Overall exhaustion has me moving more slowly than I'd like. I'm at the Digtial Games Research Association international conference in Tokyo, Japan. I'll be on a panel organized by Games for Change, where I'll be presenting some introductory information about P4 to an international audience of game researchers and creators. I'm attending sessions that will be of interest to our teaching partners in Denver, as well as to game development students in general. I'll try to transcribe notes that I've written on paper, and will then try to write new notes directly to the blog. The entire list of speakers and topics is available at http://www.digra2007.jp/Program.html

Fingers crossed. (I'm finding that I like Tokyo, though I've only seen a fragment so far.)

Session 1 Girls and Games

Nick... 

MAP tool to analyze Audio-Visual (taped) data and allow a ground-up analysis of that data. Don't know if it can be used live.

Meta Skill and Skill. Skill of game play, meta-skill in setting up the console and the environment. (relates to prestige/privilege system based on skill)

Questioning the pre-conceptions about girls and spatial games, relating that to novices and spatial motion.

Power relationships expressed in who gets to police the spaces. Is it boy's space? Is it girls' space? What does being a spectator "mean"? Spatial sovereignty.

Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution signalled that the types of games and the types of expertise ...

Gender-based conclusions may actually be novice-based conclusions...

Tracy Fullerton and Celia Pearce: The Hegemony of Play. Presentation critiques industry biases that prevent or inhibit potential changes that would allow diversity of thought. Indicts DiGRA and Game Studies scholars for complicity in processes.

Created a women's game collective: Ludica

http://www.ludica.org.uk/

Looking at 19th century models of board games and family gaming. Looking at "folk" games that existed before printing press centralized ownership of the rules, and therefore centralized control over play.

Production environment has a "locker room" mentality that reinforces status quo behaviors. Machismo embedded in long hours. "Qualified" is encoded with masculine stereotypical behavior.

Stereotypes work against men also.

Hegemony is comfort when one is within it. 

Visual Aesthetics, and definitions of play and game are contested here. The Sims is not a game (Jesper Juul's opinion, as well as that of many "hard core" gamers). Games that girls play are quickly marginalized and called "not games". "Hard Core" game players are actually in the minority, and yet have a disproportionate control over what kinds of games can be made.

Flow is the most downloaded game for the PS3, and is called "not a game". Industry insiders are pushing back against the Wii and games like flow. The hegemon disallows its challengers. 

Board game industry is much larger than videogame industry when looking at number of units sold. Time on shelves helps this, and is something to be considered.

Session 2 Education

Jose Zagal and the challenges to teaching game studies. Mentions a paper that he presented earlier this year at Siggraph Sandbox 2007 on blogging as a way to encourage reflective play. Also, how a diversity of prior experiences with videogames can pose challenges to teaching game studies and creating environments that promote critical, reflective, discursive play.

Kathy Sanford & Leanna Madill from Univ Victoria in Canada: Recognizing New Literacies: Negotiating the creation of videogames in school.

Transmissioin models vs constructivist models.

moving literacy from consumer to producer (Kress 2003)

literacy dimensions (Green 1997): operational, critical, cultural. (similar to Selber's dimensions)

teaching context matters also, elective vs core subject.

partnered with two schools in Victoria B. C. where teachers present IT and programming using videogames, without telling their administrators, they are too afraid of the fallout. Tool was Gamemaker. Data collection through observation, interviews, video- and audio-tape. This last method yielded better results for them, seeking evidence of meta-cognitive events.

operational forms of literacy (from Lankshear & Knobell 2003:11)

[what I see: collaborative learning, cooperative learning, constructivist learning]

Jose offers that we need a more nuanced view of "production" such that "when you play you are constructing a experience for yourself", or, better put, he proposes critical or reflective play as 'production'".  

Rikke Magnusson. Teacher Roles in Learning Games. Sliver of investigation of into the use of Homocide, a forensic investigation game to motivate students in high school science classes in denmark. Kids are to solve 4 murders. Scenarios presented through videogame, evidence is processed in physical science labs. [looks like an augmented virtuality]. Challenges are that teachers step in and out of fictions. Teachers may actually break the thing when their values don't match the values of the game. It sends the student-players conflicting, confusing messages. 

Session 3 Women in Games 2007 panel discussion 

Helen Kennedy: "The body in play". Immediately this is a "for adults" session. Kennedy's theory looks at the sensuality in game play, thinking about relationships between pleasure, technology, aesthetics and kinaesthetics in everday play. She has a dense list of theoretical concerns, agency, passivity, immmersion and embodiment (phenomenological questions about perception & the proprioceptive gaming subject). The idea of passivism has been touched on several times today, sometimes as spectator. Looking at Aesthetics of Cybernetics, and references Terry Eagleton's "Ideology of the Aesthetic". Played Lego Star Wars with Seth Giddings and recorded the entirety of their game and focused on the laughter, on the automatic and the somatic. That laughter is an entry point for her / their thoughts on the body. References the Wii and the need for knowledge about the interaction of the body (soma) and the technology to become foregrounded. 

http://powerup.motime.com 

Kinaesthesia signalled as intentional (outcome from Wii projects)

• Accentuated Impulsion
• Sympathetic Kinaesthesia
• Augmented Kinaesthesia
• Diminished Amplification (as compared to pre-Wii controllers) 

Subjects of the sensual and desire references (Braidotti 2002::217)

Suzanne de Castell (Simon Frasier Univ), Jennifer Jenson (York Univ) looking at Girls and Games

Three year project of Game Play Clubs. Other window onto first session this morning. One year was girls only, second year was mixed. 

Novice status is conflated with gender-based attributes in most literature. Didn't want to accept the received definitions of how girls play. 

Also see conflations between race and gender. Or rather cultural heritage and gender. Their boy subjects came from South Asia and East Asia and saw a difference in how they play.

We have to see agency streched across tools and bodies, and contexts. Changes in research assistant, changes in controllers to more embodied controllers, changes in contexts (girl only, girl-boy, expert only, expert-novice, novice only) all changed outcomes, but are not always taken into account as significant for research.

Referenced Judith Butler and Gender Effects. 

Emma Westecott.  The Making of an "Art Game". Looking at Alex Mayhew's games, eg "Ceremony of Innocence". Mahew is a sole practitioner. Also "Beethoven's Hair"

Eco, "it's necessary to invent constraints in order to create freely".

Mayhew creates a beautiful and surreal experience.  

The craft of design practice is fundamental to the player experience. (this from her last slide, don't know how she sees this)

The designer makes choices about the choices that will be allowable for the player. (this must be what she was talking about)

Marianne Selsjord: from Oslo.  "Runecast"

Girls and Women and (lack of) sovereignty over time.

Novel, embodied controllers even the "playing field" for other players.