Cyberculture: November 2005 Archive Page

Blogs are the latest form of electronic information that law enforcement is examining as part of investigations, and experts predict they'll become even more relevant as their popularity grows.

"We have to look at that as a new medium to solve crimes," said Cmdr. Christopher Vicino of the Pasadena, Calif., police department. "We would be able to use them, not so much as evidence, but more for investigative leads." --Catherine Donaldson-Evans --Today's Gumshoes Dust for Fingerprints, Then Read Blogs (Fox News)

Suggested by Megan Ritter.

All of the professors interviewed agreed that the Civ3 gods created a universe in which war goes a long way. The gods, of course, are the game designers who determine the algorithms by which history, in the game, will progress. So in order for the game to accurately portray the inputs that spit out world history, the game designers had “better create a damn complex algorithm,” says Alexander Galloway, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University who used Civ3 in a media studies graduate seminar. “The game doesn’t progress the same way [as human history],” Galloway says, noting that a player controlling Russia would essentially have to pick one form of government and stick with it. “I’m sure there are lower level history textbooks that are reductive too.” --Not Just Child’s Play (Inside Higher Ed)

While it's certainly true that all simulations are reductive, it's not true that a player in Civ3 would have to stick to one form of government. Players start out with "Despotism," but after they have researched such things as "Literacy" and "Code of Laws," they have the option to research -- and switch to -- more advanced forms of government like "Republic," "Monarchy," "Democracy" and "Communism." Each form of government comes with benefits and drawbacks, and just because you're playing Russia doesn't mean you have to move from Monarchy to Communism when the game reaches the 20th century. Each civilization starts out with a slightly different set of resources, and each civilization gets a specific military unit that is superior to the similar class units in other nations.

Don't write the sentence "There has been very little research done on games" in any more papers or articles or theses and essays UNLESS you also have a full bibliography that cites those few existing works. I don't care how many authorities you cite who may have written those words quite recently. Because yes, gamestudies is a new field, and therefore does not have entire library shelves to themselves, like literary studies. However, if the amount of articles and books you have to read to be able to understand the width of the field is so small, it is pretty lazy scholarly work - sloppy craft, simply - not to have read them all. --Torill Mortensen --Please, PLEASE stop (Thinking with my fingers)

Just trying to send a little link love Torill's way.

So far, 132 people have voted for the best geek novels written in English since 1932, in spite of Survey Monkey's rubric saying free polls were limited to 100 responses. The top 20 is therefore as follows, with the numbers in brackets showing the number of votes.

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune -- Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
[...] --Best Geek Novels Written in English (Guardian Technology Blog)

That's a very small survey sample, but it's still an interesting list. The only one on the top 10 I don't know is The Colour of Magic. I didn't get very far in either Foundation or I, Robot when I started them as a teenager, but both have been on my "to read" list for a long time.

Turning to a few student samples we can see this concept exemplified even more. Below is a quote from one of Dennis Jerz's students. This is one of the student's first postings, and you can see his/her enthusiasm about designing and creating a blog.

September 08, 2004: LOOK AT ME, I HAVE A BLOG!

I have a blog now. My very own. It's like a baby -- mine to mold, change, and create. Hundreds of people (or in my case, about 5) will be able to see my writings. People from other countries even. Hola! Bonjour! Guten Tag! foreign peoples! I think I may have become addicted though. I just found out how to personalize and change the colors. Now, every free moment I have will be spent changing colors and making the blog uniquely me. Homework? Who needs homework? I have to work on my blog. (Special K)

This student seems to be aware of, probably because Jerz emphasized to his students, the public nature of the weblog: "Hundreds of people... will be able to see my writings. People from other countries even." However, what is even more intriguing is that the student states in parentheses "(or in my case, about 5)," which would seem to indicate that he/she does not think many people will be reading her blog. --Ashley Joyce Holmes --Web Logs in the Post-Secondary Writing Classroom: A Study of Purposes (PDF) (North Carolina State University)

This was a pleasant find -- an NCSU master's thesis that analyzes the use of web logs in higher education. I think I'll throw a few quotes from this into my next annual review.

