» Games Desert of My Real Life

{July 14, 2008} Game or Sport?

While we were in Barcelona, I picked up the European (Summer Journey Double Issue) edition of Time magazine because it’s about the games that people play around the world. A number of the articles are fascinating, describing activities that I had never heard of.

For example, one article describes parkour like this: “It’s not quite a sport, and it is certainly no game. But for sheer athleticism, the French-born extreme activity is unmatched as a spectacular thrill.” The article goes on to describe parkour as part gymnastics and part tai chi. It involves moving through an urban landscape as quickly (running) and as efficiently (leaping over obstacles such as walls and gaps between buildings) as possible. Clearly, it requires considerable skill to not get hurt. We saw some young men engaging in this activity while we were in Spain and would have had no idea what they were doing had I not read the article. It’s difficult to imagine without seeing someone do it (pictures, video). But the thing that I found most interesting about this article is that it was about an activity that is “certainly no game.” If this special issue is about games that people play, why would parkour be included?

The question came up for me again in another article about competitive computer gaming in South Korea. Apparently, however, to call this activity computer gaming is to commit a faux pas. Instead, the activity is called e-sports. Gaming doesn’t engender the same respect that sport does and the professional gamers in South Korea definitely want respect for what they do.

So this got me to thinking about what distinguishes game from sport. And why does one activity command respect while the other doesn’t? I’ve had a similar conversation with Liz and Ann about art vs craft. I think it’s human nature to want to categorize things and so there are furious debates about what is art and what is craft. Apparently, lots of people have also argued about the difference between game and sport. Until I read the Time magazine articles, I hadn’t given serious thought to what is sport and what is game. In fact, the only reason I think this is an interesting conversation is because of the respect that seems to be accorded to one and not the other.

According to Dictionary.com, sport is:

1.an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.
2.a particular form of this, esp. in the out of doors.
3.diversion; recreation; pleasant pastime.

And a game is:

1.an amusement or pastime
2.the material or equipment used in playing certain games
3.a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators.

Each word has about 15 or 20 other definitions that are not quite related to this discussion. For example, someone can be a good sport or be in the real estate game. I’ll ignore those possibilities.

These two sets of definitions are very similar. Both a game and a sport are a “competitive” “pastime” involving “skill”. One difference seems to be that sport involves “skill or physical prowess” while physical prowess doesn’t seem to be part of the definition of a game. Instead, games involve “skill, chance or endurance.” But that makes me wonder why ESPN, which considers itself to be “the worldwide leader in sports”, shows the World Series of Poker (WSOP). One could argue that because winning the WSOP requires days and days of poker-playing, it requires physical endurance (which makes it a game) but there is no way to argue that it requires physical prowess.

Wikipedia says: “Sport is an activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively. Sports commonly refer to activities where the physical capabilities of the competitor are the sole or primary determiner of the outcome (winning or losing), but the term is also used to include activities such as mind sports (a common name for some card games and board games with little to no element of chance) and motor sports where mental acuity or equipment quality are major factors.”

Once again, physical prowess appears to be an important factor. But this definition might help us a little in understanding why poker is shown on ESPN. According to this definition, some games, those with “little to no element of chance”, are also sports (presumably even though the games do not involve physical prowess). The role of chance in poker has a name–we call it “a bad beat” when someone should win a hand but chance intervenes to make her lose. While chance might play a role in a particular hand or even entire game of poker, in the long run (perhaps over a series of games), the poker player with the better abilities will come out ahead of the lesser player. So perhaps we can say that poker is on ESPN because chance plays only a small role in determining the outcome. And perhaps that’s also why the South Korean gamers insist that they play e-sports. My guess is that most of the computer games they’re playing leave very little to chance and the very best gamers win these competitions.

I don’t think the distinction between games and sports is important except to the extent that the playing of games is considered “kid stuff” and accorded little respect. In Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that today’s popular culture, including video games and television, is making us smarter because of the complexity presented to us through these media. I would argue that games (including non-video games) have made us smarter throughout all of history (not just today). Through the playing of games, we practice and develop mental and physical skills in a safe space, a space that Johan Huizinga called “the magic circle”, where the stakes are lower than they are in “real life.” In other words, the magic circle is a learning space. Rather than demanding that our game activities be called sports (as in e-sports), we should be proud to play games since doing so shows we are engaged in lifelong learning.

