Event Title
The Half-Real Humanities: Hard Problems in Humanities Games
Location
PSY-226
Start Date
3-11-2017 10:00 AM
End Date
3-11-2017 11:00 AM
Description
This panel showcases four perspectives on hard problems in the humanities that can be found in Juul's (2011) "half-real" domain of video games, a medium that blends real rules with fantasy settings. Speakers will describe how they identified such problems dealing with assessment, art, ethics, and culture and will discuss projects that highlight unique issues in humanities gaming and provide ideas about how to identify challenges and solve problems in future work.
Games and ASSESSMENT
Speaker one will discuss assessment for evaluating a game's pedagogical effectiveness and providing appropriate feedback to the learner (Bellotti et al., 2013). The unpredictable nature of games built for the humanities makes it challenging to be consistent in assessment. Discussion will focus on assessment challenges, strategies for mitigation, and how assessment evolves based on the specific type of learning content and the specific type of game.
Games and ETHICS
Speaker two will discuss ethics in relation to games, from the role of the player, the designer, and the game (Sicart, 2011) and discussing how moral values operate within virtual worlds (Schrier, 2010). Domain-specific considerations, such as ethics in commercial and serious games, will also be reviewed. Examples from interface design, such as the moral buffer problem identified in autonomous weapon systems (the aversion to killing is inversely proportional to the proximity of the user to the target) will be used to discuss how thought exercises such as this are useful for considering ethical issues in games.
Games and ART
Speaker three will discuss the role of visual arts in the development of video games. In the development of a video game the visual artist invites the player to become a co-creator in their artistic creation (Pierce, 2006). This act defies the personal process of artistic creation often observed in the fine arts. Though all arts are a study in human interaction, visual art and interaction in video games pose an interesting twist on this concept by allowing the viewer to become actively involved in the artist's role. This active role blurs the lines between the player/spectator and the creator. The speaker will discuss future challenges and the responsibilities of the artist concerning visual development for games.
Games and CULTURE
Speaker four's research attends to the global circulation of games, with a particular emphasis on Japan and the US. Every year, she takes a group of students to Japan to build VR, AR, and learning games in Japanese research labs. She will discuss the challenges of attending to culture in global contexts and when working in intercultural teams. Like all media, culture permeates games, affecting what is encoded into the game message as well as the process of creation, affecting the politics of distribution, and affecting consumption practices, such as semiotically marking certain texts as different, exotic, and therefore desirable. She will share examples of student work in AR and VR completed in Japan and talk through the challenges of production and cultural encoding in student games.
The Half-Real Humanities: Hard Problems in Humanities Games
PSY-226
This panel showcases four perspectives on hard problems in the humanities that can be found in Juul's (2011) "half-real" domain of video games, a medium that blends real rules with fantasy settings. Speakers will describe how they identified such problems dealing with assessment, art, ethics, and culture and will discuss projects that highlight unique issues in humanities gaming and provide ideas about how to identify challenges and solve problems in future work.
