Anastasia Salter

THATCamp Games Invasion Postmortem

January 30, 2012 at 4:11 am · Filed under game design

To get participants in the spirit of THATCamp Games, we wanted to run a mini alternate reality game in the background. I created THATCamp Games Invasion, a short puzzle-based narrative centered around the unexpected convergence of “characters” on the University of Maryland campus. What brought these characters out of their digital haunts and into the cold of the physical world? And who was the mysterious investigator asking THATCamp participants to be on their guard throughout the weekend?

The rabbit hole was a simple website chronicling the investigation. Wanted posters from the “Invasion Monitor” around the premises alerted participants to the hunt.

On the website itself, the first “invader” marked the concentration of sightings at Tawes Hall, our headquarters on campus. It also carried a message from “I.M.”

THATCamp Invasion: Investigator’s Log

It used to be an easy gig, patrolling the boundaries between their world and ours. They kept to their screens and pixels, and the outside world was still ours. But something went wrong—the borders between worlds are breaking down. There are Characters popping up everywhere, and they aren’t all the friendly anthromorphs from kids’ games.

I’ve tracked them down to a central point where the rift seems to keep widening with every passing hour. If you’re in range of this location, I recommend you use caution and keep an eye out for any stray characters. You never know who’s tagging along for the ride.

It’s possible they’re all here for some purpose. Maybe you can figure it out—or maybe you’re one of Them. I’ll be monitoring the situation to make sure this invasion is contained. If you spot anything suspicious, announce it on Twitter with the hashtag #thatcamp #invasion. I’ll be waiting.

–I.M.

I.M. also appeared on Twitter, as the “Invasion Monitor” posting photos of “character sightings.”

The same invader who marked the spot on the map offered clues to the next location, which were placed near gathering points throughout the conference:

Each QR code pointed to an encrypted message (designed by John Murray) with half of the coordinates to a rendezvous point at the UMUC conference center. An additional message was “hidden” in the code of the invasion page:

Those who made it to the “Oracle” were given another clue: “There were two items handed to you at checkout that are more than they appear. Decipher them to complete your mission.” One of the items was the THATCamp Games t-shirt, with a puzzle on the back:

(Amanda Visconti designed the shirt, and you can read more about it and her other THATCamp Games designs in her blog.)

This message combined with the black and white images on every participant’s badge: avatars that were chosen either based on favorite video game characters or other information found online. (Each character was unique, and intended to provide participants with an icebreaker for conversation–and also to help people with shared favorite games find one another!) Once deciphered, the two items encouraged participants to “be” the character they’d been assigned.

Completing the ARG required finding all four “characters” from the Wanted Posters and returning photos of them to the “Invasion Monitor.” Several participants made it to or near this end goal. Thanks everyone who played!

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Mobility Shifts

October 14, 2011 at 12:41 pm · Filed under academia

Collaborative Student-Centered Pedagogies for Cross-disciplinary Mobile Apps

Links to the presentations:

• Anastasia Salter
• Elizabeth Nix
• Laura Gillespie
• Julie Gilliam

The panel will begin with three reports on mobile applications under development that incorporate different pedagogical models for collaboration and learning beyond the classroom. Following the presentations, the panel and the audience will brainstorm ideas for using collaborative models in the creation or use of mobile apps to enhance cross-disciplinary learning. Collectively, the panelists will address the use of mobile apps to extend or bridge student knowledge structures, draw students in to new ways of thinking about their environment, and expand their resources when confronted with interdisciplinary challenges.

Interactive Educational Design Across Disciplines, Anastasia Salter and Betsy Nix

Three mobile applications for public history learning were developed by students in Anastasia Salter’s Interactive Educational Design class (the developers) and Betsy Nix’s Creative Uses of the Past class (the researchers). These applications reflect both cross-disciplinary collaboration and outcomes, and themselves can be used as learning tools in and outside the classroom. History students investigated and interviewed the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Duke Riley and Typecast Press to produce original content, while the student development teams designed meaningful educational experiences to make that content accessible to other learners. The students were responsible for designing, testing and building the mobile learning objects. The two professors will share both the products of the experience and the successes and challenges of the collaborative pedagogical model, with particular attention to the ways the skill sets of development and design can transform students’ relationships both with research and with digital fluency. The applications themselves will be available to examine and deconstruct as a reflection of the pedagogical methods at work.