{June 15, 2008} Dr. Mario Online Rx

My latest addiction on the Wii is Dr. Mario Online Rx. It’s a puzzle game (very similar to Tetris) that came out as WiiWare on May 26, 2008. WiiWare games are developed specifically for the Wii and can only be purchased and downloaded from the Wii Shop Channel. The coolest thing about WiiWare games is their price–all between $5 and $15. Dr. Mario Online Rx costs $10. Contrast this to the titles that are sold on disk. I was in Best Buy last night and the cheapest Wii games were $20 but most were between $40 and $50.

If you’ve never played Tetris, the appeal of Dr. Mario Online Rx might be difficult to understand. The idea of both games is that shapes drop from the top of the screen. The player’s goal is to move the shape as it falls–moving it horizontally and flipping it around. The goal is to get a sequence of blocks in a row. In Tetris, the goal is to get an entire row filled in while in Dr. Mario Online Rx, the goal is get 4 blocks of the same color in a row or column. When you make the goal, the row (or blocks of the same color) disappear. If you aren’t able to get things to disappear, the screen fills up and eventually there’s no room for anymore blocks to fall. That’s when you lose the game.

Dr. Mario Online Rx has an additional premise that makes the goal a little more difficult to achieve. The premise is that the screen is covered with colored viruses. Dr. Mario is at the top of the screen dropping colored pills. Your real goal is to make all the viruses disappear by getting the colored pills to line up with the viruses so that you have 4 pill parts/viruses in a row or column of the same color. If you clear the screen of viruses, you move to the next, more difficult level.

One of the nice features of Dr. Mario Online Rx is that you can play over the Internet with other players (the Online part of the game’s name). You can play with strangers from around the world who have purchased the game but you also have the option of allowing friends who haven’t purchased the game play via your game. Greg and I played the other day and it seems that the speed of the game doesn’t suffer when you play online, even when one of the players has not purchased the game. This is a great feature that I hope more games incorporate. It’s nice to be able to share titles and I’d bet it would result in sales because people can try out games that they haven’t yet purchased. If they like the game well enough, they would probably want to be able to play on their own without having to wait for someone else to invite them to play.

I love these kinds of puzzle games. In fact, Tetris helped me get through my dissertation. Each day when I sat down to write, I would allow myself to play three games. The challenge, of course, was to stop after three games. Because these games are so simple (some would probably say repetitive, perhaps even tedious), it’s instructive to think about why they’re addicting. I think Janet Murray (in Hamlet on the Holodeck) was on the right track when she suggested that Tetris (and games like it) allow us to feel that we are in control of our hectic, chaotic lives. The game throws blocks at us just as life throws things at us. We manipulate the blocks to put them in order and if we do it well, the blocks disappear. We are metaphorically sweeping things off our desks, accomplishing tasks and maintaining order. For me, this explanation feels accurate. I do feel in control while I’m playing and I definitely like being in control. The ironic thing, of course, is that the more time I spend playing Dr. Mario Online Rx, the more things accumulate on my real desk.

{June 11, 2008} Wii Fit

We recently bought Wii Fit and have been spending a fair amount of time exploring all it has to offer. There are many things that the game does well and a few things that could be improved (without much effort, it seems to me, which makes me really wonder why these things were not part of the original design).

For those who haven’t heard any of the hype about this new game for the Wii, I’ll give you a summary. The game comes with a new input device called a balance board. The balance board looks something like a scale without the numbers (and it does indeed function as a scale). The game is comprised of sub-games in four categories: yoga, strength training, aerobics and balance games. In addition, there’s a possibility to do a body test once a day. The body test gives you a Wii Fit Age which is similar to the Wii Fitness Age from Wii Sports. When you first register your Mii in Wii Fit, you have to go through the body test, which includes weighing and calculating your Body Mass Index in addition to a balance test. Depending on who you’re playing with and how you feel about others knowing your weight (and BMI), this process can be a little awkward. The first balance test that you do involves shifting your weight from left to right and trying to hold steady at a particular spot. The amount of weight placed on each leg is represented by a blue line that moves up and down as the weight on that leg changes. The test presents you with 5 pairs of red lines into which you try to move your blue lines and hold there for 3 seconds. You have 30 seconds to complete the 5 sub-tests. Once the 30 seconds has elapsed, your Wii Fit Age is calculated based on your real age, your BMI and how well you did on the balance test. As I’ve confessed in these postings in the past, I’m a sucker for this kind of random testing of how “good” I am, especially if I do well. So you can imagine that I was quite happy that my Wii Fit Age was 38 the first time I went through the process.