I'm much better at simply showing people what blogs are all about, so I appreciated Holmes' careful description of precisely how a blog works. I might use a section of this dissertation the next time I teach Writing for the Internet.

My student Vanessa Kolberg is the "Special K" blogger. The paper mentions her name correctly, but the URL given in the Works Cited list is wrong. It should be "http://blogs.setonhill.edu/VanessaKolberg".

Each of the following uses a weblog or content management system to manage the site and/or really breaks traditional conventions in other ways, changing the way that the teacher establishes their professional ethos in comparison to the more traditional forms seen above. --Example Instructor Professional Home Pages (Introductory Composition at Purdue: Technical Mentoring)

Just doing a little egosurfing to remind myself that I do have a professional identity that extends beyond circling punctuation errors. No classes today, but I went into the office anyway and marked papers for seven hours.

Not done yet, so it's back to work. But first, maybe I'll crush Rome in Civilization III.

Comments published in a CNN article yesterday purporting to be from Sony CEO Howard Stringer regarding the planned pricing for PlayStation 3 have been removed after it emerged that he had not said anything on the question.

[...]

So where did the information come from, then? The culprit appears to be a Hollywood Reporter article on another interview with Stringer, which appeared a few weeks ago and also appeared to attribute pricing and availability information to the Sony CEO.

However, on closer inspection, the article was actually citing an anonymous source within Sony - a fine detail which the CNN article apparently missed, setting the whole rumour mill rolling once again. --CNN drops PS3 price story as Stringer comments are confuted  (Games Industry)

Via Bobby Kuchenmeister, a former student of mine, and a regular commenter, who finally got a blog. Hooray!

Researchers unveiled a prototype of a $100 hand-cranked laptop computer on Wednesday and said they hoped to place them in the hands of millions of schoolchildren around the globe.

About the size of a textbook, the lime-green machines will be able to set up their own wireless networks and operate in areas without a reliable electricity supply, MIT researchers said at a United Nations technology summit.

--$100 laptops aim to bring children the world (Seattle Times)

This story broke during the week my blog was down, so I'm late to this party. One of minute of cranking is supposed to provide 40 minutes of computer power.

All of which, as it turns out, has led us to make a change for the better. We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity. --Charles Johnson & Roger L. Simon --Excuse us while we change back into our pajamas (OSM.org)

I've been watching this one unfold from a distance.

A company called Pajamas Media (a reference to CNN president Jonathan Klein's dismissal of the typical blogger as "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas") to Open Source Media. Bloggers noted that this name conflicts with the name of Christopher Lyndon's "Open Source" radio show, and began tracking changes to Open Source Media's version of the name-change story.

Johnson and Simon have rightly pointed out the problems with Dan Rather's arrogant response to bloggers who pointed out flaws in the CBS coverage of Memogate, so it was rather surprising to see that it took some time for Open Source Media to admit that the company made a big mistake. (See Lyndon's description of the name problem.)

The Pajamas Media website, however, still contains material dismissing "Pajamas Media" as a temporary name that they will soon shed.

Why We'll Be Changing Our Name

When the bloggers who started this company first came together it was almost natural we would call ourselves Pajamas Media. It was a playful tip of the hat to that moment when bloggers exposed the misreporting of CBS anchor Dan Rather. At that time, an ex-executive for CBS tried to dismiss us as riffraff in "pajamas." But the bloggers were right, CBS was wrong, Rather retired (without apologizing) and the rest is history.

But as we have gone forward putting together this company, it has become clear to us that we do not wish to be defined merely as gadflies in opposition to mainstream media. We owe our readers and our colleagues something bigger, an alternative to the structures we have lived with all our lives. It's not enough to criticize. We also have to build something new. To do that, we needed a name that would allow us to grow. And that name we are in the process of deciding.

What a PR fiasco. It wasn't as if the people involved suddenly decided to change their name and picked one at random. They planned this, but didn't plan well enough.

While they responded slowly in terms of the blogging cycle, they still cleared it all up within a week, which is not so bad, in the grand scheme of things.

