I went to the annual conference for the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) for the first time last month and then to the annual conference for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) right afterwards. In fact, I flew directly from one conference (Orlando) to the other (New Orleans). The short story is that AERA is much bigger than NARST, that Orlando surprisingly kind of sucks for a conference due to horrible food choices and no public transportation or sidewalks, and that New Orleans during the French Quarter music festival is amazingly awesome.
All posts by markdangerchen
Two iPhone game ideas
Woke up with two iPhone game ideas. Very, very simple:
- Ultimate Gamification. Player earns points while the app is on. Random awards once in a while with bigger rewards happening to greater fanfare, bigger badges, etc. Nice confetti showers or fireworks or emblems or whatever. The description will hint that some rewards are tied to activity, using the accelerometer, gps, gyroscope, or compass. This is untrue, but hopefully players will link coincidences to ritual. (Or maybe it’s actually true… 🙂 )
- Phone Killer. Player continually accrues points while their phone’s screen is off. The points continually increase exponentially, encouraging people to keep their phone screens off for as long as possible. Long idle times = bigger payoffs. Additionally, a large lump sum payoff is given when turning the screen off after the phone is active, though, if someone chain-turned on and off the phone, they’d get points at about the same rate as if they just left the phone idle while the screen was off. The idea is subversive in that it rewards players for not using their phone. Oh, while the phone is charging, player receives no points. If the battery is lower than 25% player receives double points.
Now that I think about it, I’m not sure these games are even possible on the iPhone. How is it with background apps or apps running while the phone isn’t actually active?
Need feedback on poster about expertise in WoW as sociomaterial practice
Check it out. Too busy? Does it even say anything?
[Edit: the latest version can be seen below the first image. Thanks for the feedback!]
RPS’s review of the first 8 hours of Dragon Age 2
WIT: The Opening Hours Of Dragon Age II by John Walker
An excerpt:
Clearly influenced by the enormous success of Mass Effect II, and the excellent ways that game was executed, DA2 seems determined to try to be as accessible, without compromising on its combat. But in the compromise appears to be lost another crucial aspect of such an RPG: dialogue.
My character, The Female Hawke, is utterly unlikeable. Smug, smarmy, and needlessly rude, her having been given a voice means her identity has little to do with my own influence. Good old Grey Warden Simon was mute, but immensely likeable. And helped by being offered nuance in his responses.
Hawke has Mass Effect’s three options. While they occasionally vary, they boil down to, “Good”, “flippant” or “evil”. The latter two are always rude, the first one only sometimes. And with no conversation skills apparent in the game, that’s your lot. Creating a character whose gift of the gab can talk their way out of situations appears to have been completely eradicated – something that’s really shocked me in a BioWare game. If it appears later, it appears far too late.
I desperately miss the range of possible responses, none so crudely labeled. Here, I was able to flirt, or agitate, in a way that felt nuanced, even subtle. Now I can sometimes choose the conversation option with the heart by it, where Hawke will then say something barely related to the words I’d clicked on, often so crawlingly crude that I’m surprised my companions don’t file a sexual harassment complaint.
Digital Media and Learning conference 2011
Last week I went to Long Beach, CA for the Digital Media and Learning conference. It was great meeting a ton of people (too many to list, sorry), sharing a room with Moses Wolfenstein and Sean Duncan, having breakfast with fellow DML Summer Institute people, getting dinner with fellow Terror Novans, and seeing demos of really cool projects (cf below). The highlight of the presentations was definitely the ignite talks–quick 5 minute talks with an auto-advancing slidedeck. One presenter couldn’t make the second ignite session, so Alex Halavais took to the stage and did an improv talk with slides he had never seen before! And it was it was hilarious, on-point, and relevant!
Last year, Jeremy Hunsinger and I set up an etherpad for the conference where anyone attending could collaboratively take notes and chat about the sessions. This year, I set up the same thing with a Google doc and blasted the url to Twitter periodically. I’m disappointed in the turn-out of the gdoc use, especially given that the theme of many of the talks was about collective and collaborative/participatory production and understanding of cultural artifacts, curricula, etc. I saw many people using laptops and iPads to take notes, but those notes will forever be sequestered, not shared. 🙁
My reasoning is that together we can attend everything. There were 7 concurrent tracks. Together we could have let everyone learn about each one.
As it is, I think the few of us who used the gdoc hit about a quarter of the sessions. I think for next year I’ll suggest an official gdoc or other collaborative note-taking tool be used.
There was also some backchannel activity in an IRC which got pretty snarky. I think that’s fine and quite entertaining but I wish naysayers in that backchannel would ask questions during the sessions they had particular problems with.
Overall, the type of talk around digital media literacies and games took a step backwards, I think… or maybe just treaded water from last year. There’s two things that contributed to this I think. It seemed like this year there were many more people coming from non-profits and non-academic places, so they had to be caught up with new-to-them ideas. Additionally, there was a confluence of people from different disciplinary backgrounds, so they too needed to step back a bit to lay some foundational common language down. One example was the IRC discussion about the label “gamer” and whether someone is a “hardcore” vs. “casual” gamer. I think it was a useful discussion, and, yes, it did help me better articulate things in my head. Yet games people such as the scholars who regularly attend GLS had already covered that ground a year or two ago.
Two highlights of the talks, besides the ignite talks, for me were both in a constructive/destructive technologies panel. Dan Perkel gave a fascinating study of deviantART community-based discussion regarding the sharing of work, ownership, privacy, “safe” space, and the nature of the interwebs. Stuart Geiger gave a very entertaining and eye-opening talk about Wikipedia bots and collective response to automated procedures, touching on guidelines and policies and how they affect user behavior and participation.
Next year, DML (March 1-3) will be in San Francisco right before GDC (March 5-9), so I won’t have to choose between the two again!
Resources:
- program: http://dmlcentral.net/sites/all/files/resource_files/DML2011ConferenceProgram.pdf
- hashtag: #dml2011
- irc: http://webchat.freenode.net #dml2011
- delicious: http://www.delicious.com/tag/dml2011
- blogs covering DML:
- photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmlcentral/
Fallout New Vegas replay with mods
So my dissertation’s main argument is that gamers become good gamers as they learn how to assemble in-game and out-of-game resources (both human and nonhuman) into their network of play so they can do what they need to do to succeed in the game and draw deeper meanings from their gaming. I thought I’d write about an example.
Announcing AGILE
[Edit April 21, 2011:] We’ve changed the name to Advancing Gaming in Innovative Learning Ecologies 🙂 [/Edit]
Advancing Games as Innovative Learning Environments (AGILE) is a group that includes LIFE Center and UWISME scholars in the College of Education at the University of Washington, most notably Theresa Horstman and myself. 🙂
What does this mean? Well, not much right now actually. We needed to brand ourselves, which will help with attracting attention and monies.
Updating website theme
Trying a new theme this week… might revert or go way back to a dark/black one.
Conferences this year
I guess a bullet list is easiest. Conferences for this year:
Testing out live blogging with a NookColor
I’m at the iConference this week. Also in meetings at work this week. It’s sort of worked.
Anyway, my netbook died last year so I decided to try a tablet for a while to see if it would meet my conference needs. (Rooted NookColor with a custom Android OS = cheap tablet)