Live Blogging G4C Day 2

So I missed day one, but here for your reading pleasure are some blips and bleeps from day 2 of Games for Change.

Jim Gee and Henry Jenkins got the day rolling with a fireside chat:

Jim opens by stating that more and more the value added for games is the communities around games. Passion is not enough, because you already need persistence, but passion is essential.

How do people get passions? The thing that gets people passion are things that might seem trivial to 'us'. For example, the "purple potty" theory of passion. Story about grandmother playing Sims with her grandchild who requested a "purple potty" for her house. This was her entree into Sims, now she has gobs and gobs (7 million?) of downloads of her Sims creations.

Henry responds that the participatory culture does this (provides entry), and the surrounding communities welcome you in. "Fan communities have always operated under the assumption that every reader is a potential writer." Public Media 2.0 report as reconceptualizing media in the service of the public.

Jim notes that it's a pretty big goal to say that you're going to change communities or change society, but it's evident in the Sims communities that participation in these games does change people (and we need to begin to track it). These communities make the assumption (absent form school) that anybody can make it happen (as with Henry's point about readers/writers).

Henry goes on to discuss activist groups starting with the more traditional approach of boycott (as with the recent action around the show Chuck). Shifting dears to the HP Alliance (Harry Potter), we have an example of an activist movement shaped through/leveraging fandom to bridge from passion to political action. However, this doesn't necessarily look poitical from a traditional activist standpoint.

Jim responds, games for political change often have a moral stance but that this is like saying, "you can learn photoshop" when really people need the "purple potty" level of entry. Then the community can pick people up and take them the rest of the way towards activism. "It's not just the power of play, but the ability to design and build as play." - They see this as play, and they also see the reciprocity of the community as play.

Henry: on Project Runway as an opening for talking about fashion design for his family which is not fashion centric per se. By watching the process within the show, the audience is invited to "step back, freeze frame our TiVo, and engage in analysis ourselves."

Jim responds that the standards are pretty clear in a lot of these examples, but we have a standards movement in school which is totally opaque for the kids. A comparable lack of clarity would be disasterous for these communities.

Henry states that when he first started work on games with Kurt that engaging in game design meant that knowledge needs to be operationalizable in the game.

Shifting gears a little, Jim starts to characterize these communities: reciprocal role taking, encouragement rather than flaming, looking for legitimate feedback

Henry notes that these kinds of roles are hard to find in schools. Relates story about his niece writing Harry Potter fan fic and her entry to and rise through that community from lying about her age, to running Wrtier's Alley, to working in media literacy studies. Flipping this into his current work, designing these spaces intentionally has a requirement of not feeling like school.

I lost a little bit of the train for a few minutes here

Henry comes back to the point that it isn't just that schools don't allow entry for creative kids, but that it also is preventing them from moving forward?

Henry, "Is the issue abandoning schools, or is there a route towards improvement?"

Jim, "Can we make incremental changes, or do we need a paradigm shift?" - Bringing good games into schools will damage schools, and that's what we oughta be doing.

Henry discusses the learning library that they've just launched - it's modular and can be brought in without massive disruption to the community (Jim - let's hope it spreads like a virus) that's exactly the point. Do what Scratch does with code, and turn around and do it for culture. Tactical change - It's what you do to survive while you're working towards paradigmatic change.

Jim - We're beginning to learn that it' going to be crucial to bridge between schools, libraries, homes

Henry - We filter out everything that 21st Century Skills require (the Moby Dick incident, Jim notes that this is the death knell of a system).

Jim - Hould we drop the notion of canonical? Until we put Shakespeare in school people read it (Lawrence Levine's work?). Maybe we need to tell kids that none of these works are canonical. From Cog. Psych. if nothing is at stake, then it doesn't go deep. The emotional aspect needs to come back into school (games bring this aspect as an embodied learning experience).

Eric asks - none of the examples Jim and Henry have been talking about speak to the sort of activist games that we focus on at a conference like this. Are we taking the wrong strategy? Jim doesn't think that the didactic games will work. Some of the message is not trying to make a "g" game. You want to make a "G" game with the system around it. Henry responds with a story about the difference between low interaction Chinese games and high interaction examples from American presenters at a serious games conference in Taiwan. This can be read smugly (East meeting West), but the truth is that these two perspectives are present at any serious games conference. Henry, "Gaming is a process, not a product."

