IGDA Education SIG Spawns First Global Game Jam

42 Sites In 15 Different Countries Already Signed On And The List Is Growing

Toronto November 4, 2008 – From 5:00pm Friday January 30th through 5:00 pm Sunday, February 2 thousands of college students, faculty and industry members and the general public will join together for a round the clock video game building experience often referred to as a Game Jam. Participants will be given the details of the game design theme and the constraints and mechanics allowed when the clock hits 5:00 in their local time zone. As the time zones change, so will those constraints, to mitigate any advantage global location might give one team over the other.

Global Game Jam (GGJ) was the brainstorm of Susan Gold, faculty and international development manager for the Master’s of Digital Media Program in Vancouver and chair of the Education Special Interest Group of the International Game Developers Association.

“I wanted to find a project that explored the incredible creative collaborative nature of video games,” says Gold. "I thought a global experience would really show the strength of the game development community by having a project that crossed all cultural boundaries and everyone could participate simultaneously.”

Inexperienced in the ways of the game jams in general, Gold got in touch with the team that runs the successful annual Nordic Game Jam. "The Nordic Game Jam is proud to be a part of the Global Game Jam", says Gorm Lai, founding member of the Nordic Game Jam. "Game jams are all about coming together to develop creative new game ideas in an environment of cooperation. It is great to see that idea elevated to a global level, and into a tool that brings us all closer together."

The GGJ is being sponsored by Mekensleep Studios and Take 2 Interactive.

For more information on participating in the Global Game Jam, visit
http://www.globalgamejam.org

Photos from GDC

Here are some photos from the IGDA Education SIG Summit at GDC:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goldfile/

It was great seeing so many of you this year, save the date for next year March 23-27, 2009

New Curriculum Framework Posted

We have made available the new IGDA Curriculum Framework, version 3.2 beta! You can download it right here.

Welcome back to school....

This is a repost of my most recent listserv update:


A new semester is upon us and the SIG is busy, very busy…

But before I lose your attention with my extremely long note, we are looking for a database development person to help us put our internship program on the website. If you are interested, please contact Stephen Jacobs (sxjics@rit.edu).

Before I tell you about my and the SIG’s summer, what did you do with yours? I think it would be great if we hear about your summer games or projects... so if you feel it is appropriate, post and discuss on the list.

Summer 2007

Well for one, I moved from beautiful Tahoe to wonderful Eugene, OR. Yes, I have left the ivory tower and have gone to work in the game industry. I hope I am more than cultural anthropologist and become a real contributor. Thankfully what I am doing directly involves education, but in addition to my academic oriented work, they have already thrown me into a product group deciding what the next new technology the company develops. I sit in there with artist and programmers and engineers asking myself, how do I fit in? What I have found is that it is all about collaboration and working as a part of a team. It wouldn’t matter if I was a pastry chef, they would find a way to take that expertise and utilize it create something new. Everyone is equal on the team, each brining their own expertise and passion for games to the table. It is an amazing process and I can only stress that putting your students into team environments is going to be key for them succeeding in this industry. Do it early in your programs, because we should have had them doing this since the students started school at 5 years old. But since we only get to influence them at age 18, we have to break a lot of bad habits they have developed, (like doing everything on their own). Put them in teams and make them work together.

A lot of work regarding the curriculum framework has been accomplished over the sumemer. I want to thank Dr. Yusuf Pisan and Dr. Magy Seif El Nasr for their great work and continuing effort. We did get some great syllabi and we are analyzing what everyone has done with the framework over the past four years. It is really great to see so many educators using the framework as the instrument it was designed to be (which is a reference, not a bible).

Speaking of the framework, Tracy Fullerton, Magy Seif El Nasr and I presented at this years SIGGRAPH in San Diego. The name of the session: So you want to start a game program… we had 80 people attend (and for the last session on the last day, we felt that was a great attendance). We discussed the key points of the curriculum framework and emphasized the soft skills. I think our session was well received, there were a ton of questions, etc… everything from what type of math do students need to what game engine should we use? I know that there are a lot of people that need our help and experience in putting their new programs together, I hope many have joined the listserv.

I have asked to have a link to the SIGGRAPH slides (they are a rather hefty 16MB); I will share the URL with everyone as soon as I know it.

As for the rest of the summer, I am going to Asia to speak and meet with industry and educators about the framework. First stop is Shanghai for GDC China, I am doing a talk called Finding a Job and Carving your Niche in a Quickly Globalizing Video Game Industry. Then I get to go to Beijing and speak to several universities about their growing programs and helping them develop their curriculums (hopefully in sync with our framework). Then this globetrotter is off to Singapore where I hope to meet with more educators developing game programs. In addition, I will be attending and speaking at GC Asia, again the talk will be about getting a job in the industry. To round out this Asian tour, myself, Tracy Fullerton and Magy Seif El Nasr and I are going to attend DiGRA in Tokyo and we will be presenting a game design workshop. I am rather thankful that I won’t be talking about getting a job again and get to teach basic design principles. All of these talks and workshops are given to represent the work we have done with curriculums, class ideas and case blats we have shared with those of you that are already members of the SIG.