Once your Mii is completely registered, you’re ready to start getting fit, that is, playing the sub-games. There are too many sub-games to list here but I do have a few favorites. I enjoy many of the balance games. The first one I like is a soccer-based game. As a player, you stand on the balance board and see the back of your Mii’s head. As you shift your weight on the board to the left and to the right, you see your Mii’s head lean to that direction. Other Miis then line up to kick soccer balls at your Mii. The goal is to lean in the correct direction (left, right or middle) so that your Mii heads the ball. When the game starts, this is quite easy. It gets difficult, however, when the Miis begin to kick shoes and panda heads (of all things) at you. You need to avoid these because they smack you in the face and cause you to lose points. The smack is quite funny, accompanied by an appropriate sound effect and the visual of your Mii’s head snapping backward. The first time I played the game, I had no idea about the panda heads and because they look like soccer balls (round, black and white) until they get close to you and because I also thought that I had to lean my weight forward in order to head the ball, I did horribly (I got 20 points–to put that into context, Evelyn got over 100 the first time she played). It turns out that you don’t have to lean forward to head the ball. Instead, you just have to get your Mii’s head in the correct position. Now that I’ve figured out the game, it is quite fun. It’s also hilarious to watch other people play it.

Another of the balance games that I really like is a slalom skiing game. You lean forward to get more speed as your Mii moves down a hill and back to slow the Mii down. You lean left and right to move through the gates. It’s a simple game that is quite addicting because I keep thinking, “I can do better than that.” There’s also a ski jumping game that is addicting. In this game, you lean forward to get your Mii to move down a ski jump. At the end, you extend your knees quickly and try to keep your balance as your Mii flies through the air. The funny thing about this game is that if you miss the jump, your Mii tumbles down the hill head over heels becoming a larger and larger snowball. This is another game in which I keep thinking, “I can do better than that.”

Like I said, there are a ton of other games, some of which I’m sure I’ll talk about in future posts. An interesting question is whether the Wii Fit will actually keep anyone fit (or get them fit if they aren’t already). I think the good thing about the game is that it gets people up and moving, perhaps doing things that they wouldn’t otherwise do. The rewards (seeing your name move up the record holders list, unlocking additional levels and new games) are exactly the kinds of incentives that keep people motivated to continue to do these things (saying to themselves over and over, “I can do better than that.”) And eventually, as you unlock levels, some of the aerobics games can definitely get you sweating and breathing hard (try the hula hoop game at the duration level which is 6 minutes). The strength training games that I’ve tried are pretty difficult. But one major deficiency in the game is the inability to create a training program. You can’t string the sub-games together to automatically do one after the other. Instead, you have to stop in between each game, perhaps listen to an explanation, get your reward, and then select the next game. This lack severely limits the game as a serious fitness tool. Adding such a feature seems like it would be relatively easy to do so I’m surprised it’s missing. But even if this particular game doesn’t get me to be fit, it’s a reminder that I need to get up and move every day and that’s a good thing.

{June 8, 2008} Wii Weaknesses

A recent positive experience I had with the Wii exposes a couple of weaknesses in Wii Tennis.

Because they enjoyed playing with our Wii so much, Ann and Greg have purchased their very own Wii. We went over to their house with our Wii remotes to play. It was amazingly fun playing Wii Tennis with four people, 2 against 2. In fact, it was much more fun playing 2 on 2 than it has ever been playing either 1 on 1 or against the computer. I was thinking about why the four person game is more fun and I think the reasons expose some problems with the way the game was designed.

