Mission

In the ComETS GAME DESIGN group, we will try to model what we investigate. So, we’ll be doing playful hands-on research/investigation, and application/testing of what we find.

Objectives

• host a 90-minute meeting twice a month
• deconstruct compelling games that require a lot of cognitive work (and/or busywork, or “grinding”)
• figure out what makes them compelling
• apply that magic formula to various coursework situations
• share results with peers/colleagues

Please email johnmartin@wisc.edu for more information.

Community Gardens near me.

Local Food Systems Scenario: Players locate and map where food comes from in their neighborhood. Dairy farms? Community garden plots? Organic Farms and CSA? Canneries? Egg farms? Beef farms? Cabbage? Cranberries? Orchards? Processing plants?

Play: In the map to the right, I’ve outlined in red the community garden plots near me. For going over to them and walking around both sets, I’d get some points, similar to the UNM game Chris Holden created. If I became an expert on the locations of the other community gardens in my city, I’d earn some sort of badge. If I learned more by interviewing some of the gardeners about what they’re growing (and why), and sharing that in the game, I’d earn some further expertise points. I could add restaurants that use local food as well. The game is limited only by what the quests are, and in this game, I can challenge — and accept challenges — from other players, so there really is no limit.

Basically, I have a notion that if we got together with a few interested peers and students/PAs, we could come up with a really interesting interdisciplinary place-based field experience that offered multiple quests at multiple levels of expertise (ala “I’ll take Botany for 200, Alex”) that could be replicated in different areas across the state (and country). Although my initial thoughts center on using ARIS, they only extend as far as using ARIS as a prototyping tool — the actual game might end up in a number of different formats for different technologies.

My goals are these. I’ve been passionate about place-based/embodied learning for decades, and am now in a position where I’ve got access to cool folks and cool tools (Google Maps and ARIS, etc.), and a job where I can finally start to coordinate the creation of something amazing that combines them all. My big evil scheme is to get smart  brains in one whiteboard-filled room, and let ideas cross-pollinate. I imagine a large scalable tour/game/field experience with new quests/activities being continually added as they’re developed.

If we build a structure/frame together, it will be easier to add components individually, as needs/resources arise. And we can recruit players by luring them from other quests (i.e. I’ve played the Astronomy Quest, and like this activity — maybe I’ll try out the Ecology Quest to supplement my points!)

I have no doubt that players would quickly find that many skills overlap from discipline to discipline. So if I kicked butt in and really enjoyed a Probability sub-quest in the Botany line of quests, I might want to jump over an rip through some Probability sub-quests in the Language line of quests (e.g. um… probability of multi-vowel adjacency in billboard ads in Wisconsin?).

The GLS Conference is the premier event in the field of videogames and learning. Now in its eighth year, this grassroots “indie” event is evolving to include more innovative content formats and new programming. The GLS Conference is one of the few destinations where the people who create high- quality digital learning media can gather for serious discussion about what is happening in the field and how the field can serve the public interest. Our event is well known for its exceptionally high quality of content yet “community event” feel. Each year, we foster in-depth conversation and social networking across diverse disciplines including game studies, education research, learning sciences, industry, government, educational practice, media design, and business. Our continued commitment is to reinvent learning both in and out of formal school environments through the promise of games and simulations.

Conference highlights include: keynotes by leaders in both academics and industry; interactive workshops on game research and game design; both individual and symposia presentation sessions; big debates about critical aspects of gaming and game design; hands‐on game play in the arcade; the “hall of failure”; a massively multi-player evening poster session over cocktails & hors d’oeuvres; fireside chats that enable cozy conversations among speakers and attendees; and the GLS Games and Art Exhibition. A new session type offered this year will be the Educational Game Arcade, which will offer a space for conference attendees to play the games created by members of our community.

Confirmed speakers include:

• COLLEEN MACKLIN
• REED STEVENS
• SEBASTIAN DETERDING

We offer a variety of session formats, encouraging submissions from traditional paper presentations to innovative formats focusing on game play. All submissions are due online by January 31, 2012. Complete submission guidelines can be found on the submissions site at http://glsconference.org as well as more information about the GLS Educators Symposium and the GLS Doctoral Consortium.

It’s like a dream come true.

In 2006, I lobbied for a web-based version of MIT’s River City Augmented reality editor. ARIS delivered that for me in 2010.

