Games and the Digital Humanities at 2005 NMC Regional Conference

This is my second day back in the office after having attended the 2005 NMC Regional Conference at Yale last week. I have to say, I was impressed...

The predominant topic of the conference was Online Gaming (e.g. Massively Multiplayer Online Games like World of Warcraft) and its implications for teaching and learning. Many of the undergraduates who attend our colleges and universities play these games, and rather than villify them (as the press often does) many of the presenters instead portrayed gaming as a very engaged style of learning. Gamers solve complicated problems, they work collaboratively, do all sorts of research, try on different roles and identities, participate in and develop complex story lines... and they do all of this with great zeal. That should give you a taste of the arguments for gaming as a valuable learning exercise. The question (still largely unanswered), then, is: how do we harnass/reproduce this enthusiasm and engagement in learning processes that we design in higher education? In the opening plenary for the conference, Marc Prensky suggested that we could 1) try to use commercial games as pedagogical tools, 2) create custom games, 3) talk about games with students in class (thus placing value on what interests students), and/or 4) use the principles of gaming in designing learning experiences. These gaming principles include: 1) focusing on the users' engagement, 2) involving frequent, important decisions, 3) building in the ability to "level up" toward clear, important goals, 4) adapting to each "player" individually, 5) allowing "players" to test out theories and ideas through play, and 6) realizing that game play is more important than the look and feel ( or "eye candy").

I attended one fabulous panel discussion (actually four mini-presentations) in this track which gave a great overview of the gaming landscape. Bryan Alexander presented on the eery and intriguing world of Alternate Reality Games. Marc Prensky spoke briefly about the value of games in general and his excitement about Spore -- a forthcoming online game that will allow users to shape the evolutionary process of entire virtual worlds. Constance A. Steinkuehler talked about MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) like World of Warcraft. And Nick Montfort presented on Interactive Fiction. Here's a website of resources that the presenters put together -- well worth a visit.

Though the gamers certainly dominated the conference, I did notice a slight trend that others at the conference did not pick up on... probably because of my own interests: introducing Digital Scholarship in the Humanities to undergraduates. As I mentioned already, I helped present on our work here at Wheaton with TEI. I was surprised and pleased to see that we are not alone in this type of work. Immediately after we presented, Krista Terry and Erin Webster-Garrett from Radford University gave a presentation entitled "Teaching and the Web of Mind." As with our TEI projects, they too had undergraduates help create (and research) digital editions of texts (in this case a long out-of-print work of fiction by Mary Shelley). And the next day, a group from Lehigh University presented on a similar project, where they had undergraduates transcribing and researching primary resources/archival material from the University's Special Collections. We didn't all use the same technology (we used TEI; Radford used OCR, wikis, blogs, and text files; Lehigh used WYSIWYG editors to create HTML). But the projects' goals and results were the same: We wanted our undergraduates to have a meaningful, deep experience with primary resource materials using techniques found in the digital humanties. And most students came away from the project feeling a sense of engagement with the process and a sense of ownership of the work they did.