Technology: October 2005 Archive Page

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Ian Bogost: Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes... If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Bogost reminded the group that, despite the fact the room was arranged for a lecture, this is a roundtable.

Why is an academic talking about project management? “After all, uiversities are not exactly known for finishing things.”

About a third of the audience self-identified as game developers, about a third were educators, a smaller group were owners or investors in serious games projects. Dealing with the diverse needs of a heterogeneous group is one of the most challenging situations I face as a teacher.

Bogost’s talking points:

What’s different? Budgeting, Expectations, Stakeholders, Testing, Deployment, Integration, Other Stuff?

Topics called out from the audience: Distributed teams, risk-averse environments, creativity, production pipelines, efficiency.


Some initial tension between the creativity of the designers and the accuracy of the instructional content. An instructional designer noted “There is no such thing as an educational game model,” while there are educational models for other media.

A woman who said she is from a story-basted instructional design company says start with the learning objectives, moves to what she called the “story envelope,” but trying to get away from the opening exposition, a game that has little to do with the story, and then a final story. Bogost noted (without naming) the position of ludologists (who say that games are not fundamentally storylike).

Instructional designers in attendance said they need more game literacy. One member noted, in jest, that “Instructional designers suck all the fun out of the game.”

One speaker spoke of three champions in the mix – the game design champion, the instructional design champion, and the subject matter champion.

Another speaker invoked David Letterman, who says if you ever learn anything on his show, then he’s lost you. Game designers don’t worry about learning outcomes.

Another speaker noted that a serious game is selling a concept that the game will improve learning, and that the outcomes must be evaluated, while the outcome in commercial games is determined through sales. In a conventional design situation, a particular feature might be cut for time, but certain features in serious games simply aren’t optional.

At this point, Bogost asked a very good question. Is a particular instructional component just another constraint, or is it qualitatively different from other constraints?

I noted that, while you might want to evaluate the success of a game based on how many copies you sell, simply spending money is never the intention of a game customer. In a similar way, the creators of a serious game will have a different objective than the players (who may not want to play a game at all).

Budget: One participant mentioned that 3D prototyping must be “evangelized” so that funders can see the value of that particular technique.

Expectations: When speaking of working in risk-averse environments, Bogost noted the importance of going to the top of the organization. One participant warned that, once you educate the stakeholders about the potential of serious games, a problem is that the decision-makers suddenly develop high expectations – but typically that happens after the developer has committed to the project.

I noted that, as a verbal thinker, I was interested in the assumption lurking behind so much of the activity here that better graphics and more polygons equals a more realistic game, which by definition is a better teacher. But I noted that today’s young people are also interested in animation. For example, we need an abstracted version of an atom in order to understand the forces at work inside an atom. I suggested that we shouldn’t forget about the power of abstraction to teach basic concepts. (Bogost gave a thumbs up and said, “Inform text adventures!” The participants seemed to like that.)

On the difference between simulators and games – good simulators depend on outside knowledge, while a good game teaches you how to play the game (through a context that uses rewards and penalties to get the user to modify his or her behavior). Bogost introduced James Gee’s definition of the difference between games and simulation, though Bogost himself holds that there is no fidelity to the outside world in a simulation (and then, after dropping that bomb on the audience, rather comically changed the subject).

A comment from someone sitting next to me -- designers make games too difficult, because they are typically expert gamers themselves, and they tweak a game until it holds their own attention. The gameplay may be too hard for the intended audience to learn.

Developers noted the difficulty of testing their games on their intended audience, but in response to a question that Bogost and I asked at almost the same time, who in the room has funded such research? The crickets chirped in the room, two hands crept up, but when Bogost called on one, the speaker simply asked, “Where’s the money for that kind of research?”

Bogost will run a similar roundtable tomorrow.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Sharon Sloane: Exploring Game-Based Instructional Methodologies that Reach the Cognitive and Affective Learning Domains (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The presentation, by Sharon Sloane, president of CEO of Will Interactive, began with a long video clip showing a military leadership training game, focusing not on combat but routine decisions, careerism, inappropriate comaraderie (a superior officer being too friendly in response to a screw-up), slackerism, and even on-the-job horseplay.

Sloane warned that some of the worst principles of brick-and-mortar teaching have moved into distance learning and serious games, and set up shop on CDs and on the internet.

She invoked Bloom's taxonomy, and suggested that behavior won't change unless the affective domain is reached, where emotions and life experiences convince people to apply the phsycho motor skills they've practiced, and the information they've been exposed to through cognitive doman. Affective learning leads to cognitive goals.

Tips to engage the Affective Domain.

• Be learner-centric.
  
• Know your audience
  
• Get real.
  
• Reach out to your learner's world.
  
• One more item I didn't get...

Example of reaching out into the world of the intended audience, from an HIV education program designed to change the attitudes and behaviors of young adults.

Rule #1: Never take medical advice from someone hornier than yourself.

