GLS10 / Let’s Prototype: Women at the Intersection of Learning, Games, & Design

The tenth annual Games, Learning and Society Conference, held this past June in Madison, WI, featured a panel on women in gaming.  Moderated by games-journalist-turned-grad-student Amanda Ochsner, the panel featured some heavy hitters: Elisabeth Gee, Deborah Fields, Yasmin Kafai, Colleen Macklin, and Mary-Margaret Walker.

The discussion was mainly focused on how to get girls interested in both game design and computer science (but not necessarily both).  Following is a summary of some of my notes from the panel.

Image modified from original via Wikimedia 

How can educators create better mentoring opportunities for young women?

The first answer was a great one: be visible, and be outspoken.  Show why this is such an exciting time to be in games.

The experience of some panellists is that no matter how they set up workshops featuring game programming, it's always the boys who sign up.  We need to talk to teachers and actively talk to girls, personally inviting them to come.  Perhaps girls-only groups are needed (that's what I've been doing in my own outreach!).

One panellist pointed out that she was able to attract girls by featuring stories, music, and animations rather than games and programming directly.  The students don't even realize they are programming at first.  In another panellist's workshop, attendees would work on e-textiles; in this case, marketing must be done very carefully as both boys and girls hold onto stereotypes they aren't even aware of ("no sewing, circuitry or programming required").

Another challenge is that many still hold onto stereotypes about what it means to be a gamer; supposedly, only uncool gamers take game design classes.  At ASU, they are trying to infuse game design into journalism.  Foregrounding the subject matter that games are about seems to be a successful way to attract more women.

How can we approach teaching game design in ways that support a diversity of ideas and process?

In a sense, the discussion surrounding this question presented a solution to the previous one.

One of the most interesting ideas was that all art is technical - there are always technologies to learn that you use to be creative.  Hence, making games, and all the technology behind that (including programming) could be considered an arts subject.  The technical element is simply something you need to learn in order to effectively express yourself.

How might we engage young girls in game design, programming, and technology at earlier ages?

Something to remember: "We can't do it all, and we can't do it all in programs." Nonetheless, it is not difficult to find really good tools to help design programs to engage girls.  We can engage kids in actively designing and making things, and in making connections to things they care about.

One greater issue is the poor quality of many games designed for girls.  According to panellists, there is nothing in these games to get girls interested in computing and other technical pursuits.  The games have a low level of complexity.

We are often trying to get girls interested in game design and computing at the same time.  Perhaps, panellists pointed out, we should sometimes keep these types of outreach separate.  Learning about technology, for example, doesn't always have to be done through game design.  There are many other great opportunities like e-textiles.  At the same time, we don't always have to be trying to get girls interested in programming and computer science when we teach them game design.

Remember that each kid is already designer ("I designed my first games during recess").  That's a start.  Now let's talk about how games are actually made.  In the 1980's, you typed game code from a magazine to be able to play.  Everyone understood how programming worked because we had to.  Can we make programming not such a special thing?

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For more, see my conference notes on this session.

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GLS10 Keynote Scot Osterweil: It's Not About the Game

When I attended the 2014 Games, Learning and Society Conference (GLS10) in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin, I did not expect to engage much with the topic of stories in games.  True, it's a hot topic these days, but I didn't think it would show up much at this venue.  Thursday's keynote speaker Scot Osterweil proved me wrong.

Image via Calico Spanish

Osterweil, Creative Director of the Education Arcade at MIT, titled his talk "It's Not About the Game."  Though I am not confident I know for sure what he meant by this, I have two guesses: it might be related to Eric Zimmerman's Games Are Not Good For You talk, which Osterweil discussed at length; or, it could be a call to focus on the importance of narrative within games.

In part, Zimmerman's talk was trying to say that we need to just let games be games.  We should not be instrumentalizing them for other purposes (like, say, education?).  This made Osterweil realize what we are really doing as educational game designers.  We are trying to change people with technology.  In a sense, it's not unlike the reprogramming scene in A Clockwork Orange, he points out.  Is this what games are supposed to be all about?

