Game Studies Class Spring 2012

We look at gaming through the lens of the academy, as players and as designers. I have learned a lot by offering the class for the first time in fall of 2011, and like to think the course will get better and better.

We shall read about games.  We will read blogs, and experts, we will watch video and have conversation about what we read. With a little luck we will have some expert presenters. We will learn about what makes games compelling to the university, and to people in general.

We shall write about games.  Writing is a powerful form of expression, but this is not an English class. We shall blog and learn how to give feedback, as designers. We shall also learn how to write rules and descriptions of games.

We shall design games. We will make a minimum of two games, F2011 made a card game and a video game. We will use powerful drag and drop tools, we will actually make a video game, NO PROGRAMMING REQUIRED.

We shall play games.  Hopefully we will have fun, we will play games and think about what they say and mean. Some of the games we play will suck, others will change our lives.

You will leave the class with a greater insight into your power as a designer, and yes, you will be a designer when you leave. Okay, perhaps that is optimistic, not everyone is a designer, but you will create games and have the insight of a designer.

Who should take this course? People interested in the medium, or those who want to find a “way in” to game design and game culture, people looking to understand how games affect culture, and how fun can be used as part of learning.

I am not going to sugar coat this, there will be times when this is work, but anything worth having or understanding is worth working for. Help us make games a bigger part of the university experience.  If you have any questions or have any difficulty adding this class please email me: james.morgan@sjsu.edu.

Who am I? I am a long time gamer, lots of RPGs and board games.  I ran a successful LARP for 5 years and have been playing computer games as long as I can remember. I co-curated a couple shows on games as art in 2010/2011 and have been making art in MMO’s and Virtual Environments through Ars Virtua since 2006.  I am the advisor for the Game Development Club at SJSU, and am working with the deans of five colleges to create a bigger presence for games and gaming on SJSU’s campus.

invite – look art

Opening July 16: look art

Ars Virtua pleased to announce the opening of look art, an art show in a multi-user dungeon commissioned by Turbulence.org.

Receptions are scheduled in the space at 10am Pacific and 6pm Pacific time on Saturday July 16, 2011.

You can connect as a visitor via telnet or mud application our server is named turbulence.sjsu.edu and our public port is 2860.

Request an account http://bit.ly/look-art-login to have your own login/password. We also have a http to telnet gateway from Mosha.net (works with firefox and IE): connect as visitor, or to connect and enter credentials(your login and password).

Featured artists are Thomas Asmuth, Alejo Duque, and Christopher Poff. Artwork represents a conceptual re-interpretation of the portrait through ascii text, a distopian data exchange platform and an interactive artists manifesto.

For more information “look” at the site on July 13 (5pm) http://turbulence.org/works/lookart/

Laser Painting: Jupiter

I have had the source materials for this one for 6-8 months now since Jupiter was big and bright in the sky.  This is my first laser painting at San José TechShop as well, and I am quite happy with it.  Soon to be posted to Etsy, this painting took about 8-10 passes with the laser.

I am finding that the photography and the in person aspect of the paintings has quite a different feel, I suppose that it will all come down to lighting in the way it is displayed.

look art preparing to launch

I have been working on a MUD curatorial now for over a year and it is finally scheduled to launch on July 16. This is quite exciting and quite a relief. I am still toiling over the curatorial statement, but have got three fine artists who will be presented when we launch.

This project will be the latest effort of Ars Virtua, a look back at the roots of MMO’s and what I hope will be a serious consideration of immersion. Anyhow, I have hired a terrific docent to provide some gallery sitting and am honing the instructions to make logins friendly from the web, via telnet/mud client, and over the phone system. My phone app is just a telnet app for my ancient iPod touch though and the web gateway is having problems with most browsers (but curiously works really well with safari on the iPod). This project has been one trial after another with technologies that fail and being bounced around on servers.

Thankfully CADRE has stepped in and will be hosting us for the two years we are committed to presenting it. I am not sure exactly what will happen to it afterward, I hope there is some way to archive the code in a way that it can be easily resurrected. This of course is the issue with legacy platforms. Thankfully our MUD, TinyMUX, is open source so I shall probably just bundle it up and make it a download.