Whenever you play Wii Tennis, you are playing doubles. What this means is: if you are playing 1 on 1 or against the computer, you are controlling two characters (usually two copies of your own Mii) with one remote. I think the decision to always have tennis be doubles was a mistake on the part of the designers of the game. One of the reasons that the Wii is so popular is because of its unique (and innovative) input mechanism. By using the Wii remote, a player is able to interact with the in-game characters in a way that feels like interacting with the real world. Rather than mashing keys on a remote, the player moves an arm to hit the ball in tennis, for example. This more realistic interaction with the game has appealed to many non-gamers and is truly what has made the Wii the phenomenon it has become. But the decision to have a single remote control multiple characters in the tennis game means that we lose some of the realism of the interaction. When a player moves an arm to hit the ball, two characters in the game swing their rackets, which is a little disconcerting. It would feel more realistic and be more engaging (and more fun) to be able to play singles if you are playing against only one other player or against the computer. Then your one remote would control a single character within the game.

Of course, I understand why the designers made this choice. Within Wii Tennis, there is no way to control where your character moves. The only thing you can control is when the racket is swung and at what angle. The movement of the characters is controlled by the game itself. By allowing a single remote to control two characters, the game then only needs to control horizontal movement of the characters (they move left and right depending on where the ball is) and does not need to control vertical (forward and back) movement of the characters. Instead, one character plays the front and the other plays the back. This, however, is another weakness of the game. Because you can’t control the movement of your character, there are some shots that are impossible to defend against. For example, Greg has perfected a shot off a serve to his forehand. If the serve is a regular serve (that is, not one of the ones that is really fast), Greg will return it with a cross-court shot in a spot where the front character cannot get to it and the back character (whose left and right movement is controlled by the game) does not start moving fast enough to be able to return the shot. So as a player, there is nothing you can do to return this shot. You’re inhibited by the limitations of the game implementation.

This second weakness concerning the lack of control of the movement of the in-game characters exists when you play 2 on 2 with a separate remote controlling each of the four characters in the game. But the first weakness is not there so that it feels like a more natural interaction with the game, even if other flaws exist. I think this is a lesson for how to design engaging games. The more realistic the interaction, the more closely the in-game characterization represents the real world, the more engaging (and the more fun) the game is.

{May 31, 2008} Back on the Wii Remote

I finally played with the Wii again today after staying away from it since my unfortunate encounter with a post (which you can read about here). My hand still isn’t back to normal–it was a deep bruise! I was a little nervous about playing but I ended up playing for about an hour and a half. The interesting thing is that after being away from it for almost 3 weeks, I gained in my skill level. My Wii fitness age today was 29 and I’m getting closer to being a pro in tennis. I’m already a pro in bowling and I got a score of 213 (my record is 214) in the only game I bowled. I’m back, baby! But you can bet I moved the coffee table far out of the way! I’m also cultivating a minimalist approach in which I don’t really use my entire body as I play. Instead, I just try to flick my wrist a little bit, especially in tennis. It seems to be working pretty well.

{May 13, 2008} A Tale of Wii Woe

I suffered my first (and, I hope, only) Wii injury last night playing tennis by myself against the computer. Because I was only going to play a match or two and because I am incredibly lazy, I didn’t move the coffee table out of the way before I started to play. You can guess why that might be problematic. There are warnings all over the packaging and even within the games to make sure that you have enough clear space to play these games safely. But I very clearly ignored those warnings.

Our Wii is set up upstairs in the loft. On the left side of the loft is a wooden railing. It has one large post in the center that sticks up higher than the rest of the railing. In a game that I was winning by a wide margin, I tried to make a killer cross-court backhand shot (in other words, I was swinging as hard as I can). The back of my hand impacted the top of that post. As pain shot up my arm, my hand turned dark reddish purple and then started to bleed. My first thought was that I had broken my hand.

Eventually, the pain subsided enough for me to take a quick inventory. I could move all my fingers and rotate my wrist. I put ice on my hand and took some ibuprofen. It hurt to move but wasn’t aching so I started to think that maybe I hadn’t broken it after all. I decided to reevaluate the situation in the morning.

Luckily, the only times the pain woke me up were when I rolled onto my hand. Because I know how much broken bones ache, I was really starting to think that I hadn’t broken it. But I still had some pain that radiated up my forearm as well as a burning sensation down the back of my hand. I also accidentally touched the back of my hand on the inside of the car on the way to work and that nearly sent me to my knees because the pain was so bad. There are a lot of little bones in the hand and I wasn’t sure what breaking one of them might feel like. So I decided to see my primary care physician to see if she thought I should get xrays.

