SXSW 2009 Thoughts
As is my usual yearly tradition, here are a few collected thoughts inspired by the scheduled aspects of SXSW 2009. I hope you enjoy them!
From Educating Kids Through Gaming
Although this “Core Conversation” was a bit rambling and confrontational at times, there were common threads in the anecdotal examples which the participants discussed. The easiest way to inject an educational experience into a game is to cause the player to actively reflect on their time, through writing or discussion. With regards to games, it seemed like the most interesting approach to causing learning through games was to have a teacher guide their students through reflective thinking and writing about their experience. I remember book reports being rather useless and often cheated on by extreme use of Cliff Notes. Why not start having Game Reports instead? Many modern games do carry a good narrative, and there’s arguably much more incentive to experience the game world firsthand. It could create a good habit of reflection and critical thinking over a medium that the current generation is more likely to actively expose themselves to instead of books.
Also, it seemed that entertaining formats are natural incentives towards developing the basic skills that are needed to access them – skills which many children do not yet have. Arithmetic games need basic arithmetic knowledge. Adventure games typically need reading skills. Would it be so bad to provide “pure” adventure games to illiterate kids to encourage them to read?
In either case, I think the way forward will be for teachers to develop skills as shepherds that assist in causing learners to actively seek out value from their experiences. There are certainly risks associated with blindly tossing kids games to play, but with a guide present, children can be encouraged to make the most of their experiences, regardless of whether they are pure entertainment or traditional “edutainment.”
From What Can We Learn From Games
In this panel, I especially enjoyed the dialog between a questioner, Warren Spector, and Henry Jenkins near the end of their talk. The questioner wanted to know how to save the world through games, and WS and HJ had some unexpectedly blunt responses. Warren Spector responded that people should give up the idea that they are somehow going to change the world through content creation. He believed that the best thing you could do would be to give someone a world complex enough that they start developing system-level thinking. Henry Jenkins said that we should not expect games to produce social activists any more than we can point to games as the origin of psycho killers. It was a nice dose of reality just when I needed it.
From Journey to the Center of Design
Now available to view via Youtube! [Part 1, Part 2]
Jared Spool’s talk was one of the most entertaining this year, and it was also one of the most iconoclastic and thought-provoking. So much good stuff to talk about in this one, but i’ll try to keep it to two paragraphs.
He’s been doing research on the things that companies and groups do that produce great products, and he ended up splitting the “things that companies and groups do” into five groups – namely, tricks, techniques, process, methodology, and dogma, with each one reflecting more and more unwavering belief in formality, until you end up with a quasi-religious viewpoint. Surprisingly, the groups that did the best relied almost solely on tricks and techniques, with little tolerance for the rest. This fits with my experience, and to me, feels pretty validating, so I can’t be counted upon to provide much criticism for this finding.
He took this schema and then proceeded to knock on the door of User-Centered Design dogma, telling us that there’s never been any actual research proving that these practices actually work. Instead, Spool gave us some real-world practices that he’s found do actually work in providing a good user experience. Now, keep in mind that although these don’t seem like design activities, if they have an impact on the end result, then we should be aware of them. The first was having a shared group vision. Every team member should be able to independently describe what the user experience will be like in five years.The second was a feedback loop. Jared’s pH test for the presence of a feedback loop was this question: In the last six weeks, have you spent at least two hours watching someone use yours or a competitor’s design? The third was a good culture. The question for this was interesting, too: In the last 6 weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure? Jared’s talk was all about converting from blind faith in a design dogma to a results-based set of techniques with which to inform design.
From other stuff…
I enjoyed several other panels, and took some limited notes, but these were the main themes that I felt ran through my experience. The discipline and practice of working on the web is advancing, and although it is still young, the worlds of business and learning are cautiously reaching out to learn lessons from the work that people are creating on the web. We’re an industry that is growing more quickly than other industries of the past, less formalized and more communal in nature, but still an industry that is exploring what its practical reach and applications are. The developers and builders that go first are trying many things, making mistakes, and learning, and as a whole, we all benefit from that. It’s a promising time to be working on the web, and SXSW has again proven to be a useful reflection for the web community to glance at.
