The "Curse" of free and instant communication

We'll get to the relevance of my discourse to teaching sooner or later. Bear with me.

We're living under "the curse of easy and free instant communication". When I was in England for three years researching my dissertation in the late 70s, the only practical means of communication (for a graduate student, anyway) was letters--snail mail. Phone calls were very expensive. Email, instant messages, Facebook, Skype, were unheard of (though for a few people on the Internet at the time, there was email--no Web though). Everyone was accustomed to these limitations. And so it wasn't a big deal if you didn't hear from someone close to you for months, when in distant climes.

But instant communication has changed how we live. So when my oldest friend's 18-year-old daughter came here from Germany along with her dad in September on the way to college 2,400 miles away (sigh), we were already better friends, and now as adults, than when they had left when she was not-yet-14. I'd corresponded with her through Facebook for nearly a year and talked with her (and seen her sometimes) on Skype. When she went off to college, we kept it up, so I had closer communication with her than anyone (other than her dad) who wasn't in Washington. Of course, there's cell phones as well within the country, but last year she used a pay-as-you-go and so I didn't call, now we both have the same company's phones and calling costs nothing. This would have been impossible 30 or 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago.

But the reverse of this is "the curse": if you've been communicating with someone several times a week, and then that person gradually stops, you can only think "well, I'm not worth the time it takes to answer the phone, or to type a few keys in Facebook. That person must not care for me worth a hoot any more." If it literally takes 30 seconds or less to communicate with someone, when you don't hear from someone it is likely to hurt your feelings. If someone goes from Germany to America, and then cuts off friends in Germany, what are the friends going to think when communication is easy and instant and free? And so forth.

Maybe it depends on how long you've been friends. I've known brothers and sisters who've been out of touch for more than a year, even a daughter who was out of touch with her mother for six months, and the relationships have since succeeded. If you're friends long enough, and are separated geographically, there are ebbs and flows.

Text messaging seems to epitomize this. In a sense, to me millennials seem to be terribly insecure, constantly wanting to stay in touch with friends and family, and now they do it through texts. But I'm assured by the few people I've talked with at length about text messaging, that they feel no need to constantly stay in touch, no insecurity.

Another reason for texting seems to be to find out things you can find out, but which you have no need to know. One of my student's friends, Alex, often comes into my class to use a computer and sometimes, even, to participate in the class discussions. One day he wasn't there, so in idle curiosity I asked Justin where Alex was, thinking he might know off the top of his head. "I don't know, but I can check" he said as he reached for his phone (which was on the desk next to him, not in his pocket. . .). I said no, there's no need, it makes no difference; but now he had the bit in his teeth, and just had to text Alex "where are you" ("home" was the answer). Somehow this epitomizes to me another aspect of texting and millennials, the great need to know something even though that something doesn't change your behavior, is in fact irrelevant.

We see this in the mania for knowing the news "up to the minute", even though intelligent people usually realize that "up-to-the-minute" news is often false news. [see my blog post about Skepticism for examples: http://teachgamedesign.blogspot.com/2008/05/skepticism-how-do-we-know-things.html] So many people want "up to the minute" even though it makes absolutely no difference in what they do or how they behave. I call it yet another "Triumph of Capitalism" (or maybe more accurately, of Marketing).

Out of 39 game design students (Fayetteville, NC), mostly high school seniors, some younger, some college age, 12 send and receive more than a thousand texts a month, and another 7 send and receive more than 5,000 a month! Half of them do more than a thousand a month, more than 30 a day! The distraction is Immense. I'm teaching game design, which is all about thinking, and especially about thinking critically; monitoring their cell phone constantly is detrimental to what I'm trying to get them to do.

So the practical question and point of all this is, what do I do about it? Ban cell phone use? I already have classroom management software (Genevalogic Vision) that can block Internet access (or allow access only to certain sites) and that can lock up the computers, and I use it sometimes. I know there are cell phone neutralizers, but they may be illegal in some places, and of course they cost money. I could just tell students, when I see them using a cell phone I'll confiscate it. At present I confiscate (until the end of class) only in egregious cases.

As with many other maturity issues, the high school folks are much worse than the college-aged students.

Presentation at TGC

On Thursday, April 8 at the Triangle Game Conference in Raleigh I'll be presenting "What video game developers can learn from 50 years of tabletop game development." The time has not been set yet.

"You can have two out of three . . ."

Many people worldwide have talked about a maxim related to any kind of manufactured goods, or to projects, that runs like this: For production in general, "fast, cheap, good--you can have two out of three." Discussing the three pillars of project management, controlling the cost (budget), being on schedule, and meeting performance goals, it is: "In projects: cost, schedule, and performance, you can have two out of three." In general, these forms hold true, though it IS possible to make all three in some cases.

This can also be applied to many areas of endeavor where “two out of three” really is the limit. For example, I used to tell my computer networking students, “fast, cheap, long-distance: in networks you can have two out of three.” The Internet is cheap and long-distance, but not fast. The typical local area network is fast and cheap, but not long distance. A fast, long-distance network is ridiculously expensive.

In boardgames, the maxim is something like "short, simple to play, richly detailed. In boardgames, you can have two out of three,” but almost never three out of three.

