i write these words on the train from Edinburgh to London Kings Cross.
the conference on Narrative & Interactive Learning Environments has just ended, and with it one of the most freakish weather spells Britain has ever experienced. this past week, the weather in England hit an all-time high of 38.5 deg Celsius, and it has generally been extremely foggy and damp in Edinburgh. today, however, the sun is out and there's not a cloud in the sky. perfect weather for a train ride across the British Isles :-)
Edinburgh is truly a beautiful city. it marries the outrageous topography of San Francisco with the age-old heritage of Oxbridge. visit it in August, as i have just done, and the cocktail is spiced up even more by the intoxicating heterogeneity of the various festivals, such as the Fringe, and Film Festivals. every street corner you turn you hear new languages being spoken, with new sights and sounds and smells to distract your senses.
apart from drinking in the atmosphere of the festivals, i also found time to visit 'Our Dynamic Earth', which is a museum focusing on the geological, atmospheric and biogeographical processes affecting our planet. i also took the obligatory open-top bus tour around the city, during one of the few bursts of fine weather, thank God :-)
and what of the conference itself? well, much like the city as a whole, my fellow attendees came from a mix of teachers, education administrators and consultants, psychologists, computer scientists and programmers, film-makers, university faculty members and fellow doctoral candidates. in terms of countries represented, they included Australia, South Korea, Denmark, the United States, Ireland, and of course, the UK. even better, quite often the papers were delivered with the unique drone of bagpipes in the background :-)
this diversity was also reflected in the range of papers presented. especially memorable were Mike Swanson's talk on how to create intuitive, interactive and believable personalities for games (the eyes have it), Judy Robertson's talks on computer-based role-playing games created by children (using the Neverwinter Nights' toolset), and Padraig Murphy's talk on how young Irish people express ideas about biology, culture and identity.
an issue that came up (not unexpectedly, i guess) was the role that gender plays with respect to games research. for example, Judy shared how one of the girls in her study elected to use the Unreal Tournament engine to design a game in which the objective was to look for kittens :-) and lest we lapse too easily into gender stereotyping, we were also reminded that young girls were also not averse to violence, except that it was often expressed in a different way than boys chose to; that is to say, not in the playground, but through verbal abuse and peer pressure instead. in fact, the point was also made that young boys were often too developmentally immature to realise such more subtle forms of bullying and violence even when confronted with it personally.
another strong theme among many papers was the extent to which technological solutions might be applied to at-risk children, and to those with special needs. standouts in this category were Megan Davis's talk on technologically-mediated therapeutic narrative elicitation in autistic children, Eileen Brosnan's sharing on the 'Working Things Out' CD-ROM (containing self-authored stories by young people overcoming depression and other mental health problems), Mark Matthews's talk on the 'Personal Investigator' 3D game (a psychotherapy title targeted specifically at adolescents), and Lisa Gjedde's talk on the game she has developed for young learners with multiple functional deficits.
as you can infer, the conference turned out really well for me. i had not expected so many other papers to be about games, and it was truly refreshing for me to know that we do not work alone :-) i found especially heartening the kind and earnest words on the good work regarding the capture of authentic teen talk, shared with me by an expert teacher many many years my senior, immediately after my paper presentation. i found it really encouraging that this field which we have chosen is no respecter of age or experience.
what was also terrific was that even though games featured prominently in so many papers, different aspects of the use of games in education were covered, such as from the perspectives of programmers, planners and practitioners. this i found was a unique strength of this conference.
(on a side note, something i felt was interesting was that it was clear from the representation of the avatars in the various games and videos shown, that there is an appreciable difference in the cultural aesthetic in computer games - so just how well do games travel? :-) )
all told, this has been a week i will not forget :-)
