NY1 Coverage of Our New Video Gaming Exhibition

This past weekend, as I just posted, we launched our new pop-up called Video Games: The Great Connector. This morning NY1 aired this fantastic piece covering the important role it has to play in the city.

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Video Games – The Great Connector: behind the scenes on (one of) my proudest achievements

Those who know my work over these past three decades know that my professional work contains multitudes: youth development, racial and gender equity, informal learning, digital learning, games-based learning, experience design, museum design, writing, and evidence-based decision making.

I am so grateful that my work usually addresses at least one of these interests. Sometimes, when I am lucky, my work addresses more than one. My most recent project – doing research for, building a team to create, then project leading the development of Video Games: The Great Connector – spoke to ALL of my interests, at once! What a dream project. When it launched this weekend I was struck by how much it represents so much of the work I want to do in the world, as well as HOW I want to do that work. And I couldn’t be more proud of how it all turned out.

In this post I wanted to go behind the scenes to share some of the key decisions and pivot points that brought this exhibit to life. But first, to ground it, I’ll describe the end of the story, the exhibit itself.

THE EXHIBIT

Let’s start at the end. A few minutes before we opened to the public, I took this quick video (now speed up) to narrate an overview.

If you prefer to read the overview: Video Games: The Great Connector is a new pop-up exhibit in Harlem that centers youth and their experience of games while focusing on the topic of connections and the theme of racial equity and making game design practices visible. It is running from Feb 3 – Mar 30, 2024. Timed-tickets to 90 minute sessions are free.

It’s designed in three section: Connecting with Self asks visitors: How do you use games to be who you want to be in the world? It begins by exploring game characters – both those made by game designers and ones created by players through tools provided. It maps a path towards inclusion within character building tools and a wall of characters designed by NYC teens and visitors. It asks: What choices do YOU make when creating your own avatar?

Moving from identity formation to skill building, the second half of Connecting with Self asks: What are you trying to learn through the games you play? It uses holograms, video interviews, panels, and games to explore how youth use games to develop new knowledge and skill and how all well-designed games contain good learning principles.

Connecting with self ends with asking: How do you use video games to manage your emotions? Using fridge magnets, of course, to encourage discussion. There is also a section of how youth navigate game spaces through speedrunning.

The second section, Connecting with Community, asks: How do games connect you with others and the world around you.

It features games curated by Games For Change, a game simulation of the social places we play with others, and an interactive map of NYC’s game communities. Its centerpiece game highlights how game can be designed to build social connections.

Finally, Connecting with Future asks: How can your interests lead you into a career in the gaming industry? It features games that are still unreleased, with games designers appearing weekly in the exhibit, videos featuring local game experts sharing how diverse interests from their youth led them into the field, and offers a career aptitude test that suggests a personalized pathway. Visitors are then invited to embody that role at one of many selfie stations, creating a photo at a NYC-based game collective, decorated with stickers that signal your imagined role there.

Say hi to Mile Morales from the Spiderman 2 video game and then, before you leave, take a photo with the giant switch.

FIRST PIVOT: FROM EXHIBIT TO RESEARCH

My involvement with this project began in December 2020, just a few months into the pandemic. When I was at AMNH, I worked closely with Susan Perkins, a Museum scientist, to develop board and digital games around exhibit content. When she left to become the Dean of Science at the City College of New York (CCNY), I was not surprised when she introduced me to other CCNY-affiliated people who were also interested in the power of games to engage youth.

These individuals were Stan Altman and Brian Schwartz. Together, they founded SAENY and their Harlem Gallery of Science. Associated with the CUNY system, they created projects to bring Black and Latinx youth into engineering studies within the public college system. One approach had been through creating local, pop-up exhibits. Previously, they told me, they had done one on the science of music and the science of basketball.

Now, they wanted me to know, they were ready for their next one: the science of games.

This is when the first pivot occurred. First, I helped them to understand that an in-person exhibit might not be the best model for reaching NYC school students during the height of the pandemic. Second, I helped them to understand that before taking on such a project, they should inform it with a research project that delved into the knowledge and experience of their intended audiences: NYC youth (both high school and college) and their teachers.

So, they hired me. Over the next six months I did research. Interviews. Surveys. Focus groups. I worked with Genesis Espinal, a college student at CCNY who was also a graduate of Urban Arts gaming programs, to run a youth program (over Discord), once a week for four weeks, with youth at Urban Arts.

The first line of inquiry was to understand the relationship between video and tabletop games and area high school students (West Harlem, Upper Manhattan, and the South Bronx). Games of interest include both tabletop (e.g. Chess, dominos, Uno, Yu-Gi-Oh) and digital (e.g. Fortnite, Minecraft) games.

