My Tumblr Blogfolio

I have successfully transitioned to a new blogfolio format. I hope that you will find the new design to be both aesthetically pleasing and easy to read. My former blog, along with all of its content, will remain archived here on Blogger. However, I will not be posting new content here. Instead, I will continue with regular updates over on Tumblr. In line with the Tumblr format, I am also hoping to keep my posts brief and to the point, whereas I have tended to write more fully-developed articles in the past. Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any thoughts on the new format and design.

R Beginner's Guide Book Update: Statistical Analysis with R Released

In the final days of October, my beginner's guide to R was released. The book's official title is Statistical Analysis with R and it can be found on the Packt Publishing website.

The primary focus of Statistical Analysis with R is helping new users become accustomed to R and empowering them to apply R to suit their own needs. No prior experience with R, statistical software packages, or programming is necessary to learn from this book. It is written for a broad audience and should be well received by businesspeople, IT professionals, researchers, and students alike. Statistical Analysis with R takes readers on a journey from their first installation and launch of R, to analyzing and assessing data, to communicating and visualizing results. This guide is an excellent way to rapidly become an experienced R user and learn the skills that you need to apply R to your work.

Samples

A sample chapter from Statistical Analysis with R is available from the Packt website. This chapter, the book's eight, introduces the graphical capabilities of R, such as generating, customizing, and exporting various plots, charts, and graphs. You can download the sample chapter and its accompanying R files for free. If you like this chapter and are interested in learning more about R's graphical capabilities, you should know that chapter 9 demonstrates in depth how you can build and customize your own R visualizations.

The publisher has also posted a few brief samples from the book, which can be accessed via the following links. These samples are taken from chapters 7 and 8 of Statistical Analysis with R. Respectively, they cover the common process behind all R analyses and introduce the graphical capabilities of R.

• Organizing and Communicating R Analyses
• R Graphics Part 1
• R Graphics Part 2

Feedback

If you decide to read Statistical Analysis with R, please feel free to provide me with your feedback. It would be great to know what you learned from the book, how future guides could be improved, and your overall experience with R.

Meaningful Play 2010 Conference Highlights

I attended the 2010 Meaningful Play conference from October 21-23 at Michigan State University. Meaningful Play 2010 was the second rendition of the international conference on designing and researching serious games. Much like I did after the 2008 conference, I will highlight some of the thoughts, ideas, and inspirations that I took away from this year's Meaningful Play.

James Gee - Design, Learning, and Experience

James Gee, from Arizona State University, gave the opening speech for the conference and set and excellent tone for what was to follow. His primary argument rested on the concept that all people are smart... when they are given a meaningful context in which to think and act. Stakes and emotions are crucial to human performance. Accordingly, when our educational systems give people demotivating, uninteresting, and meaningless challenges, it should be no wonder that only a small percentage of them "succeed" on assessments and the rest are considered stupid, at-risk, or problematic. Building from this idea, Gee further points out the outdated hierarchical nature of institutional knowledge. That is, in essence, that the one genius is smart and everyone else is dumb, because the genius knows the answers to obscure and meaningless questions. In contrast, Gee believes that expertise now resides in the communities in which one resides. Therefore, expertise itself has become the ability to draw precious knowledge from the community, rather than to possess it oneself. Gee ends by suggesting that the only institutions that are capable of innovating are those that do not have a reputation to protect. He also mentions that while games can be used well for STEM education, they are most powerful in empowering people as learners and preparing them for future learning. Through gaming, people can recognize that they are smart and begin to question the status quo that tells them otherwise. His final ironic note to designers was to remind them that although people are smart (and games can make them realize that), they will not necessarily think the same way they do.

Renee Shull - Leading Change - Managing Pace LEGO Workshop

I attended a fun workshop that involved exploring creativity through Legos. During the workshop, we were asked to build our answers to very abstract concepts. Photos of my creations are shared below. Feel free to guess the meaning behind the designs or interpret new meanings into them.

My random warm-up creation

My current belief/attitude towards meaningful play on social behavior

How beliefs/attitudes towards meaningful play on social behavior could be improved

Ben Sawyer - What Will Great Serious Games Look Like?

