To play for the holiday

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Just quickly I added two new sidebars. One is for my presentations given in the last year and a half. You can find the Vermont Business Expo and IBM presentation, last week's IEEE CS Tech Summit talk and others. The Kingbridge GameChange Summit was really the questions for a discussion John and I led. Likewise the GDC Building Partnerships guided a workshop and includes the output of the groups.

But you might find it more fun if you view the other new sidebar. It is for Class Created Games. I separated this from the EMC projects as the purpose of creation is very different. It is the first class in which the students get to create electronic games as a team. They have previously created paper based games. In former blogs you may have read about the process the class and myself went through and what we all discovered. Different from the EMC games, the class created game is purely about the player having fun!

I think the team who's game is posted did very well in that objective and the corresponding goal of learning to work together! The team members were Justin Kimball as producer, Jaime Fraina as lead designer, Scot Gaylord as lead programmer, Matt Gustafson as lead tester and sound, Chris Matuzsek as lead artist, and Dan Hart as secondary artist and programmer. As a warning there is blood and robots but no real violence - very Doctor Who-ish. Enjoy!

Too many cool things to share...

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I am REALLY tired. So tired that I had to type my own blog address in three times before I got it right. So tired that when I hit the Google site, the graphic looked beautiful...Spring and sunshine :-) I have been once again flying coast to coast and working at breakneck speed. Too many cool things to share. So please excuse the length and seeming random nature of the delivery. One thing that made me happy upon my return were "miss you Ann" messages from my students Rafi and Jordan on my whiteboard. Good to come home.

Home. Today I keynoted at the Vermont Business Expo Technology Luncheon (I will post that and the IEEE CS presentation after compressing). Man I was nervous playing to the home town crowd. Even my friends commented on the television advertising. "Ann, I've been invited to lunch with you." All things good. When I finished the talk I realized just how much I have discovered this year. Speaking gave me the opportunity to arrange and share much of the content and thoughts I have been writing about here. The talk began with Ray Kurzweil, traveled through to the impacts technology has wrought or brought (dependent on your persuasion), introduced possible business models that make sense of the exponential change, and ended with the remarkable capabilities of this generation to accomplish and create change illustrated by the work our EMC crew has been doing.

Speaking of which, Tuesday and Wednesday America's Army, in the guise of Phillip Bossant, Matt Soares and Kevin Lee came to campus. They began working with the student teams to create level maps. If successful the maps will be distributed through the AA site—full credit given to the students. Their energy and excitement was palatable. Discussion, whiteboards, and impassioned listening were part and parcel. The AA teams were as gods—and rightly so for the knowledge of building complex yet popular levels and art assets based on reality that they shared. All comes back to the power of mentoring.

Likewise the students working on the Info Lit games, the CIMIT project and the Burlington Google Map projects are also working energetically. It is soooo cool! The atmosphere is somehow different this summer. I believe the spring green and the lack of scheduled classes have given the students the opportunity to put their heart and soul into their projects. They are learning all the same but in a concentrated manner much like I experienced as a graduate student.

Students. I just returned from the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors' (BOG) meeting and our Technology Summit in Las Vegas. There I am on the Education Activities Board and the Awards Committee. This BOG, I hosted the Game Summit. Speakers were CTO of A2M Martin Walker, newly minted COO of EA DICE in Sweden Senta Jacobsen, Davey Jackson from GarageGames and Scot Osterweil from MIT's Media Lab. All gave incredible presentations—each very different topically from the other. I opened up the day. Project management, game engines, AI in games and what that portends and games for learning were the topics. The downside was the size of attendance, the plus it was captured via video for web distribution (visit the IEEE CS site). Biggest plus was the exchange of knowledge and camaraderie of the speakers...very cool group. An aside is how crazy LV is! Talk about addictive behavior and virtual worlds!

Back to learning. Three weeks ago, incredibly influential to me was the Digital Now summit hosted by Fusion Productions. I can not recommend it enough for those in associations. If they opened it more broadly, many corporations would benefit as well. I am very grateful to Hugh Lee and Don Dea for inviting us to participate. There the focus was social networking, Web 2.0 for connecting to community. Both a sky eye view and the in the trenches approach helped me to focus on what we should be doing for the Center and what we are integrating into projects for our partners. If invited back I would love to find sponsorship for our students to create games on site. I think that would really touch this impressive group. Check out the link in the sidebar. They have posted all of the proceedings in forms of video, slides AND notes.

Luckily students Lauren Nishikawa and Wes Knee along with our new but invaluable operations manager Sarah Jerger were able to attend. Sarah will be in-charge of applying much of that knowledge into the Center's outreach. We took Saturday and went to Epcot at Disney to celebrate Lauren's 21st birthday!!!! What a marvelous day. I am still amazed at the genius of Walt Disney, the man behind the corporation. He was virtual environments before we computerized them! Did you know that when Disney World first opened it flopped? Artist, businessman, technologist, futurist.