Another question from the audience - When the whistle blows and the game starts in sports, the coach would never run out and kick the ball, but this is functionally what happens with the teacher in the classroom. Jim - Designer as the teacher in games, reciprocal mentoring and organizing are forms of teacher, but none of it is the current model. It's a mistake to think about this as unorganized but differently organized (call it mentorship or call it teaching). Members in these communities want self mastery as well as community membership. Henry - coach as recognizing the skills and goals of the player and providing strategies to help the player be as good as they can be (creating a context where each individual can shine at what they do). The real problem starts to become schools extending their authority beyond school time (both legal and softer social mechanisms).

Next question - Play On 2009 there was discussion of the evolution of the gym teacher, and the nature of human biology itself - taking a more dynamic/robust model of what it means to be alive in a sociocultural context. Trend of seperation vs. potential of engagement - games allow us to engage in a dynamic of present moment life force. Jim - Games are an embodied form of learning in fact.

Next Question - Online learning communities positively functioning in contrast to how social network communities sometimes don't work. Opportunities in open/distributed gaming? Henry - Social networks vs. online commnunities, current work with Howard Gardner on developing pro-social games "It's not that I think we should leave everything alone and the feral children will be raised safely by the internet." From Howard's ethnographies, the experiences kids are having aren't being taken seriously which lifts ethical constraints, we need to take those experiences seriously. In terms of the distributed/mobile aspect - the technology may be secondary to kids getting out of their schools and looking at the community. Example from Australian Flickr group that provided members with a new way to see their communities?

Next question - What grade level do things become horizontal, and what does the teacher do after that? Jim responds - Deb Meier (a kindergarten model at all levels). Plenty of top down instruction is available in these communities, but it is always on demand. If you're not prepared for it, it's no good. No pedagogy is bad, but it needs to be used in the right way. Teacher roles need to shift to community organizers, mentors, and co-learners.

Next Session: Ethics in games with Karen Schrier (host), Sam Gilbert, David Langendor, Alison (from Nickolodeon) & John Nordlinger

Can games make us better people?/Also looking at the discourse around games and ethics: Why are some games/game practices/game communities deemed immoral while others are not/Design choices we make in game design, staffing for game production & marketing.

John - 3 things: Why are ethics important, what are some examples, the third thing? Designing without ethics is like playing  WoW without quest helper. An ethical background enhances design, but having a focus on a specific ethical purpose is key. Examples of ethical games: Popovitch's Fold It (a game to cure a disease) designed around the human:computer diad for pattern design and pattern recognition, Snowy focused on treating burn victims.

Alison - Games can provide space for communication around ethics, particularly focused around families. At Nick, they're looking at how you can create new spaces for family communication (for family play). What are the spaces for co-entertainment that are already happening that games can be modeled off of? Second, trying to provide spaces for play that allow kids and teens to try things out. Kids are looking for spaces for collaboration (creating their own collaborative spaces). Emphasis on creating virtual worlds that support collaborative play (balancing exploration and structure). Asking kids how they would create their own virtual world, and kids want to both help other players and take action in the online world that can somehow help irl. Creating games that support a sense of self efffcacy for kids.

David - What it takes to design a game that fits into one of these spaces (the Onion video on preparing kids for the apocalypse). This gets to the natural tension between fun and engaging game play, and fun and engaging outcomes. In many instances of design fun trumps all other considerations. However, when a game is played in the context of learning (or in a learning institution). The designer then has a responsibility to document their decisions so they are available to the students and teachers. Example of disconnect in SimCity (coal vs. nuclear). In the game, coal was more polluting where nuclear plants might melt down (the probability of meltdown was way higher than is remotely possible)? This leaves the question of the designers responsibility open. From the standpoint of the developer, the developer needs to plan for the additional cost for representations.

