This Developer’s Life: Games in Education Summit

Dear reader:

What a wild week… Tornados, Punk Rock, Speechafying, Girls, My Alma Mater…. 

Guess that was a two ellipse sentence; I hope your week was less exciting than mine. 

Anyway, the short version is that I was doing a panel with Stephen Schaffer, Tom Abernathy, Roger Travis and Michael Highland at the Games in Education Summit in Pittsburgh PA this week.

The long of it…well…goes something like this: 

It Begins:

I flew in on an 11 hour flight from Seattle to HUSTON to Pittsburgh - like for serious, what mind boggling web of bureaucracy + scheduling spat out that route? 

(Let this be a life lesson to you kids: don’t be so lackety that you

fail to book a trip you’ve known about for months until the week before…)

Abhorring hotel rooms as always, I ended up crashing with the ever radiant Laura Pliskin (yes…like Snake…) - who we’ve sadly lost to the film world as an art director - and Sema Patel, CEO of Interbots, the company that makes this crazy critter. 

I’ll avoid the specifics because it would make certain people’s perfect ivory pallor turn red, but let me tell you about how my time in Pittsburgh began by being attacked by insects…INDOORS (which has nothing at all to do with your house guys, it’s all of accursed Irontown.  Thanks again for the room!).  Where else in the world do you get critters coming from the woodwork out for no other reason than to find someplace hard to reach to die in…and that smell just like really stale Doritos?

Suffice it to say that I decided on the better part of valor and made like a tree (mixed metaphore +2).

A Mysterious Stranger: 

So I’m walking down one of the 10^6 hills in Pittsburgh, determined to find something eat before I wander into the conference when I see this dolled out punk rock chick waving me down.  She signals for a cigarette, I shrug, she catches up to me, looking for all the world like a 19 year old half Spanish Nancy Spungen with way cooler hair, and says “got a smoke?”  The next thing I know we’re having lunch together at the Hofbräuhaus (a surrealist wonderland where they make the employees wear “traditional” Bavarian garb).

After a lunch filled with Nietzsche, Shakespeare, a little bit of emo tragedy and the vivacious exuberance for life that only a 19 year old can have, we cross Hot Metal Bridge and head back towards the conference... 

Conference:

So…only about three weeks before the conference did I come to the realization that it was situated at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (henceforth known as the ETC).  I spent a year of my life in that build, I got my masters in that building, hell, I’ve had sex in that building: coming back was a trip. 

Upon entering I get bombarded on all sides by people who I have to talk to: Mark Chuberka and  Steve Farrer of Game Path (the guys who put on the event),  Luis Levy of the Bohle Company (dude, you still owe me a book on how to be a tester!) Don Maranelli, maestro of the ETC and inveterate pirate…and a long list of speakers and academics who I’d corresponded with but never met in person. 

I’m juggling all of these people while showing Jasmine (punk rock girl) the wonders of the ETC (for those of you who’ve never been there: it’s chocked full of movie relics and marvelous toys).  Hilarity ensues … 

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) she has to go to work shortly before my panel, we exchange numbers and agree to meet later on if there’s time. 

The Only Thing In This Whole Damn Article You Care About: 

Confession: the summit was great.  The amazing thing about it was how different it was.  It didn’t just cover Games in Education, but a whole gamut of idea, none of which are regular GDC fair.  I don’t have time to go over all of it, so this week I’ll give in to narcissism and simply talk about the panel I was on. 

The topic was “Collateral learning, values, and cognitive framing in story-based video games”, which ended up roughly translating to “What should we be teaching future game designers???!” (yes, specifically with three question marks and an exclamation point).  

As game schools crop up all over the world and industry jobs trended towards requiring greater and greater degrees of expertise it becomes an important that we consider how we are going to educate those entering this craft.  Some of the problems that we see in games today may well have their root in the haphazard stance we’ve taken towards education up until this point.  The panel I was on focused on designers and the education required to prepare designers to produce the experiences of tomorrow.

The most salient point of the whole discussion in my opinion was that to craft experiences you have to have experiences.  The game designers of the future will have to know about much more than simply video games and programming, they will have to be brought up with a firm background not only in mathematics but also in the liberal arts.  Designers in the future will have to have a broader set of references to bring to bear than just fantasy novels and sci-fi.  As a medium we are inexorably growing towards tackling a broader set of human experiences and, in order to do so, those who design our games must have a firm grasp on the human experience.

I wholeheartedly agree with this stance.  Simply speaking from personal experience I think that over the years my bachelor’s in Classics has done more for me as a designer than my master’s in Entertainment  Technology.  I believe that the two greatest tools for a game designer are reflection and introspection, in that order.  Without the ability to reflect on your experiences you can’t deliver the meaning of those experiences to others, without introspection you have no center to work from.  The traditional education in programming and (perhaps) mechanics doesn’t deliver either.  We need to do better. 

I’m out…

I’m out of space and I’ve still got a ton to talk about.  Tune in next week to hear about a Tornado and the Detroit Cobras…along with more musings about how to educate a designer. 

And as always, reach me at jportnow@gmail.com or jamesportnow on twitter.