Advised that the learners will have different motives. Simply pass a course? Become a more successful person? Avoid casualties and maintain morale in a war situation?

Introduced "Hate Comes Home," a game about bias and ethics, understanding, stereotyping and prejudice, used in California schools and elsewhere. (I'd call it a modern morality play.. just as doctrinal as Everyman, but filmed with shaky-camera effects and a documentary style - including "artistic" camera effects (slow-mo, etc.) and a voice-over narrative - that one doesn't usually see in a computer game. The military is learning, through the global war on terror, that the old style of teaching military doctrine isn't working. Since lower-level people are now making higher-level decisions in the field, the military needs to develop the critical thinking ability of people in the field, rather than relying on the centralized wisdom and experience of the upper-level officers.

According to a slide, "Generic content no longer works. We cannot rely on the leaner to make the leap to today's realities and unique circumstances. In GWOT [Global War on Terrorism], education and training must depict real events in real environments in order to work."

Today's artillerymen are asked to do peacekeeping tasks and interacting with civilians in towns, rather than "putting steel on target."

Described the characteristics of successful "game-based learning solutions." Based on a comprehensive learning strategy; customizing the game on the fly to meet the needs of the learner; get useful feedback that's not simply a score. Games need in-game reference materials that can be accessed easily during gameplay.

(By the way, that term is a wonderful example of marketese - no real human beings talk about "game-based learning solutions," but I can understand why Sloane wants to use that term in her presentations. Her game philosophy is essentially the same as Gibson's. but where he used Flash cartoons to teach a general point, she used videotape and special effects -- blood, simulated burns -- to create a gritty realistic detail. Having said that, the make-up was not exactly top-notch, and the acting was adequate in the training clip, low-key and documentary-style in the high school diversty game and a hostage-negotiation scenario, and really just adequate in a combat simulation. Sloane says her games are designed to recreate reality, and repeatedly apologized for only being able to show isolated clips out of context. Is it flippant of me to note that the games she showed were only partially successful at emulating the cinematic qualities of film?)

(I just asked her the above quesiton. She responded that her test audiences responded postively to this particular method of instruction. There is a difference, she noted, between educating people in the field to change their short-term behavior in order to achieve results, and teaching a complex concept in the context of a college course. While Sloane is an accomplished and confident speaker, numerous times she ran up against a wall when she realized the information the audience was able to glean from a three-minute clip is completely different from what a player might learn from an extended interaction with the whole training system.)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Dolly Joseph and Mable Kinzie: Boys [sic] and Girls [sic] Game Play Preferences: Survey Results (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I’m hemmed into an awkward back corner, so I hope the presentation’s good, since I won’t be able to get out easily.

I didn't catch the speaker's name at first, but it was Dolly Joseph speaking alone, about work that she and Mabel Kinzie did at the University of Virginia. She began with the thick theoretical grounding that I find comforting in an academic presentation -- though the use of “Pedagogy” in Tim Holt’s presentation as a term of insult used by a bully suggests the tension between academics and designers).

Joseph made multiple references to her dissertation... she invited the audience to interrupt with questions, working her way professionally and methodically through her slides, occasionally referring apologetically to information that she was not covering. That did spark a lot of requests for clarification from the audience. I'd like to see more of this study as it develops.

I found the very small statistical sample to be troubling -- 20 students for the survey, and just four for in-depth profiles. In addition the survey was a proxy -- measuring what students said about games, not actually measuring their reaction to games. For instance, rather than giving the students the chance to play four different games, and then observing how much time they spent on each game, the students were instead asked to answer a question about what kind of hypothetical games they would like.

To her credit, Joseph didn't make any grandiose claims about her findings -- she freely admitted the risks associated with making claims on such a small data set, though she did on several occasions express frustration that the data confirmed multiple stereotypes about children. If the data had challenged rather than confirmed those sterotypes, would she have presented her findings differently? (For more on gender and desing, see Utopian Entrepreneur, in which Brenda Laurel describes the flak she got from some feminists who were horrified that her company designed games for girls, and catered specifically to the friendship-related issues that are so important to girls.

What follows are my lightly-edited liveblogging notes.

She was building on her own research on the use of popular culture in education, and mentioned comic books.

Hm…. the presentation is based on comparisons between the activity of two different game camps in Charlottesville, Va., offered under the title “Got Game”.

A survey of the participants of two camps, featuring feedback gathered from a total of 21 participants. While I rather like the idea of having kids give feedback through surveys, journals, and a “video confessional,” that’s just 21 kids – not even a whole middle school class. That’s a pretty small sample to use, and the arbitrary choice of four out of these 21 students leads to problems. As long as a study doesn’t use this kind of profiling as evidence to support a statistical conclusion, I’m perfectly happy hearing what we can learn from the analysis.

The researcher chose four children to profile, with different ethnic backgrounds, learning styles, and gaming preferences.

