2010 CHAT Festival: A Group Perspective

The first CHAT Festival ( http://www.chatfestival2010.com/ ) took place from February 16–20 at UNC-Chapel Hill and saw an interesting collection of folks involved in digital media gathering together for a few days of idea, technique, and technology sharing.  Participants spanned the gamut from students and educators, to musicians and DJs, to design firms and video game developers.  With a wide variety of sessions and keynotes to attend, as well as several project displays, there was a lot to take in (and even more to remember and apply!).

In case you weren’t able to make it (or were able to make it and, like us, are probably trying to remember everything you learned) here’s a collection put together by the DELTA Instructional Support Services Production Team of our top take-aways from the inaugural CHAT Festival:

• Media Shift: Media is drifting away from the concept of only being for one “screen.”  Some of the most innovative and successful forms of digital media span across multiple mediums (such as TV, website, social network, mobile device, game, etc.) to keep users engaged with the content in a much more active manner than simply leaning back and watching a show.

• Gamer Demographics: One game development studio, Insomniac, talked about how demographics wasn’t as important of a factor for them to consider when making games as they once thought it was.  They found that even if they tried to make a game for a certain demographic (for example, 10-15 year olds) a large number of people that fell well outside their demographic would end up playing the game, anyway.  So how did they change their thinking?  “Basically, we make games we would enjoy playing and trust that other people (of all ages) would enjoy it, too.”

• More Gamer Demographics: Also on the subject of demographics, the average “Gamer” is not who you might think.  It is not a 14-year old boy, but rather a 35-year old adult, and men and women are becoming increasingly equal in numbers.  (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26734.wss )

• User Engagement: Need more user engagement with your site?  Try doing what The Escapist did—add an “Achievement” system for your user base.  If you have people register to view (and contribute) content anyway, you can turn this participation into a “game” by adding rewards (even if it’s just a special badge on their profile page) for finding hidden things on the site, reading a certain number of articles, contributing enough posts fellow users dubbed meaningful, adding some content that became a featured article, etc.  Users will then work hard to find all of these achievements and compare their achievements to friends to figure out how to one-up them…all while greatly increasing the average user time on the site and exposing them to more of the content you want them to see.

• Trust in Communication: People tend to have trusted “filters” for information, whether that’s a newspaper, news channel, blog, tweetdeck, or just a group of friends.  To effectively communicate with an audience, you must be able to show up on these filters.

• Gamer Defined: How is being a “Gamer” defined now?  Does it still mean someone who plays a published title on the computer or a console system, or is it truly anyone who enjoys playing a game?  If the latter is the case, does this mean that everyone on Facebook is a gamer (even if they’re not playing Farmville, the Friends system itself is a game of sorts)?  When you stop to look at it, “Gamers” are a very diverse and commonplace group now.

• Story of Games: Games are a special form of storytelling in that the main character is the player.  There is a unique sense of “I did ________” as opposed to “the lead character did _________.”

• Expectations for Games: People who play (non-casual) games have come to expect a decent story behind the events of the game and why their character is trying to achieve the goals set out for them.  Gone are the days where a game could get by with “Your girlfriend is held hostage on the 20^th floor of a building occupied by thugs.  Go get her.”

• Proof of Gaming Success: “According to a 2008 study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a great lecture can improve learning outcomes by 17 percent, while switching to a different delivery mechanism such as serious gaming can improve learning outcomes by 108 percent.” (from an IBM representative for Innov8, and from this press release: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26734.wss )

• Real-World Application: In education it is important to make projects and assignments something real that applies to students’ lives, so that there is true value for the students in learning the necessary skills and retaining them.

• Gaming as “Normal”: Games have begun to make several transitions in our daily lives.  It’s moving out of its niche as being “cool” and heading towards “normal” for many people.  Gaming no longer belongs solely in lush, 3D virtual spaces, but rather in “player space,” where the most important aspect of a game takes place around the players and their interactions with the people around them.

• Gaming for Complex Systems: While games are not the “silver bullet” in solving problems, they serve well in explaining complex systems that other media can’t.  In deciding when to use a game, take a problem to be solved and treat it as a puzzle – what kind of ways do you solve this puzzle?  Does it make sense as a game?  An article?  A presentation?

• Biological Impact of Games: Studies have been done with children with cancer who play a video game called Re-mission. Research results have been reported…
  “In the study, participants given Re-Mission maintained higher levels of chemotherapy in their blood and took their antibiotics more consistently than those in the control group, demonstrating the game’s impact at a biological level. Participants given Re-Mission also showed faster acquisition of cancer-related knowledge and faster increase in self-efficacy.”

  Source: Is Re-Mission effective in supporting health-related outcomes and behaviors in adolescent and young adult cancer patients?, Retrieved on 2/25/10 http://www.hopelab.org/our-research/re-mission-outcomes-study/

From Specific Events:

• Defining Entertainment: How we define entertainment is changing drastically. More and more users want what one speaker phrased as “lean forward” technologies (where they are leaning forward and interacting with the media as well as other users) versus “lean back” media (where the user is sitting back and absorbing the media). With that said, I feel like there needs to be a balance between both. I know personally sometimes I want to interact (I am definitely guilty of IMDBing throughout a movie on a occasion) but sometimes I just want to sit back and be entertained.

• Emotion in Games: A big question that came up in several sessions I went to is “can games evoke emotions? Yes we all know they can stir up emotions in us like anger at missing a jump or triumph at getting to the end of a level but can they evoke complex emotions (empathy, despair, etc) like books or films often do. For example, consider the last time you cried while playing a game (and not just because you lost 🙂 ) but because of an emotional connection that was made during the game? For most people, the answer is never. While some game developers consider this to be the holy grail of game development others rephrase the question to be “should games evoke emotion?” In other words, instead of trying to recreate complex emotions that we experience with other media, should we be focusing more on the emotions that are possible through games but not other media?

• Bathysphere: If you weren’t able to make it to the Bathysphere, check out the s ummary and video below. An interesting use of Unity 3D and motion capture technology.
  http://www.hastac.org/blogs/adam-rogers/hastacchat-bathysphere-interactive-art-installation

• Domefest: If you weren’t able to make it to DomeFest at the Planetarium (a juried festival of some of the world’s best digital animation and art for planetariums), you can check out some of the film entries at their Vimeo Channel – http://vimeo.com/channels/domefest . I had the opportunity to talk with some of the guys who run the planetarium afterwards and had an interesting discussion about the current technology they use in the planetarium, their plans for the future, and how different the standards are from one planetarium to another. They have a blog cleverly named “When in Dome” that they update regularly at http://www.moreheadplanetarium.org/whenindome/.