What Did You Learn in School Today?

A professor inventing his next university

To learn digital game-based learning project design and development, I needed to start a school, a digital game-based learning example that teaches people how digital mediums fit in artists’ studios. The personal e-folio shows how I study multimedia arts.

by Bill H. Ritchie, Jr.

I'm all fired up.

I play. Therefore I am learning.

I play at inventing a new university for myself, one where I can’t be fired, and I can’t be forced into early retirement by a committee, or be a fatality in some political battle in the faculty or state legislature.

In my university, all the students have to fire me before I'm gone. In fact, they don’t have to fire me, and I don’t ever have to quit. The students just beat me at my own game, that’s all, and I just lose. I walk away unharmed. And I can start all over again.

You might call my new university the “university of the future” or, with a word I made by gluing together the words university and community: the word is Communiversity. It’s the university of the future because it’s mainly a distance learning school. It’s formed with the intent to help teachers and students in the new relationships that are developing because of the digital media.

The interesting thing about this school is that it’s a school where digital games are the foundation of the work, or what used to be called the core curriculum. The expression core curriculum isn’t used much any more, since the concept of a “core” doesn’t’ fit the age of digital reproduction. Foundation, too, is a misleading term; the word root might be better.

You might wonder what I do. Actually, I often wonder the same thing, and that’s what I like about it. Let’s just say I think of an idea I haven’t found anyone else working on, one that I want to see someone working on, and I start in on my keyboard, dig into my files, databases and half-built games and see what happens.

Maybe I'm a tinkerer.

This usually leads to some surprising results. Or, equally often, I simply accomplish an improvement over what I was working awhile back; or my actions will cause a light to go on in my brain, and I make a new connection. Often I begin writing, like I used to do when I was taking notes in a lecture class. I might use my PDA, or a notebook computer.

Today, for example, I learned how to take four snapshots of my early days in video from an old computer and put them into a game I'm working on called Stamps ‘N Stories. My reward for this feat is that I’ll be able to paste the stamp in my electronic album.

I learned this is the only way a person can keep their legacy together and get it into the most popular form in society today—the CD-based or on-line computer game. Those four stamps tell a story, and in playing with the computer game, Stamps ‘N Stories, that’s what you get.

Each stamp is a window, or portal, into the memory of the artist. The artist is me in this game, and I’m going to let other people look into the past the way I saw it and the way I tell what happened.

Want to play with me?

I live in a printmaking world, and I imagine another person—or countless people—would want to play with me, or alone, because printmaking is the most interesting art form of the past two centuries. I can safely say that everyone is a print viewer, and almost all artworks come to people by way of a print.

Printmaking as an art form in its own right is really a small piece of the big picture, but printing in general is the backbone of visual communication. It’s only the backbone, however important that is, today, printing is no longer the primary means of communication as it was for the past four centuries. Visual communication is fast moving toward digital communication, and this brings with it more than meets the eye.

We aren’t expecting printing and printmaking to disappear any time soon. It’s just that people can access the visual arts (and multimedia arts, including performing arts) more rapidly and cheaply with digital media. Now, where do you think that put the visual artist who cannot, for some reason, participate in the age of digital reproduction in a direct way?

My opinion is that if an artist sets a limit on him or her self and can not, or will not, use computers, digital cameras and hypermedia, then they are turning themselves into the ghosts of a dying era. In my forty years in art, spanning three genre’s (text, TV and Hypermedia) I’ve seen it happen to people already.

I’ve seen artists’ entire legacy disappear in one decade because they relegated everything to printed images and slides only. Even artists who committed some of their assets to video and digital media didn’t maintain their “e-archives” and they are lost, too.

When print and analog video were the dominant mediums of the visual art world, surface appearance was what mattered most. Now, thanks to digital reproduction, a new form is emerging. It stands in relation to the gallery, museum and collector’s homes like the live performance and one-person show stands in relation to satellite TV and broadband.

Only by getting into the act of digital media, and playing to learn, can artists assets be part of the real world now.

Starting Your Stamps ‘N Stories Club

Join mine or start your own.

Bill H. Ritchie, Jr. is an Itinerate Professor of Art in Seattle. He taught 19 years at the UW as a professor of art, traditional printmaking and media arts. Resigning at 43 to start his own learning, research and production company, he created Emeralda in 1992, a game strategy he likens to a fantasy region accessible only by computer. He invented rules-of-play and an operating system he wants to be an online interactive game. He’s immersed himself in a virtual promised land in the age of digital reproduction.

He writes for the benefit of discipline, using a PDA when he's wandering around and a desktop PC to organize his essays. He has a thousand or more saved, which you can see listed on the ten "islands" on the Web. An example is www.seanet.com/~ritchie/eszine.html

For further information via e-mail: Ritchie@seanet.com, and see the professional Web site at www.seanet.com/~ritchie. The company’s name is Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha #105, Seattle, WA 98109. Telephone (206) 285-0658. This article’s statistics are: 1014 Words. 4755 Characters. 2 Pages. ies30624 What Did You Learn in School Today. ©2003 Bill H Ritchie, Jr.