Games: March 2006 Archive Page

Changing Literacies/Changing Mindsets: Communicating Across Digital Difference (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

I had written a different session down in my conference planner, but I’m glad I want to this one. Sally Chandler brought two of her undergraduate students from Kean University, and together they presented what they learned about the nature of research with a teacher who came of age in the world of print tried to teach students who had come of age in the digital world, as they all did ethnograhic research on video games.


I had written a different session down in my conference planner, but I’m glad I want to this one. Sally Chandler brought two of her undergraduate students from Kean University.


Joshua Burnett, Kean University, "Differences Between Insider and Newcomer Mindsets in Composition and Literacy Studies."

Yet another reference to James Gee, as part of a lists of books assigned by Sally Chandler to students Burnett and Lopez. But the students did not read the scholarly expertise first, as their teacher had expected. Instead, they considered the gamers themselves the experts, rather than academics who wrote books about gamers, and they were more interested in knowledge gained through interaction. In digital spaces, "the answer" is in a constant state of revision.

Illustrated two different approaches to research mindsets -- automatic orienting features make our own mindsets invisible to us, so that we expect others to see the world as we do.

These mindsets are inherently gendered, raced and classed. They are generally structured by the spaces in which they are acquired.

The Internet Generation and the Print Generation. Internet Gen understands online space in ways that the print generation does not. The print generation cannot understand online spaces in the same way. The print generation was already fully socialized before they encountered the internet, so their encounters with digital technology are informed by the paper-based concepts.

Student encounters with print spaces are, likewise, encumbered with traces of their encounters with digital spaces.

Categories of mindset differences in the internet generation and the print generation – the presentation worked through the criteria of space, knowledge, and self. Too detailed to reproduce the whole chart here, but it was well organized.

There is too much information in the unlimited virtual space, which requires structures for organizing information to help users find and understand what they need. New technology amplifies its powers as it is appropriated and redefined by its users. And how is the location of knowledge affected by the digital age? Student researchers expected to study games by playing games, talking to gamers, visiting gaming sites, participating in gamers' forums, and using print texts at points of need.

Internet generation authors will continue to be frustrated by the reaction of their print generation recipients. [But what about the obligations of print-generation managers to communicate in ways that their internet-generation employees can understand? --DGJ]

Jacklyn Lopez, "A Report from the Digital Contact Zone: Contact Zone Arts and the Hybridization of Literacy Mindsets."

Lopez began with a quote from Mary Louis Pratt on writing in the contact zone.

Lopez and Burnett played games and took notes on their work, and coded their own experiences. The generational difference between the researchers and their instructor led to a disagreement about the "right" way to research games. Lopez and Burnett successfully challenged and modified the print orientation of their collaborative project, suggesting that the digital experience the researchers have confers a kind of authority that balanced the authority of the teacher's position.

Lopez and Burnett developed a kind bilingualism, since they had to to teach her what they learned about game playing. [Of course, when Sally makes a mistake, her character dies immediately; but when she teases her students about not doing the assigned reading, the consequences of their misconceptions aren't as fully and immediately dramatized. --DGJ]

(Shortly after I wrote the above note, Lopez herself noted that her teacher also had to translate what the students couldn't get on their own, and notes that after the research collaboration, the print-generation teacher had picked up internet-generation techniques, and vice versa.)

[Much of Lopez's presentation involved explaining excerpts from the notes that the researchers took. I'm fascinated by the display of a student critiquing her teacher's research methods, and defining her own differences between her style and that of her peer researcher. This kind of ethnographic research is not what I'm personally familiar with, but since it's gamers who are doing it themselves, I'm finding it fascinating to watch. When I see Mary Ann Buckles doing this, or Life on the Screen, or Jim Gee, I'm conscious of what the researchers are missing. –DGJ]

Sally Chandler, "What's Different about Digital Difference?: Communicating across Differences in Technological Mindsets

The focus is really on how changing mindsets demand a response from us in the composition classroom.

Print is: linear, static, permanent, mostly linguistic, complete
Digital is: multi-dimensional, dynamic, in-process, ephemeral, multimodal, interactive.

When we contrast face-to-face communication and print communication, we see that online discourse often has more of the features of face-to-face communication than face-to-face communication does.

Digital writers expect more interaction, while print writers see that expectation of collaboration and feedback as "wrong."