But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"?an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. --Robert S. Boynton --Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs (Slate)

--2005 IF Comp Results

Vespers, Beyond, and A New Life are the winners of IF Comp 2005. Woo hoo! Free text games!

I'm back! (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last Friday afternoon, my site went down. Trying to access the homepage yielded a message that the owner of the site should contact billing@[ISP]. I assumed that there was a mix-up in terms of paying our ISP for the next year of hosting, but our billing people say that we paid the bill on time.

During this time, I was able to access my files via ftp and SSH (geekier ways of accessing files, not involving web browsers), so I knew the site was still there and the data files were safe.

About a half hour ago, I noticed that my site was still accessible under a different URL -- the URL my ISP first gave me, before the domain name servers picked up "jerz.setonhill.edu" and started pointing web surfers to hosting company's computer.

SHU's webmaster Jess Turner did his webmasterful magic, found that our ISP has moved to a new IP address (the sequence of numbers that identifies each individual unique connectio to the internet).

So now I'm back in business. Hurrah for Jess!

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed or called me to let me know the site was down.

My student weblogs were unaffected by this problem, which was a good thing, since this is a stressful time of year and I would hate to give them one more thing to worry about.

As Riya learns who's in your pictures, it begins to auto-tag the snaps itself, quickly scanning the rest of your photos and identifying each person it recognizes. Riya also uses text recognition to read street signs and other text in photos. --Riya Eases Pain of Pile of Pix  (Wired)

Still, when asked what art forms speak the most to us, games don't rank at the top. Ranked 1 to 6, where 1 is the most emotional, the order was: movies, music, books, video/PC games, paintings/artwork, and last cars. (OK, so I have a thing for cars?)

Heavy gamers have more of a feeling for movies. Lighter and younger gamers are more moved by music.

For genres, I thought MMOs would top the list, but RPGs are the runaway winner ? by far the most emotional genre of videogames. --Hugh Bowen --Can Videogames Make You Cry? (bowenresearch.com)

This is a teaser article, advertising a full-length report. While I'm very interested in the subject, journalists should be careful of how they use this kind of study.

Was the study peer-reviewed? What was the methodology? What is the author's purpose in publishing it (and selling copies on his eponymous website)?

I'll have to look into the death of Aeries from Final Fantasy VII. Interactive fiction fans seem to place the fate of Floyd the robot (from Infocom's 1983 Planetfall) in the same category.

Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’.

Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling. --Adam Fresco --Texting teenagers are proving 'more literate than ever before' (Times Online)

gr8 2 c

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Paul Marino: Machinima: Using Games to Change Filmmaking and Instructional Video (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Executive Director, Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences
Author of The Art of Machinima

The presentation was a brief introduction to a demonsration of clips, many of which I've seen, so it wasn't as immediately informative as I had initially expected. Still, a useful focal point for many different issues. Marino began by defining machinima as “the intersection of filmmaking, animation and interactive/game technologies,” ended by calling it “the democratization of animated filmmaking/storytelling.”

What follows are my hastily typed notes. I kind of shut my brain off and just watched the clips, so this entry will be a little thin.

Capturing live action, even if it takes place in a virtual world, is a kind of filmmaking.

Cinema + Moore’s Law = Machinima

Quake Movies – The Rangers – created “Diary of a Camper,” a silent film with text-chatting dialogue, created by capturing the actions of players in the multi-player environment. The term “Quake movie” persisted for a while, but since it was being created within different games, a new term was needed.

Term coined in 1998 by Hugh Hancock and Anthony Bailey. (Machine + cinema, with the misspelled ending being part of an e-mail communication.)

Clive Thompson, NYT, noted that machinima is not just about creating an animated movie, but also permits game players “to comment directly on the pop culture they so devotedly consume.”

Machinima Clip Screening

“Apartment Huntin’”
“Warthog Jump”
”My Trip to Liberty City” -- “Almost a travelogue, in a Woody Allen kind of way.”
(Played the clip from the beginning to the joke about not really playing baseball.) (The same author also created a great short film on a text adventure theme.)