Games are supposed to be about play, and play is all about agency.  It's what we do when we don't have to do something else.  We don't do it for some specific purpose —  not even education.  Play is about freedom: freedom to explore, freedom to fail, freedom of identity, and freedom of effort.  How many educational games actually include all of these freedoms? No game can make you play harder than you want to.

You can't just add "fun" to a math game.  If you don't find something fun to begin with, you shouldn't make a game about it.  Games are much more about building conceptual frameworks and preparing for future learning - not instructing something.

So what about narrative?

Osterweil says he grew up wanting to be a storyteller.  He noticed that the Greeks had a word, agon, that was relevant in multiple areas important in Greek culture.  Agon means competition, which has context in games (i.e., competing in the Olympics) and stories (conflict in theatre).

When we go into a game, we enter as a contestant: "we willingly submit to arbitrary rules and structures in pursuit of mastery, only if we can continue to be playful".  In other art forms, like film and theatre, we are spectators (though possibly not passive ones).  We construct knowledge differently with these two roles, and with stories in games, we can make them overlap.

In addition to being contestants and spectators, we can also be creators.  Perhaps where all three overlap is where the most powerful educational opportunities lie.

Osterweil emphasized that we as game designers need to start thinking more about the affordances of story and gameplay.  We need to start thinking more about the ways narrative is engaging our players.  Beyond this, when making games, we have to care about it ourselves; we can’t just think about what the kids want or else we'll end up giving them a creepy tree-house.  Both the creator and consumer of narrative need to be leaning forward in interest.

To read more about the keynote, you can look at my raw conference notes, the collaborative conference notes, Sam Potasz's blog post summary, and Donelle Batty's Storify of the second conference day.

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Mini-Course 2014: Survey Results

After a one-year hiatus, I ran my all-girls mini-course on computer science and games again this past May.  Along with a picture of my lovely class, I wanted to share this year's pre- and post- survey results.  Note that while I compare some numbers to past courses, I did not post data from 2012 and there was not course in 2013, so neither year is mentioned.

 

Pre-Course Survey Results

Before we begin with our first class, I ask the girls to fill in a survey to try to capture their attitudes toward computer science.  Naturally, I hope to see a general improvement in these attitudes by the end of the course.  Here are some of the more interesting results.

"I am confident that I understand what the field of computer science is."

• Strongly agree: 1
• Agree:5
• Netural/don't know: 11
• Disagree: 2

There was less confidence about what the field is than in some previous years (e.g. 2010, where 50%  agreed to this statement in the pre-course survey).

"I would consider computer science as a good career for women in general."

• Strongly agree: 5
• Agree: 14

 Despite the lower confidence, there was not a single neutral response for the first time.

"I would consider computer science as a good career for me."

• Strongly agree: 5
• Agree: 5
• Neutral/don't know: 9

This is the highest number of any type of 'agree,' let alone 'strongly agree.'  Could it possibly mean that the widespread efforts to get young people (especially girls) into computer science are actually starting to work? I hope so!

Post-Course Survey Results

I ask many of the same questions after the course, as well as some new ones.  Here are the most interesting responses.

"Are you glad the course was just for girls?"

• Yes: 8
• No: 1
• I'm happy as long as I'm not the only girl: 10

We did our surveys before we got together with the other (mostly male) class to share our games and eat pizza.  It would be interesting to see if their responses would change after that event.

"I enjoyed learning about what computer science is really all about."

•  Strongly agree: 12
• Agree: 6
• Neutral/don't know: 1

This is a great result, even considering how many came to the course open to the idea that computer science might be interesting.

"I would consider computer science a good career for me."

•  Strongly agree: 8
• Agree: 6
• Neutral/don't know: 5

This is the best year-to-year result for this question that I've seen.  Even though 2011 was a good improvement over 2010, this is better still.  It is also wonderful to see so many responses move up (neutral to agree, etc).

"I am more likely to try computer science in high school or university after taking this course, or this course has confirmed my desire to do so."

• Strongly agree: 8
• Agree: 10
• Neutral/don't know: 1

Fantastic.  I only hope that their next experience with CS is a good one.  (I hate that I have to worry about that!)