• One student who liked games with clear goals and good positive feedback and strong closure, and thus liked a game called Bioscopia, which the researcher presented as like Myst. “None of us understood why it was fun.”
  
• Another student frequently asked “What is the point of this game?” Didn’t like educational goals embedded within the gameplay, she wanted to know what she was supposed to learn.
  
• Yet another student preferred collaboration during gameplay, liked controlling social interactions and adaptable goals.
  
• A fourth student gravitated towards complex, realistic problems, with an urban aesthetic, liked action and conflict. Liked to set his own goals.

All four of the profiled campers were proficient in “active play” – under the pressure of time, with rapid character birth and rebirth, starting over from the same point, and dichotomous storylines (good/evil). Educational games that included this kind of play were answered highly. Kids were not fooled by games that inserted quiz questions as barriers.

Explorative play – part of the game world is initially hidden; travel through physical space is important; discovering new areas leads to new challenges. Only one profiled camper liked this.

Problem-solving – Discreet challenges with set goals; hierarchical or parallel, multiple challenges that are generally independent. All of the four students enjoyed these. Clear challenges and readily apparent successes and failures, consequences are apparent. Some educational games are insufficiently challenging for middle-school children. Assembling puzzle-pieces or other simple tasks were not addressing the higher cognitive abilities of the advanced students.

Srategic play – long-term manipulation of resources; multiple pathways; greater complexity 2 of the 4 liked this mode; few educational games employ the open boundaries of this kind of gameplay – the complexity might be too challenging.

Social play – Intra-game, multi-player, and collaborative. Social play was not implicit in any of the games surveyed games.

Said the kids “were wild for” the idea of playing an online social game, but that element wasn’t part of any of the games tested.

Results: Design Suggestions (after looking at case studies of 4 children, from a pool of 21)


I asked the speaker to clarify – these are four suggestions for games that the researcher wishes would exist, because they contain elements that she says these fours students would like. [The ideological force behind the suggestions are at least as interesting as the gameplay suggestions themselves.]

1. Cures of the Rainforest: Goal – find plants with potential curative properties within the rainforest. Put together a party with characters who have certain background details. Teaching flora and fauna. [But wouldn’t a game that presented the political and economic choices that must be made by the government of a third-world country that possesses rainforests. Issues related to the economic dependence on tourism, poaching, the jobs of people who might be employed by a local logging company, the agenda of a Hollywood celebrity whose presence on the team would increase publicity but displace a scientist… ]
   
2. Vigilante P.I. – “Solve crimes and bring corrupt businessmen to justice.” Strategy and problem-solving, using mental powers and a bit of muscle. Forensics, chemistry, health hazards. (You would be able to shoot.) A question from the audience: Did you get backlash from suggesting shooting a person would be an appropriate element of a game?
   
3. Butterfly Babies – “Collect, breed, and ‘grow’ butterflies.” “Create a pretty butterfly, but use science to do it.” Biology, genetics, lab procedures.
   
4. Zoo Rescue – “Free a trapped zookeeper by traveling through a maze-like zoo.” Teaching biology and ecology, solving puzzles that lead you through passageways. Surprised to find a child who liked that kind of gameplay.
   

In response to a question I asked about the ideological decisions behind the game design choices, the researcher said that students who were worried about their on financial situation were more worried about saving their neighborhood; those students who had the luxury of worrying about the world did.

Analysis of a survey of the 20 children who participated in the study.

Boys more likely to play on consoles, girls more likely to play on computers.

Both genders preferred to play their own genders and ethnicities.

Girls preferred thinner female characters.

Boys preferred games in the street or sports fields, girls prefer games set in a mall to a meadow. (This result sparked a flurry of questions from the audience, that eventually established that participants were given a survey to take home, and for this particular question were asked to say which of the following four choices would be their favorite setting for a game: streets, sports, mall, and meadow.)

I don’t know how the following was determined, but boys preferred saving adults and senior citizens, girls would rather save young children. (I’m actually just as curious to know more about this item, but since I was one of the questioners about the previous item, I kept my mouth shut so the presenter could get through the material.)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Tim Holt:  (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Remediating the classic Atlas body-building cartoon, Holt presented the scenario in which a big burly organization kicks sand in the face of a scrawny game designer. He suggested that modding is a way to create a great-looking game, that can be used to get further funding, without requiring a million bucks for the prototype. In some ways I'm more advanced than the target audience for this talk, but what Holt is doing now is what I'll have to do if my own idea for an educational game is going to go anywhere.
Holt noted that open-source and alternative development options are available, but he got a little FUDdy on the audience. When Holt, who used to work for Valve (the company that makes Half-Life) first suggested that he would talk about several alternatives to the traditional commercial development process, then admitted that would only talk about modding, the audience chuckled. The presentation walked through the process of using Half-Life 2 as a source for mods.

