Returning from "Scotland"

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Summer is nearing an end—our Fall semester starts again in less than 3 weeks!!!! Being so Sarah, Ray and myself just returned from vacation. Ken is off for another week. Interestingly enough he's in Nova Scotia where I just returned from. Ray just returned from the "original" Scottish coast! So in essence the three of us visited Scotland of sorts.

I was far from connectivity except upon return on the ferry that travels from Nova Scotia to New Brunswick. There of course I immediately took photos with my iphone and uploaded to Facebook to share! It was difficult at first to leave work behind but in the end it was very good to vacate all work, all stress, all to do lists. And it is always good to view one's life through unexplored contexts and pare down to the essentials.

It was almost as difficult to pick up work upon my return. Hundreds of emails needed responses, plans needed refocusing, and my brain needing to be shook to jog lose what ties had been left undone. It was enough to make me want to take the next ferry back!

However there was the EMC full of life, full of students! Burlington 3D had grown in scope, Cystic Fibrosis had a new game character, VT Virtual Museum is in final concept production. The Masie iphone and IBM teams were hard at work. There was Lauren Nishikawa in her new role as Junior Creative Project Manager. Rafi presented a proposal for fundraising for the Empowering Play project, Amanda had an excellent marketing plan proposal. 

Likewise I could see the impact of the EMC. For those of you who haven’t caught this, what began as Champlain student Raymond Ortgiesen blog post was picked up first by “Gamasutra” (the publication for Game Developers) and then by “healthGAMERS”. The discussion is on the term “serious games”. A number of our students wrote into the forum—Heather Conover, Derek Harde, Max Nichols, Bryan Hare, and Glen Cooney. Wonderful to hear their thoughts on the topic now that they have been working in that venue for two years!

Regardless of my thoughts on the topic, what I appreciate and find rewarding is the engaged level of debate by our Champlain students in a public, professional venue: 

Is the Term Serious Game Misleading? | healthGAMERS
By Melanie M. Lazarus, MPH 
This week's Standout Member Blog is Raymond Ortgiesen's Blog, views from a junior game design student at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. His featured post is entitled “Some Thoughts About Serious Games.

Gamasutra link: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaymondOrtgiesen/20090727/2595/Some_Thoughts_About_Serious_Games.php

As Govanna Peebles, the VT State Archeologist expressed to me, hard not to want to work here. So it is good to return!