Play Make Write Think

Author: David

Week ahead: 5

David's Posts
5 2/11 “Introduction” and “Games” from Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson
2/13 Superbetter, chapters 1 & 2
2/16 Side Quest 5: Sunday Sketches

Podcast episodes 1 & 2

On Tuesday, we’ll discuss Steven Johnson’s Sleeper Curve and his argument about games. These sentences from the introduction particularly resonate with the sort of arguments I’d like you to think about constructing for your podcast episodes:

The approach followed in this book is more systemic than symbolic, more about causal relationships than metaphors. It is closer, in a sense, to physics than to poetry. My argument for the existence of the Sleeper Curve comes out of an assumption that the landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms. The specific ways in which those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume. The work of the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces, not decode them (9).

How does Johnson “diagram forces” in these pages, rather than “decode” them?

I’ll also bring in some board games for us to look at in conjunction with Johnson’s article. I’m going to ask you to play one of these games from the SDL game lending library within the next couple (I added the library to our texts and services page, with information about check out).

On Thursday, we will probably continue our discussion of Johnson some and also discuss Superbetter.

Podcast Organizing

David's Posts

If you know you want to be in a specific group with someone else in the class, add your names to the group list in the podcast planning document. Anyone who hasn’t signed up for a specific group will be randomly sorted into groups on Thursday.

The first two episodes are due in just over a week, so two groups need to sign up for the first episodes in that planning document too and we should schedule a time to meet this week. Because it is especially difficult to be the first to publish episodes, I will grade the first two with extra leniency — in case that encourages you to take the plunge and claim one of the first two spots.

 

Week Ahead: 4

David's Posts
4 2/4 Gone Home: A Story Exploration Game
2/6 Ian Bogost “Media Microecology” and “Empathy” from How to Do Things with Videogames
2/10 Side Quest 4: Combophoto

On Tuesday, we’ll spend the bulk of the class discussing Gone Home, which you have been playing this week and liveblogging as you go. We’ll probably spend some time discussing whether Gone Home is a game or a story and whether it’s a game or a puzzle. Officially, Gone Home is classified in the genre “walking simulator,” so we’ll probably spend a bit of time thinking about what that genre entails. It would be helpful if you ask yourself before class what is the game’s purpose and audience too. We’ll also continue, hopefully wrap up, naming the podcast and establishing the other baseline rules we’ll need.

On Thursday, we’ll discuss two chapters from Ian Bogost‘s How to Do Things with Videogames. Bogost is a professor of game design on the other side of town, at Georgia Tech and also publishes very smart essays frequently in The Atlantic magazine. (We’ll most likely read a few of these essays later in the semester.)

Follow up from Thursday

Rules

In class on Thursday, we decided on some rules for the podcast:

  • Episodes will be 10-15 minutes in length
  • Each episode will focus on one game, though it’s acceptable to mention another game in order to make a comparison (perhaps another game mentioned in an earlier podcast episode)
  • Each episode will analyze the rhetorical situation of the game under consideration.
  • Each episode will use concepts and terms from the essays by Jane McGonigal, Mary Flanagan, Ian Bogost, and others that we’ve read and discussed this semester. I’ve started a Google doc in our shared folder where we can crowdsource a list of definitions and terms to explore this semester.

Any other rules we need to add?

Title

We made a list of title suggestions and then narrowed that list down to 7. Vote below from among the finalists for your favorites by checking boxes below, or add a comment on this post and suggest another title if one has occured to you since Thursday. You can pick more than one, but don’t pick more than 3.

Podcast Title
Vote for your favorite titles

Side Quest 8: A Human Document

Side Quests

Due: 3/22

Tag: sq8

For your eighth Side Quest, you're going to play a collaborative writing game in which you collaborate with a published novelist to write a poem.

The British artist Tom Phillips is probably best known for a project that he began in 1966 and which he has continued ever since–he set himself the challenge to buy the first book he could find at a secondhand bookstore for threepence and to alter every page using drawing, painting, collage, and cut-up techniques to create an entirely new version.

He found W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document and combined the words in the title to create A Humument. Phillips not only created new art works from each of the 367 pages but has now completed five different editions of this altered book.

You can view pretty much the complete series of pages on Tom Phillips site here. You can choose pages, view the original and then view different versions of that page.

For this week’s assignment, I want you to create your own visual poem-thing. You can find your own page to alter if you’d like, but I’ll bring in an old used book that you can take pages from too. Think of it as sort of a collaboration between yourself and the book’s original author or think of it as a game where you get to create new text but within the strict confines of the text available on the page.

