GLS 0.5 2009
The Institute of Play is at Games + Learning + Society 2009 conference. It has been a great experience. Some informative sessions, interesting Frag and Chat, fun workshops playtesting and of course the food. Yum!
Thursday was a double win with an opening Keynote by Jim Gee of author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. His speech covered an interesting case study of a woman who used the SIMs game to simulate the “feeling” of being an unskilled worker while retaining the engagement. Successfully marrying intention with fun is always a challenge for serious games.
The end of the day was with Julian Dibbell talk on politics of play. The case study being the loose internet swam Anonymous and the Church of Scientology. Learned about the consequences of hacking an epilepsy site to the persistence LOL Cats.
Big Tangrams Play Test
If you love Big Puzzles you are in luck. We are running our Big Tangram game during the weekend of June 12-14. We are fortunate to be participating in both the Come Out and Play Festival and the Figment Festival.
The Figment Festival is on Governor’s Island. We will be there Friday and Sunday (June 12 &14). At Figment it will be the casual version of the tangrams. You compete against your friends or just see how many you can solve. It is a fun time and kid friendly.
Day in the Park is our theme game that we are running at the Come Out and Play Festival on Saturday (June 13th) at noon. We will have a 4 teams of max of six players. You will not only compete in solving the puzzles but also there are missions to complete to earn the next puzzle. Each member of the winning team will get a tote bag for their day at the park. Everyone is invited in a post celebration picnic.
Come out and join the fun!
See full flickr set of playtest.
Game Designers:
Doris Cacoilo, Mary Jeys, Pollie Barden, Giana González
Twitter Love at Grassroots Media Conference
We were fortunate to be invited to participate in the 2009 NYC Grassroots Media Conference on May 30th. Doris, Ingrid and I co-presented on using Twitter for community outreach and activitism.
The session was just an informative for us as for our audience. We got a great conversation going. We actually ran over time because there was so much lively dialogue.
Angus Johnston of studentactivism.net was in our session. He was a great resource and brought a lot to the table.
The Doris and I are working with Ingrid Dahl, editor of the Youth Media Reporter, on a practical implementation of Twitter for outreach and activitism. Established activist communities are typically slow to adopt and take advantage of new technology. Often this is due to lack of awareness, staff, and simply their audience is not using the platforms or outlets of the technology. We are working on ways to lower these barriers and allow organization to take advantage of digital tools in a meaningful and effective way.
Resources from our presentation can be found here:
Presenters:
Pollie Barden and Doris Cacoilo - _gaiastudio.org
Ingrid Dahl - Youth Media Reporter
Jersey City Mayor Elections Tuesday
JC Mayorial Elections are this Tuesday. Saturday there was the broadcast “short” bus going around town. Today I see this in the resturant window.
Really there are using " Vote for Progress
Are they taking all their campaign strategies from Back to the Future? This is so sad. Still don’t know who I will vote for on Tuesday.