Lastly touching on the Games for Health conference from two weeks ago ( I have been traveling ALOT). My biggest understanding there was that the field is just opening up. Exergaming seems to be a given, as is patient motivation. What is now needed is research and for that funding. I was very lucky to get to know Leighton Read. It is a very small world. He knows Tom Malone and Tony O'Driscoll. I was hooked on his presentation to our small group of RWJF grantees. It is not surprising. He is behind seriosity, created one of the very earliest games for health and he was a doctor in Boston.

Another fun thing for me was to reconnect or meet for the first time some very interesting people. It was like old friends' week if that is possible at an event I've never attended. I was able to introduce Peter, the chief PI on the grant to Ryan - our SME on the CIMIT project! Both I could introduce to Mike Zyda (coincidently he is the first person I knew behind AA though he is not with them anymore). I was lucky to meet Jeanne and Anne, two RWJF grantees from Indiana that I hope to keep intouch with. In the small world category we would run into each other at the gym pre-start of day and they both are connected to the Lake Champlain region!

OK That is it for the evening. I will part with the quote from student Ben Gerowe's signature:

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to be visible."

—Vladimir Nabako

Fiero, Curiosity, Serious and People Fun

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Spring is finally happening in Vermont. For me it is a time of paying attention to the light of the day, whether it shall rain or not, how the ground feels—is it a planting day?

However this Spring I am not getting much soil turning done. Instead seeds planted years or semesters ago are fruiting and I am busy—and not in Vermont.

Tonight I am learning from one of those seeds planted years ago! As I write I am at the preliminary session to the Games for Health conference sponsored by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. With UVM researcher Peter Bingham we are receiving a grant to collaboratively produce a rehabilitation game. Peter and I began discussing some sort of collaboration when I started the game degree program at Champlain four years ago! 

The opening dinner keynote, Nicole Lazzaro, squarely approached the question I've been examining - what are the game mechanics that support social impact games or games for learning!! I've read her work before but in-person she presents in an approachable manner. Her research defined the "four fun keys" or patterns of player's emotional response to game mechanics. Mechanics drive player choice eliciting an emotional response. Her categories are: "hard fun or fiero"- produced at its most basic by mastering a difficult challenge; "easy fun or curiosity" such that it produces imagination; "serious fun or relaxation" such as rhythm, practice, learning; and finally "people fun or amusement" that she defined as having the most complex drivers. 

Listening to her I was tying it all into how to use social networks to expand the outreach. In that case a social game strategy might have the most relevance to a project we have on the board. However fiero and serious fun might also be more appropriate to the intended audience. Nicole also stated that fun games often elicit 3 or more of these. A mix in the more detailed components are what she has seen lead to the most highly successfully games. She believes that the key component is matching the emotion to the mechanics. An example she gave was that if a game put one in a "fight or flight" state then attack makes sense. For instance if you are playing Halo and being shot at best strategy is to shoot back. However if it is critical thinking that you want to build then you must encourage the state of mind best suited for that. The example she gave here was of Katamari Damancy. The game mood seems relaxing...you are collecting amusing items. In reality much complex puzzle solving is taking place to enable the player to collect the objects. Now I know why I like Katamari so much—it is an example of a "serious fun or relaxing" game—much like gardening is for me!

Illumination

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It's spring and that means the school year is shifting. Accepted student days. End of projects. Finals. Awards events. Soon graduation. Much of this season is about illuminating the talent of the students and what they have achieved. They continue to amaze me.

Last night, the "IBM" student team and EMC staff traveled to Underhill, for a final post-mortem on the IBM project (see project below in the link on the right) and a Vermont styled evening. John Cohn and his generous wife Diane welcomed us into their refurbished one-room schoolhouse home. We discussed what went right, what went wrong and what we wished we could do with the project. Apparent was that we each grew through the experience. In turn that learning is influencing our upcoming projects. However and more importantly a web of community grew beyond the campus causing strong relationships and respect. John impacted our lives and the students equally impacted his.

After deconstructing the project, the students got a tour that included the old bell tower looking out over the hilly countryside. John rang the bell and one could imagine the generations of students called to class in that building. Diane cooked a delicious dinner to feed our troops—home cooking being a luxury to college students. It felt as if our Champlain students were getting a real down to earth Vermont "thank you".  John even gave us a home-brewed physics/chemistry lesson lighting up the yard of that old schoolhouse with

some of his mad scientist chemistry magic. Resembling Thor the god of thunder & lightening, he concocted plasma gas in the microwave, created gigantic sparklers, and became a fire-breathing engineer. Mike Fowler remarked that he wished his high school science teachers had been so dynamic. Then in a magnificent finale worthy of the Fourth of July, John created a huge heart stopping BLAST!!!! To get a sense of the evening and the consequences, please read John's April 11th & 12th blogs. 