No one at the doctor’s office laughed out loud at my tale of Wii woe but everyone had a story of someone else doing something stupid like this. My doctor felt that I probably had not broken the hand (because I could move it in all the right ways and because it hadn’t really kept me up at night) and that the pain was most likely the result of all that soft tissue damage, including to the tendons that run down the back of the hand into the forearm. But she thought I should probably still have xrays because of the extreme tenderness across the knuckles.

So I walked up to the hospital to get the xrays. I know the xray technician from some volunteer work that I do and he and his fellow tech had a hearty belly laugh when I told the story. He also said that he completely understood how this could happen with this game. I think he was just trying to make me feel better about my stupidity.

Here’s what it looks like today:

This picture doesn’t give you the full sense of the color of the injury but it does give a sense of the swelling and the abrasions. It turns out that I didn’t break my hand, which I feel incredibly lucky about, especially given how hard I swung that Wii remote! I’m not sure when I’ll play with the Wii again or when my hand will feel better. I’m even less sure about when my ego will feel better. But I am sure that when I do play with the Wii again, I will move the coffee table out of the way.

By the way, here’s a blog dedicated to telling stories of Wii injuries. There are a lot of stories! That should probably make me feel better about my Wii experience. But there are a lot of people who do these kinds of things too. And that doesn’t make me feel any less stupid.

{April 30, 2008} King of Kong

A few weeks ago, Ann, Greg, Evelyn and I went to the Red River Theater in Concord and saw King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I was prepared to see a movie that did for competitive video gaming what Spellbound did for spelling bees, what Scrabylon did for competitive Scrabble and what Wordplay did for competitive crossword. I got that and so much more. You need to see this movie.

The documentary tells the story of a Donkey Kong rivalry between Billy Mitchell, a restaurant owner from Hollywood, Florida, who gained a modicum of fame in the early 1980’s when he scored the first perfect score on Pac-Man and Steve Weibe, a family guy from Seattle. Billy is part of competitive gaming royalty, a rock star admired by other competitive gamers for his charisma, gaming ability and mullet haircut. In 1982, he set a high score on Donkey Kong that stood for many years. The film shows Steve Wiebe’s quest to beat that high score. At every turn, Steve is thwarted in his quest by the fact that he is not an insider. The judges of the competition are from an organization called Twin Galaxies, an organization in which Billy Mitchell plays an integral part. At every turn, Steve is screwed over by Billy’s buddies who seem to be unusually invested in maintaining Billy’s mythology. Billy is a bad guy in the movie, proclaiming lofty philosophies of gaming while behaving in ways that are directly opposed to those philosophies. Throughout the movie, I was angry at the injustice of what Steve faced.

And isn’t that the mark of a good movie? Why should I care about whose name goes into the Guinness World Book of Records next to “Live Donkey Kong High Score”? But I did. And that’s why you need to see this movie. It makes you care about a bunch of geeks and their attempts to set records on an obscure game from the early days of video gaming. Even Steve’s young daughter understands the ridiculousness of it all when she tells Steve that Donkey Kong ruins people’s lives.

{April 27, 2008} Games for Little Ones

The other day, Evelyn and I were in BJ’s in Tilton buying large quantities of gum and soap when I spotted a display of games for the Wii. I’ve been wanting to check to see if there’s a boxing game with more realistic physics than the game that comes with Wii Sports so I checked out BJ’s display. Although they didn’t have a boxing game, they did have all kinds of other games packaged in pairs and selling for the price that one game normally sells for. The one that caught my attention was Winter Sports, with 15 different sports (although the various types of skiing really should count as one sport). It was packaged with a game called Action Girlz (yes, with a z–that’s how I know it’s a cool game) Racing. Although I was annoyed at the obvious marketing ploy (and stereotyping) of a game for boys (the Winter Sports package is blue) packaged with a game for girls (you guessed it–Action Girlz Racing comes in pink), I decided to buy the games.

In the checkout line, we listened to our cashier tell a long meandering story that had something to do with a gay rooster to the people in front of us. When the story finally ended, she gave them their receipt (which you need in order to be let out of the place and which the cashier was holding hostage to make them listen to her story) and turned her attention to us. She commented on each item as she scanned it. When she got to the games, she hesitated, took a second look at us and said, “Someone must have a little one at home. Either that or a grandchild.”

