven Years War and the Revolutionary War. No idea how accurate it is, but I could easily see this game as supplemental material for an American history class, especially if there’s other resources that help students critique the game. (or use the game to critique the textbooks)
- The dual pistols never seemed to work for me.
- Jarring to see the standard Assassin’s outfit in cutscenes when I had chosen a different dye to run around in.
- There’s no point in crafting anything except the items Conner can use. The easiest way to make money is to just buy and sell bear and beaver pelts. And there’s no point in getting naval convoys going since, by the time you can reliably do so, you’re rolling in cash.
- I did like the side missions, especially the homesteader ones.
- The recruitment of Assassins was great. The leveling up by assigning them to missions was pointless. I didn’t get a sense that higher level minions actually did anything.
- Really long epilogue. Surprisingly nice and meaningful.
- Very pretty looking game. The Caribbean waters were great.
That’s a lot of games…
For the past 6 weeks, while keeping appointments, applying to a few jobs, following research project leads, etc., I’ve mostly been playing digital games. Attempting one or two sentence descriptions/reviews…
FTL: Faster Than Light – A gem. Roguelike meets Space Alert is an odd description but sort of makes sense. IMHO, best game of 2012. I played this in September (got early access as a kickstarter) but threw it in this list since it’s so good. 59 hours.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown – The atmosphere of the original mixed with simpler 2-actions-per-turn mechanics, almost like a board game. Almost reminds me of Incubation, which btw is a really great tactical puzzle game. 130 hours.
Divinity 2 – Action RPG with lots of quests but not much decision making. Combat is engaging and challenging on higher difficulties, but. ultimately. it’s mostly a grind, like Kingdoms of Amalur. 70 hours.
Dishonored – Stealthy play through. Love the art design. Game was so-so. ~20 hours.
Defender’s Quest – Tower defense meets RPG. I kickstarted this for the artwork. I wish there was a branching storyline with interesting decisions and less grind. 46 hours.
Cthulhu Saves the World – I love the humor and the attempt to minimize the grind, but man… I just couldn’t do it. 42 minutes.
Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, episode 1 – I kickstarted this one, too, mostly due to their previous work on the indie King’s Quest fan game. Episode 1 is really quite good. Longish wait times between screens, though. Reminds me of Still Life (the really good first one, not the meh second one). Erica Reed, like Victoria McPherson, is an FBI agent tracking down a serial killer. ~8 hours.
East Side Story: A Carol Reed Mystery – Odd 1st-person adventure game featuring photographs using Photoshop’s watercolor filter. One in a series of games. Unfortunately, I found it really quite boring and the artwork more quaint than edgy. No relation to Cognition. Didnt’ finish. ~1 hour.
Nancy Drew: Alibi in Ashes – I’ve got this love hate relationship with Nancy Drew games. Each one has needlessly time-consuming travel elements (the town map that you drive around in is cool, except that you don’t actually get to drive and just point at a location–after tediously hotspot searching with your mouse–and wait, wait, wait). The voice acting is getting a little tired (same woman for like a bazillion games whose voice is starting to sound pretty old), making me hope they recast soon. But still… I like the NPC interaction (though I wish it had branching dialog). The Haunted Carousel, btw, had the best, almost Planescape-like, dialog. ~8 hours.
Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel – The very first scene has possibly the worst voice acting I’ve ever heard, killing the game. ~15 minutes.
Captain Morgane – I liked So Blonde, but this game felt like a step backwards, actually. Bizarre choice to give the main character a French accent (while the rest were mostly English) yet not know any French. Three art styles mashed together (lovely manga/comic-book-inspired illustrations for the cutscenes and backgrounds, dated low-poly character models during the main point-n-click adventure game, and bizarre super-deformed animation during mini-games). Sometimes humorous writing, but really weak intro and ending. ~8 hours.
Clover: A Curious Tale – I like it a lot. Reminds me of the later and much shorter Android game Quiet, Please! Unfortunately, I got stuck, and, apparently, there are no walkthroughs for this game. I would have thought this game would’ve been more popular… ~3 hours.
Dirty Split – Wow. I love the retro 1960s art. Short but fun game with good voice acting. Free! ~3 hours.
This puts a too-small dent into the backlog I have. Seriously. I think it would take another two months to get through all of the games on my list. Starting December, however, I’ll be ramping up research projects and game design, probably reserving only about 20-30 hours a week for playing instead of 50 or so.
And that’s the end of that chapter….
Yesterday was my last day at UW as a postdoc with the LIFE Center, the Institute for Science and Math Education, and the Center for Game Science.
I’ve decided to pursue a few research projects that I think would best be done while not distracted by a day job.
Namely, I’ll be reviewing an ass-ton of free game making tools, while also playing around with game interface design and some simple game design in the process. I’ve gathered a list of over 2 dozen free tools out there covering all sorts of game genres: adventure games, RPGs, platformers, interactive fiction, etc. My hope is to 1) get back into game design, practice art, try out some ideas, 2) produce a document/series of blog posts that is useful to a k16 educator who wants to incorporate game design into their existing courses (whether that’s English, social studies, math, or whatever) but doesn’t know which tool is appropriate for their needs, and 3) get ready to teach a course on game design in the spring at Pepperdine. What’s great about this teaching gig is that it’s primarily an online course (with face-to-face meetings bookendings), so I can stay in Seattle.
Anyway, I’m also hoping to play a ton of games, as I’ve accrued quite a backlog over the last few years. Look at my Steam profile. Most of those games I haven’t played yet.
First up: the remake/sequel to X-COM, named… XCOM!