Chandler remixed Lessig and Selfe, covering the ground I've heard being covered in many of the presentations I've chosen to attend. [I particularly like how she's applying it to ethnographic research, in a context in which the research was done by experienced gamers. The CCCCs certainly got its money worth when it invited Lessig to speak last year. Woe to the rhet/comp speaker who was at 4Cs last year but didn't attend the Lessig talk! --DGJ]

Chandler noted that initially, all her students opposed Lessig's concept of CopyLeft, but at the same time they admitted that they themselves had downloaded illegal material. (After a discussion with the students, more came around to seeing the value of Copyleft.)

How is teaching across this digital difference the same as teaching across the traditional categories of race, class, and gender?

At this point, the comparison points us towards the need for a new discourse, in a way that race/class/gender discourse is not new. Internet generation mindset is in many ways a product of white male military-indstrual modes, but the uses of that mode often actively contests and rewrites the dominant discourse that generated it.

In theory, the younger generation has been raised in this new culture, which leads to the possibility for (r)evolution. Digital tech is going to continue to be important, it's not clear who's going to control those concepts of communication.


As part of a lively discussion that followed the presentations, I was trying to say the world "e-mail memo" and it came out "e-mo." That’s not worth blogging as a separate entry, but it’s worth a footnote here.

Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

As is always the case with a conference blogging exercise, these are my rough notes, typed as the speakers were talking, and lightly edited in my hotel room at the end of the day.

Matthew S. S. Johnson, Indiana University, Bloomington: “Communities in Playspace: Writing and Democracy in Online Communities.”

(I arrived a bit late… I’m going to ask Johnson to send me a copy of his paper so I can do it justice. He says that in the part I missed, he mostly went over composition theory, which is sort of presumed to be a priori knowledge at this conference, though there is only so much of the literary theory in which I was trained that translates into the world of rhetcomp. Thus, I wouldn't mind seeing what Johnson sees is important for laying the groundwork for the use of video game culture in the writing classroom. But since I heard him speak last night and went to dinner with him afterwards, I think I can piece it together reasonably well.)

Johnson was discussing the unique design model of Seed. Developers aren’t stopping their work once the game is released. They will continue to develop the game based on the decisions made by the players. The more players choose a certain mode of interaction (in this game, which has no single conclusion), the more likely the developers will go in that direction.

Johnson also noted the fact that the developers of “Oblivion” courted and encouraged fans to give suggestions for where the previous incarnations of The Elder Scrolls fell short.

Many developers are providing web kits that permit players to make fan sites easily. Gaming corporations do this to garner interest in the games, and even maintain some sense of control over those websites. But the consumers produce fan fiction and other related texts that enhance and build upon the gaming experience. That mass of fan-produced writing does influence the designers as they create the next iteration of the product.

Programmers stand by waiting to see what players will do, and the player actions (in the game and in the writing they do about the game) forms a feedback loop.

Gaming communities create openings that are potential merger points for compositions.


Erin Smith, Michigan Technological University. “Semiotic Domains Reloaded: Literacy and Localization in Video Games.”

An excerpt from a longer work in a publcation edited by Cynthia Selfe and Gail Havisher, with chapters co-written by scholars and gamers. Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Language and Learning presents literacy as a social practice. We need different literacies to function in different semiotic domains. Video games, for Gee, are marked with certain characteristics, shaped by the internal and external design grammar. Within the game world, learners test their cognitive models. Video games provide an environment that can foster active learning.

The game industry provides an extraordinary example of Jameson’s claims about global communication forces. Exemplifies the logic, strategies, and contradictions of a force striving to balance global reach and local appeal. To what extent can we lay claim to cultural information in the world of the game, without considering broader contexts. Sony coined “global localism” rather than forcing local cultures to adapt to global culture. Can range from making sure you have the local slang right, to completely re-writing the narrative. Microsoft has a “geopolitical product strategy team” that pays attention to cultural factors that affect the way their products might be received.

Game developers design game from the outside, with localization in mind. Plot lines that would require too much revision to be localized in other cultures, may be scrapped, or only released locally.

Gee: cultural models are images, storylines, or metaphor that we recognize as “normal.” They remain invisible to us unless we are challenged. For instance, most military games penalize players for killing civilians, but in a game whose name I didn’t catch, settlers are considered combatants, and may be shot without penalty.