The second line of inquiry was to understand how to connect youth interest with CCNY opportunities while advancing CCNY’s ability to leverage gaming opportunities. These could be seen as two sides of the same coin – what youth need to gravitate towards CCNY and what CCNY needs to have in place to keep them there once they arrive.

The third line of inquiry was to advance game-related programming at the Harlem Gallery of Science.

In the end, the frame had been shifted: from engineering to all academic topics, and from what games could do for youth (inspire them to go to college) to what youth actively do with games (shaping their identity and advancing towards career goals).

SECOND PIVOT: FROM RESEARCH TO GAMING PATHWAY

What also shifted was the next step: from an exhibit on games to a new pathway for NYC’s Black and Latinx youth to enter the gaming industry through a new partnership between high school programs (organized by Urban Arts), CUNY schools (centered at CCNY), and NYC’s AAA and indie gaming developers. Millions of dollars came in to fund Gaming Pathways, a new public option for a career in gaming. I stayed involved in multiple ways, such as producing monthly events and developing the communications strategy.

THIRD PIVOT: FROM PATHWAYS TO EXHIBIT

Fast forward to December 2022, two years after I first got involved with Harlem Gallery of Science. The Gaming Pathways was up and running. Schools had returned to making in-person field trips. Maybe it was time to revisit the idea of an exhibit on games.

I put my hat in the ring and asked to build a team to take on this modest but audacious project. Game on!

As a raised-upper middle class, cis-gender male, white Jew, I knew I did not want to lead a project in Harlem, for Black and Latinx teens, about their relationship with video games, if I could not do it with a diverse team that was skilled, talented, and could understand in ways I never could the needs and perspective of our audience and the exhibit topic.

The first person I reached out to was Nick Martinez, whom I worked with for six years at AMNH. Professionally, he ran the youth mentorship programs at the Museum in which high school and college students interacted with the public; that regular and deep connection with today’s teens was invaluable. We had also worked together on many projects so I knew he could both keep up with my crazy ideas and unexpected iterations while not hesitating to share his own ideas and let me know when mine were off. And personally, he loves video games. Together we would build the rest of the team.

I had volunteered as a reviewer at the annual showcase for the students in the Fashion Institute of Technology’s museum design program, where I learned about Marlyka Williams. Impressed by her work, we invited her to join the team. Nick knew of an exhibit designer, and he came on board to lead the design team, with Lyka’s support. Finally, Ashlyn Sparrow is the Senior Research Associate at the Weston Game Lab at University of Chicago. I had invited her to present with me at conferences – showing how her work with teens and ours in NYC through Gaming Pathways provided models for universities to engage local youth with games. At first she came on as a special advisor, but there was no holding her back. Before long she joined Nick and I as the third curator.

Once the team was organized, we needed a process. There was only enough funding to produce an interpretive plan along with assets for promoting it to raise the closing funds. We decided to created visitor personas, do comp research (analyzing all relevant game exhibits over the past few decades), and create three advisories to guide our ideations. One was composed of local high school students, one of local community leaders, and one of local gaming experts (in game design, academic gaming programs, and such).

In March of 2023, with the team and plan in place, we had six months to develop the interpretive plan.

Ashlyn, Nick, Me, and Lyka on opening night

FOURTH PIVOT: FOCUSING THE EXHIBIT

Working on our personas and video game exhibit comps, we developed many ideas. Working with the three advisories, we refined those ideas.

Together we developed exhibit goals and design values. When it came to topics, four themes emerged:

  • How games are used by players to form a wide array of connections (which we called The Great Connector; remarkably, the term stuck and became the name of the exhibit, requiring no further revisions).
  • Making visible the invisible design of video games
  • Gaming culture and identity formation was another topic, as was social advocacy through game design.

Ultimately, among the four, what interested the teen advisors the most was the topic of connections, with the theme of invisible design and racial equity threaded throughout. The two adult advisories decided to follow the lead of the youth, helped us to refine the idea and bring in new resources, and we were off and running.

We split the exhibit into its three sections (three types of connections), ideated museum experiences that would be compelling to youth, and, in the end, delivered an interpretive plan that excited the Harlem Gallery of Science.

During all this time we found a great host for the exhibit, The Harlem School of the Arts. Founded in 1964, this historic institution was both a fantastic location (blocks away from the CCNY campus and an express subway station) and the perfect institution (an after school arts organization interested in expanding into game design). A contract was signed with a February 3rd opening date.

The clock was ticking.

Now all they had to happen was for the Harlem Gallery of Science to raise the funds, and with enough time left for us to still build it.