Differentiated modding - resuing somebody else's wheel -- from the traditional development process. The process starts with buying a commercial game such as Half-Life 2, noting that the companies want users to create their own modifications. Modding is a great playground, but you don't have to start from scratch. Half-Life 2 includes lots of grungy bitmaps, which wouldn't be acceptable for a hospital simulation, of course, but are easily expandable. Holt's laptop has 14 GB worth of content that can be reused in original mods. That content includes code that defines the AI properties or the in-game characters.

Holt showed the Half-Life 2 characters, which his collaborators complained they slouched too much, turning the oppressed out-of-work civilians of Half-Life 2 into confident, confidence-inspiring doctors (with white work boots).

Used Half-Life 2 greenery functions for a forestry simulation, expanding a function originally designed for grass and shrubbery, turning it into a system to populate a forest stretched across kilometers.

"It's too hard to explain to a bunch of foresters why they're running around with a crowbar."

Showed a proof-of-concept game for "Pulse!!" - a first-person medical game that featured an in-game EEG monitor synchronized with an in-game patient. The PC, with stethoscope in hand, touches the patient's chest, and we hear the heartbeat and breathing, based on where the hand is touching. (In the background, slouching hospital workers wash their hands or punch buttons.)

Indicated that in order to do mods, you'll need to play the game in order to understand its capabilities. "If your co-workers don't like it, invite them to play too."

Saved me a bit of time by noting that there aren't really any books out there on the subject of modding games.

In response to a question from the audience, briefly mentioned other platforms such as Neverwinter Nights and the new Civilization IV that offer modding capability.

Noted that, in addition to a copy of the game, you'll need a 3D modeling program (he suggested XSI), a programming environment (Visual C++), and an image editor.

Holt's virtual forest needs a system where people can share data, posting persistent notes within the game world. [That really got me thinking? would that be virtual geocaching? Let players leave audio comments for each other? That would let students annotate the same simulated world in different ways, according to different objectives? that really opens up a huge range of ways to reuse the same generic simulated environment. Lots to think about! -DGJ]

Giving students a virtual patient that they have to take care of day and night [That would be an extremely interesting variation on neopets, or the parenting simulations in which adolescents are given dolls that they have to take care of]

Offered the advice to "keep it simple," as applied to "Pulse!!"

Holt mentioned Garry's Mod - a sandbox version of Half-Life, with a scripting language called Lua.

Played "A Few Good G-Men," a wonderful demonstration of what can be possible with simulation. Perhaps only a scene that features a cold, stiff military officer in a courtroom setting would work. While the clip was fascinating, I would rather have seen a demonstration of a game - using a remediated version of a movie to demonstrate what modding can do.

(Holt's use of the buzzword "pedagogy" in his remediaton of the bodybuilding cartoon was hilarious.)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Perla and Whatley's Keynote Address: What's So Serious about Game Design? The Art or the Science? (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Quick Take:

I thought both speakers did a fair job contextualizing serious games, but as a humanist I am used to attending conferences in which speakers are meticulous about plugging their individual observations in to a larger theoretical framework. I did take practical notes during Whatley’s careful walkthrough of the design process, but I could have learned most of this content directly from the slideshow. I felt that both speakers were concentrating so much on delivering a take-home message that attendees could use to inform and persuade other stakeholders, that as a result, just when the speakers had laid out all the pieces, instead of synthesizing and building on the situation the laid out, they backed up and said “And here’s what this really means,” and delivered a much simpler version of the message. I’m not sure what that accomplished, rhetorically, other than to train audiences not to pay attention during the setup. But I recognize the difficulty of speaking to a diverse audience -- I often struggle with how to meet the expectations of English majors while not alienating or terrifying the non-majors in the same class.

New to me – the “OODA loop.” An acronym for Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action. In war, when one side has a more efficient OODA loop, the effects can be powerful. But in a game production context, the developer and the client need to have matching OODA loops.


What follow are loosely-edited notes, taken during the presentation.

Perla

Perla’s book The Art of Wargaming was published by the Naval Institute Press, introduced a scientific approach to designing a game system for military purposes. He observed that war is a fitting topic for "serious games" there is no subject more serious than war. A justification for seeking realism in wargames.

On teaching naval officers to use games to teach military strategy: "How can you teach people to create credible games, if they don't have that spark of genius that all working designers have?"

Perla introduced what he called a bad definition of wargaming: "Any type of modeling, including exercises, campaign analysis, computer simulation without players (CSWP)"

Perla offered his own definition, that differentiates between field exercises and computer modeling that are sometimes grouped under the umbrella of "wargaming," but which are fundamentally different from gaming. To Perla, wargaming is "A warfare model or simulation that does not involve the operations of actual forces, in which the flow of events affects and is affected by decisions made during the course of those events by players representing the opposing sides."

The dimensions of wargames: Time, Space, Forces (not just military, but also civilians and physics), Effects, Information, and Command

The military command structure exists in part in order to counter the effects of entropy. Success involves controlling that entropy better than your enemy.