Quoted a scholar (the name sounded like “EE woo BOO key”) who notes that Japanese electronic products don’t carry a “cultural odor” that leads consumers to associate those products with Japaneseness. Schoolchildren perceive Japan as “cool” because it created Pokemon, but Japanese computer games and other characters don’t look Japanese. There’s a term for the non-Japaneseness of these characters. (Smith didn’t spell it, so I won’t even try to reproduce it here.)

Referred to a student, Eve, who wrote to the author of David Freedman, Creating Emotions in Games, to challenge his reading of Final Fantasy X. “You stray so far from the reality of the game that it makes me wonder whether you were playing it blindfolded with earplugs.” Eve has a “culturally aware” position, quotes from details in the gameplay in order to defend her critique of Freedman.

Differences in the Japanese voice acting and the American voice acting. The original team’s work on the Japanese game “could have been blown to hell” by a bad translation or a radically different voice interpretation.

If we’re going to start bringing games into the classroom, contextualize them, and it will serve our literacy goals more fully if we do.

During the Q & A, an audience member asked about the idea that the Japanese are using their electronic products to represent themselves culturally as westernized, that therefore their products do have a “cultural odor.”


Alice Robinson, University of Wisconsin Madison. “Videogame Design as a Writing Process.”

Works with Jim Gee. Robinson’s goal is to determine designer intent. Do designers intend the active critical learning results that researchers note when they study gamers?

Gunther Kress, “Design shapes the future through production.” Design is a cognitively higher activity than critique, which looks backward at a text.

As a linguist, Gee looks at rule systems. The “internal design grammar” is a “complex system of interrelated parts meant to engage and even manipulate the player in certain ways.” You have to go beyond the internal design grammar if you ever want to get good at the game, and reach for the external design grammar. Players become readers of the IRD, but also a writer, since nothing happens unless you do something first. Players are demanding a lot more from game designers, demanding more from their interactive experiences with games as texts. Genre molding, mixing genres is part of the future of games.

Robinson repeated the designer/player, writer/reader, teacher/student slide that was a central part of her SIG presentation last night. Her research focus separates designers from marketers, artists, sound engineers, etc.

Quotes from one designer shows he is thinking very clearly about what people say, in a social environment, about the games they played. I think the audience responded meaningfully when Robinson invited us to imagine what our own authorship process would be like if we thought first and foremost about what our readers will say to each other. Paraphrasing the designer’s goal, Robinson said, “I want students [probably Robinson’s Freudian slip for “players” … speaking energetically from notes, she actually made this substitution several times] to have memories about playing my games, and I design my game to create those memories.”

The designer is not creating individual activities, but rather the environment. Killing a dragon is an isolated task, much like doing a worksheet. The task itself is part of a larger problem-solving effort. Designers want players to outsmart them.

[I like how Robinson moves back and forth between the designer/player relationship and the teacher/student relationship. I wonder if “problem solver” makes sense.]

If the end statement is “I can’t believe you can set everything on fire!” that means something different from putting a flamethrower in the game. In curriculum design, starting with “I want students to write a research paper” is akin to putting a flamethrower in a game.

In response to my question about the function of pedagogy in game design, she admitted that she is focusing on “the most progressive designers,” whose games are instantiations of the new literacy studies theories.


During the Q & A, Cynthia Selfe expressed concern that English teachers are “going to muck it up.” She thought about that phrase, and came up with instead the delightfully oxymoronic notion that we will "muck it up" because we, as English teachers, “tidy up” the genres that we pull into the classroom. She encouraged us to think about this genre as the students’ space, and encouraged us to respect this genre and learn from the students.

Johnson noted that he’s very careful about writing about the gaming communities that he doesn’t participate in, so that he doesn’t “take the data” that belongs to the game world.

1UP: Perspectives from Scholars/Practitioners of Video Games (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 1)

I arrived early at this session and spent some time reconnecting with Matt Barton, whom I know from previous conferences. Barton is working on a book on graphic adventure games, and gave me some suggestions on what I might do with my interactive fiction work. I really enjoy his work on Armchair Arcade.

