A Few Moments in New York

Piet Mondrian (1943) Broadway Boogie-Woogie [detail]

A couple weeks ago, Matt Spangler and I flew to New York City to see All the Way, Bryan Cranston's new play about LBJ, and Sleep No More, the ingeniously immersive take on Macbeth that has audience members wandering a supposedly restored hotel for three hours of creepy, voyeuristic fun. On our final day I also found time to visit the Museum of Modern Art, where I indulged in a guilty pleasure: taking pictures of people taking pictures.

Andy Warhol (1962) Campbell's Soup Cans

Jasper Johns (1954-55) Flag

I'd originally intended to pop in for a few minutes - I actually considering saying something like "I'll pay you ten bucks just to let me see Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" - but a good deal on tickets persuaded me to dedicate a morning to MoMA. And, wow, I'm glad I did. The Picasso was indeed worth a detour, but my favorite part was an opportunity to study other folks' reactions to the collection.

New York High Line

New York High Line [detail]

One additional highlight: Strolling the High Line before Sleep No More. Somehow I'd not yet heard of this clever repurposing of an old railroad spur into a pedestrian promenade and greenway that cleaves through Chelsea and the Meatpacking District. It was a lovely way to enjoy dusk in New York City: drifting above the street on an elevated linear parks, the Jacarandas in bloom, and feeling grateful for the chance to travel.

Ready for GTA 5!

Image from Game Informer 

Having read the Guardian review, I'm more excited about GTV 5 than ever. Here's my favorite quote:

"The world drags you in. It begs you to explore – and then it rewards you. You feel every millimetre of the landscape has been thoughtfully handcrafted with the curious gamer in mind. This seems an odd compliment – surely every video game landscape is crafted in this way. But so often, open worlds are built from architectural filler – bland unending landscapes and cardboard box tenements. San Andreas is a state of contrasts and extraordinary detail, there is always some interesting new nook to chance on, some breathtaking previously unexperienced view across the hills toward the capitalist spires of downtown. Designers often talk about rewarding the player for exploration, but usually do so with facile Easter eggs, hidden away in mundane backwaters. From the raging rivers running through the mountain wilderness parks to the beautiful modernist architecture tucked way in the Vinewood hills, Grand Theft Auto V is – like Fallout, Skyrim before it – a form of virtual tourism."

The Sandbox Project - Mini-Mapping

Inspired by Darcy Osheim's thesis that examines World of Warcraft from a pedagogical perspective, I'm launching a little experiment in paragraph-level writing that explores the intersection of pedagogy and sandbox style gaming, focusing mainly on console games like GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and LA Noire. Aside from common interest, my project and Darcy's thesis are unrelated. These 'graphs are written without an outline. Their connections may be tenuous or superfluous. I may never finish. 

Because of their expansive and apparently open-ended nature, sandbox games often provide a roving reference point in the form of a mini-map. The map "roves" to the extent that one may see it while walking, running, swimming, or flying. One may read it during a firefight or while exploring an unlit cave. In this way the map's roving quality becomes ironic, at least when one considers its ever-present placement on the screen (or at least its near instant accessibility via button click). Mini-maps come in handy when the larger world of the game gets too big and complex. But what if maps do more harm than good?

Kirk Hamilton has written that the consistency of a well-crafted gaming environment - augmented by landmarks, signs, and symbols - enables a player to master geography and navigate without always-on maps. Indeed these tools may limit a player's ability or inclination to engage an environment personally, richly, meaningfully, if only because the map distills an already abstract world to an even more detached manifestation, such as when threatening foes (actually animated pixel-pictures) become reduced to red dots. No matter how rewarding a game's premise, too much map-reliance risks transforming a world of experience into an exercise in button-mashing. Providing a point of comparison, Hamilton recalls his decision to forgo Grand Theft Auto's map feature:

"[I was struck by] how much more exciting combat became: wildly intense, visceral, and a bit terrifying. With no map and no HUD, the game's first large-scale shootout in Vlad's bar was as intense as the culminating sequence of a big-budget crime film. Walking into Comrade's, I felt as wired as Michael Corleone sitting down at the restaurant table on that fateful night in The Godfather. When Niko drew down, gunfire erupted with great chaos and bloodshed. In the immediate aftermath, Niko crouched behind a table as I wondered if the coast was clear. Was the armed bartender still crouching back there, waiting? Had I taken him out, or only clipped him?"

