San Francisco-With an eager audience of leading game developers and academics in attendance last week, the Moscone Convention Center was transformed into a video game lovers utopia.
On one floor a massive expo showcased some of the latest video game platforms such as Sony's PSP and the latest designer tools for designing characters for games.
The conference focused on sessions held by distinguished leaders from five main groups such as game design and the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). IGDAs sessions aimed to make a difference within the game development community.
UW-Madison education Professor James Paul Gee and UW-Madison assistant education Professor Kurt Squire spoke about what can be learned from games and how to make academic/industry relationships work, respectively. Gee studies learning principles built into video games.
Gee used Tecmo's action game \Ninja Gaiden"" to demonstrate what consumer off-the-shelf games have to teach users about the process of learning from games. One skill he taught is that verbal information is given just in time, not before the gamer needs it-but after the gamer had the opportunity to discover it.
As an example, Gee said, ""You're taught how to run up walls, and this information is couched within the identity of being a ninja, informing not only how to play, but how a ninja might interact with an environment.""
Gee went on to say, ""This is something most traditional schools do wrong-they give you all of the information up front, before you can actually use it, which hurts retention and discourages interactive learning. Games succeed in teaching because they make us feel smart for figuring things out.""
Kurt Squire led a diverse panel of academics and game industry leaders titled ""Making an Industry/Academic Relationship Work."" Squire asked questions that elicited varied responses among the panel. He addressed how industry and academics can get beyond differences in cultures and time scales to build relationships that work and what developers can gain through a partnership with an academic institution.
Nathan McKenzie, a game designer who has produced many games such as ""Star Wars Racer Revenge,"" said, ""When designers are stumped on why a certain game succeeded or failed they struggle for terms to describe aspects of the games.""
He believes academics studying games know these terms and by knowing them as designers better games will be created.
On the other end of the spectrum, academics such as Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon University mentioned how beneficial internships are to his students and this is a first step for students to form relationships with the gaming industry. Pausch spent his sabbatical at Electronic Arts to better understand the game industry.
Squire and Gee were speaking alongside such industry luminaries as the president of Microsoft, J Allard and Nintendo's president Satoru Iwata.
