GAMES:EDU

The slides from presentations at Games:EDU South have started to go up on Slideshare. We've had many requests for Jolyon's slides, which should be up there soon.

I got this in my inbox, and it’s definitely worth passing on. Game Jams have been a venerable part of games culture around GDC for a long time, and now the IGDA Education SIG is aiming to send them global:

I am really excited to announce to friends the live website of a new project that the SIG is organizing. I hope with your help to make at a real success with everyone globally. The Global Game Jam will be announced at Sandbox and SIGGRAPH, where we are doing a call for host venues and looking for sponsorship money to pull of such a large scale project. The Global Game Jam is a first of its kind Game Jam that will take place in the same 48 hours around the world, January 30-February 1st, 2009. Our friends at the Nordic Game Jam will be our flagship Jam – they have had years of success. This should be a real experience in creativity, innovation and experimentation.

If you know of anyone willing to host a Game Jam in their local area or for that matter, help us sponsor the project, please let me know. Information regarding hosting and sponsorship is available on the site. We hope to have local jams throughout Asia, Europe, North/South America, South Pacific… and anywhere else willing to host a jam. The Global Game Jam is open to everyone. Sign-up for the local Jams will happen in late October. The GGJ will provide one representative of each winning local jam a round-trip ticket to present their game at the IGDA Education SIG Workshop at GDC.

http://www.globalgamejam.org

I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this.

Slides from Games:EDU North are being sent live here. So far, we have slides from Nick Burton of Rare, Jon Purdy from the University of Hull, and Mike Reddy from the University of Wales, Newport.

The closing talk of the day was by Dr. Mike Reddy from the University of Wales, Newport.

Mike is an interesting speaker, who started by asking everyone to switch their phones on and text him comments during his talk. Much of the talk itself echoed Matt Southern's earlier points.

Mike described the current conflict over games courses as a Cowman/Farmer conflict: The cow men want freedom for herds to graze, and farmers want fences and structure. Similarly, many academics want freedom to pursue interesting research projects, whereas much of industry wants the security of vocational courses encouraged by organisations such as Skillset.

It's by no means a simple problem. Mike summed up the results of purely research focused courses, as seen by the industry, with this fictitious job advert:

Wanted: Graduate
0 years of industry experience
No portfolio to speak of
Must be incapable of eye contact
No ability to work in a team necessary

Clearly, the balance will continue to be a difficult problem. Games need both vocational and theoretical inputs to survive and mature. Not only will this require new courses, but maybe even new kinds of institution.

One of the things we're aiming to do with Games:EDU in future is develop greater engagement between the audience and the speakers. Question and answer sessions at the end of talks are fine, but this time we thought we'd also have workshops.

Jonathan Purdy (University of Hull), John Sear (University of Derby), Steven Yau (EA), and Gregor White (University of Abertay Dundee) handled the workshops each giving a short presentation then splitting the audiences up for group discussions.

Steven Yau was a former student at Hull, and gave a presentation about the job hunt that led him through a Master's degree and eventually to EA.

John Sear spoke about the projects they'd done with students, running small groups as imaginary game studios, but putting them under the same pressures. Late changes to projects, firings, even studio closures, the team at Derby have a great deal of fun with the students. Talk of this carried on into the workshops, with one of the main points coming out of it about planning: Such measures are carefully planned at Derby, but introducing them late to a course creates more problems than valuable experience.