Tips for "gaming your subject matter" (for those who aren’t doing wargaming)

Identify the "true philosophers of your subject matter" and make the postulates of your subject tangible in your game universe. Then – he offered whimsicaly -- "Just do it -- enter the artist."

Whatley

Douglas Whatley, CEO BreakAway, Ltd, offered a quotation from Donald E. Thompson of the National Science Foundation: “Perhaps the most fatal flaw in the education of young people is that we apprentice youngsters into 19th century science rather than letting them play scientist.”

Whatley presented serious games not just a replacement for e-learning, books, or rote teaching, but “fundamentally change the way we train, the way we educate… and hopefully to improve their interactions with the real world.” Much as “the game publishers are the bad guys in the stories we tell,” those game companies know how to protect the creative arc of the process.

Whatley’s definition of serious games: “A product that is not specifically entertainment, but which uses entertainment or the techniques and processes of the entertainment business, to achieve a purpose.”

Offered a chart illustrating the stages in the development and delivery of a game, with time on the horizontal and manpower/resources on the vertical.

Concept
Design
Prototype
Preproduction
Production (top of bell curve; the only time that simply throwing more people at the project can accelerate it -- when “nine women can have a baby in one month”)
Alpha, Beta, Testing, Delivery, Support (difference between “code complete” at alpha, and “content complete” at beta)

Of the government: “They don’t actually like paying for the testing phase.”

Whatley offered a useful set of terms that expand the concept of a “serious game”:

Simulation: “a speculative exercise with rules, goals and containing a disequilibria outcome. Typically it has a mathematical construct that allows one to test an adaptive skill set within a planned context.”

Play: “outcomes are often unknown and unexpected. We attempt to let kids make things explode.”

Toys: “fun objects that allow one to explore the woodness of wood.”

Whatley returned to the list of dimensions of wargaming, and offered some expansion.

Time – granularity (turn-based… how to force people to deal with a problem)
Space – granularity
Entities – the objects in the game
Effects – what can happen in the game (don’t model the physics of the element, but look at the effects as a separate element – thus, use die roll tables instead of simulating physics)
Information
Command

Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Blogging (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Here's my schedule for the first day of the Serious Games Summit, which starts in a few minutes here in Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington D.C. I do enjoy the mixture of commercial, government, educational and indie content, but the biggest draw is probably the dollars at stake to be extracted from government agencies for military training. I'll check out the booths of course, but the government/military/business angle is not why I'm here.

Signs That I'm Not at a Humanities Conference

1. Demonstrating the seriousness of the situation: Whatley mentioned that one of his EULA (end-user license agreements) includes the warning “death and dismemberment are not our fault.”
   
2. When I asked a question about simulation, Whatley’s response began with, “If I shoot a bullet at you…”
   
3. The word "pedgagogy" appears in one of the presentations, not simply to be dismissed as pedestrian and non-theoretical, but in the speech bubble of the beach bully kicking sand in the face of a scrawny little game designer, in a remix of the classic comic book advertisement for body-building snake oil.
   
4. To be continued??

Last year there was a T-shirt. This year? A plastic bag with a program, a promotional CD from Anark (one of the sponsors) and a few other fliers. (I overheard one of the conference organizers say that nobody offered to sponsor the t-shirts. Shame.)

I certainly hope there are muffins or cookies somewhere around here. [Update: There are.]

Keynote: Peter Perla and Doug Whatley
"What's So Serious about Game Design? The Art or the Science?"

Tim Holt
"Healthcare and Forestry -- Half-Life 2: Meet Serious Games Modding"

I'm conflicted... I'm interested in both of these topics, and may bail out of the first one to visit the second.

Dolly Joseph and Mable Kinzie
"Boys [sic] and Girls [sic] Game Play Preferences: Survey Results"

Lauren Davis
"Inside our Hidden Agenda: Using Contests to Generate New Ideas for Games in Education" (Never got to this. I've actually blogged about the Hidden Agenda effort before, and I would have loved to hear how the project is doing, but Joseph's presentation held my attention.)

Michael Gibson
"Creating Life Experience Through Dramatic Simulations"

Sharon Sloane
"Exploring Game-Based Instructional Methodologies that Reach the Cognitive and Affective Learning Domains"

Ian Bogost
"Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes... If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now"

Well, it looks like the exhibit hall is supposed to be open now.

Update, 01 Nov: See my liveblogging from day 2

People are investing major chunks of disposable income and (astonishingly, in a flat-out work-obsessed society where no one has time) untold hours in modding. It's one of the fastest up-and-coming social trends in the United States.

And modding has already tumbled head-on into a legal snake pit. --Andy Oram --Control Freaks: Modding and the Clash with Law (oreilley.net)

Modding is the practice of making and sharing new content for existing commercial games.