Sam - From the social sciences perspective, talking with teenagers about playing a variety of games. To riff off of Henry from last session, it isn't just a question of focusing on ethical games but focusing on ethical gaming (players engagement with these games). From gamers who played Neopets, one player who could be called a bad player, was able to hack into the game with the help of her boyfriend and acquire huge numbers of items. The community was enraged, the player found it hilarious. The game managers froze their accounts, but also froze the accounts of everyone who interacted with them. Player's response was, "It's just a game." Contrast with a WoW player who was PuGing. The player's friend asked to get an item, and his friend offered the strangers a fair role at it as well rather than giving it to his friend. Games are often very good at representing ethical issues, but games in and of themselves are only part of the equation as players can respond to these choices in radically different ways.

Karen asks the panel some questions: A month ago Konami pulled its Falluja game (it was getting too much flack), but provided some pretty mixed messages in their media response. Should games make people uncomfortable? Do companies have a responsibility not to make people uncomfortable? Sam replies that game mechanics could be different in WoW to make loot distribution automatically fair, and the space provided creates opportunities. In addition, experiences that make players feel uncomfortable can be poweful. Daid says if you accept that games are an art form (a whole other argument, which I will hold forth on soon on this blog) then it's perfectly valid for games to make you feel uncomfortable. John notes that companies have responsibilities to 3 constituents (stakeholders, employees, and the public). Each wants something different and in pitching to a company like Microsoft you need to account for all 3. Alison talks about mimicing how kids play on the playground in game development to provide authentic valuable experiences.

What happens if you're creating a game and you don't consider some of these ethical elements in design (and wind up having to deal with it post facto)? John states that Microsoft has to make sure up front that these issues don't arise, but the typical company doesn't. Alison notes that they try to get content up there that, while not offensive, will make people think.

Luwana (?) asks: How about games as ways of teaching ethical decision making: It's hard ot think about fraud prevention games that don't also teach fraud - David responds, you kind of have to trust your player. A lot of games are about being transgressive and giving the players choices they might want to test out but you can design implications/outcomes for the player that cause them to think it over.

Next question: In terms of games as exploration spaces, are players agents in a moral system (relation between ethics in games and life). Sam responds, game spaces have an ethics of play (i.e. in WoW there are ethical and unethical ways of interacting, a sense of sportsmanship) and in online games that space gets blurry (as in selling characters on eBay). It then depends on the value of a space. John adds that the distinction between game ethics and real life ethics is artificial, and it will almost certainly dissolve over time. Alison adds that even in casual games people are learning things (biometric research on branding) so there are things being learned in all games and there is clearly bleed through from both sides. David adds that we should have caution when evaluating a player in real space vs. virtual space because ethics is highly contextual.

Jesper asks: Flipping the question about allowing players to do unethical things. Some of the games proposed in a session the other day made the choice in game completely obvious, and how do you deal with this side of the ethics? John states that we shouldn't make these choices simple or obvious. David notes that kids tend to gravitate towards the revolutionaries in the game he was working on, so the made the loyalists more sympathetic to create a grey area. This is a slippery slope, and these are tough questions.

Next question: How do you handle players who are bullied in game?  Alison responds, we try to mitigate as it goes and provide access to an in game counselor if needed, but this question needs a harder look. Sam notes that even in a game space, when on is bullied early in a game they are more likely to assume this as the way the game is played. Having positive experiences in game can really help.

Ethan asks: How about an example of a game that is cost effective for ethical situations? (I unfortunately missed David's response). Sam mentions Passage as a good example of doing a lot (in terms of ) with a low budget.

Final question: The capacity of games to expand our emotional range? David notes that this possbility is here, especially in terms of single player games, but the authorship in big game spaces is more problematic. Sam notes that there is a different type of emotional space that comes in multi-player games (not so much profound narrative), but that these game spaces can provide for both more "selfish" emotions (pride) but also generosity.

Our session was after this, but first a HS student named Kaylen Doyle gave an awesome talk on designing games for change from the student perspective. She's going to email me a copy of her slides and I'll post it here.

Ian Bogost and Clive Thompson talking on Games and the News (I came in late for this one)

Ian is talking about the election returns and CNNs use of the magic wall as an example of technology deployed without clear purpose, but also how the commentators were playing with the simulation to work through ideas in real time. Clive mentions the redistricting game as an example of a game in that vein that worked.