The next steps are pretty straight forward, finish the website, host a party, staff the gallery. It has been far too long since AV has had an opening. I am even looking for some manner of opening night entertainment so people don’t actually have to look at the art.

I shall make a proper post as the site prepares to launch, I am happy to share credentials with people who are interested in testing the environment as well.

How do I publish a website?

I recently got this question: “I have never bought a domain name before and need help. What do I need in order to publish my website and what services should I pursue to accomplish this?”

I thought that since I seem to be answering this fairly often that I would make a blog post and just update it each time I got asked again, so here goes:

You will need two things to operate your own website, a domain name and a place to host that domain.  Prices for both of these vary widely but there are some things you can do to figure out how much it will cost. You can expect to spend $5-$10 for your domain name, and a like sum each year to renew it.  There are deals that let you buy multiple years, but you need to read the fine print.  I have bought domain names for $1.99 only to find that the renewal on them was an inordinately high amount.

The same is true for web hosting, you can find really cheap hosting that is just a couple of dollars a month. This is probably okay starting out, but as your site gets bigger (or as you add sites to your hosting plan), you may find you need better service. Do not believe the claims of “unlimited” on anything, if you start to push the upper end of what the host considers normal you will find out just what they mean by unlimited.  If you are storing huge files, they will point out that this is not what the service is for, and if you are transferring lots of data or have a popular website, you will be told that your site is impacting the other sites on your server. Expect to pay $60 per year or more for your site.

For the low price you will be paying, you will have to share server space, bandwidth and processing with other sites. There are tools for finding out what else is hosted on your site, http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/ is just one I found with a quick google search. My personal website’s server has a thousand other sites being hosted on it. Some of these sites are, um “adult content” which may contribute to traffic slowness. Also in the news recently there have been stories of servers being confiscated because one of the sites has illegal content.

How do you buy a domain/ find a host? If you haven’t already bought your domain then you can sometimes find a good deal with hosting, but make certain you check the cost of renewing, and that it is not out of line with the going rate. You can find a list of possible hosts by googling “best website hosting 2011″ or somesuch, it is useful to actually check the reputable nerd sites like engadget or even cnet. Don’t stop at the first one and be prepared to educate yourself.

bluehost, hostgator, 1and1 all seem to be reputable and have reasonable plans.  I have hosted my sites with Godaddy for years now, but cannot recommend them because I don’t want to put more money in the pocket of the owner so he can vacation and kill more “big game.”

A few notes, unless you know you are running something specific, you probably want linux hosting as it is really the standard at the moment. You probably also want the cheapest possible plan as your first website will undoubtedly not tax the hosts servers. I do recommend that you host video on YouTube or other services, and embed your links as you will get much better performance and not have to worry about data caps. Make sure you keep a copy of your master video though as a backup.

That should be enough to get started.  Feel free to comment if you have other questions, or offer suggestions.

My colleague The Devil (XV)

Too many coincidences with the devil today, listening to “Satan is real” and I found that one of my colleagues is known affectionately as “The Devil.” I guess I actually work in hell : )

Put forward the new curriculum to the committee today with very positive reaction, but little movement.  Looks like I need to create a new course for our game design class, yikes. Only two weeks to do this too.

Video is totally kicking my ass, and only because I am not working smart.

curatorial curatorial again must work smarter and write more

these days should be good but I am letting stress get to me…

I got a bunch of good students this semester too, gonna have a real talk with them tomorrow.

 

Cribbed from THATCamp

this is a repost from: http://www.thatcampbayarea.org/2010/10/10/games-art-and-story-telling/

 

I have been looking at the intersection of games, MMO’s, virtual environments and art for a few years now.  It would be interesting to have a conversation about the future of the form as desktop game development continues to take hold and under-represented populations see it as a viable form of storytelling.

It would also be interesting to play some games from the show http://learn.toplay.us (games as art)

—update with notes—

Notes from Memory:

If you have not played it yet, look at passage by Jason Rohrer (download and play), it takes no more than 5 minutes and expresses the idea of an aesthetic experience in the game play, it is not the same as reading about it, watching video of it or watching it being played.