Reflecting on Hamilton's argument, I reflect on efforts to produce the equivalent of always-on maps in my classroom lectures, activities, and assignments. I recognize good reasons for the inclusion of these maps; many students grow frustrated by seemingly unstructured learning environments, and their how-do-I-do-this? questions can tax even the most patient professor. But I admit that my perpetual mapmaking and instruction-revision sometimes distracts me from time better spent trying to solidify ideas, inspire exploration, and encourage risk-taking.

No, I won't abandon the map just yet. I certainly don't anticipate refiguring my classes as open-ended "explorations" without navigation tools. A solidly written course description, syllabus, and daily agenda can be essential, no matter how open the class may be. Still, I can't help but ask: How might I better integrate mapless adventure into my students' (and my own) learning experiences? How can I help students learn to transcend the dismal science of taking directions, to start making maps themselves?

The Sandbox Project - Enhance

Inspired by Darcy Osheim's thesis that examines World of Warcraft from a pedagogical perspective, I'm launching a little experiment in paragraph-level writing that explores the intersection of pedagogy and sandbox style gaming, focusing mainly on console games like GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and LA Noire. Aside from common interest, my project and Darcy's thesis are unrelated. These 'graphs are written without an outline. Their connections may be tenuous or superfluous. I may never finish.

"Freeze and enhance."

This command, typically ordered up by the lead investigator in some neo-brutalist command center, conveys technological sophistication. Blade Runner was my first encounter with this fantasy of infinite gaze, back in '82. There's Decker with his Esper machine, trying to glean the truth from an old photograph: "Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance. Stop. Move in. Stop…" He commands and the image clicks, left then right. Closer. Left then… Decker's machine somehow manipulates a mirror's reflection to peer around a corner. "Enhance."

Image from The RPF

Halo's Theater option offers up a similar thrill, allowing the player a chance to halt gameplay and fly through the expansive battlespaces of previously saved missions, to click frame by frame through every minute of an encounter, to zoom and enhance - even the boring parts, such as when hero stands lazily in the hanger bay while marines are getting annihilated by aliens nearby ("Ah yeah, that's when I got up for a snack and forgot to pause the game"). Halo's narrative pathways are far too rigid to enact a sandbox experience. Yet in Theater-mode, the player becomes a director: tilting, panning, and advancing through scenes [sometimes racing, sometimes crawling], discovering previously unknown options. "So that's where the sniper was hiding!"

The player-as-director reveals an important dimension to the sandbox concept, one that might offer useful insights for anyone interested in teaching and learning. Instructors often deliver course concepts in dribs and drabs, epitomized by the click of phrases on a slideshow. Knowledge wasn't there; now it is. Better write it down. But what if all the information, all the tools, and all the toys are present in one open space, and the student isn't reliant upon the steady drip-drip of instructor-wit? What if the student can direct her or his learning narrative, or at least feel some sense of control and creativity in the process?

That latter proviso ["some sense" - italicize either word] is, of course, the point. After all we have such a world right now. Someone seeking knowledge could do far worse than to cruise the vast and growing Wikipedia data-sphere. Sure, there's plenty of dreck in those pages: vandalism, provincialism, and goofy editorial nonsense by folks who have more time than expertise. Still Wikipedia is undeniably able to offer up at least a semblance of knowledge, not to mention useful breadcrumbs to genuinely peer-reviewed research. Add YouTube educational videos, a decent local library, and the occasional free public lecture, and the determined student can learn nearly anything without setting foot in a school. Yet while a student may enter a grand and seemingly endless array of ideas [Isn't there something creepily antisocial about the much-hyped "Internet of Things?"], that person needs guidance and encouragement to make sense of it all.

