The City
One of the primary goals in this class is to get to know our city better, and a bit more generally, to learn how to dig into place. There is no set amount of content you are supposed to acquire; it is impossible to know everything about a place, and we don’t have the time to even pretend to come close. There are many lenses to look through. Each sheds light in its own way. Some take the form of issues, while others represent a way of seeing and thinking. Some examples: graffiti, architecture, homelessness, suburbia, water, urban renewal, open space, sustainability, transportation, contested spaces, politics, and food.
Lenses like these both limit and provide focus. They are what we need to use and what we will try to create.
The University
We need to learn how to look beyond the borders of our everyday life at the university to see some of the rest of Burque. We also need to learn how to see the place the university is, not just a neutral container for the activities we engage in.
The university is where we are. It is a place. It has a history. It is also near enough to work in on a daily basis, something not true of the other locales we may take an interest in. It should be useful to us as a practice space, laboratory, and setting for “real life” even though we often think about academic work as something separate and hence associate with the university as an ivory tower. At the same time, we should make a determined and consistent effort to understand and engage with the city that exists outside its borders.
This is true both as a site for investigation and a site for action. The university is a great place to run around for example, lending itself to inventive outdoor gaming scenarios. The varied levels, terrains, and buildings already feel like a videogame. However, very few people come to campus to wander around or play in this space. Most people are on a mission from point A to point B while they are here. It is therefore not a good place to set a game you hope people pick up informally. The Zoo or a museum or even parks are a better bet in this respect. People go there to wander, walk, play, and maybe learn.
We will need to leave campus regularly to do justice to the idea we are examining the city. We will need to talk to people who are not primarily students or teachers here. We will need to expand our experiences within the city by going new places, meeting new people, and traveling in new ways.
Place and Space
There is more to a place than the specifics of the space that place inhabits. The physical details take on real meaning through the place’s cultural identity. In our investigations and designs we will often pay close attention to particular physical details, like the placement of a stoplight, but these details will be viewed in terms of a larger context, the living place in which they are found. Another way of saying we intend to focus on place is that we will engage with their ecologies.
Urban and Wilderness Ecologies
Ecology as it relates to this and other cities is heavily used by two, usually separate, groups: those interested in wilderness—the ecologies of non-human organisms within a place—and those interested in human ecology—how people live together within a space. David Greunewald encourages us to not see these as separate ideologies, but as both contributing to a bigger sense in which we, concerned with understanding and acting within a place, can think ecologically. For instance, when we consider issues like proposed development for the Rio Grande bosque here in town, we should think not only in terms of man and nature, but in terms of power and access. Another hint these ideas need to be considered together: this blog post from former ABQ Mayor Jim Baca, notes that environmental advocacy organizations are typically very white. It is common to lament the distance to be covered ideologically to make progress on environmental issues, but what about the need to cross cultural divides?
Games
From one perspective games (or play) are old as dirt. They are a cultural universal, and in fact something we share with many animals. From another rather new. Videogames have emerged as a major form of entertainment in the last few decades and more recently are being explicitly tapped into to address a wide variety of subjects outside entertainment: education, activism, news. Videogames not only borrow a lot from older games and styles of play, but incorporate designed interactive systems (many of these are simulations but not all). There is power in this new medium for the expression and articulation of ideas not possible before. There are things about engagement and action that game designers have uncovered for the rest of us to make use of: failure as an important part of learning, the inevitability and usefulness of emergent as opposed to directed phenomena, the fantastic power of a group of interested people to accomplish something together just because its interesting to them. We will learn about how games work, what might be done with them, and what lessons we can learn about the other things we do from what people do in and with games.
Many of these truths are things you need to understand first hand. You don’t need to play every game, but without enough experience with games, you can’t really get what they are about and capable of, or even break the knee-jerk reaction that they are “only a waste of time”.
You are among the first for whom this is not only an abstract truth, something to approach through criticism or professional apprenticeship, but an everyday faculty. Just as published writing, over the course of a couple millennia, transitioned from the province of the very elite to anyone with a tumblr account, videogames are now becoming a creative tool available to the general populace.
Our study of games is not all about ending up with games, gamifying everything. There are some practical aspects, but our broader purpose with them are the general insights into the design of interactive experiences afforded by a study of games. When we make something for someone else, we imagine them doing something with it. Game design is a unifying grammar for the design of experiences in any medium.
Game Readings
- Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal
- How to Do Things with Videogames by Ian Bogost
Technology
Usually when we say “technology” we are referring to newer technologies, but in reality technology is a universal part of human history. The pencil and paper we used before Microsoft Word are technologies just as much as that software or your phone. And not all technologies are things. The written word that we sometimes use those tools to produce is a technology too. So is algebra. We have a lot to learn about modern technologies that we can learn about older ones.
Technology Readings
- Users as Agents of Technological Change by Kline and Pinch
- Things that Make Us Smart by Donald Norman
Mobile
Mobile is a big deal. It is the most quickly adopted technology in human history. There are already more active cell phones on the planet than people. Most teenagers and adults in the US have smartphones. Soon, most people in the world will have not only a cell phone but a smart phone. Smart phones are not only communication technology, they take the two previous mammoth destabilizing technological revolutions, computers and the internet, and put them in people’s pockets. As students, you’ve probably been told mostly to ignore this technology in the name of education, but the potential is as tremendous as it is threatening.
We will look into mobile as a technology, think about some of the biggest ways we are using it to change places and ourselves, and as with games, make practical use of the new tools of mobile media production, especially augmented reality games. Also, as with games, this is a hard medium to work in for this class if you are unwilling to spend some time there in your life outside the class.
Design
Rather than acquiring, this class focuses on constructing. We will largely learn through making things. Design not only is a means of access to content and ideas, but it is also content and ideas. Through reflective practice, we will learn about making things, together, as part of a team. Another way to say this is that we will pay attention to process as well as product. Your designs will be too intricate, deep, and multifaceted to be put together by a single person. So we will need to learn how to work together across skill and expertise differences. Your products will not be ultimately for me or to receive a grade, so we will need to learn how to think from the perspective of their uses. In many areas, you will be pioneers in the medium; with no established standards, we will have to ourselves determine the nature of quality work.
Sharing
Your designs are ultimately acts of sharing, as is my teaching that guides this course. But we sometimes forget this verb in the name of personal achievement. We will find ways to become better and more cognizant of sharing as a fundamental part of learning and doing. We will look for every opportunity to share ideas, work, and credit. We will learn about creative commons licensing, open source software, and other formalized modes of sharing. I will not require you to reinvent anything that you might more successfully get through borrowing. Especially in working on your designs, you will encounter the responsibility that is a part of sharing. If someone is going to take the time to play your game for example, it is your duty to not waste that person’s time. After all, they are sharing too.