If you liked the game I demo’ed during the Dork Shorts it is called Every Day the Same Dream by Molleindustria.   On top of being beautiful the process of playing teaches and facilitates the aesthetic experience.

Game Development tools are cheap and run on low end machines for examples see Scratch by MIT (which is also a visual programming language but lends itself very well to moving and interacting with sprites on the screen) and Game Maker which is now available for the Mac and the PC and provides a simple development environment that can be introduced to young audiences as well as non-programming audiences.

In curating the show Learn to Play there were several basic lessons regarding art and games.  The subject is still somewhat contentious among both groups (artists and game developers) and there has always been a degree of crossover. L2P specifically looked for art at the point of interaction, one of the side effects of this is similar to that of conceptual art in that the experience is not always visual or obvious.  Game Developers seem (like many creatives) to want to see much of what they do as culturally relevant and artistic, artists have long employed game like features in both interactive and other work.  Our greatest takeaway was that the fundamental stories in games are still essentially controlled by the hegemony, or in this case by the white male game developers.

This is unfortunate for two reasons, the first is that the tools are so simple and the skills used in creation of games so valuable that essentially everyone should practice them at some point (and in fact my art students will all be required to make video games this semester). The second is that this is such a powerful medium for expression of stories and transmission of understanding.  The industry feels like it is gridlocked and stuck in blockbuster mode where it cannot deviate from the stories that have been told. This is sad and unnecessary.

Moving forward we want to reach out to underrepresented communities and teach the tools that will encourage them to put forth their stories.

 

 

Installing Learn to Play

The lovely and talented JP Bruneau installs games on donated computers for Learn to Play

The struggle is to give the space a feeling that is inviting for people to play the games in, but to accommodate all of the games as well.

Playability is key here, and we have our layout for the preview, note the cool classic videogame accents by graffiti artist Rigo.

this weekends workshops

Okay, if you haven’t been to the Out of the Garage workshops get your butt down there, this is the most amazing maker community of artists I have ever seen.

Just watching the evolution of these artworks is fantastic and the workshops have all kicked ass:

build paper viruses and have them loaded into the trojan horse for the San Jose Museum of Art!!  Scott and Victoria took the horse from Second Life to Sketchup to Real Life(tm)!

http://01sj.org/2010/attend/workshops/virus-paper-sculpture-assembly-workshop/

become a flight attendant, well train to use the zipline and get free rides:

http://01sj.org/2010/attend/workshops/imaginary-airforce-flight-attendant-training/

build a fucking barn based on what the internet says (starts at 11am):

http://01sj.org/2010/attend/workshops/all-raise-this-barn-west-performance/

make a hoodie for zombie tag, this one ain’t free, but includes an arduino lillypad and an LED hoodie!

http://01sj.org/2010/attend/workshops/project-hoodieplay-workshop/

So jump on board, it is not too late to soak in this amazing scene.

Out of the Garage

On the first public day of Out of the Garage which also happened to be a Sunday, I attended an Open Solar workshop by http://opensolarcircuits.cc/ as part of #01SJ. Here is a link, there are like 8 more days of it http://01sj.org/2010/artworks/opensolarcircuits/.

Cut and sanded the boards (thank you TechShop), scrubbed them. Printed the traces and mixed the acid.  Laminated the traces and dissolved the paper before dropping the boards into an acid bath.  The “white paper??” actually preserves the traces better than without, but is optional. Drilled holes after the acid bath and we have PCBs.

Using open source designs or worked out designs, I can see this being a really easy way in to electronics. Of course if the hardware is common it will likely be cheaper to just buy the boards (or the finished product : ) but that defeats the porpoise.

The materials used for this have ecology and kitchen science in mind as well and can be bought locally, well except maybe for the board materials.

As far as empowering students and teaching electronics, I think this is pretty astonishing.  I never thought I could make my own PCB and here I did it in a few hours.

Open Source, Spanish language, DIY, physical electronics, with green materials run by women.  YIKES this is unstoppable.

I am asked for a complete list of materials, I think this can be integrated into the curriculum along the lines of basic physical computing.  I shall post it as soon as I get it.