Summary


This year's course was not changed drastically from previous years.  We spent some more time in the lab, and had more guests talk to them.  I also skipped the section on women in the industry.  Although one person said she wished I had covered that topic in her survey comments, I have to wonder if skipping it contributed to this year's success.  (I previously wrote a bit about messaging in these sorts of workshops and courses.)  Either way, I am thrilled, and can't help but think that maybe these sorts of programs are finally going to make a difference soon at the post-secondary level.

As usual, you can read more about the course here, or take a look at the materials as presented to the girls.

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My FDG 2014 Cruise Ship Conference Experience

You may recall that I was going to a conference on a cruise ship in April.  Well, I'm back from Foundations of Digital Games 2014 and am happy to report that I have found another new favourite conference and community.  The conference went well and I made some wonderful friends. Win win!

It was a strange experience, being on a cruise ship for (mostly) academic purposes.  This was my first time on one, and to be honest, I actually prefer the resort experience more when it comes to vacations.  An overwhelming sense of "fake" was prevalent on the ship, and while resorts aren't necessarily better, on a cruise all you have is the boat.  No beach, no grass, etc.  I also didn't love the dark, cavernous feeling on most decks of the boat or the lengthy process to embark and debark.  Even the mall was kept dark and lit with neon lights most of the time.

But there is a big advantage to hosting a conference on a cruise ship: nobody can leave! This was really great for building community.  It was easy to find other attendees and spend some social time with them.  For example, on one of the early nights, there was a disco party happening in the mall.  At that point I was alone, wandering around, wondering what to do.

When I ran into some friends (old and new), I finally had someone to dance with, even if we were stuck with disco for quite some time.  I would not have danced disco alone, but with them, I had a blast.

I have to admit that the upper deck with the pools was a nice place to prepare for my paper presentations (lab mates, if you are reading this: pretend I prepared weeks in advance and practised at our meetings).  Sitting on a swinging chair looking out on the ocean is a good way to relieve last-minute stress.

And boy, was I stressed.  I wasn't worried about the actual presentation being good, but rather whether the audience of heavy-hitters in the stories-in-games field would think the work itself was any good.  It was a rare moment of feeling the imposter syndrome.  To make matters worse, I had two talks almost in a row! Good to get them over with, but no chance for feedback in between.

Fortunately, everything went very well.  The talk was good, and the questions afterwards were even better.  A lot of the people I was intimidated of in the first place made a point to tell me that my talk was interesting.  Later in the conference I even got to have an extended conversation with one of them, giving me both confidence and ideas.  (Learn more about what I presented if you're interested.)

After my talks and a couple of other interesting paper sessions, I escaped on my own for a bit to decompress.  The sun was starting to set, which was the perfect time to take a stroll around the boat.

The next day, the ship docked in Cozumel, Mexico, where two of my new friends and I went on a tour of Maya ruins (apparently you aren't supposed to include an "n") and visited a gorgeous beach.  I was really glad to have my talk behind me at that point as I could completely relax and enjoy it!

 

The last day of the cruise included more interesting talks and a lovely reception and dinner to cap it all off.  I left the following morning on a high, and already trying to figure out how to ensure I attended next year's conference.  I left feeling like I had finally found "my people," from my awesome roommate to the researchers with the same interests.  Thanks FDG, and hope to see you again soon!

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Interactive Storytelling in Games: Next Steps

Last night I gave a lecture for our undergrad society on some of the more interesting recent developments in interactive storytelling, along with a preview of my own thesis work.  Below are my slides.

Interactive Storytelling in Games: Next Steps from Gail Carmichael 

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Cruise Ship Conference

I've never been on a cruise before. Who would have thought that my first opportunity to sail would be for an academic conference on videogames? Come on, admit it. You're jealous.

via Wikimedia

The conference is Foundations of Digital Games, and the photo above shows where we'll be living for about 5 days in April.  This past fall, my supervisor and I worked really hard to get a paper we'd been sitting on into good enough shape to submit, and wrote up a whole new paper on my thesis work.  I was nervous about whether either would get in, but lo and behold, both did!

The paper on my thesis work, A Framework for Coherent Emergent Stories, got in with generally positive reviews, despite the very embarrassing fact that two important diagrams ended up as black boxes.  The one more negative review was actually extremely helpful - we will definitely be improving our write-up with those comments in mind.