The idea was that the web offered accessibility to folks who didn’t have smartphones — folks like teachers and their students. A web-based editor would allow classrooms to engage in place-based design. I used the few projects we had started at the time as examples of the type of projects that could be done by students.

We’ve reached that point, and with ARIS v1.6, I think we’ll begin engaging in some massive exploration of GeoAnnotation and Data-collection.

Good times a-coming!

It's Sorry and Parcheesi played outside as fast as you can run!

If you’ve not already read about in the Daily Page or on MacArthur’s Digital Media Spotlight, on April 18-20, we held our first “Global” ARIS jam. There were over a hundred participants from Columbia, the Netherlands, and Spain, and the U.S. including folks from the Minnesota Historical Society, 3M, Oregon Middle School, Whitewater Middle School, Oconomowoc School District, Middleton Alternative Senior High, University of New Mexico Albuquerque, University of Northern Colorado, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Parsons The New School of Design, University of Murcia, consultants from WiseGuys and IdeaMonkey Inc. And in the ensuing 50 hours of work, folks created 127 games (not counting the ones we made in the workshop!).

Pretty Cool, huh?

I held four ARIS workshops in that time. One for the opening group and three for high school and university classes that dropped by. Between teaching workshops and roaming the amazing Wisconsin Idea room in the UW-Madison Education building (thanks for hosting, SoE!!) helping participants work through design logic, I was only able to make one game ———>>>>

Adobe Connect slogged whenever we had more than 9-10 feeds.

Nonetheless, we were mentally and physically exhausted afterwards, and we learned a whole lot about creating interactive place-based experiences for learning through play.

As part of informal study group that examines the learning and teaching inherent in games, a group of intrepid GLS students, ComETS members, and other UW-Madison folks met and began work on a “Spheres of Influence” game. Based slightly on “Risk” but featuring diplomatic, propaganda, and market influence rather than military influence, SoI allows the bridging and connecting of countries, and forces an interesting interdependence upon one another while simultaneously encouraging competition. Spheres of Influence can (of course) be enhanced with the judicious use of money to fund:

• outposts (to secure influence) — Represented by tacks in the prototype, these are “properties” built on lands that one is trying to influence. These are very $10, but are needed to secure influence. An outpost is needed to bring in revenue from a country, and if an influence bridge is secured by more than one outpost, the revenue increases by +1x
• agents (to protect outposts) — Represented by small blocks, these are missionaries, diplomats, propagandists, settlers, or other agents who set up shop in a land and work to secure the players’ investments. They are expendable but $5 each, and buy the player 1 turn before their outpost is vulnerable to attack and removal.
• influence itself (to bridge countries). Represented by Uno cards in the prototype (we needed something that could be tacked in and was of a finite length of about one card), these are the “arms” of influence — think of them as roads, railways, or some other trade-way. It only takes one or two of these to reach into neighboring countries. They must be secured by outposts on both ends in order to begin providing the player with revenue from the resources of a country. Once secured on both sides and branching into a new country, the revenue of it is increased by +1x.

It’s civil discivility  at it’s most pernicious, and we’re not sure what to do with it yet.

Consequently, we’ll be meeting again this week (Wednesday, 4-6pm in the Teacher Education Building on the UW-Madison campus) to finesse and further some of the game elements involved in it.

We invite you to try to take over the world, though there’s a good chance some will try to make rules against doing exactly that.

If you’re interested in participating, email Caro dot Williams via gmail, or regardingjohn via gmail. We’d love to influence you.

Via: Voxy Blog

The Six Technologies are no surprise to those of us who have been advocating and developing mobile learning practices and tools. They are:

1. mobile computing
2. open content
3. electronic books
4. simple augmented reality
5. gesture-based computing
6. visual data analysis

If these look at all familiar, it may be because you are already using them via your smartphone. They are all  fiercely personal, socially connecting, and deeply embodied. The iPhone and iPad has ushered in an era of apps that take advantage of the geo-locative technologies, brilliant displays, touch screen and accelerometers of these devices to make many of the items listed already either mainstream or nearly-so — highlighted in popular “near-future” media representations.

What they do no explicitly mention, but what is implicit in the current uses of many on this list is games. Mobile games are huge, often rely on complex visual data analysis and gesture-based input.

I’ll be adding more commentary to this as I have time.