Obviously, Tom Phillips has been doing this for almost 50 years and I’m not expecting you to produce work that is as polished or complex as his – nor that is necessarily as visually compelling. And it will probably feel very strange to you as you begin, but just let yourself be playful and experiment with your task. You do not need to be a professional artist to make these pages, but you probably do need to be able to relax your desire to be in control of what you produce and you probably need to turn off the self-critical voice that will tell you that you’re doing it wrong.

Alter your page using whatever methods or tools you prefer, then scan the page in color at a high resolution as a JPG or PNG file and load it to your site. You might or might not include in your post the text of your altered page.

Side Quest 5: Sunday Sketches

Side Quests

Due: 2/17

Tag: sq5

This week let's play a game with drawing! Sort of like last week, when you combined two different photos in order to make a new thing, this week you'll combine an actual physical object with something you draw on a sheet of paper -- it's a game that invites you to see the objects in the world around you in a new, more creative manner.

Christoph Niemann is an illustrator, artist, and author whose work regularly appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. He’s got a mixed media series that he calls “Sunday Sketches,” in which he takes some object from his surroundings and creates a sketch on the page around it. Some of the best such works he’s included in his book entitled Sunday Sketching.

Some examples from Niemann’s Tumblr:

headphone gorilla

paperclip beach chair

cat book

ear bud pipe

avocado mitt

toilet paper tank

You can see that each of these pieces is an actual three-dimensional tangible object placed into a drawing on paper to transform that object into something new. Niemann then photographs the resulting sketch to create a two-dimensional artifact.

For your fifth side quest assignment, I want you to create your own Sunday sketch in a similar style.

  • Take a picture of your sketch and publish it as a post.
  • Give your post a funny or witty title.
  • Write a paragraph or two in which you explain the process whereby you came up with the idea for your Sunday sketch and the choices you made in realizing that idea as an actual sketch.
  • Include a link back to this prompt and tag it “sq5”

Side Quest 4: Combophoto

Side Quests

Due: 2/10

Tag: sq4

Let's play a game with photo editing this week! For this week, you'll make a combophoto, which combines two different photos to create a new image.

Stephen Mcmennamy is an Atlanta artist and Creative Director at the advertising firm BBDO. He first came to my attention when I saw his series of “combophotos” that splice together two different images to form a surreal new creation.

Here are a few examples from him:

cauliflower + poodle

paintbrush + spaghetti

bridge + guitar

Take a few moments to look through the images he’s posted on his site linked above or on his Tumblr or his Instagram. Then create your own square combophoto and publish it to your site. You can take your own photos, but probably you’ll want to use CC_licensed images you find on Flickr — make sure you give credit to the originals that you modify to create your combophoto.

The level of technical aptitude for this assignment is actually relatively small, just simple cropping and resizing. The greater part of the challenge is thinking creatively and finding images that you can work with. That said, note that Mcmennamy comes up with ideas and then specifically stages photos to combine, and he seems to often spend significant amounts of time shooting and selecting his images. You won’t have lots of time, models you can hire, or expensive photo equipment to work with, so I don’t necessarily expect your final images to be as polished and perfectly aligned as his are. More important is for you to be playful and come up with images that combine to create something funny or witty or striking.

To edit the two photos together, you can use whatever photo editing software you’d like. Pixlr is a good free web app, as is PicMonkey. Adobe Photoshop is also available for you to use on the computers in the Media Library on the 4th floor of the Woodruff Library.

Once you have your image, publish it in a post on your class site. Don't forget to give it a funny or witty title! Tag your post "sq4"

Write a paragraph about how you went about choosing the two images you combined and why. What challenges did you face as you created your combophoto? What do you think your final image conveys?

Games Podcast: Further Details

Quests

Overview

This post contains lots of additional information that will be useful to you as you work on your podcast episodes, mostly focused on nuts and bolts issues like equipment, editing, and so on.

Check out the assignment prompt for conceptual guidelines and roles and for information about what I am expecting from you.

Equipment

The Writing Program has purchased 4 Yeti microphones and placed them on reserve with the Music and Media Library. If you check out one of the Yeti mics, you might want to skim over the manual here.

There are a number of other microphones available for checkout as well, so if the Yeti mics are not available check out something else.

Audacity

Audacity is a good, free, open-source audio editor (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). It’s pretty standard software for mixing podcasts, so I recommend you give it a shot.

There is a very good tutorial wiki for Audacity online — this basic page on mixing voice narration with music probably covers 90% of what you’ll need to do for your podcast. It’s not terribly difficult, but there is a learning curve to it and you should definitely make an extra copy of your raw audio files before you start mixing and editing them. Expect for it to take longer than you think it should to do the sound editing and build time for mixing into your plans. There are some students in the class who have a fair amount of experience working with Audacity — make friends with them and ask them for help (make sure to give thanks for their help in your episode credits!).