I know I will miss being a professor, so any time you want me to come visit, give a workshop, teach a class, talk about anything (other than getting a job), email me. No really, I do know a lot about getting students prepared for entering the workforce, so if that is what you need, I would be happy to help you prepare your lectures or give you my slides, or even deliver the info in person. I hope to be traveling around the US this fall meeting as many educators as possible. I would love to visit Boston again and work with them to develop a consortium. There are over 90 educators in the Boston area in some game related work. To me that is amazing and exciting, we should expect to see some great things coming out of the Northeast. I have been asked by some schools in New York State to do something similar with their academics in games (early November). The SIG’s focus with this outreach work is to get everyone talking with one another and hopefully collaborating on projects and/or research together.

I want to wish everyone a great and successful year. I hope your classes are full of students that are excited to learn, creative and hard working. I hope you plan on attending GDC in 2008, remember it is the week of February 18th. I know that Derric Clark is hard at work making sure that our program has something for everyone, be it those starting programs or those experienced game educators that are looking for professional development. We will be having two tracks and our own site outside of GDC, so we don’t have to close registration before the early bird discount is over this year. We also plan to make the two-day workshop affordable, no breaking travel budgets on my watch. You will only need to get a classic pass, not a gigapass and a seperate pass for our workshop. We will be posting news related to that as soon as arrangements and the website are up and ready to go. I have blocked reasonable priced hotel rooms ($100-150 a night) to also help reduce the cost of attendance.

I want to thank everyone who has been a part of the listserv and our community as well as any of the SIG’s activities, thanks for helping and volunteering.

Sincerely,

Susan

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Susan Gold

Chair, IGDA Education SIG


"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us." -Marcel Proust

MacArthur Grant Awarded to Institute of Play

Exciting news! Katie Salen, who is on the advisory board for the Education SIG, just received a MacArthur grant of $1.1 million for the Gamelab Institute of Play. The project is going to create a new school for 6-12 grade with a pedagogy based around the idea of gaming literacy ("the play, analysis, and creation of games"). The plan is to open the school in 2009. Go check out their website for more info: it's a very interesting project.

Darius Kazemi
Technology Co-Officer

Boston

One of my biggest passions is trying to bring people together in our community. I think by deepening and broadening a collaborative community within local, national and global educators is fundamental to the success of our growing genre. Not only is it nice to know that we are not alone in our academic goals, but in most issues that arise we go through the same ups and downs… be it funding, being taken seriously or just general challenges. It is the reason why I turned to the IGDA when I started teaching in games in 2001.

A few weeks ago I was asked to participate in the city of Boston Mayor’s office one-day conference to develop strategies that support the growth of Boston’s Game Industry. Since I was on my way to Boston I thought I would try to meet with local educators working in games, so I did a little investigating. Mind you, Boston is thick with colleges and universities, but I managed to find close to 90 educators working in some aspect of games. They have enough people to start their own special interest group. I called the meeting to see if they were interested in developing some sort of consortium, or sandbox to work within. A place where they could possibly create an environment for low-risk experimentation or just work collaboratively. After pulling together this list, I emailed everyone and invited them to a meeting. Although the invite went out with short notice, I got 30 people to the table. I was so exciting to see the growing interest in game education. What amazed me was that most everyone in the room did not know each other… yet. I was so pleased to find out that so many of those around the table were here just so that they could meet one another.

Keeping that in mind, I very much want to ask all those willing to call, email their neighboring institutions. Start to build a few bridges to your neighbor schools. We are not inventing the cure for cancer here, games are only made as a product of collaboration. I would like to see our community build friendship and alliances before the summer break comes. I know this is a lot to ask for the end of the semester, but is there anything you can do to build upon what you have in your college? Could a collaboration expand and help one another? Art schools, contact the technical schools and vice versa.

As Dr. Alice Robison of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program said of this past Friday's meeting, “The fact that all of us were committed enough to gather for this meeting is a testament to our willingness to collaborate.” I think each of us sees the potential benefits in creating these bridges. So please, be like one professor at one institution said to another educator, I have always been interested in talking to someone from your school; “I should walk across the street.”


Susan Gold
IGDA Education SIG Chairperson

GDC07: Game Studies

Kurt Squire , UW-Madison, discussed video game studies as an increasingly accepted field of study. For working groups, he posed questions such as: What are the best practices for studying games? What effective pedagogical models are emerging? How do teachers balance the needs for understanding the technical aspects of the medium with the demands of scholarship?

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Beth A. Dillon

GDC07: Curriculum Framework 2

In working lunch II, participants discussed various ways to design a program using the current curriculum framework, focused on typical university constraints within disciplines.

Each group discussed:
Discipline structure: how to offer courses within disciplines and across disciplines
Bridging the gap between disciplines
Problems for one discipline to talk to another, resistance from different sides
Should game programs be in different disciplines or form their own interdisciplinary unit, if so how?
How do you see the courses in the framework distributed across disciplines or within what form of interdisciplinary structure do you see them fit best?

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Beth A. Dillon