On Oct. 31, the Serious Games Summit gets underway in Washington D.C. Its sole focus: To bring together the computer gaming industry with other experts from various fields for more than just a good time. --Beyond 'Flinch and Twitch' Games (Cybershake)

Thanks to some (partial) funding from SHU, I'll be going to this event. My students were crushed when I told them I was cancelling most of my classes Monday and Tuesday.

(There's a Monday class that meets for just one hour a week, and I'm going to let the students run that class themselves.)

For the last decade, most game companies have been governed by one obsessive idea: that making games more lifelike?more three-dimensional and hyperreal?will make them more fun. But this hasn't worked. Even the crappiest game today has an elaborate 3-D world you can wander around and marvel at the superb rendering of shadows, the elaborate tattoos on the characters, or the lens flares when you look up at the virtual sun. But after you've finished admiring the scenery, the game itself is often incredibly tedious. You're just running around, solving obtuse puzzles, and listening to wretched pseudoacting by virtual characters.

What's missing? Game-play. What today's game designers have forgotten is that a video game isn't about 3-D rendering. In fact, a video game isn't about "technology" at all. It's a game, and as game theorists such as Eric Zimmerman have argued, a good game is created by crafting a few simple rules that make your goals teasingly difficult to achieve. --Clive Thompson --Blasts From the Past: What today's game designers can learn from Space Invaders. (Slate)

At first glance, it seems like a regular blog. But look closer and you'll see there's something very odd about the blog's content: It's very familiar. Too familiar.

That's because you wrote it, six months ago, on your own blog. The rest of the content doesn't make sense: The same word repeated over and over again. There are ads all over the sidebar for products like Viagra and mortgage loans.

This, you realize, is a splog, and you're the victim. --Nicole Lee --How to Fight Those Surging Splogs (Wired)

It's happened to me.

I couldn't help but make a joke with the title, because it's seemingly right on the money. You see, Google is getting ready to take the wraps off of a new service called Google Base. If it can be posted online, it would appear that they would, in fact, prefer it belong to them. At least, they'll store it for you and make it searchable. -- Ken Fisher --Google Base: All your base are, in fact, belong to us (Ars Technica)

I think a better title would be "All Your Base Are Belong to Google," but that's just me.

For those who don't get the joke, see "All Your Base Are Belong to Us," a meme that hit the internet around 2001.

The very fact that we can use wildcards to search Google for variations of phrases means that we can study this process in popular culture, essentially in real time. New to me: the term "snowclone," one example of which is a variation on Dr. McCoy's famous line, "I'm a doctor, not a ____."

The variation, of course, is "I'm a _____, not a _____."

I finished a three-hour binge of racing, clicked off my Playstation 2, and ... it was over. My compulsion had vanished. I still enjoyed the game, and had plenty more challenges to complete. But I didn't need to play it any more. For some mysterious reason, Burnout had suddenly released me from its talons.

This is one of the abiding mysteries of games: Why do they let us go so suddenly? --Clive Thompson --The End of the Affair (Wired)

One of the units in this January's "Videogame Culture and Theory" course will ask students to do a "close playing" and analysis of a game they are playing right now. My assumption, and I hope I'm not over-reacting (preacting?) is that students will come into the course with a strong idea of the "canon" of videogames worth studying, and that these games will overlap closely with whatever the students have themselves played recently.

I can't force them to buy a PlayStation in order to do the "readings," and since it's an online game I can't just put all the games on reserve in the library. (Emulators, here I come!)

If I did let students focus only on the games they already know well, I worry that the syndrome applied above will make it difficult for the students to return to and think critically about games they have recently played. So I am going to try to teach the critical process by asking them to play older games, and even "spoof" games like the ones from a recent StrongBad retrospective on videogame designs. (Here's a good example of what I mean.)

Games and game technology are poised to transform the way we educate and train students at all levels. Education and information, skill training, even political and religious beliefs can be communicated via video games. But these games and repurposed game technology, collectively called "serious games," have yet to be fully embraced by educators.

It's not enough to declare that "games teach" and leave it at that. Teachers aren't going to hand out a game to a bunch of students and simply trust that the students have learned the material. -- Proof of Learning: Assessment in Serious Games (Gamasutra)

Unlike many articles on serious games, this one presumes the audience knows about games but doesn't know much about education. It educates a gaming readership about education.

• As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs
  
• The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
  
• The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
  
• About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
  
• About a new weblog is created each second
  
• 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
  
• Between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts are made each day
  
• About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
  
• An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average

--David Sifry --State of the Blogosphere (Sifry's Alerts)

A. A suburban teenager's online diary, bursting with angst-y Goth poetry and "creative" grammar.

B. An alternative news source that can break stories the mainstream media won't touch.

C. A scholarly notebook, where a professor reviews books, brags about student accomplishments, and posts occasional cat pictures.