Exporting as an MP3: Note that probably the most complicated part of using Audacity will be configuring the MP3 encoder. Because of copyright laws, Audacity does not come with a native MP3 encoder so you can’t export as MP3 straight out of the box. You’ll need to download and configure an extra plugin to do so.

Other Software

If you’re already very comfortable with using GarageBand or another sound editing software, you can use that instead.

Student Digital Life also has lots of resources that should be of use to you with this project. If you want to use more advanced software, the Media Lab has the full Adobe Creative Suite, including Adobe Audition, available and student assistants who can help you in using it. The Tech Lab is also a great space for you to go to get ideas about how to approach these projects. There are also gaming consoles available in Cox Computing, so if you want to explore games as new media you might stop by SDL and see what you can do.

Recording & mixing guidelines

As I say above, Audacity has a very good tutorial wiki. There is tons of information included there, but this single basic page on mixing voice narration with music probably covers 90% of what you’ll need to do for your podcast.

Transom is “a performance space, an open editorial session, an audition stage, a library, and a hangout” that seeks to spread good ideas and practices for public media, especially focused on audio. There’s lots of good stuff there and I encourage you to check them out.

Of special note: “Using Music: Jonathan Menjivar For This American Life.” Menjivar is a producer and music supervisor at This American Life and his essay is a fantastic breakdown of different methods for incorporating music into a podcast episode.

See also, the other pieces in the Transom “Using Music” series.

Podcast hoster Buzzsprout has a pretty good “Podcasting 101 Guide” with some useful tips, including about where to position yourself with regard to the microphone.

Music

You need to be careful when using music to not violate copyright law. Here are 2 really good sites to find Creative Commons licensed music that you are allowed to use:

Free Music Archive. Mostly more contemporary music types, searchable by genre or by other methods.

Musopen. Public domain and creative commons licensed classical music.

Week ahead: 3

David's Posts
3 1/28 “Introduction to Critical Play” from Critical play: Radical Game Design by Mary Flanagan
1/30 Podcast brainstorming and planning
2/3 Side Quest 3: Liveblogging Gone Home

In class on Tuesday, we’ll discuss Mary Flanagan ‘s introductory essay and compare it to the essays we discussed last week by Jane McGonigal. The goal will be to come out of that discussion with a definition and a list of some key ideas that we are interested in exploring over the course of the rest of the semester with regard to games.

Before class on Thursday, I’ll put up a Google doc in a folder that I will share with each of you, with examples of podcast bumpers from previous semesters and some links to potential music for our bumpers. I will also share some sample cover images. We’ll spend the class period making key decisions about what our podcast series will sound like.

In class the next week, on 2/4, you’ll need to have played through Gone Home by the time we meet so we can discuss it together. Your side quest this week will entail liveblogging your game play.

Side Quest 3: Liveblogging Gone Home

Side Quests

Due: 2/3

Tag: sq3

As you play through Gone Home for class on Tuesday, I want you to liveblog your experience playing. Liveblogging is an informal  sort of freewriting — while you are in the midst of playing the game, just notice whatever seems interesting to you and pause periodically to note those observations in your blog post.

The game begins on the front porch, with a brief puzzle to get in the front door, and  sets up a little background for the main character and serves as a simple tutorial for basic game mechanics, so launch the game and play through that opening section, then pause the game and open your dashboard. Write a new blog post which starts by announcing that you’re beginning to play through the game and links back to this post (not just the course site, but this specific post). Tag your post with “sq3,” “gone home” and “liveblog” plus whatever other tags you’d like. (You can add tags in the post editor page, in the section labeled Tags, which should be in the sidebar just beneath categories and just above the featured image area.)

Write a paragraph (or a few sentences) responding to that opening sequence. Again, whatever is interesting to you about it — visual and audio style; emotional reactions; how the game establishes setting, time, and character. Perhaps especially think about how the game establishes character given that there is only one person present in the narrative and it’s the first person narrator — without dialog and other traditional methods of defining character, how do the game designers go about doing so? You might make predictions or note expectations for where this game will head.

Publish the post. Once you’ve published your post, you might check out the other students’ posts and see how they responded to the opening sequence — please leave comments on their liveblog posts responding to observations they made!

When you’re ready, go back to the game and play on. When you find a scene that seems particularly cool or beautiful or interesting, take a screenshot and/or write up a brief note about it on your liveblogging post — either leave a comment on your own post or edit the post and add a timestamp plus a few lines of commentary on the end of your post.

Check in periodically with your peers’ responses to the game and pay attention to whether you have similar or different reactions. Leave comments on your peers’ posts too, responding to their observations.

css.php