Meaningful Play 2008: Impressions and Reaction

I’ve been so busy prepping for this presentation, working on material for ODU, and working on a short article for Journey to the Sea, that I haven’t updated the blog in quite a while.  As you can tell, I’m not really the quintessential blogger, anyway.  Sheesh…I need to get something more worthwhile up at The Hog’s Head, too.

But for now, I thought I’d give some impressions of the inaugural Meaningful Play Conference at Michigan State University this weekend.  It was both multi-disciplinary and international.  In fact, my favorite presentation of the weekend was a keynote address from Ute Ritterfeld from VU University Amsterdam.  Her longitudinal research into questions about interactivity and multimodality was quite illuminating, particularly her team’s conclusion that multimodality matters more than interactivity in Serious Games.  While I am not sold on every detail of her methodology — I’m not sure what makes game reviewers from popular gaming publications “experts” in gaming qualities — I do find her broader research and conclusions to be quite fascinating and relevant to some of my own interests.  I look forward to when her presentation is published. 

CEA 2008 Presentation

This is my CEA 2008 Presentation concerning narrative in videogames.  I was only permitted about 15 minutes, and I showed a clip from Call of Duty 3 over one section discussing World War II based first-person shooters.  You can follow the link above for the Word document, or you can check out the cut/pasted version below.

Overall, the conference went well.  I sat through several presentations concerning contemporary fiction, particularly Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and White Noise.  I sometimes find it amazing that the latter novel (now 23 years old) still receives as much critical attention as it does, especially in the wake of 1998’s Underworld.  But, I also attended some panel discussions about modern technology in the classroom, and was a wee bit disappointed.  The presenters’ grand revelation was that students spend quite a bit of time using Facebook as a communication and networking application.  Uh-huh…