Another early arrival was Matthew S. S. Johnson, a dyed-in-the-wool narratologist. I told him that Jesper Juul, whose dissertation slammed interactive fiction and the mythology surrounding it, has moderated his position in his new book, Half Real, which works towards integrating narratology and ludology.

The three of us discussed our hopes that the CCCC video gaming community, which is just beginning to form, will last.

The first speaker, Alice Robinson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spoke on, “What Videogame Designers Can Teach Writing Instructors.” She works under James Gee. She began with some statistics from a recent Pew study demonstrating how pervasive computer games are in mainstream popular culture. Since students are often casually gaming in one window while they are doing homework in another window, Robinson discussed the relationship between what happens in the brain when one plays a game, and what happens in the brain when one writes a composition. Finishing a four-hour session with Civ IV involves reviewing the charts and data that the game displays as part of the end-of-game debriefing. She touched on the “embodied cognition” aspect of video games, which I presume refers to the fact that people learn in many ways, and that the direct manipulation of the simulated environment ties into our hard-wired system that lets us learn through interaction with the real world. Robinson noted that good games have a “design grammar,” and compared the “designer/player” relationship to the “teacher/student” and “reader/writer” relationship. All the theory that identifies positive ways that the teacher/student and reader/writer dichotomy can interact with each other and enrich our understanding of texts, the designer/player relationship is perhaps even more suited to helping us understand the many positive ways that that barrier is transgressed (I’m using my own words here – she is going very quickly through the introductory material.) Her research involves interviewing professional game designers. She spoke positively about the connections between creating a world and teaching; notes that designers are interested in the metaskills their players develop. [But when I attended the Serious Games summit, it was very clear that the “fun vs. pedagogy” debate was alive and kicking, with the designers feeling pushed around by the authority that serious games projects gives to the curriculum designer.] that writers often fail many times, and games can help motivate us to try again.

Mark Mullen, from The George Washington University, presented “Designs on the Future: Student-Authored Game Design Documents in the First-Year Writing Class” looked at student-authored design documents (including help files). He taught a course called, “I’m Game: Exploring the Art, Science and Economics of Electronic Games,” as part of a first-year writing and research course, and spoke of it as a pre-disciplinary critical thinking course. (A little later he spoke of it as a technical writing course, and contrasted it to the literary analysis one finds in most other writing courses.) One of the two sections of this course was entirely female, the other was with two exceptions all male. While about 45% of women acknowledge playing games, women wouldn’t consider Solitaire or Freecell as “games,” when the dominant cultural paradigm for “computer games” involves combat and killing. The students also developed the criteria they used to evaluate their own assignments. All the students played American MaGee’s Alice, a nightmare version of Alice in Wonderland. Students developed a group contract, a design treatment, a “pitch meeting,” prep of the final draft, and the students scored each other’s proposals based on the criteria they had set up. AR2076 – a “horrifically violent” first-person shooter proposed by three women. Players had to recover each of the 10 original amendments in the Bill of Rights, and each level was themed on each of the original amendments. Bringing George Washington back from the dead to spew wooden teeth, etc. In writing classes, we only ask students to do simulation activities… asking them to create a design document pushed them beyond that paradigm. “Some of the best writing I’ve seen freshmen produce, bar none.”

Matthew S. S. Johnson, of Indiana University Bloomington: “Revisiting Rivalry: Computer Game Competition as an Invention Strategy.” (Matthew, do you have a home page?) The competitive spirit of gamers can encourage and inspire in online environments. Johnson noted that in the last 20 years, rhetoricians have lauded motions away from competition and “victor and vanquished,” towards a more nurturing model. But in MMORPGs, the competition is not the point – the point is personal improvement; such a game never “ends,” so nobody is ever a “loser.” All those who keep playing keep improving. Competition is seen as negative because of the victor/vanquished dichotomy; Johnson notes that there is joy, forgiveness, strength, action, and nobility in computer games. Competitive elements in MORGs are in the background, motivating characters, while players write to each other in forums, blogs, walkthroughs, guides, etc. The gamer community includes a way for players to give feedback to modders, whether feedback to aid in revision, or a review intended for other potential players. Mod contributors compete with other modders, but they also benefit. Collaboration is not opposed to competition; can serve as a valuable incentive to discuss and write.

Matthew Barton turned the discussion over to the audience of about 10. “Why are you here?”