Visionary Machinima

“Anna” – lifecycle of a wildflower.
“The Journey” -- abstract, arthouse film, medium of expression.

Dance Videos: Keep of Movin’

“Let’s Get Started”
”Shut up and Dance”

Episodic Machinima
“Popular, and to a certain extent profitable.”
Red vs. Blue – five-person team that supports themselves, a million downloads per episode, over three years.
“Strangerhood Studios,” based on Sims 2.
“Cyborg Altar Boy”

New Building Blocks: Machinima Gets Crafty

In machinima it’s hard to do drama, easy to do comedy (the reverse of Hollywood)
Half-life 2’s Faceposer.

Marino’s clip… Presented the G-man singing in a music video.
“Robes”
“A Few Good G-Men”

(As soon as I get the chance, I’ll add links to sources for all these clips.)

Marino noted that Pixar films take two or three minutes per frame to reander, but today’s machinima creators are taking advantage of the real-time rendering tools that their computers and consoles possess. We’re reaching the point where creating these films don’t take nearly as much time as it used to take. Are we in the “Age of Ubiquitous Creativity”?

The talk really didn't have much to say at all about instructional filmmaking, even though that was part of the title. Overall, I'd say the audience was impressed; a crowd of about 20 people were around the speaker at the end of the presentation -- that's generally a good sign.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Derek Wischusen: Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using AI (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Began with a useful grid that recognizes that realism is not the only way to evaluate a game, and that realistic games are not the only kind of training games out there.

Wischusen presented two binary pairs:

Fun/Training
and
Realistic/Unrealistic

Goal: Fun -> Training

(I like the recognition that realism is one option, but there are many ways to be “unrealistic,” just as there are many ways to be nonwhite or un-American. Expressionism, impressionism, romanticism, abastraction etc. are all artistic alternatives to realism.)

Key messages:

Training isn’t “just in time” or “just in case”
Simulation isn’t training
Networks, virtual environments, games, process measures are not training


Training is “relevant practice with feedback”

Assessment and Feedback

Simulation/game provides the practice environment. Practice alone does not make perfect. Intelligent assessment and feedback is essential for effective training to occur.

Perfect practice makes perfect. To learn how to do it correctly, you need assessment and feedback to tell you when you’re not doing it correctly.

While the good instructor is always the best source of training, there are rarely enough instructors to meet training needs; and never enough to provide one-on-one training.

(Hmm… A embedded assumption is that one-on-one training is best.. but “best” is a value statement. If you factor in ROI, then one-on-one instruction may be inefficient. Are all instructors “good” at one-on-one training? The reference to a “good” instructor is sort of begging the question. )

The system can do pre-testing to identify the knowledge you bring into the system, personalizing the delivery according to the needs of the learner.

“Cognitive fidelity is as important as graphical fidelity for both training quality and end-user acceptance.” (Hmm… that phrasing privileges graphical fidelity, but the speaker noted that not all training simulations requires that kind of fidelity.)

Presentation of Virtual Interactive Pattern Environment and Radiocomms Simulator (VIPERS) – an Air Force Research Laboratory project designed to give student pilots practice performing a labor-intensive landing procedure. Typically simulated with a duct tape pattern on the floor, with the students calling out their status and responding to commands as the routine requires. A technique better practiced on the ground, but students have limited access to fancy simulators.

(Hooray – in an aside the presenter noted that 2D environments can provide just as good results as rich 3D simulations, and cautioned the assumption that realistic graphics are always the best option.)

Synthetic Teammates for Realtime Anywhere Training and Assessment (STRATA)

DARWARS – offers a massively multiplayer online war, that permits different training systems to plug into it. Emphasizes “headwork” (teamwork, not flying skills).

Giving the trainee a situation that contains an error; will the trainee note that the setup information contains an error that makes accomplishing the goal impossible.

AI agents should occasionally make errors, since people do make errors in the field. That’s part of the “realism” in the training environment.