FIFTH PIVOT: BUILD IT

Within a week of delivering the interpretative plan, the funds were in! We now had around 20 weeks to get from concept documents to fully realized, installed, and staffed exhibit. This period was full of many small pivots as ideas hit reality. The reality of budget – could we afford it? The realities of time – could we produce, or get a signed agreement, or develop that relationship in time? The realities of physics – could this idea actually fit in the space and still function? And the realities of iterative design – how many iterations can we run through before landing on a satisfying solution for each design challenge?

We had to get image permission from game fan artists and gaming museums, collect images from NYC youth, engage partners to curate and design sections, collect games and art assets from partnering designers, produce original interviews and edit them into exhibit videos (with HGS’ Brenna Robinson), and develop branding guidelines completed with logo and typeface designs. Throughout it all, we had to keep the client engaged, informed, and incorporate their feedback. We used Asana to coordinate 13 different workstreams as we moved fast and cheap.

Ash, Nick, and I each brought in different existing connections and networks that, together, defined the topography of the exhibit. Nick, for example, had the connection that led us to our host, The Harlem School of the Arts; Ash’s own work became the basis of the Player Characters: Behind the Design exhibit. I will leave it to them, should they choose, to share more about their own personal archeology. What follows is a map of how my personal history was translated into the exhibit (to make visible this often invisible aspect of exhibit design). Here are a few examples:

  • Linguistic James Paul Gee revolutionized contemporary gaming studies. He is both a mentor and a friend. His work has been instrumental in my understanding of the potential of video games for social impact and learning for nearly two decades. It was an honor to get to bring his theories into the exhibit in the How Good Games Teach section.
  • Gee inspired the GEE! Awards, run by my good friend David Gagnon to bring attention to Gee’s theories. Twice I have been a judge for their annual competition (and once reviewed a collection with Nick Martinez) so it was great to work with the Awards to identify past winners and contenders to include in our new exhibit, using it to put attention on these fantastic examples of good learning embedded within good game design.
  • Many of the prompts in the exhibit, and their related activities, come directly from the educational experiences developed for and with our youth advisory at Urban Arts in the spring of 2021. How do you use games to be who you want to be in the world? How do you use video games to manage your emotions? This approach of centering youth (not “What do game do to you?” but rather “What do you do with games?”) first began there, eventually becoming the voice of the exhibit. The wording itself of these prompts was iterated from interview to interview in 2021 until we got it right — and then reused within the exhibit. Many of the exhibit activities – like the fridge magnets and avatar drawings – grew from the type of learning experiences we designed with and for that 2021 youth advisory that I led with Genesis.
  • Games For Change drew from its own Awards to curate one section of the exhibit. I co-founded G4C twenty years ago (and won the first one in 2006). ‘Nuff said.
  • We developed the idea of the Unreleased Games Arcade last year (we being Nick Fortugno, Meredith Summs, and myself) as part of my work developing events within Gaming Pathways. It was a two-hour festival of unreleased games where high school students played and provided feedback to local game designers. Nick, Ashlyn and I were excited to explore how to bring that to the exhibit itself – not just the games but the designers as well. Ashlyn led this part, along with HGS’ Masaya Heywood, recruiting local designers whose work will move through the exhibit, one week at a time, with new game designers on site every Saturday to connect with and mentor the visitors.
  • We knew we wanted to teach visitors about the skills needed to enter specific areas of the gaming industry, but we lacked a model. At the Games For Change Festival last year a presenter from Canada shared an interactive model that looked perfect. I contacted him and he told me the name of the academics who developed it in Finland. I contacted them and they said it’s in an open sourced tool (Kumo) and we could do what we wanted with it. We then worked with two graduate students at CCNY (Cecilia Gamo and Suchi Sherpa – both in the Master’s in Branding + Integrated Communications program) to give them an opportunity to adapt that for the exhibit. Working under Ashlyn, they pivoted from KUMO to Typeform, themed it around a kitchen with recipes, and created the current exhibit. To refine the skill tree for our needs, we worked with the leads of gaming studies at both Hostos community college and CCNY to ensure the academic recommendations we’d present to visitors could be achieved through public colleges in NYC.
  • For the Game Dev Cosplay selfie station we were never satisfied with the image of the game design studio we intended to hang as a backdrop on the wall. Within just a few days, I was able to reach out to Yiyi Zhang of GUMBO, a game design collective in Brooklyn, who went out of her way to take new photos that ended up fitting perfectly into the exhibit.

When I now look around the room, as a result, I see not only beautifully designed experiences but the vast social web connecting people and organizations that made it all possible (in such a short time, and on a modest budget).

