Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.21.11 | Like many of you, we wish we had attended South by Southwest Interactive (well, the whole thing, really). But we managed to put aside our envy while searching for digital media-related news and talks.

There were numerous panels on gaming, including a panel of magazine editors who, with audience assistance, came up with a list of the Top 10 Games that Best Represent Modern Gaming (listen here).

The list includes such classics as “Tetris” and “Super Mario Bros III” along with newcomers like “Starcraft II.” “World of Warcraft” made the list and was hailed as the “supreme example of social gaming as a complete ecosystem.” What’s your opinion of the top 10?

In a separate panel, “Game Publishing Evolution from Traditional to Digital Distribution,” the focus was on the implications of digital publication of video games as compared to more traditional pathways. 

Speaking of games, David M. Ewalt of Forbes covered the keynote by Seth Priebatsch, a 22-year-old Princeton drop-out who calls himself the “Chief Ninja” of SCVNGR, a location-based mobile app that asks users to complete challenges:

Priebatsch took the stage to expound his theory of the “coming game layer” – essentially, the way we could make things work better by turning them into games. “The game layer is the next decade of human technological inteaction,” he said. “Its about using game mechanics in the real world to motivate action.”

Take the example of schools – they already are games, says Priebatsch, though poorly designed ones. The grading system has twisted the moral hazard of gameplay, replacing the real reward (learning for learning’s sake) with fake rewards (the arbitrary letters on a report card).

The central problem, says Priebatsch, is that players can lose; failing is constant possibility. “It is a game mechanic you can lose in a game that we don’t want anyone to lose,” he said.

Priebatsch’s solution: Why not create a grade dynamic that is based much more on progression?

Here’s more on Priebatsch’s talk from Down the Avenue. You can watch his SXSW talk below. He’s also a former TED speaker.

The BBC has more on apps that drew attention at SXSW and the people behind them. Attendees weighed in on some their favorites, from the utilitarian Dropbox to Epic Win, an iPhone app that turns your to-do list into an on-going quest to level-up and develop skills (another example of gaming your life).

Moving from gaming to long-form storytelling, PBS invited leaders in journalism, technology and business to talk about the impact social media and video viewing have on reporting and where the “Frontline” series fits in. Read it for comments from NPR’s Andy Carvin, The Onion’s Baratunde Thurston and Columbia Journalism School’s Emily Bell, among others.

Meanwhile, writing at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Young notes the mix of panels that “included cautionary tales and warnings against technology run amok.”

“To Craig A. Piercy, director of a master’s program on Internet technology at the University of Georgia’s business school, such questioning matches a public mood, expressed in recent books like the MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other,” about feeling overwhelmed by online messages and gadgets that demand constant attention,” writes Young.

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, argued that crowdsourcing—getting the public to do odd jobs for small or no fees—raised concerns about the capital of labor, while Lisa Nakamura, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discussed racism in the context of video games. Young writes:

For instance, in China large numbers of users began earning actual money playing the fantasy role-playing game Lineage II. They did so by playing for many hours and selling their online loot to people in the United States who did not play as long. Many of the Chinese chose the online role of a female dwarf, a character class in the game that can more easily win treasure on solo missions. Rival players began killing off female dwarfs in the game on sight, often adding anti-Chinese slurs in the chat section of the game as they did, said Ms. Nakamura.

“What happened was that female dwarfs become an unplayable race” in the game, she said. “They basically became a racial minority.”

For more coverage, you can listen and in some cases watch the interactive keynotes and featured speakers. Also check out the SXSW Interactive award winners for a look at well-regarded sites and services that either launched or were completely redesigned in 2010.

In the Student category, the winner was FeedSpeaker, which enables visually impaired people to use voice navigation to access the latest news stories. FeedSpeaker was developed at the University of Media Stuttgart in Germany as part of an Electronic Media Master course with an “inclusive society” concept. Old Spice won for digital campaign of the year—“Smell Like a Man, Man.” Here’s to next year ...