I'm at the Serious Games Summit in Washington, DC. It's been a while since I've offered live coverage of an event, so I thought I'd try to liveblog a bit. This post will update during the course of the day.

Henry Jenkins - Keynote - Serious Games in the Age of Media Convergence and Collective Intelligence

Seriously Mining the Portfolio of Games Past, Present, and Future
Johnny Wilson, Noah Falstein

Learning About the World Via Games: The Game Designer Project
Eric Zimmerman, James Paul Gee, Katie Salen

You Can't Change History! How Games Require Us to Rethink What and How We Teach
Nick deKanter, Andrea Lauer, Kurt Squire
(Notes courtesy of Mia Consalvo)

Fighting the Gerrymander with Games
Chris Swain, Doug Thomas

A Virtual Orchestra for Introducing Children to Music
Roberto Dillon

Keynote - Serious Games in the Age of Media Convergence and Collective Intelligence
Henry Jenkins

Henry began with a discussion of his new book Convergence Culture. What are serious games? Henry presented a number of images to challenge the notion that educational games don't sell and that there's no market for them. If one looks at commercial games there are a number of games that would count as serious games if we just had a broader definition of what they are. Henry thus suggests that we broaden our definition to include commercial games that are contributing to our understanding of education in games. If we rise to the challenge, we can have a broader influence.

Part of the problem is the notion of seriousness. Can we hold on to playfulness and playful learning that drew us to games in the first place? Also, the notion of "game" itself is problematic. The industry seems to call anything you do on a computer that is fun a "game," but for industry outsiders there are accusations of "that's not a game." There's a discursive war going on around the word "game" depending on what the indusstry wants to put in the marketplace.

Henry proceeded to discuss learning that takes place around games rather than through games. In his book Covergence Culture, he discusses the participatory context of a great number of media, including games. [As an aside: Henry mentioned that some of the principles he would present in the talk respond to the questions I raised in my review of the book ].

Henry covered the core claims in Convergence Culture:

(1) Convergence is a cultural rather than a technological process. The industry focuses on black boxes and technical consolidation. Henry's argument is that this is actually not what convergence is about -- technological convergence is a kludge. Rather, on a cultural level every story, idea, etc. play out across all possible media platforms.

(2) Collective Intelligence: In a network society people form knowledge communities to solve problems that they couldn't solve on their own. Henry uses the example of Survivor spoilers in the book, which he briefly discussed here.

(3) New forms of participatory culture are emerging, which Henry relates to folk culture. It's relatively easy to contribute freely something they've created, and where there are social incentives and support to do so. Henry also distinguished between interactivity and participation. The former relates to technological systems, but participation refers to culture.

(4) We're acquiring skills through play that we will later apply to more serious ends. In our information society, we play with information. We're more likely to embrace it through our entertainment lives, but we reuse these in other lives -- education, activism, therapy, etc. This is exactly what's taken place in serious games

(5) Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, many institutional forces are connecting in unpredictable ways. These are resulting in new forms. We are at a moment in time where lessons in one space transfer fairly easily to others. The technological structures help us find ways of transferring our community knowledge into more specific, individual knowledge.

The serious games movement reflect the current state of media. The movement shows that the potential for the technology is greater than the explored space of the medium: it makes a case for the value of the medium. The super mario generation are coming of age and moving into systems of power, where they are influencing decisions.

A growing body of research on the pedagogical value of play is also contributing (e.g. James Paul Gee). This work focuses on understanding how play and games participate in learning.

The rise of games studies programs also contributes. Adding games to the curriculum provide alternatives to the commercial mainstream. The history of film programs in universities demonstrate this potential to do what the market does not.

The independent games movement also contributes, e.g. Manifesto Games, a new kind of network for production and distribution. Increased numbers of festivals, the opening of the Xbox 360 platform through XNA, and so forth, make it easier for amateur and more experimental, non commercial production.

Henry then discussed the learning games to go project, a collaboration between The Education Arcade, Maryland public television, the Department of Education, and commercial developer FableVision. Henry discussed the difficulty of producing commercial products in universities, but the promise of prototyping and conceptualization. Finishing games requires a network of collaborators.

Some of the things we could do with serious games:

Compare the spelling bee -- a completely abstract word game -- with Scrabble, in which the player actively engages spelling and word usage. This is a kind of model for one of the misdirections of some serious games.

