Discussing Identities through Game-Making: A Case Study

Identities should not be understood as a static, defining trait, but as a temporary articulation performed by diverse people. Based on data generated through the Playing Beowulf project, in which students produced their own games, I present a reflection on the meaning of a gamer identity and how diverse identities can be performed and articulated during game-making process. Understanding how these identities are orchestrated in a non-professional environment might help to clarify the relationship between them and the social and cultural position occupied by games, as well as to reflect on the validity and possible limits of a gamer identity

Platform, culture, identities: exploring young people's game-making

Digital games are an important component in the contemporary media landscape. They are cultural artefacts and, as such, are subjected to specific conventions. These conventions shape our imaginary about games, defining, for example, what a game is, who can play them and where. Different research has been developed to understand and challenge these conventions, and one of the strategies often adopted is fostering game-making among “gaming minorities”. By popularising games and their means of production, critical skills towards these objects could be developed, these conventions could be fought, and our perceptions of those artefacts could be transformed. Nevertheless, digital games, as obvious as it sounds, are also digital: they depend on technology to exist and are subjected to different technologies’ affordances and constraints. Technologies, however, are not neutral and objective, but are also cultural: they too are influenced by values and conventions. This means that, even if the means of production of digital games are distributed among more diverse groups, we should not ignore the role played by technology in this process of shaping our imaginary about games. Cultural and technical aspects of digital media are not, therefore, as conflicting as it might seem, finding themselves entangled in digital games. They are also equally influential in our understanding and our cultural uses of these artefacts; but how influential are they? How easy can one go against cultural and technical conventions when producing a game as a non-professional? Can anyone make any kind of game? In this research, I explore young people’s game-making practices in non-professional contexts to understand how repertoires, gaming conventions and platform affordances and constraints can be influential in this creative process. I organised two different game-making clubs for young people in London/UK (one at a community-led centre for Latin American migrants and other at a comprehensive primary school). The clubs consisted in a series of workshops offered in a weekly basis, totalling a minimum of 12 hours of instruction/production at each research site. The participants were aged between 11 and 18 and produced a total of 11 games across these two sites with MissionMaker, a software that facilitates the creation of 3D games by non-specialists through ready-made 3D assets, custom audio and image files, and a simplified drop-down-list-based scripting language. Three games and their production teams were selected as case studies and investigated through qualitative methods and under a descriptive-interpretive approach. Throughout the game-making clubs, short surveys, observations, unstructured and semi-structured interviews and a game archive (with week-by-week saves of participants’ games) were employed to generate data that was then analysed through a Multimodal Sociosemiotics framework to explore how cultural and technical conventions were appropriated by participants during this experience. Discourses, gaming conventions and MissionMaker’s affordances and constraints were appropriated in different ways by participants in the process of game production, culminating in the realisation of different discourses and the construction of diverse identities. These results are relevant since they restate the value of a more holistic approach – one that looks at both culture and technology – to critical videogame production within non-professional contexts. These results are also useful to the mapping of the influence of repertoires, conventions and platforms in non-professional game-making contexts, highlighting how these elements are influential but at the same time not prescriptive to the games produced, and how game development processes within these contexts are better understood as dialogical

Platforms and Texts, Rules and Play: Teaching game design and game analysis

During our previous work on games and meaning we have noted the strategic advantages of drawing a distinction between claims about ‘meaning’ and claims about ‘interpretation’ (Carr and Puff, 2019). One way to summarise this would be to think of ‘meaning’ as a noun that exists somehow, somewhere ‘in the game’, and interpretation as a verb – something that is done by somebody, somewhere, during some form of playful entanglement with a game. In this presentation we reflect on the usefulness of this distinction for addressing some of the challenges that arise when teaching game design and game analysis

On the influence of geometry updating on modal correlation of brake components.

In most industries dealing with vibration, test/analysis correlation of modal properties is considered a key aspect of the design process. The success of test/analysis methods however often show mixed results. The aim of this paper is to assess and answer some classical correlation problems in structural dynamics. First an investigation of correlation problems from tests is proposed. Tools based on the modal assurance criterion are presented to provide a deeper analysis of correlation and results improvement. In a second part, the need of FEM topology correlation and update is demonstrated, using an efficient morphing technique. Tolerances in the manufacturing process that are well accepted in design and production stages are shown to lead to significant degradation of the test/analysis correlation. An application to an industrial brake part is eventually presented, in an approach of correlation procedure automatization for recurrent use

Factors affecting the student evaluation of teaching scores: evidence from panel data estimation

We use a random-effects model to find the factors that affect the student evaluation of teaching (SET) scores. Dataset covers 6 semesters, 496 undergraduate courses related to 101 instructors and 89 disciplines. Our empirical findings are: (i) the class size affects negatively the SET score; (ii) instructors with more experience are better evaluated, but these gains reduce over time; (iii) participating in training programs, designed to improve the quality of teaching, did not increase the SET scores; (iv) instructors seem to be able to marginally 'buy' a better evaluation by inflating students' grade. Finally, there are significant changes in the rankings when we adjust the SET score to eliminate the effects of variables beyond instructors' control. Despite these changes, they are not statistically significant.Este trabalho emprega um modelo de efeitos aleatórios para estimar os principais fatores determinantes na avaliação de professores por estudantes. Os dados compreendem 496 cursos na graduação, relacionados a 101 diferentes professores e 89 disciplinas, durante 6 semestres letivos. Os principais resultados obtidos são: (i) o tamanho das salas de aula afeta negativamente a nota recebida pelo professor; (ii) professores mais experientes são mais bem avaliados, mas estes ganhos são decrescentes ao longo do tempo; (iii) a participação em programas de treinamento, desenhados para melhorar a qualidade do ensino, não afetam as notas recebidas pelos professores; (iv) a avaliação recebida pelos professores é marginalmente influenciada pela nota dada aos alunos durante o curso. Finalmente, os dados mostram mudanças significativas no ranking dos professores, quando são feitos ajustes para eliminar os efeitos de variáveis fora do controle dos professores. Entretanto, estas mudanças não são estatisticamente significativas

Research enchancing the quality of teaching: Econometric evidence from Brazil

Este artigo reporta evidência de que as atividades de pesquisa tendem a melhorar a avaliação recebida dos professores pelos alunos (SET) com uma defasagem temporal. Além disso, os resultados sugerem que as atividades de pesquisa sejam complementares às atividades de ensino. As atividades de pesquisa parecem afetar a qualidade do ensino no momento em que são realizadas, indicando um ganho na realização conjunta das atividades de ensino e pesquisaWe find evidence that the process of doing research increases the professor’sknowledge andenhances thestudent evaluationof teaching (SET) with a lag. Moreover, the results suggest that research activity seems to be complementary to teaching. The research activity seems to increase the quality of teaching at the moment that it is put in place, i.e., both activities can be seen as ’mutually reinforcing