It took me a while to come up with this form, compared with the networking form. “Complex” could be confusing, and “detailed” alone didn’t seem quite enough. I think the current version pretty well expresses the situation.

Games using cards are more likely to be able to achieve all three, I think, with Magic: the Gathering being an example of the many collectible (and sometimes non-collectible) card games that achieve all three. This may be why cards are now so often a part of boardgames. Yet games that use a standard deck of playing cards will surely lack rich detail.

In video games, you have the advantage of using the computer to keep track of (and display) details. So you may be more likely to achieve all three in one game, because the computer can hide the administrative part of the rich detail that players often must track themselves in a board game.

"Why would I write a game design document for a tabletop game"?

Answer: you don't. I have never heard of it being done. Sometimes, when you're ready to approach a publisher, you'll write a description for the potential publisher, but this is nothing like a game design document, as it is a marketing tool. If the publisher is sufficiently interested in the game they'll try it out, why would they need a document that describes it when the game exists to play?

When you think you know what you want in your game, make a prototype. If you don't know what to do in the prototype, you haven't thought about it enough. Even after you make the prototype, you'll change it a great deal as you playtest it. So why write a design document?

Hierarchy of degree types

The more a person knows about the rapidly deteriorating state of American education, the more one recognizes that there is a hierarchy of degrees.

From most to least desirable:

• Seated, full-time students at a school designed for full-time students
• Seated, part-time students at a school designed for full-time students
• Seated, at a school designed for part-time students
• Online

This differentiation applies less for a masters degree than for an associates or bachelors, and less for a doctorate than a masters.

Some subjects are most unsuitable for online, some much more suitable.

Yes, this is an opinion. Some people don't care how you got your degree. Some (the smartest, perhaps) don't care whether you have a degree, recognizing that having a degree doesn't mean you can actually do a job: they care whether you can do the job.

"Digital games" are most games, not just video games

Many people use the term "digital game" to represent what I call electronic or (for convenience) video games (technically, there are electronic games that have no video component, certainly not in the accepted sense of video). Sometimes "analog" is used for non-electronic games. I used "digital" for a while, but the problem is that digital means with discrete steps that have nothing in between: Yahtzee, Craps, and other dice games, Tic-Tac-Toe, all of those are digital in this broader sense, as are most "traditional" games. I sure don't like having to type "non-electronic", but that's much better than "analog" or "non-digital". And "video" works better for me than "digital", because it is closer to what I usually mean.

Games of Maneuver vs. games of "combat dominance"

One of the first things I do with beginning game design students is give them sets of "Clout Fantasy" pieces and a large vinyl chessboard, in groups, to have them make up games. I have water-soluble markers so that they can draw on the chessboards if they choose. They enjoy the exercise, they get used to working in groups (which also helps them get to know one another), and ultimately they learn that designing a good game isn't as easy as they thought it would be. It also teaches them to work under constraints.

"Clout" pieces are very nice clay chips (like high quality poker chips) with artwork and two numbers on them (and also zero to four dots, but students rarely use the dots). I bought a bunch very cheap ($8 for 12 starter sets listing at $14.95 each) because Clout appears to have failed strikingly in the marketplace. I give each group four differently-colored sets of 15 pieces--two starter sets. The sets are standard, but the pieces differ between each color. Students are free to use the numbers and dots or not as they choose.

So checkers is a game they could play immediately with the sets. I don't give them dice, but they often ask to use them in the end, and I agree.


So much for preliminaries. Students often make some kind of wargame, given what they have, and I find that the students often don't understand how maneuver and combat methods work together.

When I say "maneuver", I mean the location of pieces matters, and is what separates good play from bad, not how they fight. Chess and checkers are games of maneuver. Go is a game of maneuver, even though the maneuver comes through placement of pieces rather than actual movement. Even Tic-Tac-Toe is a game of maneuver, in this sense.

Games of "combat dominance" are defined mainly by the rules of how pieces conflict/fight. This often involves dice. Yes, there is conflict in chess, but the rule for it is very simple, whoever moves into the square, wins. Checkers is similarly simple, Go nearly so.

The most typical dice combat I've seen from beginners is that each side rolls a die, and highest wins. There is no provision for one side to gain an advantage from local superiority of numbers. So if one side has 10 pieces and the other 3, the odds in combat are still 50-50. Unit strength may modify this (say with the numbers on the Clout pieces). Hence maneuver is *pointless*. Why bother to get numerical superiority in an area when it makes no difference to your success? And you have a game that absolutely amounts to dice rolling and no more, when unit strengths do not vary.

About the time three units defeat nine thanks to a run of luck, students will get this, if not before. The ideal to be impressed on the students is that maneuver ought to be important just as the strength of unit can be important.

Of course, combat rules can be quite intricate, though rarely are in the context of this exercise. Shooters and fighting games can have quite complex combat rules, though they are also games of maneuver.

It might be interesting to go through the typical list of military "principles of war" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_War) and try to apply to simple games. "Maneuver" is one, as is "economy of force" and "mass", if I recall correctly.


(Note: Civilization (computer version) uses one-on-one combat, ignoring other forces present, but I think this is intended to emphasize differences in technology, so that one really good unit can defeat many lower-tech units. Nonetheless, maneuver IS important in Civ., but in a very large context--strategic movement, not tactical movement.)