Consider the ways games can provide links to specific learning topics outside the games... either on the web or elsewhere. Henry called this "game 2.0," drawing a correlation to web 2.0. The game is a beginning point in a process but don't be boxed in with a single discipline or function -- a game about chemistry, for example. Second Life might be an example of this. It wasn't built as an educational game but it's facilitated a number of educational activities. Or consider Whyville, which teaches science but also has a thriving economy, which drives the learning experiences. The social system facilitates the knowledge that takes place. And turning the tools of design is important in this process. What people makes of the games are more important than what developers create with the games (e.g. Will Wright's games). Learning through remixing -- e.g. MyPopStudio, an avatar-based media studio that teaches principles of media creation -- or modding -- are examples. The challenge of modding is great -- Henry used the example of teachers who didn't want to run Revolution, a mod MIT made about colonial Williamsburg on Neverwinter nights, because the NWN startup screens had occult symbols, and this might pose a problem in the current political environment.

Other examples -- dual language codes in games for language learning (e.g. in the Sims). Urban game academy, where the focus is not on the product but on the process of learning. The Game designer project - a set of templates and toolkits for creating new games for kids.

Linking information together across media channels -- what Henry calls transmedia -- suggests that serious games designers need to think about multiple media channels (e.g. Alternate Reality Games). Another is Augmented Reality Games, using information appliances in the material world. "Cultural attractors" draw like-minded communities together; Henry's example is the television Lost. A "textual activator" gives people something to do. What are you giving people to do with your game? Just playing the game is probably not enough.

Henry discussed the Labyrinth project. First, you design a pet, who then runs away into an imaginary world. The game is designed to foster math and literacy for middle school kids, and it can be touched by a number of technologies and being able to connect to the game world at any point. Proportions, transactions, and other math problems are connected to a compelling fiction about a dark world in which the pets kids designed are being turned into "pet food" inside the Labyrinth.

Henry also discussed a new initiative between MIT and Singapore to work on innovation in games. Here innovation includes not only learning but also new game genres, new content, new players, etc.

Seriously Mining the Portfolio of Games Past, Present, and Future
Johnny Wilson, Noah Falstein

Play is education. With play, and far before formal games, we learn survival tactics that help us later in life (puppies and kittens as an example). Johnny presented the idea of "insidious education." Conversations and responses are hard in computer games. In text games, you played "guess the parser" -- what does the system understand? Maniac Mansion started to solve these problems by giving you the conversational options. Depicting dialogue, and human facial features remains difficult, as does the subtlety of conversation. At Lucas Arts, Noah explained that they used comedy as a way to skirt the issue. You don't just want to pull things from other games, but you can draw these techniques into serious games. Shivah, a new graphical adventure about a rabbi's crisis of faith, was mentioned as an example. Conversational response requires a great deal of resources.

Retro graphics used to work for serious games, but glitz is now required no matter the budget, or at least it's frequently asked for. We don't have enough conversational interaction in gaming today, but there are precedents in text and graphical adventures that we can learn from.

Desperately simple interfaces from older games also suggest lessons for designing games for everyone, which is a typical problem in serious games. Guitar Hero is a good contemporary example.

Games and ethics: Batllehawks 1942: what happens when the pilots bail out? The developers had strong debates about what to include in the games (should you be able to shoot at the pilots that have bailed out?) Seeing both sides of the conflict offered a solution to some of these design conundrums. Including consequences is a useful strategy for creating ethically interesting results. Games should allow players to do the wrong thing and to role-play the awful thing they might not do, and to see the different perspectives.

Games can put you in the shoes of other people and have an insight about the real processes that underlie different topics -- Noah offered the example of the temptation of invasion in Civilization III -- is one of the best examples of what games can do.

Isolating a portion of the system and allowing the player to test it is a learning experience. In some management games, such as Sports Mogul, for example, you deal with this in simulated people.

Learning About the World Via Games: The Game Designer Project
Eric Zimmerman, James Paul Gee, Katie Salen

The MacArthur-funded Game Designer Project is a venture between the UW Madison and gameLab. It's intended to let kids (junior high+) learn about game design by creating and modifying simple games. It's not a prototyping tool and it's not a tool to create serious games. But making games itself is a form of media literacy.

The project originated partly from Eric's concept, and the UW folks had some equity concerns about kids producing in addition to just consuming knowledge. UW was concerned about the kids who were not getting guidance in production of media through technology. The game design project is intended to show kids how to think like producers/designers. Thinking about complex interactions is required in game design, and these principles are a "particularly modern" way to think about the world as a set of systems that can be manipulated. Gaming/playing is a type of literacy itself.