Launch

We opened the exhibit on a Friday night, February 2nd, with an opening reception. Attendees heard from the podium about the importance of games and learning from such distinguish speakers as Pat Kaufman (Commissioner, NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment), Mark Levine (Manhattan Borough President), Provost Tony Liss (City College of New York), and Michael Flanigan (Senior Associate, Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce). Sylvia Aguinaga also spoke, a game designer whose work is featured in the exhibit, having flown in from Los Angeles. Other people came in from Chicago, and Seattle, and Detroit, and Pittsburgh, determined not to miss the opening.  

In the weeks prior, we had frantically worked to both install the exhibit in time (with the heroic and skilled efforts of sadrud-Din shah) but also respond to the expected unexpected last minute challenges (a key team member getting sick a week before launch, installed panels crashing to the floor damaged hours before the opening, etc.)

When the speeches concluded, the guests filtered into the exhibit. The day prior, the exhibit still not fully installed, we welcomed around 3 dozen high school students to experience the space and provide feedback. It was our last chance before opening to get direct feedback from our primary audience about what was – and was not – working. Now people with name tags holding drinks were socializing, watching videos, reading panels, taking selfies, and playing games.

Thirty minutes passed the designated closing time we had to kick everyone out. The docents (CUNY college students) who we trained the day before to manage the exhibit, for their first time, turned off the exhibit and prepared it for the public opening the next day. Throughout I was holding the remote that controls the three overhead projectors sending games to the three center screens. At the end of the night, before we turned off the lights, I handed that remote over to Matthew Lopez from HGS who is part of their team overseeing the docents.

“This is a baton,” I said. “I am passing it on to you.”

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Virtual Visits to the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum Now Live

Old illustration called Lover of Soda Water

Wish you could visit the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum from the comfort of your own home?

Thanks to an amazing group of graduate student interns, now you can.

The best way to experience the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum is in person. But the new Virtual Seltzer Museum will give you a sense of the many delights that greet our visitors. In fact, just for you, we may even include some extra special online-exclusives.

Visit and find timelines that go back 2,400 years, of both seltzer history and of seltzer in NYC. You’ll explore the industrial process of turning municipal tap water into high quality seltzer. You’ll manipulate 3D models of century-old machines (still in use in the factory) and tackle visual puzzles that test both skills and knowledge. You’ll read seltzer stories left by former visitors (to the Museum and this site)… and might even be inspired to leave your own.

So get yourself a tall glass of seltzer, welcome to the Virtual Brooklyn Seltzer Museum, and begin your self-guided tour. (Please exit through the gift shop).

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Back in the Classroom (NYU)

Last year you might recall how thrilled I was to start teaching as an adjunct professor at NYU, in their Educational Communication and Technology department’s Learning Technology and Experience Design program (formerly known as DMDL). Drawing inspiration from my new new book on digital design in museums, I have inherited a course from Leonard Majzlin, who first taught it 30 years age. The course is called Media for Museums and Public Spaces (and it might now, under me, be called Lean UX in Museums).

This week I started the course for the SECOND time, with a wholly new set of students. And following the process I teach in the course, this is also a fully new iteration of the materials – for example, last year I only got through 1/2 of the content I had planned for the first session. This time, I made it through 75% of the way (maybe next year’s iteration can get us to 100%…).

Last year all of my 14 session had to be developed in advance. I was trying out new systems – for communicating with students, for how grades would be determined, for how we might manage field trips. And I was trying out new activities and projects, unsure which would work better than others. And I was, frankly, unsure how it would feel being back formerly teaching in a college (I started at Pratt in the late 90s, but that was a LONG time ago). It was exhausting but rewarding, and I collected feedback all along the way.

Going in to the first course this week I was so much more relaxed. I could focus instead on the new students, and getting to know them and their needs, as well as nurturing the new emerging group dynamic so all could feel a part of the class. It was more fun for me, which meant I could connect with them more and be flexible on the fly with the curriculum (note above’s untouched 25%).

It was also great to “collect data” on pieces I have now done TWICE, such as the 10-minute bit of immersive theater where I turn into a guide at a future museum that has recreated NYU for them to visit. (Turns out the building – the old MTA center at 370 Jay Street – is where all the city’s money trains once went to empty their chests of nickel treasures!). This activity is all about looking at the performative aspects of museums. Not how museums use performance but how museums are themselves a performance – and to help students learn to identify those elements and consider what happens when those techniques are used in other settings (like in a store) to summon “museum” experiences in their spaces.

Here are some photos from it below:

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The CUNY Games Conference 10.0

This week I was excited to be part of The CUNY Games Conference 10.0.