Virtual Environment Cultural Training for Operational Readiness (VECTOR)

Building a 3D environment that teaches soldiers to interact with people in a foreign environment, so that the locals are more interested in helping the soldiers than hurting them. The AI agents respond to trainee actions based on the emotional state of the agent, according to rules determined by cultural subject-matter experts. Within the exercise is a synthetic instructor, who gives objectives, provides feedback on both military and cultural protocols. The training involves interacting with the locals, getting important information while following cultural rules.

VIGILANCE – HazMat training, skilled support personnel (SSP) who assist the first responders. They may operate heavy machinery. The concern is that our SSP haven’t been trained to assist an EMT during a HazMat response.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Sande Chen and David Michael: Roundtable -- Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

These are my very rough notes. Some of the speakers didn't give their names, sometimes I couldn't hear their names, and sometimes they gave their names while I was furiously typing something else.

The moderators are authors of Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform

Presenters began this roundtable by noting an opposition between “Abigail McGillicuddy,” the traditional teacher, where the buck stops, and “HAL.”

Microsoft employee: emphasized the fuzziness of knowledge as the future, as opposed to a prescriptive system that records a single correct answer. In games, knowledge is treated as binary – right and wrong. Teachers, on the other hand, recognize few absolutes, emphasizing contextualization.

Human has to be there for the time being, but technology will

Richard Carey, Pearson Education. Pre-assessment to level a student into the gameworld; in an educational context you want to place the student right away into the proper level, rather than starting them out too easy. Getting the “picky teacher” to use the software.

Does “test” and “assessment” mean the same thing to everyone here?

John Fairfield, Rosetta Stone. Think of placement rather than assessment.

I noted that testing is just one method of assessing; that assessment can be done without any kind of test.

Eric Lauber, IUP – noted that the simulation “looks more real” but that we don’t have much evidence of transferability of what’s learned in one context to a different context.

Technical consultant – “What I care about is what is this information used to sell these games,” that is, convince people that they want to use it (even if it’s given away for free). A technical consultant needs better data, “more backend.” Won’t be able to convince medical clients to use those games unless he can provide longitudinal study data that shows improvement.

David Gibson – designing simulation that helps teachers deal with kids; wants to be able to represent the intellectual growth of simulated students. Noted that Vermont went to a portfolio method for assessment. Noted Ron Stevens’ work on transference in case-based learning, doing neural network analysis on problem solving, making early predictions of the strategies students are going to use. Also referred to research on the automated SAT, so that you don’t have to keep asking them the same kind of question once you’ve determined what the student knows.

Susan McLister, editor-in-chief of a technology magazine. Noted a major challenge in education is to convince teachers that games are not evil, that there is a direct tie-in between tames and what teachers are expected to do. Embedded in a game should be measurements for higher-order learning skills.

Military speaker – one of the longer histories of using games for training. Wants to know when to use a training game, now that they have games that they believe are training. Wants confirmation that they are doing what they think they are doing, what the ROI is versus traditional methods? Improved skill level, improved long-term retention?

Owen: Referred to the “happy path” and “adaptive thinking,” noted the need to create models around not just models and skills, but also confidence.

Completion assessment vs. process assessment.

Margaret Corbit, Cornell: Games are missing a piece in which students showcase and present what they learned in their own ways. Games don’t include a way for students to express what they learned.

Pat Youngblood, Stanford: [Was distracted… missed her point.]

Kids learning in cyberspace all the time… President of the U of Washington complained that media has not filled its mission of educating the masses. The spirit of games does not involve rigid assessment… (at least not about what educators value)

Designer: Can’t find off-the-shelf products that help him do what he needs to do, and assessment is typically one of the problems. Pressure from teachers who want games tied to state curricular expectations.

Mike Gibson: Beyond the learning within the games, how is it affecting the user’s ability in the real world. (A selling point.)

Another speaker – be sensitive to demographics of the audience. Want to be thinking about what you want to assess – a skill, knowledge, cognitive ability. Simulators typically do very badly in training people. Referred to data that says simulators have negative transfer training.