The other paper was about non-linear stories in traditional media and games.  It was hard to know how this one would fare since the topic is more closely related to games studies, making me a bit of an outsider.  It was accepted in the work-in-progress track, which I am definitely satisfied with.  Lots of really useful comments in those reviews, too, so while this isn't the more important of the two papers, we should be able to improve it.

I have to admit that these successes are really great news after a recent string of rejections.  My publication luck is finally beginning to pick up!

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Video Games and Learning: My First MOOC Experience

Way back in the springtime I signed up for a Coursera offering on video games and learning.  I had no idea when the course would actually be offered, and forgot about it until they finally, around the end of September, announced that the course would be beginning shortly.  Right in the middle of my first term of full-time teaching.  A term in which I have 700 students.  Talk about timing!

Despite the possibility that I couldn't give this course as much attention as I'd like, I decided to give it a try anyway.  It's an area I'm interested on a personal and research level, and if nothing else, I figured the videos should be interesting.

So far, so good in that regard.  I was excited to see so many familiar faces in the lectures and concept videos.  They aren't people I know personally, but whose work I've been following for some time.  The topics have been interesting, and I really enjoyed seeing the Games Learning Society lab space (totally a place I could see myself working).

I've consistently been about a week behind the lecture and assignment schedule, so I often miss out on the more timely discussion in the forums.   I'm not sure it matters much in my case, though, since I don't have a huge amount of time to dedicate to interacting with other students anyway.

One question that's fair to ask is whether I've actually learned anything from the course so far.  Honestly... I'm not sure.  Because it's an area I've been watching for a while now, I probably know most of the basics already.  I also can't remember many of the specifics of what was covered in the lecture-style videos (they are very, very hard to focus on, unlike the animation-supported concept videos).  That said, it is nice to have the review and to think about new things via the assignments.

My experience with this, my first MOOC, has been good enough that I signed up for another one that's more directly related to my thesis project: The Future of Storytelling.

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Slides from 'Coherent Emergent Stories in Video Games' / GHC13

I gave a talk at this year's Grace Hopper on what I've been working on for my thesis project:

Coherent Emergent Stories in Video Games
Crafting satisfying narratives while preserving player freedom is a longstanding challenge for computer games.  Many games use a quest structure, allowing players to experience content nonlinearly.  However, this risks creating disjointed stories when side quests only minimally integrate with the main story.  This talk introduces the problem of nonlinear storytelling in games and discusses our flexible, scene-based story system that reacts dynamically to the player’s actions.

My slides are embedded below and you can learn more on my website.

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A Preview of My GHC13 Gram's House Poster

It's not finalized, but here's a preview of the poster I made about Gram's House, a research project I started a few years ago, for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.  Gram's House is a game designed to encourage girls to consider computer science through a story about making a difference for a loved one and through computer science concept puzzles.

As usual, my poster is fairly minimal in terms of text content.  I use my posters as props to talk about the project during the poster presentation, or as teasers to entice viewers to get more information.  If you'd like to know more, visit me during the conference poster session, or check out my research page about the project where you can also look at the PDF of the poster.

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The Latest on the App Formerly Known as Carleton Quest

I've been making good progress on the app formerly known as Carleton Quest.  I've rewritten the story to include more faculty-specific info and general school spirit, made fewer locations mandatory, and updated the UI.  I submitted an ethics application for the survey we hope users will complete at the end of the app for a chance to win great prizes.  I've also been looking for a new name (so far, the winner is CU There; let me know if you like it).

  

I'm still working out a few bugs with that fancy centre button with the camera, and Andrew Heaton kindly offered via Twitter to help me style the HTML story text (thanks Andrew!).

With luck, I'll get this version submitted to the app store soon, and our posters with QR codes will be up in the next couple of weeks.

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Female Friendly Narrative Modding in Games

Why is it that there are still so few video games stories with awesome female protagonists that don't play into the usual gender stereotypes? What's a gamer to do if he or she wants to experience more of them today? Narrative modding might be one minor possibility...