The CUNY Games Network is an organization dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in the developing field of games-based learning. They connect educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY and beyond who are interested in digital and non-digital games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching and inquiry-based learning.

We had a LOT going on at this, their 10th anniversary.

Nick Martinez and I spoke about the soon-to-be launched exhbit – Video Games: The Great Connector. We emphasized how it was commissioned by The Harlem Gallery of Science as part of their efforts to inspire Black and Latinx youth to pursue a career path through the City College of New York. We also spoke about the many CUNY faculty and students who contributed to its design. The deck is below:

Then I gave a talk about how and why I created the card game Uncannny Valley, as an educational tool to develop AI visual literacy. I prefer to address this in person, so people can play with the cards themselves, but I still made sure to provide playful ways – over Zoom – to engaged with the topic of using games to address controversial topics.

Finally, Nick Fortugno gave a talk about the academic-side of the Gaming Pathways program at CCNY, which is building towards the first B.A. in game design in the CUNY system. These three talks were all part of the Day One online sessions; Day Two was in person, where Robert Duarte ran a table to share information about the Pathways within the community.

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2023: A Year At Work and Play

Barry in a cardboard siphon cut out

Mark Twain once said: “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” Twain, clearly, never worked with me! My favorite part of running my own consultancy is choosing who I work with, and on what, and where we can make it as playful as possible.

I was going to write this last spring, to share with you some of the cool things I get to do running my own consultancy. But then I did more things so I put it off. And then it was summer, when I did even more things. And the list got bigger. Then it was fall. You get the idea.

Now it’s the end of the year, and I just have SO MUCH to tell you about, so much to be proud of from the past year, so many people I am grateful to have gotten to work with. So hang on tight and join me for the ride!

A is for A.I.

Lots of contestants on a stage
  • In March I ran two sessions at the Jewish Education Project’s 2023 Jewish Future’s Conference. Picture me at the plenary, in front of 150 educators, running an A.I.-themed game show, with contestants armed with ChatGPT and Midjourney. It was awesome. That was followed by the A.I. Arcade, providing hands-on opportunities for attendees to play with these powerful and dangerous new tools and shape what they mean for the future of learning. This was the beginning of a year of workshops and presentations on the topic.

  • Events included work for OLAM (a network of Jewish and Israeli organizations working in the fields of global volunteering, international development, and humanitarian aid), Temple Beth Sholom (preparing Jewish educators for the coming AI onslaught in their classrooms), keynoting New York University’s EdTech unconference, and then into New Jersey to the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy (to both lead AI workshops and to close out their day of professional development for hundreds of educators with another game show “The AI is (not always) Right”).

  • I wrote a well received piece – Shall We Play A Game? How to Teach the Basics of Generative AI – on what I have learned so far.

A is (also) for AMLE

Barry and Maddy at the booth
  • I had a great time working with the National History Museum of Utah at the AMLE conference in Maryland, promoting their free classroom resource, Research Quest, to middle school educators.

B is for the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum

Boys spraying seltzer
  • Yeah, so this year I opened a museum. My own museum. Working with Alex Gomberg, the proprietor of the Brooklyn Seltzer Boys, we had a soft opening in spring and a hard launch this fall. We worked with graduate students at Teachers College and NYU to design it and I couldn’t be more proud.

  • Visit our web site here.

  • I designed the logo!

  • We received amazing press coverage, including this cover piece in the New York Times and this local TV coverage on NY1. And we ended up the year with this great piece in the Jewish Week.

B is (also) for the Borscht Belt Museum

  • Last year I lead the strategic planning process for the Catskills Borscht Belt Museum. They received great coverage last spring in the New York Times when it announced its opening plans.

F is for Friday is Tomorrow

Cover to Friday is Tomorrow

F is (also) for 50 Years of Text Games

  • I like to promote the work of others here that have impacted me in the past year. This book – THIS BOOK – is one of the best, if not the best, works I’ve ever read delving deep into a game genre to understand it from the inside out. 50 years of text-based games, 50 case studies, stringing together disparate elements of my 50+ years into a coherent whole. And the games are STILL available to play. Since reading the book I have dove deep – into Fallen London, Hitchhikers Guide, Kinds of Dragon Pass, and so many more.

  • And maybe I’ll be announcing one day I’m writing my own…

G is For Games For Change

  • This year was the 20th anniversary of the Games For Change Festival, which I co-founded 20 years ago.

  • Before it started I wrote a blog post looking back 20 years, on the fourth day of the Festival this year I posted about how exhausted/elated I felt, and afterwards I posted video links to my two presentations (one being a lightening talk reflecting on our failures and the second an amazing panel of the original founders).