Ben Sawyer of Digitalmill gave the somewhat depressing closing speech to day one of the conference. His perspective on the future of serious games was highly corporate in nature and focused on the infrastructure investments necessary to bring serious games to the masses. His criticism of the current industry is that while serious games are a known and accepted concept, they have failed to make an impact on a broad scale. While I agree with that assessment, I do not necessarily agree with the implied assertion that individual serious games should or must be scaled to make a valuable contribution. Sawyer sees successful serious games of the future as being tied into online service networks, pervasive and platform agnostic, supported by real curriculum and materials, and of course, good games. They will implement the following "world class" technological and social infrastructures:

• Realtime data
• Notifications, reminders, achievements
• Accessibility
• Adaptive play
• SCORM compliance
• Security
• Support
• Deployment.

The reason I find is to be a disheartening perspective of the future is that if these were indeed the requirements for the success of serious games, I see the industry as devoid of a future. Quite simply, no games, including those made by the most wealthy and powerful of commercial companies, have achieved these lofty aspirations. Further, serious games typically have little to no financial resources available to them, let alone those of Electronic Arts and the like, and are reliant predominately on intellectual capital and hard work.

Fortunately, there is always room for diverse visions of the future. I do not believe that serious games of the future need to meet all of Sawyers requirements at the "world class" level to be great. While I agree that Sawyer's suggestions are important, insightful, and conducive to generating more scalable games, I do not think that games need to be scaled to the masses to be successful. I do see a handful of exorbitantly funded projects striving for Sawyer's aims, perhaps with a few achieving them. But, I believe that the most substantial change from serious games will be born from the body of small experiences that many "insignificant" games instill in players. To me, dreaming of one game that can reach everyone is both an unachievable and undesirable outcome. Instead change will be enacted on a person to person level in classrooms, web browsers, and walks in the park.

Katherine Isbister - Games That Move Us: Designing More Powerful Emotional and Social Play Experiences

Katherine Isbister brought an inspiring perspective of psychology and physiology in gaming to day two of the conference. She gave multiple examples of commercial and research games that require input that engage players physically and socially in gaming. She explained that the physical feedback loop involved in games can be used to explore the social and physical experiences that are possible with modern gaming technologies like the Wii and iOS devices. For instance, Wii dancing games can make players feel silly by requiring certain movements and iPads can allow multiple players to collaboratively solve problems on a single screen. Her big challenges to game designers were to leverage the abilities of virtual realities to impact real world relationships and to discover the advantages of gaming as a medium.

Isbister's presentation was personally inspiring to me, because it caused me to reflect on MultiVerse, which I released for the iPad last summer. In MultiVerse, I explored the capabilities of multitouch technology in excess to experiment with the kinds of solo and multiplayer experiences that it could create. This presentation and the attendees' reaction to it reminded me that I am where I want to be as an innovator.

Robin Hunicke - Finding the Feeling: Experimental Development @thatgamecompany

Robin Hunicke of thatgamecompany closed out day two with an intriguing tale of experimental game design. She took us through the process of developing, testing, and revising the yet to be released title Journey. This game seeks to employ collaborative, but noncooperative, gameplay. Certainly, this is an epic challenge, but it leaves me all the more anxious to see what becomes of Journey as it nears its ultimate release. Hunicke's takeaway message was that it is worth failing to try something new. As someone who appreciates experimentation and strives to innovate, I greatly sympathize with this viewpoint.

Like Isbister's presentation, I found inspiration in Hunicke's account as I empathize with the experimental game design process. MultiVerse is indisputably a commercial failure, but I do hope that it's existence is worth the efforts that I put in to create it. My greatest goal all along was that MultiVerse would inspire other designers to explore the full capabilities of multitouch devices, rather than recycling the same hit games of generations gone by on new systems year after year. I will know this pursuit was worth it when a megahit game reaches the masses using the same principles and interactions that are present in MultiVerse. I believe that day will come within the next two years.

Debra Lieberman - Motivation and Rewards in Serious Games: Impacts on Player Engagement, Learning, and Behavior Change

Debra Lieberman, representing Health Games Research, gave an interesting overview inspection of the impact of rewards systems on different types of players. While the presentation's perspective emerged from health intervention games research, I think that its offerings are widely applicable to serious game design. Lieberman described rewards systems as primarily having internal (intrinsic) or external (extrinsic) motivational impacts on players. In light of a recent health product that appears to be solely based on extrinsic rewards, she posed the question: do we always need intrinsic rewards in games or are extrinsic enough in some cases? In addition to rewards systems, she identified two types of players, those who are highly involved (motivated) in the game content and those that have low involvement (unmotivated). The reward systems and player types can be arranged to yield the following 2x2 grid.