Zelda Cosplay :D / CLOUD1414

I started my journey into female friendly narrative by randomly looking up a link I've had saved up for a while: Ada: Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.  I found an interesting article called Self-Saving Princess: Feminism and Post-Play Narrative Modding.  It discusses the idea of modding not the game itself with editors or code, but the modding of the narrative outside the technology, that is, "modding that takes place through player and critic participation after the game has been created through discourse."

For example, Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency is discussed as someone who has modded the narrative of games with respect to how women are portrayed in them. 

Her call for funding for a series of videos on this topic was met with outrage, disgust, threats, anger, and resentment from some sectors of the gaming community online. ... But anger wasn’t the only response to Sarkeesian, and in fact, it seems that the anger and threats of violence incited more support for her project than had existed previously (and may have existed at all).

And now, with three videos published from the Tropes vs Women series on video games, Sarkeesian is calling on players to look at female characters in games in a whole new light.  This is narrative modding because "it fundamentally changes the way that players are able to engage with the game because of their knowledge of her critique and the community’s response to it.  Once these tropes are exposed and brought into mainstream discourse, the player’s experience of the game is modded."

The latest Women vs. Tropes video, Damsel in Distress: Part 3, embedded above, mentions explicit narrative modding, albeit briefly.  One well-known projects that changed Link into a girl through a Wind Waker mod came from a fellow Carleton University alumnus, Mike Hoye.

Initiatives like these are very cool, but the fact that any sort of narrative modding is even necessary has to make you wonder when video games are going to grow up and offer more female-friendly stories.  I'm hoping it'll be in time for my daughter to enjoy them when she's old enough to play.  (She's almost 2 now, so get on it, industry!)

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Brenda Romero at G4C13: The Games Need to Change

In the games for change movement, what needs to change? Brenda Romero, designer in residence at UC Santa Cruz, thinks it's the games.

In her Games for Change 2013 keynote, Romero explains that she did not make her award-winning board game Train as a game for change per se.  Rather, it was a game "about something" — a game about a subject much like a book or movie can be.

"I wanted people to feel what I felt when I thought of these things [about the Holocaust]."

A big challenge when making games of this type is that, as a designer, you just don't know what players are bringing to the game, nor what they might take away from it.   Romero's experience with Civilization: Revolution is a case in point: it allowed her to nuke the Japanese when their advanced culture became a threat...just for being technical...while playing as Ghandi.

Some games for change are in your face about what they want you to feel.  The designer acts as a preacher, telling the player what path they will go down.  This isn't as powerful as experiences like Train or Civilization: Revolution.  Instead, it is better to make something that the player can explore however they want (or need) to.  Sometimes we don't need to be direct.  The games that changed Romero the most changed her precisely because she didn't see it coming.

This is one advantage Romero sees for analog games: they don't have story lines or cut scenes to tell the player how they should feel.  The usually just have rules.  The games for change movement also affords advantages: while the mainstream can't touch certain difficult topics with a ten foot pole, games for change are invited to look at them in depth.

But, as Romero points out, there doesn't need to be a division between commercial games and games for change.  The beauty is at the nexus of the two. As a result, it's not that we need "games that change people, but [it is] the games themselves that need the change."

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Earnest Games, Not Serious Games

Why is it that after ten years of Games for Change festivals guys like Ian Bogost are still making the same argument: games have the power to depict complexity in ways other media can't, and they have the potential to positively impact how we talk about and understand complex issues.  Why are so-called serious games not living up to this potential?

In his Games for Change Festival keynote this year, Bogost gave his take (along with a healthy dose of self-criticism).  I've done my best to summarize it here.

You see, there is a bit of a paradox that the serious games community faces.  Games involve systems thinking.  Systems thinking assumes that simple answers are always wrong.  But serious games are presented as "superficially transformative affairs."

A post mortum on Oiligarchy, a game about oil consumption and political participation through corporate sponsorship, was said to increase the game's transparency or allow the intentions of the creator to better shine through.  Does this mean the game is insufficient to talk about the issues? That additional words and images are required?

Fatworld, Bogost's own creation, did a good job of representing the rhetoric of nutrition, but wasn't a terribly good game (so he says).  Meanwhile, the Apps for Healthy Kids winners were apparently not very good either.  Yet these were much more successful than Fatworld - what excused them from mediocrity and propelled them to success?