PANEL | Founders Reflection: Barry Daniel Joseph Benjamin Stokes Suzanne Seggerman Nicholas Fortungo Gaming Pathways at 2023 Games For Change Festival

M is for MuseWeb

Me, Tim and Maddy
  • It was great to finally get to return to MuseWeb, after all of the pandemic-era disruptions. MuseWeb is the very conference where I first spoke about my project Crime Scene Neanderthal, which unexpectedly led to my new book (See N is for New Book).

  • So how cool is it that I now got to return to lead a half-day workshop to teach museum professionals the digital design skills I explore in the book? MuseWeb is also my FAVORITE museum-related conference.

  • I also co-lead How to Develop a Data-driven Strategy with my colleagues from both the Natural History Museum of Utah & Mutually Human. Fun for all!

N is for NEW BOOK launch

Barry and Eric
  • Making Dinosaurs Dance: A Toolkit for Digital Design in Museums came out this past spring. It is both behind the scene stories on what it’s like to work at an institution like the American Museum of Natural History and it’s a framework for leading one’s own digital design work.

  • My book launch party at NYU blew my mind. Everyone who helped pull it together or attended was just so generous. You can watch the video below.

  • Over the year I gave presentations to the NYC Hive at the New York Historical Society and at Teachers College.

  • You can buy your own copy (digital and analog) from Amazon; if you do please give me a high rating and a comment! However, the more economical option is to buy a copy directly from my publisher, Rowman.com, and use my super secret code (“RLFANDF30“) to get 30% off. (or, if you write me, I’d be happy to send you a pdf for free.).

  • You can read the origin story of the book at this American Alliance of Museum’s Blog Post on the book.

Making Dinosaurs Dance Book Launch Party NYU April 2023

O is for Old Morris Cave

Barry and Eric

P is for PBS KIDS

Barry at PBS KIDS
This year I’ve been privileged to work with PBS KIDS, along side my remarkable collaborators at Knology.

R is also for Random

  • So how is this for random? On the many topics I’ve been interviewed by reporters, this one ended being on the history of Dr. Browns soda!

S is for Stephen Sondheim

Barry presenting games from the Sondheim book
  • This is the year I landed a publisher for my latest book: Matching Minds with Sondheim: The Games and Puzzles of the Broadway Legend. Coming summer 2025.

  • It is such a privileged to work on this book. To date, I have spoken with 64 subjects for my book, 45 of those through interviews which have totaled 32.5 hours. In addition I have worked with 36 people from research centers around the world (like the Library of Congress and Yale) as well as organizations and individuals with access to unique Sondheim-related content. I have also worked with the assistants to nine celebrities who worked with Sondheim to gather reflections and puzzle-related artifacts, as well as eight authors and journalist who have written about Stephen Sondheim (including David Benedict).

  • With the research behind me, this fall I dove into writing the book, whose manuscript is more than half way complete.

  • This fall I started doing presentations on the book, to work the material with an audience. It kills every time! I can’t wait to take THIS show on the road.

  • I have almost 400 followers already on the Instagram account. Will you be the next one?

S is (also) for SeltzertopiaLive!

Barry presenting games from the Sondheim book
  • I had a blast this year spreading the joy of seltzer to communities around the Northeast. Below is a good video from one of them.

  • When my book launched in Oct 2018, I figured after two years people would have heard enough of seltzer. I feel very fortunate that now, in its sixth year, the book tour continues!

SeltzertopiaLive! - September 2023 - United Federation of Teachers Day at the University

T is for Teen Second Life

  • Do you remember Second Life? Did you ever hear of Teen Second Life? A documentary was posted this year on YouTube; in it an adult who was a teen in Global Kids’ summer camp in Teen Second Life talks about his experience and then – boom – there I appear in some archival footage. How fun!

Made in Second Life: The Movie

U is for Unreleased Games Arcade

Barry presenting games from the Sondheim book
  • One of my projects all year has been producing events for Gaming Pathways, centered at the City College of New York, that bring together high school students, college students, and the gaming industry. One of the best was the Unreleased Games Arcade.

  • Watch the video we produced, and view photos and more, here.

U is (also) for Uncannny Valley

People playing the card game
  • Over the year I have been designing a card game to welcome our future A.I. overlords (cue nervous laughter). It is a beautiful deck and aims to help players develop visual literacy about the ways generative AIs create graphic images, understand how they view the world around us, and highlight the uncanny valley that can emerge in the gap between what is real and what they represent as real.

  • I have presented it to educators on many occasions and its been very rewarding to see them take to it.

  • You can sign up here to receive a copy for playtesting.

