Come geek out with us!

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Come check us and lots of other creative/tech companies out at the Vermont 3.0 Innovation Jam on Monday!

Sheraton Burlington 10 am - 6pm, free admission!

We'll also be handing out information about 2 positions we are currently hiring for to work on the Empowering Play (UN) Project.

• IT Technical Advisor
• Artistic/Technical Lead

If you want to see what we've been up to lately, check out the latest "Stuck in Vermont" video blog by Seven Days' Eva Sollberger.  Wooohoo!

Challenging Minds and Hearts: "Dude It's Code, We Can Do Anything!"

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It has been a while and there has been so much that I've been meaning to write about. All I must find time to get back to.

Foremost and giving me hope—the earth trembled at GDC in 2008, though the impact will take a while to be realized. The focal point was the Game Designer's rant with designers Clint Hocking, Jenova Chen, Jane McGonigal, Jon Mak, and Daniel James. All innovative creators in the medium.

Visually it was immortalized by designer Jon Mak and friends releasing balloons into the crowd with messages attached. Jane McGonigal summarized the call by stating "Compared to rest of the world we have it all figured out, we invented a medium that kicks every other media's ass...we occupy more brain cycles, make more people happy than any other medium in the world." Her plea to the industry to use the incredible brain power within "to fix our broken reality." I could not agree more.

But perhaps my favorite delivery was from Clint Hocking. Clint was one of the early advisors to the game program at Champlain. His ability to think critically and creatively defines new wisdom. He is known for immersive, innovative, intelligent, masculine based narrative gameplay such as his original title SplinterCell. The language of his rant reinforced a macho style (liberally peppered with profanities) as may be required by the audience. But the message was definitive...and issued a challenge to the audience. Clint began by quoting a programmer on his team who had stated “Dude it's code…we can do anything.” Clint went on to dare the community “Why can't Call of Duty be actually about duty? Why isn’t Code of Honor about honor? Can you imagine if we could box honor, put it in a box?....What if you actually packaged the experience of what it means to be honorable—95% of people haven't felt that. It would sure suck to have 10 million gamers running around being the most honorable people on earth..."

Clint cuts to the core of the dilemma of games as a medium both to entertain and to offer substantive solutions. It is a powerful medium to teach. What holds it back? Is it the era in which it is created or who is creating it? Is it the toolsets available or the mindset that uses the tools?

Afterwards I became engaged with a pivotal dialogue with my dear friend and one of the best game designers I know, Pat Fortier, about creating games—the games Clint describes. Piercing my hope, he said it was impossible. Game mechanics—the elements that make games the intriguing medium they are—do not allow it.

Since then I have been puzzling over this. What is clear is that some entertainment designers are examining how the medium can effect positive change in our world. (The photos above & below, a case in point, are from designer Jenova Chen's rant that mimicked the essence if not the tone of Hocking's message.) I believe that Pat has pinpointed part of the dilemma—what are the mechanics that can teach honor, duty and respect over violence and anger. What mechanics can build community (think World of Warcraft aka WOW)? What mechanics bring the power of critical thinking (inherent in games) to craft solutions to the immense problems facing this generation and our planet? I believe Clint's programmer is right "Dude it's code...we can do anything". Then as my engineer husband Jim states, "our problem is how do we define the problem?". In the answer lies the solution to the mechanics. We only need to set our minds and hearts to it.

Processes and Steps

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Today has been that type of busy day that it is difficult to assess if anything has been accomplished. The students are very busy with end of term projects and besides brain storming on various projects, production has been halted until they finish finals. What is interesting is that many of the students I work with are under pressure not from their exams but from their class projects.

All the same the Center is buzzing with activity. As a group Monday evening, the Info Literacy team re-evaluated where the game concepts have been going and are now seeking to redirect. Janet Cottrell and Sarah Cohen from the library gave the students criticism about what points the projects were going astray on. I admire the students as that did not dissuade them from continuing. An important thing to remember is that this project is volunteer and about 20 students—from freshmen to juniors are volunteering—even during this very busy time. Instead they asked very targeted and to the point questions. 

It was discovered how much the process of Info Literacy is like the process a gamer goes through when playing a game. Depending on the researcher, the process, by any other name is very similar. Using Carol Collier Kuhlthau the sequence looks like this: 
initiation>selection>exploration>formulation of focus>collection>presentation>assessment.
Of course then it all cycles around. Just like the gamer's steps! The more difficult piece of concept development will be finding the metaphor that brings that message home—not teaching the process itself since that is so intuitively familiar to the gamer (ahhh - perhaps that is why these students are so bright!). This morning I was caught up in the idea I suggested to the students of starting at the end and letting the player then discover the process backwards—a type of deconstructive discovery. But this is up to them.

The funny piece of that was this afternoon I was late for a meeting with John Cohn and the student team working on the IBM/Engineering Week project. I walked in and John walked us (for my benefit) backwards to what had already been discussed. He created great sound effects as he back-stepped through the PowerPoint that is the current conceptual outline for that project. 

Synchronistic?

That project seems to have finally discovered its true path which is wonderful as our timeline is compressed. However it is the group searching—the creativity, the questions and the unique student understandings of the dynamic power of emergent medias—that give this developing EMC process its unique potential for innovation.

Here is a quote from an article I am reading tonight that has my head turning about creating relevant education (Nov. 2006 Scientific American by Stuart A. Kauffman from the University of Calgary):

The Evolution of Future Wealth
"...a deeper understanding of how species adapt and evolve may bring profound—even revolutionary—insights into business adaptability and the enginesof economic growth...
... Evolution can innovate in ways that cannot be prestated and is nonalgorithmic 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."

And with that tonight's photo is from the technological marvel that was Chichen Itza—also still ruminating in my head. Where did that all that creativity and artistic, written and technological discovery go and why?