Games' ability to do procedural rhetoric can be short-circuited by orthogonal media situations that resist the fundamentals of games.  In the case of Apps for Healthy Kids, the main purpose was not to change minds about healthy eating, though doing so would be a bonus.  Instead, a branch of the government wanted to demonstrate that they were hip enough to use cool technology.

Is the problem with serious games that they try to separate entertainment from seriousness, turning it into an either/or proposition? Do serious games seem to represent the goals of institutions rather than having a worthy goal on their own?

Maybe too many serious games aren't really that concerned about being games. They are hip.  They are concepts at worst, adornments at best.

We don't need 'serious games' or 'games for change.'  We need games that want to be games first and foremost.  Second, the creators of these games should really want to pursue the topics they claim to want to pursue (not just create the opportunity to talk about these topics outside of the game).

Maybe, what we need are not serious games, but earnest games.  Games that mean it, that do justice to their topics and to the medium of games themselves.

Now this is an idea I can stand behind.

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Why Game Designers Should Understand Procedural Rhetoric

I am sometimes asked why I think stories in games need to improve.  Considering I'm studying nonlinear stories in games for my PhD project, I was for a long time unsatisfied with my answer.  But I finally figured out what my beef was about today's games and their stories.

Elizabeth II by CoeyKuhn

My problem is that stories and gameplay far too often feel like separate activities.  The best stories tend to be told outside of the main mechanics (not necessarily via cut-scenes, but not during the main action either).   Many CRPG's with random encounters are guilty of this.  More recently, BioShock Infinite's story felt really separate from the shooting galleries that punctuated it.  The game felt very close to (if not exactly like) what Chris Crawford called a constipated story.  The only possible exception was the Hall of Heroes, where the environments passively provided backstory brilliantly alongside Slate's narration.  Even there, though, the slaughtering of hundreds of Slate's men felt forced, and the constant battling made it difficult to pay attention to anything else.

Beyond separating the story from the main mechanics, the meaning of what you do through gameplay may not even be tightly coupled to the story, or worse, may go against it.  We've been playing Red Dead Redemption, and I feel this dissonance fairly often.  In some quests (many of them optional, like the bounty hunting), you earn more honour or money for bringing back the bad guys alive.  Killing them sometimes even lowers your honour.  Yet in many of the main episodes, you kill multitudes of men and your honour goes up.  Even worse, in many conversation with Bonnie, your actual actions are not taken into account and she only ever paints you as an honourable man (or so it has gone for us so far - we are not yet finished the game).  Although some feel that the violence and shooter nature of BioShock Infinite has meaning, for most it creates a disconnect from the story the game tries to tell.

I've written a couple of times before about procedural rhetoric.  If you haven't checked out Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games, where the idea originated, be sure to do so.  As a reminder, procedural rhetoric in games is essentially using their rules and mechanics to make an argument (as opposed to, say, the words in the game or the visual elements).  I like to simply describe it as "saying something" with the mechanics, as I have discussed in the context of Sweatshop and Unmanned

Games whose designers don't consider procedural rhetoric end up running into problems like those mentioned above.  If you don't care what your mechanics are saying, your story could feel separate from them.  If your mechanics are saying one thing while the story says another, a troubling contradiction occurs.  But if designers carefully plan their game's mechanics so that what they say aligns with what the story wants to say, then, in my opinion, great masterpieces are possible.  And that is why designers should learn about procedural rhetoric.

Edit: I was reminded of the concept of ludonarrative dissonance, which describes my problem with stories and games quite well.  There's even an article about BioShock Infinite and this idea.  So basically what I am saying is that understanding procedural rhetoric and being mindful of what your mechanics are saying is one possible fix to ludonarrative dissonance.

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Princesses, Dragons, and Assigning Numbers to Stories

I've been working on a prototype story for my thesis project ("Coherent Emergent Stories").  Although I have a couple of stories on the go (such as the one I made for my GRAND poster), the one I am working with now was loosely inspired by The Paper Bag Princess.  This is an informal representation of some of the nodes:

In addition to these nodes are many more satellite nodes that, at the very least, further the story's themes or develop its characters, but that are optional and can be seen in any order.