  • You can follow the project on Instagram.

A strange image

V is for Video Game: The Great Connector

Barry with colleagues
  • I am excited to end this year in review announcing that tickets are available – for free – for the pop-up exhibit I am curating, for the Harlem Gallery of Science, that will be housed at the Harlem School of the Arts.

  • Video Games: The Great Connector is designed to inspire Black and Latinx youth (and the adults in their lives) to explore the academic and career opportunities found within NYC’s digital gaming community.

  • After reviewing other exhibits – in NYC and around the world – I’m fairly confident we’ll be offering something never before seen: an exhibit about video games that centers the youth experience and foregrounds racial equity throughout.

  • It is one of the most exciting projects I have worked on all year (with the amazing team pictured above) and I can’t wait for it to open February 4th.

  • Get your tickets today!

  • Thanks to all the people who helped me get through the year – all my clients, colleagues, family, and friends. I wish you all the best going into 2024.

Barry giving a faux tour to NYU graduate students

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Amazing Video From NYU on Brooklyn Seltzer Museum

As you might know, I recently founded the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum with Alex Gomberg and his family. We developed many of the exhibits with graduate students from New York University and Columbia University Teachers College. Below is a fantastic video that was just released by NYU promoting the space and our collaboration with their students. Check it out!

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Preaching the Gospel of Games For Change

For twenty years, as one of its co-founders, I have been preaching the gospel of Games For Change.

But what, exactly, is that gospel?

At the recent 20th Anniversary of Games For Change, I was given the opportunity to clarify. I was invited to reflect back on the first two decades of Games For Change, reflect on mistakes made, and keep it to under 3 minutes! Of course, I loved the challenge.

I had a blast but realized, to my horror, that while I had carefully timed it to fit into 180 seconds I had not accounted for pauses to wait for the audience applause or laughter. Whoops! So you can read what I meant to say below then watch to hear how I cut off the end to land my final point in the video that follows.

This afternoon I come before you to preach the gospel of games for change.

Can I get an all right? All right.

In the beginning our gospel was limited. And often used against us.

We wanted to highlight small games addressing social issues that made the world a better place through people playing them.

The media looked at us and said: Come again? Let’s put attention on these few, good games, while we continue to make people afraid of the vast ocean of bad ones.

We never meant to walk into a binary, but we soon learned how false that idea is.

We learned from James Paul Gee all games have the potential to model good learning. We learned from Bernie de Koven, may his memory be a blessing, that all play has the potential to form a community actively building a world that reflects their values.

And at the tenth G4C I noted a trend. The CHANGE in Games For Change no longer came just from a game being played. It was also about how it was created and by whom.  We began to speak more regularly about students in school, or Indigenous communities, for example, creating game companies to tell their ancestral stories.

So what today is the gospel of G4C? And who is it for?

Twenty years ago I co-founded games for change. Last year I co-founded Gaming Pathways, working with an amazing group of partners to launch a new way for Black and Latinx high school students to enter the NYC gaming industry through the public college system. Our upcoming video game exhibit, opening next year at the Harlem School of the Arts, has a youth advisory. When we asked them what games they play associated with the theme of social justice, I was blown away.

The action role-playing games Dark Souls II. The big budget Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The Games for Change darling, Paper’s Please.

Twenty years ago we could hardly find enough games to fill our first panel; today youth can find Games For Change…  everywhere.

Some Shabbats I go to temple. When I do I am with a community that together is not pointing out who among us is good and who is bad. Rather it is a collective process that calls us all to our better angels. It’s a reset. It’s a time to check in with our values and expect more from ourselves.

That I suggest is the current gospel of G4C.  That we all need a time and place like this, right here, right now, to come together and look at our intentions when we make games, to look at who is making games, and under what conditions, to hold the gaming community accountable, to itself, to the world, and to the players yet to come.

Can I get an amen.

Thank you.

Also, as part of the anniversary, I also participated in this remarkable panel with my fellow co-founders, Suzanne Seggerman and Benjamin Stokes, facilitated by Nick Fortugno. We had so much fun reconnecting, revisiting what in the world led us to create Games For Change, and sharing lessons learned along the way and hopes for the future. It’s a good watch! Check it out below:

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Teaser for Video Game Exhibit in Harlem: The Great Connector

How do youth use games to form connections with themselves, their communities, and their future?

This is the topic of a new video game exhibit I am co-curating which will open in winter of 2024 at the Harlem School of the Arts. Driven by the Harlem Gallery of Science (and funded by many to be thanked at a later date), this project is part of Gaming Pathways, the new option for a public pathway for a career in NYC’s gaming industry.