A part of me wanted to say, “I’m not old enough to have a grandchild.” Except that I am–my grandmother was a year younger than I am when I was born. But the bigger part of me wanted to say, “Why do you assume that games are for kids?” Raph Koster (in his amazing book A Theory of Fun for Game Design) says, “I also find it curious that as parents, we’ll insist that kids be given the time to play because it’s important to childhood, but that work is deemed far more important later in life. I think work and play aren’t all that different, to be honest.” The rest of the book is an argument about Koster’s belief that when we play, we practice skills that are important to success in life. We socialize with friends. We laugh. We persist in the face of seemingly unsurmountable obstacles. We try out a variety of solutions. We expand our understanding of the way our world works. We keep our minds active and engaged and questioning.

I believe, as Koster does, that play is practice for life. When we play, we learn. And the recent popularity of games gives me hope that more and more people will understand that play is appropriate and important for all of us, regardless of age. So maybe one day that BJ’s clerk will understand that I do have a “little one” at home but the “little one” is me.

{April 16, 2008} Professional vs. Personal

Ann recently said to me that she was surprised to find that I had put pictures of my niece and nephew on my PSU web page. She had expected my web site to present the professional side of me and not the personal side. Her comment started me thinking about how to separate these two sides of myself. I’m not sure I can. If I think about my life as a continuum, with the professional side on one end and the personal side on the other, I can see that some things fall clearly on one end or the other. Most things, however, fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum.

For example, I have been a huge game player since childhood. I played all kinds of games with my family. One of my favorite game-playing memories is of playing Scrabble with my mother when I was about eight and she had no mercy on me and my eight-year-old vocabulary. I played organized sports all through high school, college and into adulthood. I play video games and board games and card games even now. For most of my life, I would have considered this to be on the personal end of the continuum. But then, about nine years ago, I started to incorporate games into my classes. When I taught Fundamentals of Computing, I would have students play Sherlock and then write an algorithm for how to make guesses in the game. When I taught Client/Server Programming, I had students work on an Internet-based game for their semester project. When I taught Artificial Intelligence, I used games of all sorts to motivate the discussion of various algorithms. When Evelyn and I wrote our Software Engineering book, the project that we developed within the text was a large-scale, multi-player, Internet-based game. Gradually, my interest in game playing has moved further and further to the middle of the continuum between my professional and personal life.

And then two years ago, I had the opportunity to move to the Communication and Media Studies department and teach classes in Digital Media. With this move, my interests in game-playing have become the center of my professional life. Now I spend some part of every day thinking about games, talking about games, writing about games, teaching about games, and playing games. Games are everywhere in my life. How could I separate the professional aspect of game-playing from the personal aspect? I don’t think I can. And that’s part of what I both love and hate about academia.

{March 26, 2008} Games as Rhetorical Tools

My friend Beth sent me information about a game that has been making some headlines in England and France. It’s called Miss Bimbo and apparently there are about a million subscribers in France and about 200,000 subscribers in England. Many of the subscribers are 7-17 year-old girls. Its creator is a 23-year-old web designer named Nicolas Jacquart. In this online game, which appears to be similar to Webkinz, players attempt to keep their “bimbo” alive by occasionally feeding her (but, of course, maintaining her low weight), encouraging her to find a sugar daddy rather than doing something nasty like working, and “if necessary,” getting breast implants and other kinds of plastic surgery.

An interesting thing is that when I pointed this game out to a group of friends, Robin said that when she first read about it, she thought it was a smart critique of Barbie culture. Then she realized it wasn’t a parody but was supposed to be taken seriously. It would be interesting to see what kind of game the Barbie Liberation Organization might design.

I love the idea of using games as rhetorical tools for social criticism and editorial comment. Ian Bogost has created a company called Persuasive Games which is based on exactly this idea. He says, “Our games influence players to take action through gameplay.” The idea of using games as rhetorical tools has huge potential that has hardly been tapped. It’s one of the core ideas of my class called Creating Games. Students in that class are required to create a board game that has a point of view. The way we talk about this in the class is that the game needs to have a message or teach a lesson of some sort. After some initial hesitation, most of the students understand what I mean by “point of view” and actually develop interesting games. I’ll be discussing some of these games and some of my ideas about using games as a communication medium at the Eastern Communication Association Conference in May.

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