As game designers, gameLab wondered if they could use a game to teach about game design itself, rather than making a game to learn about chemistry or other topics common in serious games. The focus is on game design, not on programming.

What is game design? It's not programming and it's not visual design. The game designer creates the rules of the game -- how do you set it up, what do you do, how does the game work. The core of being a game designer is creating rules. The rules then become the experience of play.

What are gaming literacies? Katie explained that this is something they have a hunch about, but that they aren't yet sure how kids really use games, and thus how they can best offer tools for them. The notion of thinking about things in terms of systems, as procedural systems, that changes over time and based on choices a player makes, is a particular kind of literacy. Modding and reading and writing -- in Henry's sense of the word -- are part of this process. But in addition, designers are creating systems in games that found the behavior upon which the play experience takes place. The ability to read a game and understand its representation, what things mean in the game, and how to operationalize them are part of the idea of game literacy.

Katie then showed some sketches and concepts for the project itself. They did not want to make a game tool, like GameMaker. Rather, they wanted to create an experience that explains what it's like to think like a game designer, and to make games along the way. Working in the editor is a small part of the experience.

It's an RPG-style online game meant to be accessible to many kids. Built in Flash and deployed online, the intent is to insure that it will run on older machines like ones in schools. The aesthetics is steampunk, and the story is set in "the factory." The world runs on games, and players take on the role of game mechanics. The factory is old and run down, producing bad games, and the player will have to fix these games. The characters in the world need new, better games to play, and they have particular roles that correspond with "mechanics." The characters have toolboxes. Creatures in the world are all game components, and the player can construct games out of these creatures. The factory dispenses "capsules" with creatures and rulesets, and the player needs to determine what to do with a capsule to modify and build a game.

A "master mechanic" serves as a kind of mentor that offers feedback to kids as they work on the games. Some of these will be done procedurally, others will be accomplished by real designers or educators assuming the role of the avatar. The game is single player but the factories are networked and the players can trade games and build a reputation in the world. The players can be rated -- akin to reputation or experience -- and you can work your way up to a new level in the system, where you can then become a mentor. In the beginning, players will make simple games, but as they work as a knowledge producer in the evnoropnment they can earn new abilities. The narrative is deployed through an interactive comic.

Players will be able to access the ruleset of every element in the game. Katie showed concept art for the characters, capsules, and creatures. In one example, a four-legged racer character can move in four directions and move at a particular speed. The beginning player uses these, and then modifies them for use in new games. The system to describe a game component is a simple taxonomy -- four or five types of creatures:

Player character creature, controlled by players
Enemy creatures
System creatures, like timers, goals, points counters
Block creatures, like tiles and hazards that make up the structure of the game

The head represents the type of creature and the legs the movement type (two legs, four legs, single wheel, for example). By embodying the rules of the game in the creatures offers an identical means to characterize all aspects of a game at once.

As an example challenge, a castle might have creatures but no goal or outcome. The player might have to determine how to turn it into a game with a goal -- for example, by adding a finish line for a race game. In doing this, kids should be able to learn the core aspects of game design and how to combine them to create games.

Katie then showed a level editor they are working on to create the broken games the kids will work on. The basic principle. The tile-based editor ressembles 8-bit games of the 1980s. Arcade-style games are a good reference for kids to consider. The editor offers the types of features one usually sees in a tile-based editor to create the space, and because the behavior is based on the creature, it sort of comes to life as the creator edits. The objects themselves exist within an economy -- that is, the player gets new creatures based on different conditions in the game.

The game is targeted for after-school and non-classroom contexts, not classrooms itself. At UW Madison, Gee and his colleagues will be recruiting volunteers to participate in the actual testing and research aspect of the project.

You Can't Change History! How Games Require Us to Rethink What and How We Teach
Nick deKanter, Andrea Lauer, Kurt Squire

Muzzy Lane, in area for about 5 years. Game: Making History. Nick deKanter, speaker. Pop quiz: when was Poland invaded by Germany? 1939. What is ‘lebensraum’? Qs around history. Understanding the concept of living space is a lot more important for us, for how we’re doing things today, the choices we’re making as we look to the future. The date Poland was invaded by germany is easy to assess, when it comes to real learning, it begs the question of so what. Does it matter if it was sept 1 or sept 3? Important to put that in the context of why we teach history to begin with.