Tonight was a quieter, though no less impactful student-focused celebration. It was the Communication & Creative Media Division Awards Night. The first students up to the podium were Wes Knee, Emily Benton, Ben LaPointe and Lauren Nishikawa receiving the Team Excellence Award from Prof. Eric Ronis. Nominated for their work at Elliott Masie's Learning 2007, the students had to go yet another step and create solutions for the Student Government Association. What I've observed is that this group is actively spreading what they've mastered —the value of and successful skills needed for teamwork—to other students.

For the last award of the evening, the Emergent Media Center presented its first award; the EMC Interstellar Award to Lauren. What she has given the EMC is quite a gift. She has set the bar for what it means to work with the EMC. Lauren is a student who is equally talented as a game designer, Flash scriptor and an artist. She brings creativity, professionalism and level-headedness to everything she does. Appropriately the plaque we gave her was created in equal parts by ourselves, Wes, John Cohn and even Paul Ledak. Paul is IBM's VP of Emerging Business Opportunity in Digital Convergence. Here's an interesting interview with Paul on 3D internet and digital convergence. Paul cut the design in wood for Lauren's plaque using a laser cutter—a VP of Digital Convergence crafting the first Emergent Media Center award for Lauren. It's rather like passing the torch of the future. Now how cool is that?

Lastly I want to share a story about the Outstanding Artist Award given by Prof. Geebo Church. Geebo is a man I deeply admire. He is an artist in the pure sense. Geebo tonight talked about the role of the artist. To be an artist inspires one's whole existence—it is indeed a calling. Simply stated, the artist's role is to illuminate what others may or may not see. They shine a light and provide questions and context. When I look at my life and why I love my work, it is because our students are both the candle and its flame. A teacher's job is to provide the fuel, the students' is to illuminate the future. The student artist who received the award is Game Art & Animation senior Nick Malutama. Nick is originally from Africa. When you view his piece; first created for a history class, now with almost 42,000 hits on Youtube, I believe you will understand why I advocate so strongly for our students' voices.

Down to the Wired

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My class is down to the wire in Game Production I. Seems like yesterday the local paper, Seven Days, wrote about our second class.  It is amazing how quickly a semester flies by! Equally amazing is how deep the learning is for the students and myself. 

The goal of the class is to conceptualize and build a game in 14 weeks. The students (artists, designers, programmers) learn how to construct a game, about the creation process, about roles needed, and how to follow a production method. They apply technologies and skills they have learned in other classes thus building those skills further. It is about games, engineering, art, animation and creativity.

Yet if one was to cut to the core of this class and dig out the seeds, it is about team work. It teaches the skills needed to work and live successfully in today's world. And learning to work together is a vital concern for our global future. As Dr. R. K. Pachauri writes in Greenhouse Gases: The Developed World's Role (Time, Mar. 24, 2008):

"There is need, therefore, for enlightened minds from north and south getting together to define the sustainability imperative and persuade political leaders of the benefits of growth with lower natural resource intensity in all countries — developed and developing."

It is the nature of the team that if it can not organize itself efficiently, if ego takes the place of commitment to the goal, the project fails and so does the individual. Surprisingly consensus does not equal success, in much the same manner as passive aggressiveness does not equal peace.

For these reasons it is a very difficult class. A student's grade is not dependent solely on his/her individual effort. It relies on how they can work together towards a common goal. All this I knew having constructed, taught and guided many courses employing team projects. Yet this class has been different from the formers because the entire semester is devoted to one project. Team skills can not be slowly built on a starter project and then reapplied to another in one course. Likewise for the students to learn, I as the instructor must let go of the reins enough so that they can master teamwork and achievement. No lectures here, instead direction as to process and resources, tuning in, analysis, guidance and response. So this semester, my students taught me a deep message through their experience. It is this: willingness to be on a team and individual effort can not succeed without a solid leader enabling team success. The key being enabling. 

At the start of the semester, the class had four projects in process—each with strong concepts. On each team are members of varying capability, no one team stronger than the other. Yet by midterm, one team had fallen completely apart. A member even quitting the class and leaving the team hanging with no deliverable project! It was not from lack of talent or idea. It was because they did not have an organization or structure in place to guide them through the rough spots. The team leader aka "producer" lacked the experience needed to pull together a resourceful team when crisis hit. He did not have time to build honest dialogue and commitment from the individuals. This team was reassigned. Despite this painful outcome, each member now flourishes on new teams.