My task now is to turn the ideas behind each node's availability (where should the player be? What knowledge should they have? etc) into numbers.  We are currently using a modifier system to calculate suitability of a node at any given time.  This means that I need to represent things like mood and knowledge as numbers.  This is much easier said than done!

I will also be writing some code that will represent formula(s) for computing a scene's score so that we can test what scenes will be available for various game states.  I decided to use Python, since its quick and easy scripting nature is just the thing needed here.  It also seems easy to connect directly to a Google Spreadsheet, where my story data currently resides.

Tomorrow, we plan on spending the morning playing with the prototype and adjusting the data and calculations as needed.  I'm really curious to see how far off the mark my numbers end up being!

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Stories and Games at GRAND 2013

Last week, I attended the annual meeting of the GRAND (Graphics, Animation, and New Media) research network, held in Toronto.  Although the research and discussion presented and held at the conference spanned much more, the focus for me was on games and stories in games.

The presenter I was most excited about seeing was Jane McGonigal of Reality is Broken and Superbetter fame.  She believes that gamers are actually practicing some rather useful skills when they play.  For example, they learn to be hopeful and creative, two of several things that we should want people solving the world's greatest problems to be.  I reviewed her book a couple of years ago and still find that it influences my thinking on games.  Although I already knew most of what she talked about at GRAND (having been a fan for a while), I loved seeing her in person, and loved even more that my friends and colleagues now buy into her ideas as well.

A surprise for me was how much I loved Terry O'Reilly's talk.  I admit I'm not much of a CBC follower (unless they're airing an Ottawa Senators hockey game), so I didn't know who Terry was ahead of time.  He spoke about the power of stories, mostly with respect to marketing and advertising.  One of my favorite quotes:

Make people feel your message, not just understand it.  -Terry O'Reilly

Besides being an extremely good talk, it was fascinating how much I connected with his message with respect to games.  In particular, I found myself being convinced by him (and less directly by Jane McGonigal earlier) that stories can truly make a difference in learning with educational games.

On Tuesday night I presented my nicely designed research poster.  I was quite pleased to see a few other really great posters.  My favorite poster (possibly of all time) described Tiffany Inglis's research on pixel art in the form of a comic strip.  Check out the poster on her project page.

Finally, on Wednesday, the last day I was at the conference, I attended the Women in Games panel.  The panel featured Grace from Fat, Ugly, or Slutty, Cecily from Dames Making Games, Anita of Feminist Frequency (which is most recently focusing on tropes vs. women in videogames), and Brenda of Silicon Sisters, a women-lead game studio in Vancouver.  The discussion was fascinating, and I saw a lot of what I do with women in CS shine through, even though involvement in games can be much broader than programming/CS.  It was also really neat to see what Brenda and her company have been working on, since I had been chatting with Brenda about stories in games the previous evening at my poster.

Even though I had less than two days between trips (poor baby Molly!), and even though I could only stay for two days, I'm really glad I ended up coming to GRAND.  I feel energized as I move into my attempt to get a lot done research-wise this summer...

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My Beautiful GRAND Conference Poster

I'm a strong believer in creating conference posters that look good.  If they have a striking resemblance to printed papers, in my opinion something has gone really wrong.  With that said, I have to say I had a lot of fun designing my most recent poster.

Although this image is slightly out of date from the final print version, it gives a good idea of what I was going for.  You can get the gist of the research by looking at it, but it does not contain all the information a paper would.  That's what the poster presentation itself it for: I will have the opportunity to discuss the work more deeply.

There is no reason whatsoever that a poster can't be both beautiful and functional, so I encourage you to see what you can come up with the next time you create a poster! If you have an example to something you're particularly proud of, I'd love to see a link in the comments.

Edit: You can now check out the high resolution PDF of the poster if you'd like.

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Cool Ed Tech at the Montreal Science Centre

I love science and tech museums, so while visiting Montreal this past weekend, I made sure to stop by the Montreal Science Centre.  They have some really cool stuff there, but I was most intrigued by two of their exhibits that centred completely around a single piece of ed tech.