Yes, that X-COM. The game that I used to wake up at 5 in the morning some days to play before classes while a senior at Reed College. The game that I used to stay up til the wee hours for. It was the only time in my life when I could be totally fine with 5 hours of sleep per night for weeks. The game that started my love affair with the turn-based squad-based tactics genre (Jagged Alliance capturing my heart in later years). What’s funny is that at the time, I felt like nobody knew what I was talking about when I described these games. I always wondered why the creators of the original X-COM moved onto smallish projects, thinking they were underdogs, not capturing people’s attention. (Anyone remember that email tactics game?) And now, sort of out of the blue, X-COM is getting a massive, big budget remake. Looking forward to it. I hope Julian Gollop is getting props.
A series of interesting choices vs. the appreciation of banality
These two stories appeared in my feed reader back to back!
The first covers tips on how to create interesting decisions for players (with information transparency), playing off the highly quoted “a good game is a series of interesting choices” (or a series of difficult decisions, etc.).
The More You Know: Making Decisions Interesting in Games by Jon Shafer on Gamasutra
By contrast, we have an analysis of Pocket Planes and how its banality and uninteresting choices cause personal reflection. Wow.
A Series of Uninteresting Decisions by Ryan Kuo on Kill Screen
—
After thinking about this on the bus, I wonder if this dyad of articles points to the fact that meaning from games can come from either within the game or outside of the game. With the Civ games (that Jon Shafer worked on) having lots of info and difficult decisions means that meaning is derived from understanding what that info means and recognizing patterns in the algorithms of the game. With Pocket Planes, it sounds like the choices about what actions to take are pretty nonexistent; understanding the game rules comes pretty quickly. The player is then left with the choice to just chuck it and move onto another game or find meaning in his or her understanding of the game in relation to some other thing outside of the game. In the case of Ryan Kuo, he found meaning when he examined the relationship between the game and himself/his actions (not meaning inherent in the game rules).
These kinds of understandings don’t always naturally happen… I think particular players are equipped to derive these types of meanings. And now that I think about it, I think both can be scaffolded. The question to a game designer is which kind of meaning making does he or she want with the game and how will that be scaffolded, not just designed in the rules?
Secret World thoughts
very brief thoughts, which I may or may not fill in later:
- I wish the main PC had voice over and dialog choices like in SWtOR (or Mass Effect)… or maybe just dialog choices… or maybe just choices that affected dialog and mission results while still staying the silent one.
- I wish there was follow-up with more NPCs rather than leaving them wondering if you acted upon their information by not returning to them after you report in to your home faction.
- I wish there were fewer assholes in chat. That’s not unique to TSW though…
- I wish there were more instances for investigative missions, so we didn’t have to constantly compete with other players who were working on the same puzzle missions. I think a lot of bugs people are reporting are actually because other players are messing up with their solutions midway.
- I wish chat wasn’t broken. Often the group channel or whispers won’t go through, which is pretty annoying when you’re trying to group with someone.
- I love the Lovecraft influences in Solomon Island.
- I like how characters can dynamically adjust their build for more dps, more heals, more hate generation, etc. depending on situation and group composition.
- And I like how individual abilities aren’t actually more powerful than others, just that you get more of them unlocked as you go, and it’s the combination of them (you pick 7 active and 7 passive abilities; the rest are just idle) that makes for interesting synergies.
- I love the puzzle missions that have me breaking coded messages, thinking outside the game sometimes, looking stuff up on Wikipedia, reading Poe, brushing up on art history, etc.
Games Learning Society brief recap
The Games Learning Society conference (June 13-15, 2012, Madison) was great. Last year after AERA and GLS, I was really concerned about in-game assessment and badgification. It seems I wasn’t the only one, as this year’s three keynotes (Colleen Macklin, Reed Stevens, and Sebastian Deterding) all made arguments for considering gameplay as occurring within a larger social space and that deeper level meaning can be derived in the local interactions of all the objects within that space, implicitly or explicitly stating that assessments need to extend beyond the game-player model and that gamification needs to recognize meaningful mechanics and relationships rather than just surface level features of games’ reward system.
Played a hella fun game of Sabine Harrer’s Kyoto. “We killed 75% of all the animals on the planet!” “Yeah, but it was the scary animals, so it’s okay.”
Moses Wolfenstein did an excellent Well Suffered session with Super Meat Boy.
A bunch of heavy hitters in games studies gave their positions on the magic circle (Eric Zimmerman, Jesper Juul, Thomas Malaby, Erica Halverson, Crystle Martin, David Simkins, and Kylie Peppler, moderated by Moses).
Scott Nicholson gave a great math summary of the problem of most gamification:
game = structure + goals + play
game – play = structure + goals = gamification
Also, I learned that I met Adam Ingram-Goble in 2005 when he visited a class taught by John Bransford at UW that I was a student in! Wow!
Finally, I should probably mention that the cover illustration I did for my new book was one of the pieces in the GLS art exhibit! 🙂
A few years ago, I used to blog summaries after each day, but more recently I’ve been satisfied with other people’s coverage and just participating in the twitter stream. But anyway, here’s some good resources:
- Sebastian’s keynote slides: Paideia as Paidia
- Scott Nicholson’s meaningful gamification paper
- videos of over 2 dozen sessions
- a couple of bloggers: Games + Learning + Society = Winning by Shelley; Caryn Swark’s series
Next year, I hear they’re going to have catering provide actual chocolate-covered broccoli! And each one will have a fluorescent dye in it that will help us assess how many we’ve eaten.