Crisis struck two weeks later with a team that looked to be one of the best. It was not for lack of talent—in fact it may be due to it. Strong talents and stronger personalities compose this team. In this case the gregarious and well-liked producer was unable to give hard, meaningful criticism. The strong individual preferences and prejudices could not be balanced towards the goal. When offered the choice to bring in new members to get them to goal, this team elected not to.  This became the downfall. The good news is that after two weeks of struggle, this team has managed to pull themselves together. They were given an ultimatum and encouragement. Roles have been reassigned. They are committed. It looks promising.

You may wonder about the two successful teams. In both cases, I tip my hat to the producers. Both were also relatively new to the game. What they possess is the ability to listen, understand and evaluate their team's personalities, motivations and skills. They balance and moderate the teams. They are strong at organizing, setting goals, giving feedback, being transparent and accountable. Each is surprisingly soft spoken, yet determined to succeed with a resilient belief in each member of their teams. The respect is returned.

During the course of this class I discovered a book through the Center's project manager, Ray McCarthy-Bergeron. He pointed me to "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni. The students read it three weeks ago, within the chaos, and recommend that it be included early in my next course, but not so early that it has no relevance yet. This I will do and we will require it of the Center's project teams. It gives a basic conceptual framework to understand team dynamics.

The class delivered their "Alpha" or near-to-final game tonight. In two weeks final projects are due, pizza is promised. The games are looking strong. Though there is a lot of work to be done, I believe they will all make it. They've learned the lessons necessary to succeed. You can be sure when they do I will post links. 

Two other quick notes on learning and technology, check out the recent SITE blog by Bonnie Bracey Sutton entitled "Toward Digital Inclusion of All Students in a Flat World". She ponders deep questions and suggest sources for answers. In it she refers to a new web site developed for Scholastic and the National Governor's Association on Innovation America www.youinnovate21.net (image above) . I got hooked on the game section.

Also check out Clint Hocking's blog from February26, 2008 on GDC. He responds to a question I posted on the meaning of the potential power of games to influence by responding:

"What does it mean that they do have that power? Well - I suppose that today it means that we have a responsibility to ensure we develop an industry that wields that power responsibly."

All interesting stuff when we are talking about learning and media. I know I'm learning a lot—much from this generation and the media they consume and create.

Shifts. Singularity. Evolution. Oh & Wealth

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Just a quick find, Kevin Kelly (Shift Happens) on Ray Kurzweil (Singularity is Near) http://www.veneermagazine.com/01-18/01/the_group/singularity.html

We could broaden the definition of intelligence to include evolution, which is, after all, a type of learning. In this case, we could say that intelligence has been bootstrapping itself with smarter stuff all along, making itself smarter, ad infinitum. There is no discontinuity in this conception, nor any discrete points to map.

To that I would throw into the mix this article ""The Evolution of Future Wealth: Technologies evolve much as species do, and that under appreciated fact is the key to growth" (Scientific American Nov. 2006) by Stuart Kauffman

"...a deeper understanding of how species adapt and evolve may bring profound—even revolutionary—insights into business adaptability and the engines of economic growth... Evolution can innovate in ways that cannot be pre-stated and is non-algorithmic by drafting and recombining existing entities for new purposes—shifting them from their existing function to some adjacent novel function—rather then inventing features from scratch.
...We do not yet know what makes some systems more adaptable than others, but research on complexity has yielded some clues. Some of my own work on physical systems called spin glasses suggests that the level of central control over subsidiary parts of a system is an important consideration. Too much control freezes the system into limited configurations; too little causes it to wander aimlessly. Only systems that hover on the border between order and chaos exhibit the needed general stability and capacity to explore the universe of possible solutions to challenges."

Good thing it is not quite Friday. But to bring it all back, I love what Kelly writes here:

Language is a singularity of sorts, as is writing. Nevertheless, the path to both of these was continuous and imperceptible to the acquirers. I am reminded of a great story that a friend tells of cavemen sitting around the campfire 100,000 years ago, chewing on the last bits of meat, chatting in guttural sounds. Their conversation goes something like this:

— “Hey, you guys, we are TALKING!”

— “What do you mean 'TALKING?’ Are you finished with that bone?”

— “I mean, we are SPEAKING to each other! Using WORDS. Don’t you get it?”

— “You’ve been drinking that grape stuff again, haven’t you?”

— “See, we are doing it right now!”

— “Doing what?”

The juncture we are at in teasing apart where we are headed and our understanding of our future needs, all seems to point back to the central dilemma in "Flatland" by Edwin A. Abbott in 1884. Here's a quirky animation of it just to end the evening.