The first such exhibit was Mission Gaia.  It contains more than 20 gaming tables with screens both on the horizontal surface and on a vertical screen perpendicular to the table.  A camera is positioned above to detect where you place rubber circular tokens and thus what decisions or moves you are making. As explained at the link above, the game is divided into three sections: "A recap of terrible ecological and human disasters," "sustainable development in a large North American city," and then an attempt at "sustainable development to the whole planet."

My friends and I played until the beginning of the third segment.  We all felt that the technology was very well done, the content was great, and that the game had potential.  Unfortunately, it was almost always unclear what your goals were in terms of the game mechanics.  We concluded that you pretty much could just "choose everything" and it didn't really matter.  The game design definitely needs some work, but an improved version could definitely go far in bringing awareness to players.

Later in the day we stopped by the idTV exhibit.  The room was set up like a mission control with tiered seating and giant screens at the front.  A group of up to four people gathers in front of a computer and puts on some chunky headphones.  With the help of a video guide, the group chooses a controversial scientific topic to research and prepare a short news video on.  The group watches news clips, arranges them into the video, and even records their own intro and outro.

This setup was far more effective to us than Mission Gaia (thanks to the latter's weak game design).  We didn't have a huge amount of time, so we just watched a few of the clips and then somewhat randomly put them together into our little video.  Even then, we could see there were differing points of view and even opportunities to decide which videos to trust (for example, not the political scientist talking about biology).  We can really see how students that spent the full half hour with their topic would learn a lot about it and form their own informed opinions.

Overall, I really applaud the Centre for managing to make everything interactive yet still compelling.  I wish all museums, whether about science or something else, could do the same.

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Story Graph Example Inspired by The Paper Bag Princess

Without giving too much away, I wanted to share an early example of the types of story graphs I'm working on for my thesis.  This was my first example, and it's inspired by Robert Munsch's Paper Bag Princess.

Without even telling you what all the colours and notations mean, you can probably gather that there are some nodes that must be seen in a particular order, and others that can be seen any time.

Eventually my examples will have much more of the latter type.  The end goal is to be able to decide which nodes should be available in the first place according to the player's current state in the game, and then to dynamically modify the scenes in small, simple ways to ensure they make sense and connect back to previously seen nodes.

Hopefully, this will result in more open and coherent emergent stories in games.

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Framing Devices With an Interactive Twist

You may recall that I recommended inklewriter as one tool for testing story ideas.  I recently found an interesting piece of interactive fiction made with it and I found it rather interesting.  It's called First Draft of a Revolution, and its format is quite different from anything I've seen before (though, to be perfectly honest, I'm not well versed in the realm of non-game interactive fiction pieces!).

The story is presented as a series of letters written between the main characters.  This isn't anything new; framing devices have been used for ages.  But here's the twist: through a series of clicks you get into the letter writers' heads, seeing their thought process as they write and rewrite their letter until you decide it's ready to send.

For example, in the image above, Juliette has made a list of the things she wants to say in her letter.  You click on each item and see a note pop up that ponders what to do next.  The notes seem to offer choices at first, but really there is only one option you can pick to continue.

I thought this was rather effective.  It would pretty boring reading about each character changing their mind and rewriting.  I don't need the explanation of what they're doing when it's the same thing over and over.

So what makes the story interactive? You can sometimes send letters without clicking on everything, though ultimately this doesn't actually change the story.  You can also choose what order you reveal the information to yourself.  As the inkle blog says about the piece:

But do the choices affect the story? Yes. Of course they do. Partly because the choices are being remembered by the other data-collecting system in action during the game, which is the one that sits between your ears. And partly because you’re performing the act of choosing.  The indecision of the characters, expressed through your choices and changes, changes everything. It’s a little like the way an actor’s reading of a line in a play changes the way the scene is experienced. Each performance is different even though each telling is the same. A gripping play isn’t about control, but it isn’t passive either – it’s electrifying, because every second is alive with possibility. Drama arises from the space between one second and the next, quite regardless of whether we’re in a screwball comedy where anything can happen, or a tragedy where a bleak fate was prophesied in Scene One.

The story doesn't take too long to get through, and while I would have liked it to go a bit further into the results of the risky move our heroine Juliette made, I also would have found doing much more clicking to reveal the letter to get a little tedious.  Overall, I recommend checking it out.

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