Toluu

Missives from the Mob

katie salen

Aims of Education speech at New School ConvocationSeptember 8 2007

Thursday afternoon I had the distinct pleasure of speaking at Convocation for The New School, giving the annual Aims of Education address. I spoke about something called the 'architecture of persistence' and the roles games can play in helping us think about the new design of learning institutions. A transcript can be found here: Download file

Karaoke Ice in Los AngelesSeptember 7 2007

Karaoke Ice went to LA this past week! LACE hosted the project for a two week tour and despite the challenge of a heat wave we managed to bring tinklepop to a whole new group of KI converts. We got a lot of good press, including a piece from the LA Times that had a huge impact on crowds as well as LA Weekly. Full project info on our myspace page

Gamestar Mechanic Goes to MinneapolisSeptember 1 2007

For a group of teens attending the Design Camp at the University of Minnesota last week, seeing the world as a potential game space took on new meaning. Eric Socolofsky and I—two members of the Gamestar Mechanic design team (a game we are designing at Gamelab)—spent the week working with the teens to design and playtest games in the alpha build of the editor we currently have for the game. As part of the game’s larger playtesting and assessment plan, design camp proved to be a remarkably fruitful site for learning about the kinds of games the teens were able to make. We worked with 12 participants, ages 14-17. Most were boys, 2 girls, some were gamers, some not. All loved to play, however, as evidenced in the many rounds of playtesting held throughout the week. Each teen’s experience varied widely but by the end of the week everyone had gained an enormous amount of confidence in their ability to design fun, playable games.

Eric and I ran the workshop as a conversation between two primary forms of games—Big Games, or games designed for play in physical spaces and Gamestar Mechanic games, created with our in-game editor. We wanted the teens to compare and contrast the experience of designing games for contexts with such different affordances and to find ways to explore a set of basic game design principles.

Over the course of 5 days the group designed 6 big games. Three were designed for spaces at the Walker Sculpture Garden (Bobbleball, Cradle, and

One Nature, in Las VegasJune 10 2007

Marina Zurkow and I just completed One Nature, a project on sustainability and water use in Las Vegas. It was a public art commission for the Americans for the Arts, and was weird and amazing. Read a related story or see pictures of the performance on Flickr.

here are some samples:

Introduction to The Ecology of GamesMarch 10 2007

The Ecology of Games is one of six volumes in the MacArthur Series on Digital Media and learning, for which I serve as editor. The book is wrapping up and I have just finished a draft of the introduction, which includes info on each of the nine chapters that make up the volume. Download pdf