An alarming number of university administrators dream of Intelligent Agents that whisk students from automated prompt to automated prompt. They envision a spreadsheet comprised of one hundred professionals, one thousand technicians, and one million students [clients? customers?]. For many of these folks, the long-form lecture and small group seminar makes no sense; it just costs too much. A few of us, particularly those who bemoan the de-professionalization of our craft, will guard the old barricades for another generation. We will practice the art of first-person learning. Few of our students, though, will replace us at the gate.

Our goal therefore should be to adapt the sandbox to our purposes. To "direct" student learning - dripping knowledge at our pace - is one approach. And sometimes such direction is the best way to teach. I merely hope we can practice a more experimental, more entrepreneurial ethos too, one not easily commodified into the MOOC model. We all have the tools, and goodness knows, there are plenty of people yearning to learn. What we must build is a practical and economical model to craft learning spaces that meet local needs. A hundred or so professionals can design the widgets and interfaces that enable our best creative efforts, But no one can know our students as we do. We can help students become directors of their own lives (and not cells on a spreadsheet), maybe to investigate the knowledge-space as they might fly through a Halo theater. The question that remains is a matter of will.

Will we master the games of our new world, or will we get played?

The Sandbox Project - Internal Borders

Inspired by Darcy Osheim's thesis that examines World of Warcraft from a pedagogical perspective, I'm launching a little experiment in paragraph-level writing that explores the intersection of pedagogy and sandbox style gaming, focusing mainly on console games like GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and LA Noire. Aside from common interest, my project and Darcy's thesis are unrelated. These 'graphs are written without an outline. Their connections may be tenuous or superfluous. I may never finish. 

The sandbox is almost never fully open. Freedom to roam requires the player to solve puzzles, climb levels, or complete quests. The initial travel space, a comparatively peaceful shire filled with gentle tutorials and easy adventures, begins to stifle the player who peers beyond the horizon. Out there are grizzly bears that'll tear you clean off your horse; there are color-drenched streets and animated neon signs; there are places where you can procure exotic weapons, new outfits, and uber-fast vehicles that make driving a crazy blur. For online players, these restricted districts also contain the promise of recognition and public achievement ("Haven't made it to Tall Trees, huh? Yeah, it's pretty awesome."). Moments like these and I'm channeling Liz Lemon: "I want to go to there."

The borders between you and that rarified domain may look natural: bridges washed out by hurricane or hills just too rocky to climb. But sometimes the game imposes its restrictions more forcefully -- like when you're swimming across a narrow river to GTA's Las Venturas. This place has got casinos and huge flyable planes at the airport. Best of all, it's threaded with freeways, and you like to drive fast. You have no stars to designate your outlaw status. No one knows you're sneaking past the dividing line. Just a few more steps strokes and… four stars. You tried to cross the border before earning your way in, and now every cop in the city swears a death wish against you. The streets are choked with SWAT teams; the skies are buzzing with attack helicopters; bullets are slicing you to hamburger and -- holy hell -- is that a tank?

The Sandbox Project - Prezi Play

Inspired by Darcy Osheim's thesis that examines World of Warcraft from a pedagogical perspective, I'm launching a little experiment in paragraph-level writing that explores the intersection of pedagogy and sandbox style gaming, focusing mainly on console games like GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and LA Noire. Aside from common interest, my project and Darcy's thesis are unrelated. These 'graphs are written without an outline. Their connections may be tenuous or superfluous. I may never finish. 

Despite its glitches and limitations, Prezi demonstrates an essential dimension of sandbox thinking: the tabula rasa. Launch a new Prezi (using the latest desktop version), switch off the template chooser, wipe out that annoying "Place for your Text," and finally enjoy the pleasure of… nothing. Just empty space.

Sure, there's the minor marring of a subtle grid, but you need only select "Present Mode" and then even the grid disappears. For that initial moment you may pan or zoom like you're driving in whiteout conditions. I wonder how a newcomer to Prezi would perceive this endless expanse of nothingness. Without a frame of reference, would this scene convey promising potential or arid emptiness?