The first comment from the audience was from a 1st year comp teacher at Fresno State Calif; he says that video games are legitimate texts that have been “completely ignored, almost to the point of humiliation, by academia,” and praised CCCC for scheduling such a session.

Another audience member said he was interested in methodology. “We want to teach them to look at things critically,” and was using for methods to integrate games rather than just show video clips. [I should look up Kurt Squire’s dissertation, on games in education.]

I piped up to invite attendees to look up “New Games Journalism,” and recommended “Bow, Nigger.” (Obviously, there's offensive language on the other end of that link.)

Samantha Blackmon Somebody sitting near Samantha Blackmon mentioned her research on Second Life, and strongly recommended the wikis being written by gamers.

Another speaker says she has used games in intermediate comp classes. She says some students say they don’t really play games. [Chatter from the audience: I’m not a gamer, but… I’m not a writer, but… I’m not a feminist, but…] Her focus is on rhetorical representations of otherness in video games. (Race, gender, and sexual orientation.) Robinson asked this speaker to comment on what to do when the public expects all research on games to focus on the media effects, particularly on children. “Try to move them away from, ‘This is evil, and it must die.’” [Mullen’s ornery response: “Why are you so afraid of your children?”]

While everyone hadn’t yet had the chance to speak, Barton noted the time was nearly up, so we shifted briefly into strategizing mode, as group members ponder the challenges we will face from colleagues who don’t see videogames as legitimate.

When the event broke up, those of us who hadn't made other plans met up with Charlie Lowe and Bradley Bleck, and went out to get some Chicago pizza. (I could've used a third slice, but Brad looked very, very hungry.)

The dress code at CCCCs varies. Matthew S. S. Johnson looks like The Man (though the pastel tie and the ponytail work against that image). Matthew Barton said the shirt he didn't bring was even geekier:

load "*",8,1

I'm proud to say I'm geek enough to recognize that as a Commodore 64 command. (Back then, we didn't need no steenkin' icons.)

Leeroy Jenkins Meets the CCCC Program (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 1)

The wireless internet access at the Palmer House Hilton charges an hourly rate, so I’ll batch-post my notes to my blog when I get back to my hotel. As is always the case with live blogging (or near-live blogging), these will be rough notes that I took during the speaker’s presentations. These notes will be colored by my own subjective opinions of what is blogworthy.

Looking through the program for this year’s 4Cs in Chicago, I’m annoyed to see that Clancy Ratliff’s talk on “Coalition-Building on Weblogs” and Stephen Krause’s talk on “Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections” are scheduled at the same time.

But I won’t be going to either of them, because instead I’m going to “Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies.”

Not only have these three sessions been scheduled at the same time, they’re listed one after the other in the program.

But wait – that’s not all. At the same time there’s a “Computer Connection” session on “Usability and Remediation,” and the same session also includes, “Leeroy Jenkins! Gaming and Visual Argumentation.”

Leeroy Jenkins is a character in a machinima video taken from within the MMO World of Warcraft. The video shows an over-eager gamer completely ruin the meticulous plans that his guild formulates while he was not paying attention. It’s pretty clear to me that the whole thing was staged, but it’s still hysterical.

Here in the lobby of the Hilton, people are gathering in small groups, looking through the conference program. We’re managing our resources, planning our strategy, and networking.

But I don’t want to have to plan. I don’t want to have to choose. At least, not at 3:15 on Thursday, when, in order to bring home all the treasure I really want, I’d have to run around checking out four different sessions at the same time, waving my PDA stylus and threatening everyone with my digital camera, firing off questions, perhaps screaming like Leeroy Jenkins himself.

Oh, well. At least I have chicken.

Victims of poor high schooling, of whom we have plenty at my university, often come to my classes asking, "Is this an 'opinion paper' or a 'research paper'?" I tell them that that is a spectacularly bad question based upon a false dichotomy; that I'm interested neither in mere feckless opinion nor in the random accumulation of facts, but rather in reasoned argument based upon a secure empirical and philosophical foundation. --John D. Arras --It's a Simple Game (Chronicle)

A great quote: "I generally believe that PowerPoint is the spawn of Satan. It breeds passivity in the students and it disconnects the speaker from the audience."

