World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale.
It´s amazing how the brain craves learning. Game devs have an open door to people attention every time each one plays a game, a door to the need for learning of humans.
Great news for all the TED fans in Argentina for early 2010. Buenos Aires will be hosting it´s first TEDx. A series of talks by the most prominent and interesting minds in the world.
More information in Tedxbuenosaires.org
I´ve found out that the best way of coming up with ideas is not to think about it. It´s not news that creativity works in mysterious ways, but since this blog aims mainly to force myself to put things into words, i´ll make a list of some rules that I use when I´m feeling empty.
1- Get away from the computer. Get out.
2- Stop thinking.
3- Start a project from zero without an idea. Often times this evolves into an actual idea to work on.
4- Tell somebody an old idea that I had. Explain it usually forces me to understand it and something new allways pops up.
Reading about Serious Games i´ve come across with the idea that Sim games are categorized as Educative games, which is not quite accurate. A 3d Dentist Simulator about removing caries from a thooth is not a game, it´s a 3d Simulator. A game has many elements in it´s core: challenges, learning through gameplay, win lose conditions, and fun.
Did you ever text a sms while driving? Do you know the dangers of distracting driving? Maybeou do, maybe you don´t, maybe you think you do. Well, luckly we have games today. Not to play on the cell while driving, but to teach us things.
The New York Times created a game to test multitasking skills. It´s very interesting to try out and see what happens. You are driving a car and need to change lanes in order to cross open gates in the road while texting on your cellphone.
A good example of games that are fun and important to play at the same time. Here´s the link to Gauging Your Distraction.
Seen in vgresearcher.
It´s just too much noise. I have to check my email accounts, answer the IM, post in the blog, see “the best video ever” on youtube, google something, check new games, read blogs, compare news in different sites, follow links, download and try something, reboot the pc, etc.
Noise, noise everywhere. We can limit it of course, but it requires and extra effort, and every day something new is thrown to our heads that adds to that extra effort required to concentrate on something.
Games today are faster than a decade ago, because there is too much to see and we don´t have the time to check if something is worth our time. If the game doesn´t work for me in the first 5 minutes, I move on. I´ve become a soccer mum gamer. Back in time we used to install a game and try it out until we got it, that´s how we were able to enjoy some games that wouldn´t stand a chance today.
We have lost the ability to concentrate because of noise, noise that we need to eliminate from our ambient in order to move on and keep working on what matters for each one.
It´s just too much data and we don´t know how to handle it properly yet.
I´m working on a proposal for developing the educative game KOKORI (a very interesting project being made by the university of Santo Tomás in Chile). As I got more and more into educative games I started playing with the idea of documentary games. It seems reasonable to have documentaries in games as in every other form of media (tv, paper, film).
Researching about it was how I got to Shinyspinning.com. Cindy Poremba is a documentary videogame maker and she is doing an extensive research on the subject. Chek it out.
Three months ago, with de9a18studio, we´ve developed two games for Canal Encuentro. A television channel with educational and cultural content produced especially in Argentina and acquired from the most prestigious producers of Latin America and the world.
As I said in recent posts I´m becoming more and more interested in education and games, and their connections. I´ve been doing some research and I´ve found out that fun in games resides, more deeply than I thought, in the process of learning. We´ve been using games for education and therapy for decades now, but still I need to make my own experiment about how it works, and if I can succeed at my attempt to make a game that teaches logic better than a paragraph of text.
I was thinking about making an experiment where I present a subject with two tests. The only difference in each one is on the first step. In the first one I explain in theory a logic system, in the second one I try to make the subject learn this system without speaking about it.
FIRST TEST:
1- A brief explanation about a logic system. IE: “(Picture of a chess board with numbers for rows and letters for columns) Object A can go from B1 to B8 in one motion, but it can´t do it if another object is on the way.”
2- A conceptualization of the system. IE: “In chess the Tower can go from A1 to A8 in one move, but if a pawn is on any tile from A2 to A7, the Tower it can´t pass it”
3- Three questions about the conceptualization. IE “If a Tower is at C1. Can I move it to C6 if I have a pawn on C3?”, “If a Tower in at D8. Can I move it to D1 if I have a pawn on C3?”, “If a Tower is at G2. Can I move it to A2 if I have a pawn on G5?”
SECOND TEST:
1- A small game where a car can move in straight lines over a grid. The further you take it in one move, more points you earn. If an obstacle is on the way, the car will stop.
2- idem FIRST TEST
3- idem FIRST TEST
After a few hundred people takes the test I will know:
1- Games teaches better than text.
2- Text teaches better than games.
3- Games teaches better than text, but the one I made was poorly designed.
4- Text teaches better than games, but the one I wrote in the test was confusing.
5- I need to make at leas 100 of this tests to find out something valuable.
6- It´s all pointless, “Yes, games are better, but we can´t make children play with cars to learn everything”.
7- It´s all pointless, “Yes, games are better, but we woun´t make children play with cars to learn everything”.
8- It´s all pointless.
9- This actually may be interesting.
10- I´ve made the experiment and in the process learned many things. Luckily I did it without paying attention to the endless reasons why it was pointless.
Two months ago I got the amazing opportunity to design a game for SouthPark Studios. It was an exiting experience from the start, we had the episode “Pandemic” as a reference and they wanted a platformer type of game, along the lines of Moctezuma, Pitfall and Jungle Hunt. Together with a fantastic crew of artists and developers we had created a great game which got published today.
The day before Pandemic was published, a casual game for PlayFirst that I was designing got cancelled.
Once again. The universe balances itself.