Arranged Delirium

As our games course wraps up, I enjoyed this timely article at the Chronicle: 5 Teaching Tips —From Video Games. I’ve really come to appreciate how playing games can really teach problem-solving skills in ways that are inherently motivational for students. It reminded me of the early days of multimedia development when we could get students to pay attention to content merely because it was interesting to them. Then, that got me thinking about my own teaching and what elements are effective and which are less so…

For those of you who don’t know about it, World of Warcraft is an online MMORPG (massively multi-player online role-playing game). The game just celebrated its 5-year anniversary and boasts in excess of 11 million players. But in terms of recognizing it as a source of entertainment or a cultural influence - well, that requires understanding it a bit better.

This short Business Management article lays out some interesting statistics that could help us place it into context.

The Guardian article linked here provides a little more detail and description of the game and generates some interesting questions (which we’ll discuss in class). But specifically his argument regarding what exactly the game is, proves interesting.

Finally, there’s a piece in Prospect that discusses the game, and why World of Warcraft matters...

My colleague AMH and I are team-teaching a computer games course this term which is great fun. For implementation, we’re using a tool called GameMaker and students are generating a number of interesting games so far. (BTW, the online tutorials are very good.) I’ve also come across GameSalad which is a great tool for making games for the iPhone platform.

We’ve also had a number of good discussions regarding game design, trends in the field, and the social impact of computer gaming. Next week, we’ll be talking about ethical issues and MMORPGs and some of the cultural issues.I’d been slow to recognize the value of academic inquiry into the area of computer gaming, and now I see what a mis-step that’s been. In many ways, I think it would be dangerous for us NOT to think carefully about this, given how prevalent it is in our society. It would be analogous to not thinking carefully about the cultural implications of television!

Our political projects continue in ITL 361. And, I have to give considerable praise to the students this term, who have done a marvelous job in discussing some truly challenging content without getting rude or obstinate. This comes while discussing topics such as: underage drinking, the genocide in Darfur, abortion (both pro-choice and pro-life), digital copyrights, among others. Well done!

I’m constantly harping on students to take personal responsibility for their data. When you’re working with central, networked, systems it’s just easy to get lazy:

“I’m not worried about my files - Someonesomewhere is backing them up.”

This never works out well. In any event, I’ve always encouraged students to use USB flash drives and just carry around their data so they’ll have access to it on any machine. They just need to remember to make their own backups at home : )

But in the last few years, several online storage services have popped up and are now reliable enough to recommend. Essentially these are services which store a limited amount of your data for free, and a significant amount if you are willing to fork out the cash. But for students - ever on a limited budget - the amount of free storage available is actually rather compelling. Thus if you can’t afford a flash drive, you can still have a free way to access your files. You must remember though that you have to have access to the internet to get to them - that’s another reason why the flash drive is still preferable.

Anyway, there are two primary models for these services: either you log into a web site and transfer files, or you download software to your machine and it attends to synching files for you. Services like Dropbox and Synchplicity take the route of installing software and handling the synch for you. I think both of these services work well. Of course, organization schemes vary, so you’d probably want to try these services out for yourself, but here is a mac-centric review of Dropbox which would probably be my choice. I’m sure you can find numerous reviews of Sychplicity as well. SugarSync is another similar tool if you’re really getting into comparisons. Comparing the features might lead you to the tool that works best for you and SugarSync’s web site has a convenient table...

But if you are working in a shared lab environment like my students, you’re not going to be able to install software. That’s what makes Box.net a nice alternative - with no software to install, it works via web browser. In fact, this is why I prefer it over the other services - I want to access my files anywhere, at any time. There’s a review of Box.net here, if you are looking for more information; and there is an iPhone app for added convenience.

All of this was just a long-winded way of saying: if you don’t want to buy a flash drive for my course, you can use a Box.net account instead. The free one give you 1 gig of storage. Just try it out before you need it - you don’t want to find out the night before the project is due that it’s not working.

...I guess that last paragraph alone could have made this a much shorter blog post. Oh well, studies indicate that you didn’t read it anyhow.