I use slide shows only rarely -- when I want to show students a typographical mistake in a sign, for instance. I'm working on a special slide show that uses images to teach the difference between active and passive verbs. I've probably put far too much effort into it, which means I'll feel motivated to use it again in the future to justify the effort I put into it, even if it turns out to be no more effective as a teaching tool as a traditional workshop with a pre and post quizzes.

Next slide, please.

They're meant to educate people by simulating real-world events and are often created with the best of intentions. Problem is, education, science and health care aren't exactly the stuff of exciting entertainment, let alone video games. --Daniel Terdiman --What's wrong with serious games? (C|Net News.com)

Okay, but I'm uncomfortable with the word "entertanment," since that carries the idea that the entertainer is doing the work, and the entertained just sits there. Sitting in front of a TV may require mental work to connect the dots in the plot and understadnd the jokes, but a game that involved doing nothing but watching a plot unfold would be boring. I'm not implying that Terdiman doesn' t know what a game is. It's just the choice of the word "entertaining" grates on me.

Finally Upgrading to MoveableType 3.2 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've had a rather hellacious weekend. I upgraded the MovableType installation at blogs.setonhill.edu to version 3.2 on Friday.

The actual upgrade went very smoothly, but it took most of the afternoon for me to get the anti-spam protection to work decently.

The spam-blocker I had been using, MT-Blacklist, did just what I said -- it blocked unwanted spam. But the built-in spam filter in MT 3.2 simply marks the spam as "Published, "Unpublished" (awaiting moderation), or "Junk." But there's no easy way for me to print out the last 10 "Published" comments that have been added to the system.

If you ask the system to give you a list of the n most recent entries that have been commented on, that list does not exclude the "junk" comments. The end result is that list is pretty much useless, because we're getting hundreds of junk comments for every legitimate comment. The system works pretty well from the perspective of the individual blogger, but at the moment the upgrade has killed the "Recently Commented" feature of our blogs.setonhill.edu portal.

Well, not actually dead... but it takes so much time to wade through thousands of comments each time I want to update the main page, that I fear it will make people think the main page has frozen. I'm sure there's some way to do solve this problem, but as much as I like that "Recent Comments" feature, it's not crucial.

When I get some more time, I'll submit an MT support ticket.

Far more frustrating was the realization that my curricular websites are broken. I finally tracked down the problem... in the past, it was apparently acceptable to use the MTEntryDate template tag in an archive template. Thus, when I wanted to print the date of an entry that appears in a list of all the entries that appeared in a certain month or on a certain day, I used MTEntryDate. A little time with Google revealed that MT 3.2 now requires me to use MTArchiveDate in those archive contexts. This took me several hours of work to recover.

My parents are in town this weekend, so fortunately I've had help with the kids, and I've been able to throw a lot of time into this problem. I even managed to get away with the family to a Slovenian dance hall for some polka dancing.

But on top of all this, I've spent even more hours this weekend working on two projects related to Colossal Cave Adventure.

One is a chapter on Adventure that I promised to submit to a collection of essays being published in honor of a former mentor of mine. I would have sworn that I sent in a rough draft of that essay weeks ago, but I got a very polite, very urgent letter asking me to please, please, pretty please submit something as soon as possible.

The other project had been on the back burner since classes started in the fall. Last summer I went to the real Colossal Cave, and while I wrote up some of those experiences in an article I submitted last fall to a forthcoming book on ecocriticism and videogames ("Playing with Mother Nature"), I have also wanted to publish some material online in venue that is readily accessible to online researchers. A few days ago, I learned that Will Crowther and Don Woods (creators of Colossal Cave Adventure) will be honored at the Game Developers Conference this week. Sadly, I haven't been able to update my curricular website since January, so I won't be able to update my own Adventure resources by then, but I figured this is a good time to start getting my notes together, just in case I encounter something in the press coverage that needs correction.

The 6th annual Game Developers Choice Awards will devote a portion of the ceremony to honoring a group of individuals whose efforts stand out in the advancement of the interactive entertainment industry. The ceremony, which is produced and hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and presented by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), will take place on Wednesday, March 22, 2006 at the San Jose Civic Auditorium.

Will Crowther and Don Woods, creators of the text-based game Adventure, will receive the First Penguin award for leading the path to unchartered grounds by creating the first text-based Role Playing Game (RPG). --6th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Then one night Lisberger went to visit his in-laws, and everyone was crouched around the TV, playing Pong.