Either way, one must add something to a Prezi. This is a sandbox built for presentations. Add words, images, or objects, and you can fill an apparently infinite expanse along X and Y axes. Then comes the real fun: learning to navigate the Z axis. Using Prezi's zoom feature, you can arrange material at various levels of foreground and background, forming layers of organization, constellations of relationship.

As this tool advances through iterations of improvement, I wonder how Prezi might be used less for formal presentations and more as a place to play.

The Sandbox Project - Virtual Cities

Inspired by Darcy Osheim's thesis that examines World of Warcraft from a pedagogical perspective, I'm launching a little experiment in paragraph-level writing that explores the intersection of pedagogy and sandbox style gaming, focusing mainly on console games like GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and LA Noire. Aside from common interest, my project and Darcy's thesis are unrelated. These 'graphs are written without an outline. Their connections may be tenuous or superfluous. I may never finish. 

Video game cities can populate our material experiences of urbanity; they certainly add layers of meaning to my walking experiences. I remember a few years back when Jenny, Vienna, and I drove to L.A. to catch an international flight. We arrived early, which inspired Vienna and I to convince Jenny that we should cruise through Compton "to see where C.J. lives." This was when our family was briefly addicted to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The afternoon was such a kick, poking along pavement that seemed so familiar. "Ahh, that's where I got into that wicked firefight!" "Isn't that where you bought a house?" We barely considered the absurdity of taking a video-game tour through a neighborhood of living, breathing people who do not imagine themselves as occupants of a video game. The three of us were simply grooving on the idea that this place could possess the patina of our imaginations, that another continuum of reality could be laid upon this one.

Sometime later Jenny and I were in Florida, driving to South Beach, when we got lost (as usual). We were plying the causeway east toward the Atlantic, crossing over lush islands dotted with mansions, when I realized how familiar this setting seemed. Thanks to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, I'd been here before. I was able to use my memories of those virtual streets to navigate us to our destination.

From these moments I find myself wondering about the uses and gratifications of video game cities. Not those fantasy domains of dragons and wizards, but the simulacra of real places that contain increasingly striking degrees of verisimilitude. What does it mean to reproduce a city for a video game? How might we study such an environment -- as play, as rhetoric, as social commentary?

I might as well start close to home. Thankfully Wikipedia's got a list of Video Games Set in Los Angeles.

The Sandbox Project - Virtual borders

Inspired by Darcy Osheim's thesis that examines World of Warcraft from a pedagogical perspective, I'm launching a little experiment in paragraph-level writing that explores the intersection of pedagogy and sandbox style gaming, focusing mainly on console games like GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and LA Noire. Aside from common interest, my project and Darcy's thesis are unrelated. These 'graphs are written without an outline. Their connections may be tenuous or superfluous. I may never finish. 

Sometimes the edges of a sandbox video game make sense; others, not so much. The best way to establish a border to a theoretically endless world is to install a natural barrier. I'm now playing Red Dead Redemption, and it appears that those white mountains in the North -- beyond the Tall Trees region where the bear and wolves await hapless explorers -- cannot be climbed. You can try, and I have indeed managed to coax myself up to dizzying heights. But eventually all players face the merciless constraints of virtual gravity.

I've read that Rockstar Games patterned the Redemption Mountains after the Rockies. Thinking about this choice summons memories of my family's first drive back in '96 through the snowy pass that drops into Denver. I recall an image of towering stone and frozen water emptying past the city into a flat green plain. Beyond that pancake prairie land lies more towns, more people. Drive long enough and you reach the ocean, yet another boundary that beckons us to beat on against the current.

Of course the ocean in some games is merely another kind of border. For players of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the ocean means certain death, which seems pretty funny to me. There I am, pumped and armed, a walking gun show, walking to my doom in four feet of water. A few steps, just a few more, and then… there I am, a virtual tough guy drowning in a sea of pixels. Apparently my avatar never learned how to swim.