Why we teach history. Data (names, places, dates); skills (critical thinking; cause and effect; bias detection). Asked teachers why they taught history. Answers had nothing to do with names, places, or things. Nothing with rote memorization. Everything to do wit the skills, see above. Data and skills not mutually exclusive, prob need both.

Making History—(cell phone rang; asked everyone to turn theirs off). Game is educational experience that capitalizes on students’ digital skills and schools’ technology investments. History sim, students are leaders during WWII era. Game platform that gives instructors the power to track, analyze, and assess students’ actions.

Game must have all of the following: accuracy, transparency, multiplayer, always on, reporting, customization, consumer quality, classroom integration materials. Game prod custs must be in line with market size and its ability to pay.

Reporting—gathering all gameplay data. To give to teacher. Put in excel and slice and dice data. Gather data across classes. Customization: esp across diff states, due to standards. Quality: avoid the ‘lame’ factor. Double-edged sword. For kids, need to be impressed. But what makes an experience for students, not just graphics or sound, but the gameplay. Can it engage? Need to be like the best commercial game devs here. ML announcing – game being published in entertainment market (publisher signed). Classroom integration materials—teacher needs to kknow how and why it fits in. tie to lectures and textbooks, make learning experiences as a whole relevant to the student. Not a stand alone.

Content: best practices. Representative of commonly accepted historical thought. Peer review standards. Supportive of teacing objectives: familiarity, comparative judgment, awareness of manifold truths, appreciation of authority, hindsight.

Why is absolute accuracy an unrealistic goal? High cost, increases tech requirements.Does it improve the gameplay? If not prob wasting time.

Role of teacher: setting context; etc

Role of student: learn the issues countries faced during spec period. Consider options avail and make choices; evaluate results; compare results to known histry.

Tests of students who played and did not play the game and their knowledge of causes of WWII. Score good in terms of helping C, D and F students. They were engaged, but didn’t surpass A and B students. This did engage the students at the lower end of spectrum quite well. Eurpoean geography, test group saw sig increases. Began to understand relevance of geography also. One sig diff in gender: girls showed stronger improvement in understanding geography. Mainly because they started so low in the pretest. Apparently this is a common bias. But playing the game allowed girls to pick up those geographical skills.

Essay questions—marked improvement. Depth of content significantly improved.

Counter-factual and alternative histories. Students who hadn’t done well in trad assignments did v well in leading class through discussions and post game writings. They wre still learning history.

Students realized that if they went back and read the texts, they’d do better at the games.

Counterfactuals are a vital part of the way we learn. Learn about potential actions.

Hindsight bias: diminishes when people stopped to consider the reasons why the results might have turned out differently.

You can’t change history… but you can change the way you learn about it, think about it, and apply it.

FF 56! Freedom Fighter.

Big gamer- ff gamer like ffx esp. wanted game to be sim, but had to scale back. Working with Noah Falstein.

Step into the revolution. First game for Lauer Learning- big learning curve. Historical accuracy is a real pain. Constant rechecking of graphics, script, educational elements. Multiple audiences; 56ers and teens. Bilingual game and two continent launch. Hungary is about 10 years behind the serious games market in US. 3 Ps: passion, politics and pressure.

Market in Hungary—saying she was making a game about 56—didn’t make a lot of friends. Called immoral, Hitler, denied access to certain locations. But have gotten good response from educational ministry. They recognize that we need new ways to reach the next gen—trad learning methods don’t work.

How do we make a game about 1956 ‘fun’ to play? Revolution gets crushed in the end. How do we give players a sense of control with predetermined ending. How do players win?

How do we make a game about 1956 that teaches successfully? Linear story with branching vs. changing history and or playing the enemy; how to motivate players to continue; questions of violence and player death; you have a pre-determined number of Russians to kill. Your ave teen boy, doesn’t play a game unless it has a little violence in it. A way to string them along a bit.

Game features: Interactive graphic novel. 200+ original panels. 28 mini-games. Explore, combat, persuade, resuce, evade.

Explore mini-game. You use mouse to click and move three characters to map area of interest. You see a tank- if you want combat, click on tank. If not, go down a side street. See people- they may tell youy something. Or it might start a persuasion game. Gave people a semblance of control. Combat: less than 30%, wanted to tell people there was combat, but if they didn’t want it, it wasn’t overwhelming. It wasn’t gratituios. Tied to real-life events and scenarios.

Also gave everyone option to jump out of combat game. Persuasion game—collect historically accurate items, put in inventory. Can use to persuade a Soviet soldier of ‘something.’