D. A list of web addresses, often focusing on a theme (such as data encryption, homeschooling, Latin-American economics, or ferns), recorded and evaluated by a meticulous web-surfer.

E. Any of the above, especially when updated frequently, and where visitors can add their own comments.

(Answer: E)

---

Seton Hill's blog site, blogs.setonhill.edu/nmj, developed by Dr. Jerz, allows any member of the Seton Hill community to keep an on-line journal (or comment on someone else's). Blogs are used both as a formal teaching tool and as an informal forum for students, faculty and administrators.

"Students who read my professional blog can see what I do when I encounter a new concept," says Jerz. "They see me testing my initial reaction against the facts as they emerge. They might see Dr. Arnzen [SHU associate professor of English] politely disagree with me. They might see me change my mind, or post a correction. That's very different from the dynamic you find in the traditional lecture."What is a blog? (A Multiple Choice Quiz) (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This appeared as a sidebar in Seton Hill's alumni magazine. Becca Baker, from our PR office, asked me to submit 200 words defining "weblog," and I was feeling quirky and unconventional, and the quiz question was the result. For the intended audience, I didn't feel it was necessary to specify the reverse-chronological order of blog posts, but if the definition were a little longer, I wish I could have fitted that in somehow.

The main article was about my colleague John Spurlock's Fulbright-sponsored visit to Montenegro, where he blogged about his encounters with the students and ordinary citizens, in entries that were sometimes touching, sometimes hilarious, and always illuminating.

I'll try to get a PDF of the article online in the near future.

You'll not only be able to watch every film, but also every TV program, news show, documentary, music video, and video blog, and all of it will be playable wherever you go. Great, you think: Thousands of channels, millions of choices, and still nothing worth watching. Nevertheless, "nonlinear TV"—watching the tube on our schedule, not the broadcasters'—is our destiny. The revolution will not be televised, however, until the companies that funnel the content into our homes figure out how to control it. The best advice for now: Study the music industry and do the exact opposite. --Adam L. Penenberg --The Death of Television (Slate)

Some weblogs are really just private diaries intended only for a handful of family members and close friends. Usability guidelines generally don't apply to such sites, because the readers' prior knowledge and motivation are incomparably greater than those of third-party users. When you want to reach new readers who aren't your mother, however, usability becomes important. --Jakob Nielsen --Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Alertbox)

I would only add that, while Nielsen's points about uninformative link titles are sensible, sometimes it's a rhetorical choice to link to an off-site source with a single word, or even a single letter, rather than always writing out a whole sentence or using the whole title of the off-site page. But the general point about writing for an audience that's new to the conversation is a good one.

Blogs can be too chummy if you consistently refer to other bloggers with their first name, but I figure if I don't recognize the name, I can always mouse over the link and check out the URL that appears in the lower left corner of the window. Since I'm more familiar with the names of some blogs than the names of the bloggers, that's usually enough to help me place the name.

The industry and the market are bewitched by the idea of more pixels and polys. Higher visual quality is fair enough, but why is it equated with better stabs at photo-realism? What's the point of aesthetics at all? If they don't matter, how come E3 can sucker-smack a "wow" or two out of so many gamers each year? Why, after gushing over how good stuff looks, do we hypocritically trot out that almost apologetic load of bollocks about gameplay moments later?

I'm guilty of it. I think it's time that particular conversational old dog was taken out back and shot. By no means am I suggesting that aesthetics are the very substance of games, but obviously, "it" is not all about gameplay. I suspect even the most fanatical ludologists have been watching tech demos with the curtains drawn.

We may not know a great deal about what they are or exactly what they do, but aesthetics are clearly important to us. As a phenomenon, aesthetics have manifested in every culture and sub-culture throughout history, and furthermore survived the demise of each. From food through to music and architecture, all of our possessions and many of our experiences are purposely shaped by designers for aesthetic as well as functional purposes. Aesthetics pervade all media, and games are no exception. --David Hayward --Videogame Aesthetics: The Future!

Also check out the discussion on Slashdot.

I say we need photo-realistic text adventures.

Fuzzmail records the act of writing and lets you send it as an email. Dynamic changes, typoes, pauses and writeovers are captured and communicated. We created fuzzmail because we wanted a more emotionally expressive alternative to email, so that an emailed love letter does not have to look the same as a business letter. --Fuzzmail (fuzzmail.org)

Intersting concept. Found via KairosNews.

Google is dumb: it places so much trust on its relevance ranking in its presentation of search results as a simple list of Web sites. Users don't have access to suggestions of alternate concepts or terms or all the tools that other search engines provide. Our clients are placing too much reliance on the first ten results they get from what they consider to be the best search engine out there. It reminds me of what happened when we Baby Boomers, raised on Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Beefaroni and Jell-O corned beef salad loaf, finally encountered- you know-real food. "Wow, you mean we can fix food that has real taste and texture?"

