What makes Osy special, for me, is that it is my stab at thinking about making games… that just happen to contain concepts that educators are interested in teaching to students. I often say very deliberately that Osy is not “edutainment.” Put more academically, the procedural rhetoric of Osy is the story of osmosis. Too often, educational games ignore the procedural rhetoric and only thinly layer educational images/concepts on top of game mechanics that have nothing to do with the message they hope to deliver. In far too many cases it is actually worse, “gamelike” visuals are layered on top of quiz/test systems and it is referred to as a “game.” In part, this is because testing/quizzing is the primary procedural rhetoric (or game mechanic) of schools. I recall one day during the design of Osy where I said something to the effect, “If you put a quiz in my game, I’m done with it.” This is an approach, that I think is conscientious of the kinds of critiques that some are leveling at the Game-ification of Education.

I’ve also been somewhat worried about many people researching games and education becoming too focused on only the importation of off-the-shelf standard game industry games into the classroom. Isn’t that the equivalent of giving up the ghost? Why not create high quality games with education sitting in the back of your head? Clearly, game developers draw on scientific concepts for the systems within games (physics, evolution, …) though it comes secondary to the overall game. Why not have it as an equal on the field of idea-battles that occur during the development of a game? That I want a player to understand/feel/know X where X includes some scientific knowledge becomes part of the design process.

Go Osy go!

Crazy Backyard Mushroom

I’m not fully sure when it began to grow, but it has now been a staple curiosity of the backyard ecosystem for several weeks now and has even spawned several unsucessful artistic forays. Behold something straight out of my imagining of Lewis Carroll’s imaginings.

UGA Front Page Archive

“Most graduates go off to California or Seattle or wherever the industry is thriving. A lot of them would happily stay here if there was more of an industry to graduate into,” says Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost, researcher, critic, designer and author of the recently published Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. “We’re not going to be viewed as a serious player in the industry until we see some successful products released, with critical acclaim and all that stuff.”
…
“Georgia doesn’t need to create an industry. It needs to create a unique industry,” he says. “We should be looking at what a regional games industry would look like. Every state is looking for ways to capitalize on this new form of entertainment, but the opportunity we haven’t cashed in on is the specific voice of Atlanta or Georgia or the Southeast.

Ultimately, this is the thing right? How do we make something that represents GA? In my case, how can we make something that represents UGA, Athens, etc? All of this ultimately goes to what Jason Della Rocca was talking about when he talked about clusters. OK, now for the ego quote:

Casey O’Donnell, assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s Grady College, has first-hand experience with that setup. He was with Vicarious Visions, a successful game studio in upstate New York, when it was acquired by industry mega-corporation Activision.

“Vicarious Visions went from 75 employees to 150 in the time I was there,” says O’Donnell, who came to UGA last August to build a program that will include video games as a major focus. “But that one studio has now been responsible for parenting four or five other studios as talented people left to start their own companies, all of them making money.

“That’s what we need to foster, a community of small, independent studios. To me, more people making a living, as opposed to a few multi-billionaires dominating the industry, is the desirable scenario.”

More to come I suppose.

The text of the email:

First of all… Thank you to everyone who came for the inaugural Athens GGDA/IGDA chapter meeting. The event was quite a success. We had 14 people in attendance with a broad variety of interests and areas of expertise. The conversation that followed the introductory presentation was excellent and I think everyone came away excited about the event. Publicity around the event was kept to strictly the GGDA announcement and word of mouth. This created an excellent situation where many of our attendees were GGDA members and interested/committed to the local chapter. We’ll begin scaling the events up as our chapter activities increase.

A special thanks also goes to the folks at The Pub at Gameday who hosted our event free of charge and allowed us to make liberal use of their large HDTVs for presentation and subsequent Wii gameplay. Not to mention the exceptional beer selection that should draw future attendees event without the draw of game development talk.

Also thanks to the folks at Hi-Rez (Michal Adam and Stew Chisam in particular) for providing Global Agenda Alpha Testing Invitations which were distributed to several attendees.

The opening presentation centered largely around the role that the GGDA and the IGDA play in encouraging game development efforts and other larger industry issues. It also focused on how small independent game development communities can thrive given the right support structures like the GGDA and IGDA. Several examples which I have been a part of in the past were talked about.

Slides can be found here (To advance click on the little white border… Yes, super annoying…).

Based on this initial meeting, I have begun setting up an Athens GGDA website, list-serve, and GameJam Wiki. We have also been officially included in the Global Game Jam which will be January 30th from 5PM until February 1st at 5PM. The event will be held in the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia. Several subsequent GameJams will be arranged that draw on concepts developed on the Athens GGDA GameJam Wiki.

All in all is was an excellent beginning for a local chapter and I thank everyone who took the time to participate.

I’ll be in touch with everyone as I get our virtual coordination tools online.

Best.
Casey

The launch meeting of the GGDA Athens Chapter will focus on letting interested members of the Athens community know about these efforts and the role that the GGDA and IGDA plays in assisting the efforts of members. Dr. Casey O’Donnell of the University of Georgia and President of the Athens Chapter will be updating attendees of his and UGA’s gaming related efforts as well as discussing what he hopes will be a new pocket of game development and innovation. It is also an opportunity to gauge interest in participation in the Global Game Jam events on January 30th

I will post photos and event notes here after the meeting. The slides have been posted as a SWF file here.

Post-event details will be posted here…