writing this at 1:20... it was a long day.
Ian Bogost (persuasive games, watercooler games) gave a great keynote for the EdSIG this morning. He thinks about games on a level that I aspire to do.
The day's schedule was simply packed after that with a lot of back and forth between West and North halls in the rain.
The industry veteran panel for the EdSIG was really going strong when I had to leave to run to the indie games summit to hear Tracey Fullerton from USC talk about student indie projects. That lecture was a bit of a diatribe (her words, not mine), but oh so necessary. and you can't argue with the results that they have produced given that they started the undergrad program in 2004.
Lunch was filled with meeting some new folks, in this case design and programming students from France presenting their work at the IGF, and with working my way down to the poster sessions. You will be hearing more about the poster session.
The afternoon time slot was reserved in my planner for an interesting panel at the Serious Games Summit. It was supposed to talk about the difficulty in telling if people actually learn from play. It had potential.
It was DEATH!
To me it seemed that the panel was dominated by Richard Wainess, a very strong personality, with a vested interest in narrowly defined empirical research. I thought we had gotten past these arguments already. You know, like at the 2004, 2005 and 2006 summits in San Jose, San Francisco and Washington DC. It was like a timewarp trip to hell.
And the problem was... the problem was all the panelists had valid statements. What was missing was any attempt to distinguish between the educational research framework and the application of games to education framework. Eric Zimmerman, who I greatly respect and who wouldn't be accused of lacking a strong personality himself, seemed somewhat befuddled as to how to get the conversation back on track. And perhaps he felt as moderator that it was his task to allow the panelists to talk their differences out. As the professor from USC continued to dig in his heels on his world view and definition of validity I could feel the hope for future collaboration drain from the room.
I thought I aspired to be an academic researcher, but if refusing to attempt to bridge divides in the interest of maintaining disciplinary supremacy is academic research, I don't want a part of it.
The thing that made the session so hard to listen to was that all of the criticisms that were being leveled against games as a learning medium could equally be applied to lecture, other media and the classroom environment.
The general conversation I heard around me as the room emptied was that it was an hour wasted for a topic that had so much potential.
But the day picked up. A strong series of posters in the West Hall including one with serious C++ with machine code (you read that right, machine code, not assembler) voodoo on how to measure performance really caught my eye and made my head spin.
The day wrapped with an interesting look from Dan Roy at breaking the walls of an MMO by allowing mobile access to the game worlds. The talk was insightful and entertaining, and a sample from a track I don't usually attend, mobile development. A nice palette cleanser from the lingering bad taste of the afternoon.
After that it was all over but for the parties. More to come tomorrow.
Hey Bill, seen this?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7265257.stm
(Your blog doesn't allow HTML in its comments! How terribly web 1.0 of you.)
Posted by: gazza | February 26, 2008 at 01:11 PM
That's because typepad automatically recognizes URLs and makes them links. :-P
Posted by: Bill | February 28, 2008 at 03:54 PM