Ian emphasizes the difference between other forms of media and games in terms of the immediacy of re/production when looking in the real world at phenomena.

One of the things that interests Ian the most is the presence of puzzle games as long standing games in the news. There was actually a moral panic associated with the invention of the crossword puzzle (idle time wasted on this activity, predicted as a short term fad). Crosswords have become "puzzles for the literate". The crossword as a means for entry into the medium (something like 55% of readers of newspapers by it for the crossword and "accidentally" pick up the news). Clive asks why online games don't generally integrate with other news in the way that they could. He provides the example of the Clinton vs. Dole election with the "winner of today's election" example in which the puzzle worked either way.

Ian suggests thinking about puzzles (and Brainage type games) as a missed opportunity for connecting back into journalism. Is there a way to make these things intersect better? Scoop (casual game) is crossword themed but "doesn't require an actual thinking" but the clues are drawn from RSS news feeds.

Clive interviewed Josh Marshall from talkingpoints, backing up to ARGs and the collaboration that they precipitate (leveraging a preexisting community of interest). Josh Marshall had a very small staff when he broke the attourney general scandal, so he leveraged the community by posting a question rather than doing the footwork himself. In 15 minutes he went form having a suspicion to having a spate of cases. He reported that back and then his readership (in an ARG like way) mobilized to get the rest of the story. Marshall stumbled into this aparatus (goals, bragging rights, other ARG features). The ARG mechanic maps neatly onto reporting, but as Ian points out instead of preconstructed narrative, these mechanics are deployed in an open ended context to get people to move out into the world/spaces they don't usually take part in. Clive notes that these game like principles are already essential to the news media.

Ian notes that this already connects to the idea of what it means to do journalism in the first place. The news media has done a poor job of conveying what it means to do this work in the first place, yet there's already natural coupling between the coupling of systems as ideas and the rendering of them in games suggests a natural fit.

The methods by which news gets communicated in the first place are clearly changing (Ian) but the standard notion of this (newspapers dying, internet rising) is a really limited way to think about this in the first place. Think about fantasy sports as an example. This could be like Play the News, or this could take the form of some sort of middleware for news. Clive notes that game designers are really good at providing players with the motivation to perform synthesis naturally. New York times relased a new open API a la Google recently and Clive sees this as a hopeful instance, but what is the audience actually picking up on these things?

Question 1: NYT and Seed magazine and others have spectacular imagery around announcements of new science, thoughts on the possibility of taking these things further? Clive thinks this is a prime idea in the way that CC has unlocked a huge flow of quality content. Is there a way of giving things (news items) an afterlife? Ian notes that the news desk is still more or less seperate from the multimedia folks as an example of an organizational problem that is problematic for realizing this sort of thing.

Question 2: The middleware that's emerging now is starting to make it easier to mark up anything reportable in a meaningful way . . . (folks coming in and out compromised the rest of this question for me). Clive responds with a story about a tool which I missed most of the details of but it involved a time limited game for making semantic connections in wikipedia towards a target.

Question 3: Is there a way to utilize the agency games provide to empower the readership? Ian responds that in soe ways the purpose of journalism is not just to lead people to the obvious conclusions, Clive notes that there certainly could be possbilities in many types of journalism where these sorts of mechanics might be viable.

Question 4: Crosswords and Sudokus have narrower limited game mechanics, are games that are less standardized capable of being designed for reuse? Ian notes that this type of journalistic activity requires computational literacy.

Question 5: The difference between fun and entertainment in news? Clive responds that when he says fun, he means that what you're doing is enjoyable in the way that a game is enjoyable (Clive's work as well as a lot of Julian's (Dibbell) work answers this question just fine).

Question 6: (This question was about connecting the dots between journalistic activity and activist response/effectiveness). Ian responds, do we ever get to know if actionable change happens for anything?

Question 7: Fun vs. compelling, we have to get away form this notion of fun. Clive agrees that compelling is a better word. Clive asks, if certain types of reporting can be conducted like ARGs, should the people be payed?

