From my 2010-11 MSU Progress Report
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Over the past year, I have attacked the goals set in my initial goals statement with zeal. Due to gaps in my skills and theoretical knowledge of game design, I have pursued each course taken as an opportunity to build my knowledge in these deficit areas. Due to the excellent instructional methods of Dr. Wei Peng and Dr. Carrie Heeter, I am confident in my background in design research and theories of serious games. I also am able to reach out into other disciplines in order to substantiate research and design. In addition, I have had the opportunity collaborate with other students in the design of two substantial serious games, “Shades of Shakespeare” and “Pardon of the Sun”. Each game was a lesson in game design and content design, that demonstrated the challenges inherent in creating games with meaningful play.
Professor Brian Winn’s course, TC445, was an invaluable aid in acquiring the technical skills for digital game design. Through his structure and high expectations, I was able to achieve some level of technical expertise in several areas pertinent to digital game design, including the softwares Unity 3D, Google Sketch-Up, and Soundtrack Pro. I acquired fundamental skills in programming logic, texturing, basic 3D modeling, user interface, and sound design through the final team project, “Dust Tales”, completed with three other TISM M.A. students, Daniel DeMaiolo, Derek DeMaiolo, and Hyun-Woo Lee. This being said, TC445 and TC840 were the only foundation courses in technical skills available that count toward the M.A. degree. I am certain with additional technical graduate coursework I could achieve advanced levels of 3D modeling and texturing, skills that were initial goals on entering the program.
Furthermore, I submitted to opportunities to exhibit and receive feedback on my student work. With the same M.A. students with whom I created “Dust Tales,” I participated in the 2011 Global Game Jam, an international Game Jam allowing students and professionals to collaborate and compete in a 48 game design competition. We collaborated with two professional programmers and M.A. student Adriel Flores in this global event, locally hosted by Spartasoft.
Four projects from the 2010-2011 academic year were demonstrated at the TISM Showcase in spring 2011, the three games listed above and “Go Green! Go White” a website dedicated to helping international members of the Michigan State University international community become familiar with the game and culture of American football.
Through encouragement from Dr. Wei Peng and Dr. Brooke Ingersoll from the Department of Psychology, I submitted my TC831 proposal, “Keeper: A game to promote mentalization in 9-15 year olds with ASDs” to the Autism Connects Design Challenge hosted by Core 77. Although I placed 16 of 126 entries within the competition, I received much meaningful feedback from designers and academics, including Dr. Matthew Belmonte, on future directions for the project and additional literature to review. This invaluable experience demonstrates how important it is to have exhibition and competition goals as a student. Peer review is essential to professional and academic development. As I am considering a career in academia, this type of feedback provides essential opportunities for growth within the field.
This first year in the Serious Game Design M.A. program has provided substantial opportunities to achieve major and minor academic and career goals. I have substantial material presented in my portfolio, https://www.msu.edu/~cunni268/, that showcases my accomplishments this past year. I am looking forward to moving forward with my next steps during the 2011-12 academic year.
For the 2011-2012 academic year, my goals involve taking the fundamentals learned in my first year of the M.A. program and applying them to substantive projects that further my career goals. As my overarching goal is to lead in design based research and research based design in several research areas, I must present myself at the crossroads of those areas in order to present an appropriate profile to potential doctoral programs and employers. At this time, my research and design interests are as follows:
- Games and media for first and world language expression, including creative writing.
- Games inspiring and teaching creativity.
- Games for intervention and enrichment in students with exceptionalities (including individuals with autism, gifted individuals, twice exceptional individuals).
As a result, I am beginning the foundation work on my M.A. project, the vehicle by which I intend to build credibility in one or more of these areas and hone skills essential to design and research organizations and non-profit institutions that are pursuing similar interests. At this time, the general area of my M.A. project is creativity, imagination, inspiration and serious games. Although, through previous professional experience, I have significant investment in writing as creative expression, I have pulled back to the larger issue of creativity in order to explore the larger areas of learning and product that it impacts.
This leads to my first goal, narrow down this broad design space into a project achievable in an 8-10 month period. This requires a great deal of brainstorming and literature review, the practice of which is essential to the field.
In addition, I plan to initiate collaboration with this project, so that it can positively affect the community. In this respect, I am beginning to explore opportunities within local communities, including connections with Teach for America, to develop a project plan that can ideally impact Michigan and Ohio youth. I believe a project like this could have the opportunity to connect with a larger university initiative, such as the Creativity Initiative, providing opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. Both community and interdisciplinary collaboration is an important part of the current academic architecture.
Success in these goals would help to provide opportunities to take the next step, pursue appropriate grant funding to support development and evaluation of the project. At the M.A. level this is often a challenge, but I believe the process of writing grant proposals is essential to my professional development. As such, I plan to pursue university and external funding resources.
As an extension, I plan to pursue relevant opportunities for publication, presentation, and exhibition. A starting point is the Graduate Academic Conference, hosted by COGS on campus, and THAT Camp, both great places to practice engaging in interdisciplinary dialog about research. However, it is my intention to submit to other opportunities available to graduate students, including the next Meaningful Play conference. Additionally, with several other graduate students, I plan to polish previous work for submission to student design competitions, such as the Independent Games Forum competition.
On a design note, I intend to continue developing the technical skills started last year. These skills include 3D modeling and texturing, game design within Unity 3D, and developing a better understanding of javascript, useful for both game design and web development. In addition, I plan to develop skills in Flash and Actionscript, in order to make better use of my current 2-D art skills for game development. In order to stay current with web technologies, where many serious games have found success, it is essential for me to begin exploring the capabilities of PHP and HTML5.
Finally, it is my intention to apply to doctoral programs. Over the past year I have met many exciting designers, researchers, and teachers in the academic community, professors, post-docs, and doctoral candidates that inspire me to move forward on this path. Through coursework and conference attendance I have come to the conclusion that the academy, despite its demands, is a place where I can holistically add value to a program. However, I also recognize, that the type of design-based research that interests me is relatively novel in the academic world, and have carefully constructed a list institutions that can 1) provide a foundation in this type of research and 2) house faculty mentors and/or doctoral candidates in at least one of my three areas of research interest. My current list of potential programs includes, Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, the Learning Sciences specialization at Indiana University, the Learning Sciences specialization in the HCI Institute of Carnegie Mellon, and the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at MIT’s Media Lab. These are intensive programs, and several appropriately merge my prior experience as a teacher with my interest in serious games. To support this endeavor it will be necessary for me to begin to seek out external Fellowships.
These are ambitious goals, but in accomplishing them I will have prepared myself adequately for next steps in the field of serious game design. I look forward to the rigor of the goals I have set for myself, for as I told my middle schoolers from 2006-2008, ambition plus action equals achievement.
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