What this means for us info pros is that, when we introduce our clients to all the sophistication of a high-end online service or enterprise search tool, we have to remember that they often do not have any context within which to evaluate it. They are accustomed to looking at search results that were cutting edge three years ago. The new search tools that are available do require more work for the user. Rather than just rely on the first page of search results, you are encouraged to look at some of the suggested modifications. --Mary Ellen Bates --You Still Google? That is So Last Week (Red Nova)

Blogs are all the rage, and I encourage their use as part of the external - and internal - communications process. Unlike press releases, which tend to read as if they'd been composed by the mating of a computer and lawyer, good blogs have a distinctly human voice. They are conversational almost by definition.

But the key word here is "conversation" - and the first rule is that you have to listen. That's why companies should encourage comments from those various constituencies, publicly and privately, as part of the conversation, even when they make insiders cringe. The people at the edges of the communications and social networks can be harsh and effective critics. But they can also be fervent, valuable allies, offering ideas to each other and to the newsmaker. --Dan Gillmor --PR: It's a New World (Bayosphere)

Jacobs decided to craft an article about Wikipedia, complete with a series of intentional mistakes and typos, and post it on the site. The hope was that the community itself would be able to fix the errors and create a clean version that would be ready for publication in Esquire's December issue. The original version was preserved for posterity.

"The idea I had--which Jimmy (Wales, Wikipedia's founder) loved--is that I'd write a rough draft of the article and then Jimmy would put it on a site for the Wikipedia community to rewrite and edit," Jacobs wrote on the page introducing the experiment. Esquire "would print the 'before' and 'after' versions of the articles. So here's your chance to make this article a real one. All improvements welcome." --Daniel Terdiman --Esquire wikis article on Wikipedia (C|Net)

Great concept. "Every factual error was corrected within minutes, and the focus moved on to refinement, clarification and making the article more readable," according to a source quoted in the article.

Of course, if the article had not been about Wikipedia itself, chances are the responses would not have been as rapid or as informed.

How many cardiologists would be willing to correct a crappy draft of an article about heart bypass surgery, for instance?

The ?word daemon?, Leonard ventures, ?however spelled, uncovers a provocative and useful dualism. An intermediary with another world doesn?t have to be beneficient. Yet neither is it compelled to be nefarious. It can be both, flip-flopping between positive and negative states?depending on context or perception, on the vagaries of polities, or the whims of the fickle masses. --Bots, Demons & Dolls (WRT: Writer Response Theory)

A great post on the history of simulations of conversation, sparked by Andrew Leonard's book Bots: The Origin of New Species.

We expect them to be able to follow us around the house, picking up after us, chattering with us like C-3PO, reading our emotions with the accuracy, if not the intent, of HAL. While robots have proved indispensable in narrow kinds of work, like assembly lines, when it comes to interactions with unpredictable, flesh-and-blood humans, they have yet to deliver on the promise of more lifelike responses. --Larry Gallagher --R Is for Robot  (Wired)

The average American is a ravenous media junkie, consuming up to nine hours a day of television, web time or cellphone minutes, according to new research which raises fresh questions about how technology is revolutionising society.

From iPods filling commuters' ears, the screens scrolling headlines in the elevator at work to proliferating on-the-move tools like cellphones and Blackberry handhelds, media is everywhere in the United States, like much of the rest of the developed world. --Media, media everywhere, and no time left to think? (Breitbart | AFP)

We're reading selections from Thoreau's Walden in my American Literature class. Thoreau's desire to shed his ties to material possessions and live simply in the woods appealed to several of the students in my morning class.

There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us - so seemingly obvious - that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here's a case in point - the weblog post's permalink. I mean - let's think about it. The problem was that a weblog's front page is by far its most visited page. This is the page where everyone actually sees your content (or at least it was until the creation of RSS feeds). But it's not possible for someone to effectively bookmark or link to that particular entry on that page, because shortly it will scroll off the bottom. Added to that, bookmarks operate at the level of pages, not posts. So how do you handle that? --Tom Coates --On Permalinks and Paradigms... (Plasticbag.org)

I'm saving this for the next time I teach "Writing for the Internet," but also for the next time I introduce blogging to a class. Some students get the whole package right away, but others need to be brought along in stages.

This year, I asked students to get used to blogging their reactions to texts by having them post brief comments on the course website, then bring 200-word reflection papers to class. I then asked students to move their initial brief comment to their own blog, asked them to read and comment on peer blogs, and invited them to post the 200-word reflection on their own blog, if they wished.

I lost some students along the way, by which I mean that some students stopped posting regularly, which means that their first blogging portfolio was a frustrating exercise in writing furiously in order to catch up.

But I added an extra blog portfolio, and moved the first due date up, so that students would quickly get the chance to see just why it is more valuable to blog a little bit each day, rather than wait until the night before the portfolio. We'll see how it turns out.

Coates credits Matt Haughey with the term "permalink" and Paul Barusch with the concept "permanent link".