Stretcher rescue game—

Freedom Fighter Factor points. To motivate people- give them these points.

Two alternate endings. 200k people escaped Hungary. 9.8m stayed. Original: if you escaped you won; but now there are the two options.

Included 8-10 video reels, radio broadcasts, newspapers, addl resource matierlas like a study guide.

“This is the best history book you’ll ever play”
Q and A
ML game DATA—what was the control group. Indicated stand up instruction was absolutely worthless. Instructor admitted they were not engaging the kids. Control group used same instructor.

Fighting the Gerrymander with Games
Chris Swain, Doug Thomas

Chris showed an opening animation from the game, which offered an overview of the importance of districting and map making in election outcomes.

Chris framed the context for the game in an analysis of game genres, which expand over time. Action games remain the most popular development of games, while other domains, like simulation and casual, are still unexplored. Chris suggested that serious games can explore in the space between strategy and simulation.

One lesson fro serious games is that usually you start with an instructional designer and a game designer and end up with something highly playable and educational.

In the game about redistricting, the goals were to create an understanding of how redistricting works and goes wrong; to promote discussion about democracy and incumbency; and to provide outlets for civic action around central issues. The game shows the archetypal situations in redistricting. A website provides additional information, including legislative measures integrated in the game.

Gameplay consists of redistricting missions which must passt he state legislature, Governor, and the courts. Missions include reapportionment, who gets and loses a district, abuse scenarios, and reform scenarios.

Chris showed some paper prototypes of the game in progress, and then a mockup. In the game, the player must choose a democrat or republican party to start with. The game was designed from a "noble journalistic" perspective, intended to show how both parties can use and abuse the system. The player gets a mission from the party head, and must redistrict based on population equality. Then the player must draw lines and they get feedback from the candidates in the sectors. The player can increase or decrease the size of the district. The candidates offer feedback based on their interests, like the majority count in their proposed new district. Of course, the player is expected to reach the conclusion that this scenario is hardly best for the people. Chris argued that this impasse is a wicked problem, and the parties must be made to come to a similar understanding of the problem.

To accomplish this resolution, the game includes political capital, a resource. For example, you can assuage a legislator's concern by offering concessions, or threatening the candidate with an opponent at the primary level. Instead of seeking to produce a particular outcome, the game encourages player to explore the benefirts and drawbacks in all systems of redistricting. The team plans to look at the responses to survey, tracking the depth of use of the website, monitoring the forums, and integrating with Meetup.com.

The game will be released in December, and will be distributed online.

A Virtual Orchestra for Introducing Children to Music
Roberto Dillon

Usually usic students don't have opportunities to practice conducting an orchestra... the usually conduct a pianist, which can't really replace the full orchestra. A game might allow this. The aim of the project was to provide a basic tool to practice for conservatory students, but also to create a game that can be fun while introducing young children to music making and to understand what goes on on stage.

Previous reserch: Max Matthews at Stanford developed a radio baton that tracks the motions of two batons in a three dimensional space. The system has been used in live performances. The Virtual conductor is a permanent exhibit at the House of Music in Vienna, that features prerecorded movies and pre-processed audio tracks. The user can conduct before this system.

In their project, Roberto and his collaborators wanted an interactive experience featuring both real tie music synthesis and video animations, and they wanted to go beyond the tempo and dynamics changes common in previous work... they wanted bad conducting to result in bad performance. How, then can this be turned into a game that is entertaining and educational.

They developed an unconventional stage (a floating platform in space!). The players compare their results, and designed a score system (a kind of virtual audience) that assigns a score by tracking performance. The virtual audience can become more or less challenging depending on the difficulty level of the user.

The audio feedback system offers applause, but jeering was determined to be inappropriate for kids. Each orchestra has a concentration level that decreases when the performer makes mistakes, lowering the player's score. A training system shows the player how to perform the gestures, and the player must use the mouse pointer to touch the points on a connected grid. The player can change the tempo, dynamics, and articulation in real time during performance.

Other user interface options include camera tracking and device tracking. Camera allows both hands but has lighting and background issues. Device tracking allows only single-handed use but is very flexible and robust. Another option is a gyro mouse, a kind of 3D mouse which allows more complete gesture recognition. The standard mouse on a desk can also be used. The mouse movements control:

Tempo - impulses per unit time
Dynamics - width of gesture
Articulation - straight or curve movements

The music score and voices are stored in a text file and mapped to MIDI voices.