Augmenting the Historical Learning Environment, Laura Gillespie

John Brown’s Harper Ferry raid is normally experienced at the national park as a “dead” event, but the technology of augmented reality brings the opportunity to relive history. Laura Gillespie will share the development process of her augmented reality game framework for historic sites and design framework for Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Utilizing the affordances of mobile devices, she has created a social situated, embodied learning experience, using historical persons and items relevant to John Brown’s Raid as part of the core game mechanics. Audio augmentation will be a key component in the game design, used not as a navigational aid, but as a layer of ambience and meaning.

Collaborative Resources Bridging Classroom and Practice, Julie Gilliam

Students in the field of social work need a number of resources in their toolbox, particularly as they make the transition from classroom to practice. Julie Gilliam has been working with both instructors and students in the field of social work to develop a collaborative resource center incorporating information and tools for note-taking and learning in assessment, diagnosing, treatment-planning, intervention, research methods and clinical supervision. The content is designed on a mobile platform for easy integration into real-world settings and allows for the individual student to build a resource structure that extends and reflects their own learning and cognition processes.

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Digital Natives, the Mushroom Kingdom and the Global Village

July 8, 2011 at 3:31 pm · Filed under academia, virtual worlds

I recently presented a paper at CHLA 2011 entitled “Digital Natives, the Mushroom Kingdom and the Global Village: Re-imagining Virtual Citizenship in Cory Doctorow’s For the Win.”

The prezi is here.

The rising generation is often referred to as digital natives and granted status for their relationship with technology: “Unlike older generations, which grew up relying on a small cluster of networks, newspapers, and film studios, Digital Natives presuppose their role as shapers of culture. The fact that so many people can participate in the online cultural commons and make contributions to it has lead to a culture that is far more diverse than it was even a few decades ago” (Palfrey 126). And yet the role of “Digital Native” comes with an inherent contradiction: while “various technologies allow her a nearly infinite array of possibilities for recreating herself in a wide range of virtual platforms, it has bound her ever more tightly to a unitary identity in the real world” (Palfrey 22). Due in part to this conflict and the role of online communities such as Facebook in reinforcing existing identity, the status of digital native does not innately entail global citizenship. However, the literature aimed at this generation can harness the potential of these virtual spaces towards presenting new models for global consciousness as a necessary part of a digital coming of age.

Cory Doctorow’s recent young adult novel, For the Win, imagines a near future world where the economies of virtual worlds have a real-world impact, particularly on the fates of laborers. His story of a group of teenagers from China, India and the United States considers the consequences of virtual worlds as spaces for global encounters even as cyberspace remains fragmented and segregated by issues of language and accessibility. His work can be understood as continuing the debate over technology’s social impact into a post-cyberpunk text and consequently an argument for the potential of “digital natives” in overhauling global social injustice, and in this attempt Doctorow leverages influences from the worlds of both literature and video games. Within Doctorow’s world, a massive multiplayer game like the Mushroom Kingdom can become the next McLuhan-esque global village: a simultaneous happening that creates globally shared experience. The space thus acts as sphere for leaning in accord with the principles set out by James Paul Gee in his seminal text on the potential impact of video games on players: “Good video games have a powerful way of making players consciously aware of some of their previously assumed cultural models” (162).

The Mushroom Kingdom has people of all nationalities and social backgrounds playing—and working—side by side. The connections that arise can hold the key to a meaningful virtual citizenship that demands global responsibility and the rethinking of allegiances and class segregation. Doctorow’s vision is inextricably tied to the realization of McLuhan’s global village in the hands of the so-called digital natives: a village where “our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, [and] we necessarily participate… in the consequences of our every action” (McLuhan 4).

Selected Works Cited

Bennett, Sue; Maton, Karl and Lisa Kervin. “The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence.” British Journal of Educational Technology. February 5 2008.

Briggs, Elizabeth L. Pandoflo. “Welcome to the Game: Cyberspace in Young Adult Speculative Fiction. Children’s literature and the fin de siècle. Ed. Roderick McGillis. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003.

Dodge, Tyler; Barab, Sasha; Bronwyn Stuckey; Warren, Scott; Heiselt, Conan and Richard Stein. “Children’s Sense of Self: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age. Journal of Interactive Learning Research (2008) 19(2) 225-249. <inkido.indiana.edu/research/onlinemanu/papers/meaning_digital.pdf>

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1964.

Palfrey, John and Urs Gasser. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. Basic Civatas Books: New York, 2008.

Zipes, Jack David. Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. Routledge: New York, 2002.

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