Tuesday GDC Notes

On Tuesday I went to sessions from both IGDA and the Serious Games Summits. You'll find those notes below the fold. :-)

Tuesday

Tuesday Morning

I. Ian Bogost Keynote Speech

Love, valentine’s day, marriage, toasts leading up to interdisciplinarity

Katherine Hayles (MLA) called interdisciplinarity “Weak and flabby”

Video Games is a new discipline and there is hazing and gatekeeping involved

We are trying to make an interdiscipline

We are a bit of a “savior discipline” or that is (at least) the way that it gets seen by some

Ideas <3 computation (the marriage of ideas and computation)

This might be the first earnest attempt at this marriage

Ideas

Will Wrght’s ideas for games come from books in other disciplines: SimCity Urban Dynamics; SimLife-> Gaia; Simants -> The Ant; The Sims -> A Pattern Language, Why We Buy; Spore -> Gaia J. Lovelock

The ideas come from outside. Successful collaboration of disciplines.

In the liberal arts we do learning in the more abstract sense how to think, how to learn and consider context. The problem with this is that it doesn’t allow for the study of computation and the problem with this is that video games are computational. 

Procedural literacy 

Thinking about the machines themselves (computer engineering) Thinking about how they are made and what brings about their evolution, not only intent but happenstance and cultural factors. 

Thinking about teamwork--Early videogames were created by one person. With some of the new PSN and XBLA games were are returning to the notion of the renaissance man developer-– the one person team. 

Hayles says throw away departments and bring on “clusters” that incoming students can declare a problem and not a major and choose the cluster that worked best for them. 

Videogames are a medium that are capable of a number of things other than entertainment. A mature medium explores the continuum from high art -> tool, but videogames are not there. There is still possibility space for us to se other as a failure or as potential for growth. 

This thing that we do requires dedication and shouldn’t be done because it’s cool or because it will boost dwindling enrollment. 

II. Reaching Out. Looking In. To Build Mutually Beneficial Partnerships– Ann De Merle

Industry/Academia

Commonality

Youth– propel both game industry and academia

Product– create vehicles in which learning takes place

Dissimilarity

Timeline– 2 years to ship vs. 6+ years

Assessment– rapid market response vs. ???

Advisory boards to build programs

Industry sponsored gatherings

Industry sponsored campuses

Game education to recruit students

 Research pushing boundaries

Internship programs

Keynote: Ernest Adams– go to industry

Make some new friends– build in diversity

Game Company 2018

Content 

Context

Community

Delivery Method

Commerce

Convergence

Connectivity

Location

Tuesday Afternoon

I. How Can We Assess Learning

Richard

Game play context is critical

Learning needs to be contextualized in order to transfer learning

Rote vs. Meaningful learning

Games can harm rote learning because it offers the novice learner a lot of extraneous information.  This is working with the notion that rote learning is desirable in the first place. Perhaps this is more necessary in the STEM courses, but what about more humanistic courses? 

The more that you can connect new information with what you already have in your brain the more likely you are to be able to retrieve it. Working with foundational knowledge and dealing with learning as building blocks.

Frank points out that we have gotten off task (or at least they have) and are not talking about assessment at all, but rather or not gamers can learn from games at all. 

Richard seems to see everything as transfer...From rote recall to critical thinking. 

II. Using games to teach CS

Andy Phelps MUPPETS

MS using games to find bugs in software Rob Musson and Ross Smith

Games at work

Let everyone win

Simple prizes

Align the game to the job (DYFJ– Do your friggin’ job)

Simple games

Game purpose

Motivate behavior– communicate goals and allow tweaking of goals over a short period of time

Facilitate education– understand standard metrics, learn the relationships between the metrics, and understand how to use the metrics

Team working– build spirit, healthy competition

Game Design

Set goals

Set rules

Determine organizational impact

Game Issues

Competing priorities between groups

Multiple goals

Conflicts between plays and non-players

Bug Hunter Design

Goal– use $ best way, gather metrics

Rules– enter info after discovery, vote on bug location, predict root cause, determine root cause

Game Flow

Detected

Predict resolution

Resolution

-Looking at a demo of Bluegrass virtual world

IBM has bee hive which is an internal version of facebook.