I think we need to relook the way we talk about education.  Most design companies will have two teams that work closely in sync to produce great products.  They are called design and development.  Designers are the dreamers who try to push the envelope.  Developers try to make that dream a reality.

Designers and developers are great when they work in sync with one another.  Developers help designers not make every new thing incredibly intricate, subtle, and self-referencing.  Designers help push developers out of their comfort zone and into spaces that aren’t just purely utilitarian.

Having these defined roles is often incredibly helpful, because it helps both groups play off of one another when they are in sync…

Education seems like it should be this way.  Those roles are almost naturally built into the system.  Students should be the designers, the ones who …

Whenever teachers read student work, there’s a barrier to entry for the student.  The student is expected to put in an appearance of work in order for the teacher to consider it worthwhile.

It must fit certain certain constraints and expectations of the assignment.  But why does the same barrier not exist for teachers?

I think most teachers would argue that the barrier does exist to some extent.  Teachers must work to capture the minds and imaginations of  the students.

However, students aren’t taught to be discerning about their education.  Being discerning would imply teaching students how to think about their education in a way that would lead to their own empowerment.

What would happen if students were given this power?  Would they reject the system entirely?

Dan Ariely came and talked today about behavioral psychology and what it can tell us about humans’ relationship with morality.

For what it’s worth I’m a big fan of his and I think the work he is doing is both incredibly deep but he really makes an effort to explain it in plain terms, something I think all academics should look at.

But the one thing that really stood out to me about his talk was how everything came back to an experiment.  Any time there was a problem or an idea that he couldn’t quite figure out, he tried to find a way to create an experiment to map it out and understand it.

I think there’s really about 3 types of worldviews on this matter, and all humans take part in some form of all three at some time or another. …

Are you practicing to win?

We all talk about how much we work, how much we prepare, all of the trials we deal with, but all of those things are meaningless without context.

What does winning mean to you?

Are you going to know it when you get there?

If you don’t have an answer to these questions, why are you doing what you’re doing?

A lot more time is wasted on simply doing things to do things than is wasted on facebook, google, youtube, reddit, hulu, etc.  If you’re on one of those websites it’s probably because there’s some disconnect between what you’re doing and what winning means to you.

Two finals points:

1. Winning is not success, happiness, or wealth by definition.  It can be any number of things.

2. One win is never good enough.  It’s the next win that really counts.

Tertiary Motion: Chrysanthemum by Dan McAlister from Carleton CAMS on Vimeo.

Reading Tom Gitlin’s excellent article on “The Necessity of Public Intellectuals” gave me some food for thought about how intellectuals can re-enter broader societal discourses.

What I am trying to argue here is that intellectual game designers (like Eric Zimmerman, Jane McGonigal, Celia Pearce, Mary Flanagan, Ian Bogost, and Frank Lantz (of the ones I know)) have the potential to broach the topic from a very different perspective than many other intellectuals can.

Because they are game designers they would have extra “street cred” for lack of a better word because they create objects that real people have fun with, not that have artistic merit without basis of interest.

Because they are designers (and of games at that) they have to have knowledge of both scientific and mathematical methodologies as well as of the importance of the humanities.  They would offer the important …

One of the things I’m really interested in (especially as it relates to game design) is the way that liberal arts is a game like structure.  Currently, one of my biggest issues with the liberal arts is the major structure that’s in place.

I think that the reality of the major structure is a challenge to the method that disciplines can interact with each other.  Part of the problem stems from the departmental structure, but I don’t think getting rid of departments would be worth it short term.

At the same time, one of the strengths of the major and departmental structure is the reality is they do teach methodologies which are important.  These methodologies are one of the primary reasons a liberal arts college is so important.  By defining a methodology we can import other skill sets and apply them in …

Odd Post I know.

Even odder that I should be writing it at 12:03 in the morning when I’m supposed to be getting rest.  But… I was reading Raph Koster’s amazing Project Horseshoe talk from 2006.  http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/10/project-horseshoe-influences/

And then he said this…

History is a spreadsheet. It’s represented by pretty icons, but it’s a spreadsheet.

…

Oh boy.

But then he keeps going.  And it’s great…

And I guess the question is, I look at the game about cooking and I go, why stop there? I mean, there’s an easy step to the game about winemaking. And I can see you right now, let’s make a game about winemaking and in your heads you immediately start thinking, dry season versus wet season, acidity of the soil, there’s all kinds of things like that. SO let’s go a step further, how about the game about wine tasting.

…

As per …

I know I haven’t posted for a while.

If you want to see recent writing that I’ve done go check at my article in The Carletonian.

http://apps.carleton.edu/carletonian/?story_id=773959&issue_id=773765&section_id=490469

Also, in other news.  I think Stanford’s D. School, while not directly applicable to games, has a lot to do with education and design thinking that is really interesting and could change alot.  I’ve included a link below because I think there’s a wealth of information available that’s just awesome.

http://dschool.stanford.edu/

While pondering my Modern Architecture course I found something I thought was slightly amusing and slightly weird. We have to accredit architects with a system of tests and rules to keep people safe. That quickly combined with the idea that game designers have an incredible amount of similarity to architects and one thing led to another and I began pondering the idea of having accredited game designers.

Why do we have accredited architects?

For one thing, most obviously, safety. Architects build buildings and we want to make sure those structures which could be incredibly dangerous are incredibly safe, even in the toughest conditions. But we also do it for aesthetic reasons. Architects don’t go to school just to learn adequate building techniques but also to understand theory like landscape integration, how to build spaces that match the desired …