Microsoft: When it comes to assessment, be careful not to think that what we define as valuable data will be adopted by the education community. Embrace whatever the standars are that the education community accepts – pointed to “No Child Left Behind” (“love it or hate it”). While teachers prefer the qualitative model, there’s a need for quantitative methods. Instead of testing against content, assess the individual user’s strategic abilities – are the individual learners improving over time. Did they use the same strategy over and over in new situations that kept leading to failure, or did they adapt their strategies based on what they learned? Useful information for the teacher to determine where a particular student is falling behind.

Cynthia Phelps, School of Information Science in Houston. Are we missing the difference between assessing our learners, and assessing the learning environment (that is, the game). Instead of just assessing how it applies to the learner, how can the game design itself be iteratively improved.

Kip Carr, Lockheed Marketing. Asked how many in the audience play videogames (plenty of hands) more than three hours a week (about a quarter of the room). Noted that gamers are being assessed all the time without knowing it.

[I then asked how many don’t play – about a quarter raised their hands, but others looked uncomfortable. A quarter is probably a low number.]

Jake Troy, doing foreign language games. Games reach people who wouldn’t ordinarily do the training, when they have the choice of watching TV or doing something else.

Robert ? Health care. About games assessing the player – what kinds of methodologies are game developers using.

Chen referred to a Gamasutra article on how games assess players, and noted that a history of cheat codes and walkthroughs.

Karen from Ideas dismissed the idea that cheating is a problem. Teachers want their students to learn, they aren’t really interested in what they do to learn.

I spoke out in favor of the idea that game that can be “cheated” – such that the learner can get around the learning task and get the goal without having learned -- isn’t a well-designed game. A game that rewards unethical behavior is a simulation to train people how not to get caught, that’s bad, but if the game is designed with reference material, and the game gives the student a motivation to consult the reference material, that harnesses the student desire to “cheat” when bored with gameplay.

Game “cheat books” – the new textbook.

Microsoft noted that learners cheat when bored. [That info could be used to spruce up boring areas of a game, or to collect information on whether the student has really internalized the concept.]

Marine Corps: Game is a tool to be used by an instructor. In a training exercise where the instructor notices a leaner is using a cheat sheet, the instructor can “lovingly tell him” not to cheat during the exercise.

I noted that the whole concept of a game is a kind of cheating, in that you get to save and reload and try again. If the point system is closely aligned with the pedagogical goals, there’s little benefit to be gained from “cheating” (in the sense of bringing a cheat sheet that says what the “right” answer is). But if a student in a game has to keep turning to a particular page, whether on a cheat sheet or in an in-game reference tool, in order to get information that the other students have internalized, then that “cheating” won’t help the leaner complete the game objectives.

A speaker from Finland noted that she designs collaborative games, in which she doesn’t consider working together to be cheating.

I noted that the whole concept of a game is a kind of cheating, in that you get to save and reload and try again. If the point system is closely aligned with the pedagogical goals, there’s little benefit to be gained from “cheating” (in the sense of bringing a cheat sheet that says what the “right” answer is). But if a student in a game has to keep turning to a particular page, whether on a cheat sheet or in an in-game reference tool, in order to get information that the other students have internalized, then that “cheating” won’t help the leaner complete the game objectives.

A series of comments on collecting data from multi-user online games. These games can generate so much data that it can be prohibitive.

Microsoft Howard: Designers should talk to teachers about what precisely they want to measure, munging the data stream and delivering information that is meaningful to teachers.

Owen: Find the “happy path” of the assessor, rather than focusing on what the learner learns. Build the assessor’s needs into the system.

Multiplayer games are good at collecting and storing data. That computer can do pre-analysis.

(Continuing...)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day II (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

(See also Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 1)

Keynote: David Warner
Riding the Cutting Edge of Distributed Intelligence

Sande Chen and David Michael
Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games

Derek Wischusen
Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using AI

Paul Marinio
Machinima: Using Games to Change Filmmaking and Instructional Video

Jan Cannon-Bowers, Perry McDowell and Mark Prensky
The Role of Pedagogy and Educational Design in Serious Games