If I don’t care, noone will… (and report from the ICEC 2006 conference)
Well, there goes my half-promise of updating every other week after September. If this research blog is “my creature”, it follows that, in all the world, I’m the person who cares more about it and I keep failing to pay it proper attention. So, what will the rest of the world think? Easy guess. Fortunately readers may have such a thing as RSS aggregators that allow them to ignore this blog until something interesting happens in it and their aggregator tells them. Easy excuse.
Moving on, let’s talk game-based learning. My latest chore was a visit to the ICEC 2006 Conference in Cambridge, UK. I spoke about <e-Game> there with an audience that knew what a game was, that accepted that games and education match (weeee!) and where noone raised a hand when I asked who did not know Monkey Island (well, actually one person did, but he didn’t understand the question properly). In retrospection, maybe it was because I asked the question in negative, and that means I counted in all the attendants that were actually asleep as positive votes. To keep my morale up, from now on I will always ask these questions in negative.
The approach was reasonably well received, maybe slightly technical for part of the audience, but I perceived interest. Andrè Melzer (second appearance in this blog!) seemed interested and we discussed about the possibility of turning that personal interest into an institutional interest from the Univeristy of Lübeck.
Speaking of the University of Lübeck, it’s curious how its Institute for Multimedia and Interactive Systems keeps doing stuff that is almost games, without really being games. With the incredibly original ideas they have (on this conference Andrè Melzer spoke about interactive radio plays and Wendy Ann Mansilla spoke about using Acousmêtre in virtual environments), they could enter the game-based learning arena as a storm and really come up with original ideas.
Obviously in a conference about entertainment computing it is difficult to extract only a few papers for a decent-sized blog entry without leaving out a lot of interesting works. Let’s just point out some adjectives:
The curious: Wim van Eck presenting a paper describing their experiences in designing games with real animals within. On the premise that animals are unpredictable and non-deterministic, they conducted a pilot in which they created a pac-man game connected to a camera that looks at some crickets hanging around and translates their real movement to the ghosts in the computer game. Do check it out, it is really interesting.
The true game-based learning: Colleague Pedro Gonzalez Calero presenting the evolution of JV2M, a true game specifically designed to learn the inner workings of the Java Virtual Machine (for a Theory of Compilers subject). Developed by the people sitting next to me in my office, by the way. It will be easy to keep an eye on that project 
The game-related: The most game-related talks were actually the keynotes. Emotions in game design, casual games and hardcore gaming rankings and matching. Hard to decide which was more pure gaming. Let’s give Microsoft this one.
The trend: Lot’s works coming from Asia related to hand motion recognition. In all flavours: Using an active glove, using a glove with beacons, recognizing the movement of the bare hand, you name it. Those were different works by different groups in different countries. See a trend? If you are looking for a new line of research, consider that one.
Other notes: Dutch people innovating in Dance Dance Revolution and similars, a lot of interactive storyelling, several GPS-based games (I should really explore that area) and lots of reflections in the relations between games and emotions.
In any case, this is a shallow selection. There were a lot of great talks, so check the conference’s website (they promised to eventually post the presentations there… still waiting) and the proceedings. You won’t regret it.
As for the conference organization: Superb. Nice location, nice facilities, and a nice information flow. Buses to pick us up in the center of the city (and drop us there), two dinners, lunch included. A weird”gala” dinner including live music by a rock band, which is a very interesting twist from traditional conferences. Kudos to them.
The research facilities that Microsoft has in Cambridge look like a wonderful place to produce good science. They even had a XBOX-360 in the common area, which connects with the ranting bit of this post: If this was a Entertainment Computing conference, how comes I didn’t see anyone approach it during the entire conference other than myself and my colleague Pedro González Calero? We can’t talk about entertainment if we never have fun, we can’t talk about games if we don’t like games.
Next post from the Netherlands, I’m visiting the Educational Technology Expertise Center at the Open University of the Netherlands with Daniel Burgos as host researcher, where we will explore the integration of games authored with <e-Game> and Units of Learning following IMS Learning Design.
