Again following Mike's lead, here is my questionaire:
My online display space for my work in interactive media, focusing on game design, is finegamedesign.com. This contains articles on the theory and practice in videogame design. My blog for exploring interactivity with a focus on learning is this one ( http://interactive.usc.edu/members/ekennerly ).
My focus is on videogames, especially videogames with educational merit. Since these goals are often mutually inhibitive, my primary goal is to entertain; my secondary goal is to educate. I believe that videogames can be leveraged to improve performance in academic, business, and artistic environments. All videogames teach skills. For example, Pac-man teaches motor coordination, path-finding, threat management, Traveling Salesman traversal, predator-prey path prediction, and time-delimited resource management. However, many of the skills from videogames do not transfer well to higher-function academic, business, or artistic tasks. For example, Pac-Man doesn't help you in mathematics, process optimization, or graphic design. To the extent that psychological mechanisms enable an activity to be playful or fun, videogames may exercise abilities that correlate to the acquisition or refinement of skill in serious subjects. For example, already robot-assisted surgeons report improved performance from videogames that exercise fine manipulation.
I am proficient at user interface design, paper and digital prototyping, and screenwriting; I have authored on these subjects for textbooks and tradebooks. I have begun to develop a theoretical foundation in neuropsychology to inform the educational and entertainment goals with objective criteria and mechanisms with which the edutainment software is interacting. One key field of mechanisms is storytelling, which enhances memory and elicits emotional response, which I want to explore more from the angle of neuropsychology. I want to broaden and deepen my toolset of videogame mechanisms from which to construct exercises, by enlargening my exposure to entertaining, experimental, or educational videogames. I also want to enrich my vocabulary of visual artistic appreciation and music appreciation such that I may precisely describe and direct artists and musicians in terms which with they are familiar. I strive to become a great interactive screenwriter; using the medium's strengths to convey the user's experience in a screenplay. I also aim to master techniques for rapid prototyping, so that experimental ideas in interactivity may be evaluated as soon as possible. Finally, I aim to be a master of psychological mechanism design for an interactive work; such that the interactive work's algorithms harmonize and synergize with the user's cognitive faculties embedded in his or her neural substrate. With an arsenal of techniques, I aspire to fine game design.
To begin this journey, I am exploring specifically how to employ the tropes of videogames to teach some elements of the Korean alphabet and its language.
I have found the following invaluable in my research:
- Stephen Palmer. Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology.
Jerome Feldman. From Molecules to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language.
Donald Norman. The Design of Everyday Things.
Various links on neuropsychology, such as the news that led to me to consider:
Here were the original requirements:
1. Create an online display space for yourself (this will be part of how you become famous as a result of your work in this class)
2. Articulate a collective participation strategy (i.e., how will you take advantage of being part of a participatory culture?)
2a. Decide on and articulate your own strategy for creating a productive tension between theory and practice in your work.
3. Define proficiency & an economy of value for the realm in which you intend to work (i.e., how do you want your work to be judged?)
4. Post a Personal Inventory in your display space that addresses the following:
- 3 things you already do well
- 3 things you want to learn
- 3 things you want to be great at
5. Post a few links, names or readings that you are interested in exploring as part of the research for these projects.