"They kept referring to the games, 'Play the game,' and since I had been working on a project called "Animalympics," the idea of games to me meant more than that. It meant Olympic or gladiatorial games," the director said. "Then I thought, 'Well, our warrior should be in a gladiatorial game setting.' From there the whole thing started to snowball." It seems only fitting, then, that a film like Tron was conceived while playing the first video game ever created. --David Konow --Tron's World: The Dawn Of Tron  (Tom's Hardware Guide)

Pong was certainly an early video game, but it was not "the first video game ever created." Tennis for Two was made in 1958, some 14 years before Pong.

When former Gizmondo executive Stefan Eriksson wrecked his million-dollar Ferrari on the Pacific Coast Highway last month, it simply seemed like a fitting metaphor for the death of his hapless handheld - the destruction of one expensive piece of machinery to mark the end of another.
--Gizmondo Bizarro (Game Revolution)

If all the news reports are accurate, the Gizmondo game system seems to let you race a Mercedes SLR, crash a Ferrari, manage the careers of special agents as they rise from eldertransport rent-a-cops to homeland security agents, and elude the authorities via a luxury yacht.

Thanks to a comment a former student added to last week's post, I found some pleasant, lush models of trees, along with numerous other realistic residential items. I've added the fluorescent light fixtures and wall sconces inside, and some pretty trees outside. I also started working with a street model (curbs and sidewalks), but ran into some file-name snags. Nothing major -- I just didn't feel like doing a lot of renaming manually. (There's got to be a way to batch process this kind of thing.)

Since this past week was Spring Break, my wife scheduled a lot of family activities. I still got to the office three days during the week, but much of that time was taken up with writing a letter of recommendation for one student, helping a different student apply for funds, and working on a new website for one of the campus units. I enjoy doing that stuff -- it's the kind of thing that gets squeezed out of a typical day during a typical week. I wouldn't exaclty say I enjoyed looking over 10 folders from applicants who don't meet our SAT admissions requrements, but it is important work that I take seriously; we actually have 20 folders to look at by Tuesday, but I wanted to get a head start on the stack. In addition, the pending release of an update to the interactive fiction programming language Inform has gotten me to pay more than the usual amount of attention to the world of contemporary text-adventure gaming.

So I haven't fired up Hammer (the Half-Life 2 world-building tool) for several days.

I have laid the groundwork for some future accomplishments. I had to leave my work computer on overnight, but it finally downloaded Steam. I confess I didn't get much modding done, since I took the opportunity to replay the beginning of Half-Life 2, marvelling at the graphics (which look great on the screen of my tiny Dell 700m laptop, but which look even better on my more powerful work computer). But theoretically, now I can test out the FacePoser (which crashes when I try it at home).

I also asked my university for the funds to buy a few copies of XSI, a powerful 3D model tool. For the purposes I have in mind, each student won't need an individual copy. In a note I wrote to my dean, I likened XSI to a kiln, and noted that when I did a ceramics project in the third grade, I didn't need my own kiln. I molded my clay and gave it to my teacher to bake. Later, I put on the glaze, and she baked it again. Okay, that metaphor sort of messes up the whole Steam/Hammer/Forge thing that Valve Software has going, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I also let our networking folks know about my desire to teach with Steam this fall. I'll need to find out what computer lab I'm going to have to use, so I can book it now.

Also in the "planning ahead" category, I've got to put together a syllabus for a games programming course that a nearby college has asked me to teach online.

From my server logs, I've noticed that my modding diary is starting to attract hits from search engines. I can't imagine that I'd be of much help right now, but I plan to keep chronicling my progress, so that people who are even greener newbies than I am might learn a thing or two, and people who've been so kind to post helpful online tutorials can bask in the link love I shall bestow upon them.

Next on my modding to-do list: Probably working a little more on the lighting, adding a working light switch and some exterior light fixtures. Maybe some grass, too. I'd also like to figure out how to get bright sunlight to come down from the sky -- right now the only light comes from artificial sources I've placed around my model.

I don't know that I'll get to it in the coming week, but I'm eager to figure out how to get my NPCs to respond to my actions. I'd also like to record some original dialog and get an in-game NPC to speak it.