Later iterations in the GTA series relax this draconian restriction somewhat, allowing players to swim for a while (conceivably forever in GTA: San Andreas, though into an endless plain of undifferentiated monotony). The GTA IV oceans, however, are not endless. Supposedly you can swim for about a half hour (real time) until the hitting a virtual wall [a gamer named indianasmith27 even produced a YouTube video to demonstrate this feat].

In one GTA forum, players compare this feature to The Truman Show, raising some interesting philosophical questions about the necessity of boundaries, both physical and virtual. One illustrative quote: "There's going to be nothing 'out there.' It's just the ocean or the desert. It would have mattered if we had some incentive to go out there and look for something. But that has never been the case."

Fair enough. Yet I wonder, what if there is something "out there," past the point where most players stop clicking those buttons (or peel the tape off their trigger), a new level waiting for that chosen few willing to endure to the end. Moments like this, I can't help but imagine that the next religion will be founded in virtual space.

The Sandbox Project - Channeling Chandler

Inspired by Darcy Osheim's thesis that examines World of Warcraft from a pedagogical perspective, I'm launching a little experiment in paragraph-level writing that explores the intersection of pedagogy and sandbox style gaming, focusing mainly on console games like GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and LA Noire. Aside from common interest, my project and Darcy's thesis are unrelated. These 'graphs are written without an outline. Their connections may be tenuous or superfluous. I may never finish. 

It's 1947 in all its postwar glory, and I'm stalking these sunburned, dusty streets, going nowhere. All my leads have dried up and the clues are cracked like a broken beer bottle. All jagged edge, not one piece that fits. It's a good day to be on the beach. It's a bad day to be a cop. What's worse, my partner is wearing my nerves down but good. He's aways sour though. The kinda guy who liked The Wizard of Oz just fine until they switched on the color. He lost his passion for this job years ago, he's worthless in a firefight, and he yelps every time I sideswipe a Studebaker. Still, I can manage him. Just one gentle press on the B-button turns him into a talking map: "Hang a right at the next corner," he opines. "Roll right through this intersection…" In mid-complaint he becomes as handy as Rand McNally. Just one button. And I need him like that, friendly and docile, because this town is a big place. Bigger than me. And it groans. The City of Angels stretches for miles, jammed with construction sites (new housing for returning GIs), packed with blocks of dive bars that swim in neon and despair, and pulsing with crimes of all shape and size. I'm playing L.A. Noire on my Xbox, filling my clue book with names and places, when the radio squawks out an APB. A bank job's gone bad. I guess they all do in the end. But this one features some twisted whack-job who's decided to spray the downtown gentry with an army issue machine gun. Some guys, I'll never understand. But I know my job. I hit the siren and bang up a few more unlucky parked cars on the route downtown. Cocked and loaded, I'm feeling the itch. 

The Sandbox Project - Tutorial

Inspired by Darcy Osheim's thesis that examines World of Warcraft from a pedagogical perspective, I'm launching a little experiment in paragraph-level writing that explores the intersection of pedagogy and sandbox style gaming, focusing mainly on console games like GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and LA Noire. Aside from common interest, my project and Darcy's thesis are unrelated. These 'graphs are written without an outline. Their connections may be tenuous or superfluous. I may never finish. 

Educators should play more video games. After all, consider how the contemporary video game teaches its player how to play; there's a lot of serious theory at work. And that theory is backed by mammoth budgets and based on high expectations for ROI. Yet the standard video game contains no syllabus, not much of one at least. I can't think of the last time I started a console game by reading the instructions. And what if I did? Most booklets include a glossy, mostly useless insert. There may be a basic overview about running and shooting and driving, maybe a fold-out map, but little else. The instructions that come with LA Noire? 12 pages of pictures and button-functions, followed by 11 pages of tiny font listing everyone involved in the game's production. Generally the "instructions" that come with most console games are scanned once and never used again. We learn to play videogames through trial and error, advancing through tutorial levels that implant button combinations at an almost unconscious level. If the process works we learn by doing, sometimes aided by explicit instruction but generally by playing. One may debate the virtues of video game content, but one can hardly doubt that game designers know how to teach.

To Read: Erik Andersen et al.'s "The Impact of Tutorials on Games of Varying Complexity"