The conversation then turned to identifying the impacts of different rewards systems on these types of players, as well as the pros and cons of rewards in general. For example, intrinsic rewards may not be well suited to players with low motivation and extrinsic rewards have the potential to undermine players' internal motivation. Lastly, a few design tips were offered based on past experience and research in health gaming. These included making use of cooperative play, avoiding stealth content in health intervention games, designing based on players' motivation levels, and using rewards consciously.

Constance Steinkuehler - The Intellectual Life of Online Play

Constance Steinkuehler, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, opened day three of Meaningful Play with an intriguing look at the ethnography of MMORPG players. She spent a significant amount of time analyzing message board discussions on gaming sites related to popular MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft. She found that while some nonsensical, infantile, or otherwise unproductive conversation does take place, the vast majority of player conversation can be considered productive and meaningful. Interestingly, she found examples of players exercising the scientific method as they created complicated spreadsheets to understand the underlying features of the game. They were also working to theorize and test hypotheses related to their data in the game world. All the while, the players did not see themselves as being involved in science, instead being gamers who were looking to cheat the system. Steinkuehler followed her ethnography with a study on reading levels in a K-12 classroom. The startling results indicated that while many students placed well below their reading levels using the content selected by the school, they placed 4-5 grade levels higher when allowed to choose their own reading content. The takeaway message here is that our current reading assessments do not factor interest or motivation into performance. At the same time, we witness players exercising the scientific method on their own accord in a gaming context. Clearly, there are unexplored potential connections between gaming, interest, motivation, scientific thinking, and performance. Perhaps games are a solution to the gap that exists between motivation/interest and performance.

Conclusion

There is something about the Meaningful Play conference that I have found indescribably valuable. It is inspiring to have so many people dedicated to advancing the use of video games for educational, health, social and other meaningful purposes. I have taken away excellent design and research ideas from both the 2008 and 2010 conferences. I recommend Meaningful Play to anyone who is interested in the design, use, or research of the impacts that games have on our world. I am looking forward to 2012.

Measuring The Physiological Experience of Gaming

Robert Christopherson, a fellow researcher in the Learning Sciences Research Lab (LSRL) at Arizona State University, recently created a video demonstrating some of the technology involved in our video game engagement project. This line of research is currently examining the physiological aspects of gaming, which include brain activity, eye activity, facial expression, skin conductivity, and the force of button presses. These items all relate to a player's level of engagement in a game. For example:

• Brain activity relates to several detectable mental states, such as engagement, frustration, and meditation.
• Eye activity indicates where players are focusing on the screen and for how long, which tells us about how they play and what attracts their attention.
• Facial expressions indicate emotional states such as concentration, frustration, and happiness.
• Skin conductivity (moisture) may indicate states such as nervousness, stress, or intense activity.
• The force of button presses may indicate states such as intense activity, frustration, or calmness.

This research is working to explore cutting edge technologies and data analysis techniques that allow us to examine things about human experience that have previously not been possible. Robert's video and his original post can be found on the LSRL website. As you can see, I make a guest appearance in the video. In the session, I was wired up with the equipment and playing Guitar Hero, similar to our testing event back in May 2010.

Squarrelz Drey: A Tumblr Comic Series

Through random and timely events last month, I was inspired to create a new breed of cartoon characters. These simply-crafted, cute, and silly creatures are a cross between a square and a squirrel. Hence, the Squarrel has been born.

At the same time, I have also been wanting to test out Tumblr, the Twitter-Blogger compromise of sorts, for some time now. I have been wondering whether my blog posts are too long for most interested readers and if I could reach people better through posts with a few hundred words rather than one or two thousand. I still have not made up my mind on that point nor begun to test the concept, but I have started using Tumblr in another way.

I created Squarrelz Drey, a comic series that is run through Tumblr. Periodically, I will doodle a few Squarrel drawings and post them to the site. I do not have a specific goal for Squarrelz Drey or the Squarrelz in general, but feel free to visit the site and indulge in the humorous antics of our skittish squarish friends.