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 3 -- Trees, Wall Sconces, Ceiling Fixtures (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Welcome to World of Warcraft: The Text Adventure.

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. There is an elf with an exclamation point above her head here.

>Talk elf

"Alas," she says. "There is a great darkness upon the land. Fifty years ago the Dwarf Lord Al'ham'bra came upon the Dragon Locket in the Miremuck Caverns. He immediately recognized the ..."

> Click Accept

"Hey," the elf protests. "This is important expository. Azeroth is a rich and storied land, with a tapestry of interwoven ..."

> Click Accept

"OK, fine. Bring me six kobold tails."

> Shout "Where are the Kobolds?" --Lore Sjöberg --WOW: the Text Adventure (Wired)

Apparently, World of Warcraft is getting too texty.

In late 1982, my best friend had a Sony TCS-310 Stereo Cassette Recorder. Audio cassette tape was the affordable recording media at the time and one wintery November day while on our way to the arcade 'Just Fun' in Ithaca, NY, we came up with the idea to record video game sounds. --Daniel P. Hower --Classic Arcade Sounds: Hear for Yourself (CoinOpVideoGames.com)

Visuals, schmizuals! We don't need no steenkin visuals! Thanks to Mike Sichok for pointing out this little piece of heaven. Mike writes,

I love that you can also hear adjacent games in the background.. such as if you pick "Zaxxon," you can also hear "Berzerk" and "Frogger" being played nearby. I forgot how ear shattering loud games were back then.. I remember a ton of bass, such as in "Tron," and "Asteroids," but geez. Hardcore.... kill the lights, turn on the blacklights, and turn this up.. I am in vintage bliss.

My Half-Life 2 Mod, Week 2: Custom Textures, Glass Window, Tree (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

A week after I began a serious attempt to create a Half-Life 2 mod, I've made some good progress.

Early last week, I did manage to add the hinged door that was the next thing on my agenda. I'd been going crazy because I had turned off "helpers," which means that I couldn't see the blue sphere that all the tutorials mentioned was supposed to mark the site of the hinge.

Half-Life 2 is set in a grungy urban dystopia, so the image files that depict stock materials (wood panels, plaster ceilings, brick walls) all look pitted and rough. While I don't want to spend forever fiddling with images, I began to realize last week that the image files really aren't just window dressing. The availability of appropriate images really does affect what items I choose to work on.

I found a few texture packs that expand the number of materials available to Hammer (the 3D world tool I'm using), but I was having trouble following a tutorial to load just one custom texture. The comments at the end of the tutorial indicate that I'm not the only one suffering from similar problems. After several hours and several tries, I finally figured out where the custom textures should go, and how to find them within the 3D editor when I wanted to use them. (Those textures came in an "rar" archive. While I already had a tool that was supposed to deal with "rar" files, when I decompressed the file the target folder was always empty. So I had to upgrade to the 30-day trial version of Power Archiver. When that runs out, I'll have to take a look at open-source archiving tools.

With that under my belt, I downloaded a pack of hundreds of new textures, including the tile floor, panel walls, and wood beam that you can see in the image. In this model, I added a ceiling, though now the lights are just emanating from nowhere. I'll have to create some light fixtures.

The tree visible outside the window comes with Half-Life 2, and I guessed correctly that it was possible to change its "skin" to add a few leaves. Not many. I'll have to keep looking if I want to use some healthy trees.

I took the gun away from the NPC Alyx, so now she's a little less aggressive. I'm not sure how to adjust her behavior, but at least she fits in slightly better in the realistic office setting I'm trying to create.

The wood panel walls are actually too fancy for the generic office settings, but I do want to create a courtroom at some point, so I don't mind experimenting with this design scheme.

The next big "proof of concept" for me is to import models of ready-made furniture. The desk visible in the photo comes with the game. I've seen textures that I can apply to simple cubes in order to get bookcases, file cabinets, bulletin boards, and the like. While I love adventure games, with secret panels containing keys that unlock more secret panels, the mod I'm working will need few functioning props (other than doors). Still, I've seen ready-made models of computer desks, TV sets, kitchen appliances, and even a collection of SWAT vehicles (that might be very useful for the police station that I hope will be in the mod).

I had to hack the URL at Wadfather in order to get past the ridiculously complex navigational system. (The link goes directly to the "Real World" textures I'll need.)