Question 8: In response to how you can empower people to do things that will actually make a difference, things people already pay small amounts of $ for (i.e. gifts on Facebook) with all the linking in of these different platforms, what is the potential here? Clive notes that a lot of non-profits talk about this as a question, but doesn't know if anyone has cracked that nut. Ian notes that there have been opportunities that haven't necessarily been exploited (the Food Forest game).

Final keynote: Lucy Bradshaw

(warning, laptop may die during this post . . . no power source available)

Lucy notes that one of the big ideas she;s been hearing over the last two days is the concept of gaming (arising from games, but not limited to them). Games matter: In her experience, she's had the opportunity to see how games matter, increasingly across a very broad demographic range.

• 38% of game players are women


• 7.4 hours is the amount the average woman plays


• 33 is the average age of game players


• etc.

PEW study with masses of kids playing (97%). "A survey found that digital kids have a hankering to 'Make a difference' and help the planet."

Games are used for training (the Army is using actual games, not jsut "training experiences"). A game is ultimately allowing the player to experiment (there is risk involved) in a way that a training experience does not.

Game level design has started to backwards inform actual architecture for better emergency routing.

Emergency relief workers have also started using games for training (first responders) and of course hand/eye studies recently with surgeons.

Lucy has gotten direct feedback about Spore regarding kids with autism using the creature designer in terms of connecting behaviors and feelings.

There's something really interesting about play. Play is in and of itself a transformative experience. Going back to childhood: collaborative play, rough housing, playing in the sandbox etc. Chlidren have to make important decisions all the time in play

Play in and of itself helps to prepare better leaders (National Institute for Play). In collaborative play around the Sims, the kid at the keyboard at the time needs to take in feedback from the other kids, sort through it, and make decisions.

What are the tactics that folks in EA used to push games that never would have come across via a straight pitch. Lucy often gets asked what about these games is educational. Her response is, no we make games. Spore, Sims, and SimCity are all games first, but players learn from these games (anyway?). Interactive games have this ability to take a player through the scientific method. Kids come to games from a PoV of trial and error. They push on the boundaries, find out what works and what doesn't, they succeed and fail.

The idea with Spore wasn't to take one point of view, it was to get all of the aspects that were inspiring for the game into it. Not providing answers, but helping to surface the questions for the players.

Players come from a huge range of motincations, and when games succeed its because they satisfy on a number of different levels. Providing different points of entry. Providing multiple ways for players to express their experience with the game. Lucy considers shipping the game to be the point where things really start, because this is the point where players really talk back to designers. The transformative process once a game ships is really where it picks up.

Games foster creativity - Giving the player a personal hook (user generated content, the ability for users to share their experiences) as crucial to the success of their games.

Spore as a way to raise the bar in the quality of user created content. Deconstructing Mr Potato head, construction sets, and clay as real examples of what they wanted to provide. "Zero to smile in 3 clicks or less" Aim was to provide players with a tremendous creative breadth. Trade off between impact on game play vs. range of creativity with Spore.

Providing players with a means to tell their own stories as another essential feature. For Spore this meant connection to YouTube with the click of a button.

A real push with new tools in the industry is goving more tools to the players to make them into game makers (characters, levels, behaviors/physics, even music). Spore as 1/3 play, 1/3 create, and 1/3 share. EA focused on the content sharing mechanism. File size is tiny (a 'recipe'), recipe is encoded in the .png. Players who are creators can create assets for other players making other parts of the content via Sporecasts.

When EA created the Sporepedia the communication mechanism was clunky and the player community improved on it by creating mailbox creatures. This brings home how the game doesn't end when it ships, but begins at this point. Even griefers provide openings for seeing this (Get out the vote example from Spore). Also guinea pig example from Sims where designers flipped the scenario with the guinea pig disease scenario and the user community responding and problem solving collaboratively.

Battery at 6%, this won't last

Kongregate and Pogo on the one hand, but Facebook apps on the other as providing game play and game making options to a whole new population. Often the starting place in design is to presume moving to the highest barrier of entry and then move back into the classroom. Flash and new open APIs provide vehicles for games to enter into the classroom in a meaningful way. These are crucial steps for how G4C can start getting in the mix.

Comments

[Jammie Morocco]

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[moses]

The blog platform is http://wordpress.org/" rel="nofollow">WordPress
Best of luck!