Since March, I have been part of an amazing team (most in the photo below), bringing together extensive expertise in museum design, experience design, youth development, and video games. (Not shown is Ashlyn Sparrow, of the Weston Game Lab at the University of Chicago)

Four people infront of the Harlem School of the Arts
From left: Mariano Desmaras, Marlyka Williams, Nick Martinez, and myself

We have worked with three separate advisory groups – area high school youth, community leaders, and game experts. Over time it became clear that the topic of CONNECTIONS, and how video games are a tool youth use to forge them, was a powerful way for us to tell a story we feel needs to be told: how youth use games to shape their lives.

Below is a teaser of what’s to come.

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Shall We Play A Game? How to Teach the Basics of Generative AI

Shall we play a game?

Okay, I’ll start. “Peanut butter and…”?

What came to mind? Did you think “Jelly”?

Well, that’s right! That’s the answer. But… I never told you the rules. 

I guess you could tell you were supposed to fill in the blank, guessing not just A new word but the most LIKELY next word. 

Also, did you only guess one word or did you keep going, such as “Peanut butter and jelly is a great sandwich to have on a picnic”? I suspect not. 

So you also knew to fill in the blank with not just a string of words but one word. 

Let’s go another round. 

Ready?

“Happy birthday to….”

Did you guess “you”?

You did it again – you filled in the next, most likely single world. 

Ah, but what if I told you we were at an event for Sharon. And it was her birthday. 

Round 3: “Happy birthday to….”

Did you guess “Sharon”? 

My question didn’t change, but your answer did. What’s different this time? The context. Without me telling you, you changed the rule from the most likely single word to the most likely word IN CONTEXT. 

And those three rules, in a generalized way, is how emergent AIs like ChatGPT work: guess the next single word, in context. The tools can produce so many remarkably complex things, things that seem more powerful than just these simple rules, but in the end that’s all it comes down to. 

So at it’s core, understanding emergent AIs can be as easy as one, two…

(Did you guess “three”? That is: ). The next 2) single word 3) in context)

For almost three decades, I have taken personal and professional pleasure in taking deep dives into the latest disruptive technology and exploring its pro-social and educational potential. Web design (1995), online discussions (1998), video games (2002), virtual worlds (2005), XR (2016), and more. 

While emergent AI is just my latest, it caught me by surprise and is moving at a speed unlike anything I have ever experienced before. 

Last November I threw myself into exploring the tools, not just for producing text, but also images, video and audio. Last December I wrote about the experience after my first few weeks (Can generating art through AI still make me an artist if ordering food on GrubHub doesn’t make me a chef?) In it, I shared how I came to realize AI is not a competitor but a collaborator, not for exploring the realm of what is real (epistemology) but exploring what might be (aesthetics).  

Since then I have integrated it into every aspect of my personal and professional life. I am using it to design a card game, Uncannny Valley, designed to teach how to view the world as an AI. I use it to write legal documents, and my kids’ camp emails, and make sense of obfuscating medical instructions.

What led me to write this particular post, which I wanted to do for a few months, was that it has led me to get in front of groups of educators and non-profit professionals to help them understand this latest disruption to their classrooms and projects. 

As I write this mid-summer, I have already delivered or booked four different events which by the end of this year will have brought me before 1,000 people. I never expected to become the expert they are looking for, but, well, here I am. 

What I hope to do below is share HOW I am approaching the topic, in case it is of interest or use to others. 

The three things that have proven most effective have been:

  1. AI Game Shows
  2. AI Arcades
  3. AI Roleplay

AI Games Shows

Many in my audience are scared. Their concerns are existential. AIs will replace them, or change their classrooms or workplace in ways more profound that COVID-19. 

In that context, a lecture – no matter how engaging – is a non-starter. Instead, I turn the mood around. I start with an over-the-top, dramatic game show, music blasting as I enter the stage. Working with my partners we then put on a 45-60 minute show that delves deep into what generative AIs are, and what role educators can have in shaping their future role in society… but we have a lot of fun along the way. 

There are three key sections. The first section is a game played with the audience, sharing a computer up on a screen. It is called CONTEXTO. It is simple: guess the word. As you guess words, you learn how close your guess is to the secret word of the day. With each guess you try to guess closer and closer until you figure it out. The neat trick here is the logic behind those relationships; you do better if your guess is more likely to appear with the secret word (within news articles, the basis for this one particular AI model). That essentially is how large language models work within emergent AIs. As we guess correct words closer and closer to the secret word, we start to see patterns. We ascribe meaning to our correct guesses. But this is false; the AI doesn’t understand why the connections exist between these words; it just knows that these connections exist, and that, it turns out, is enough. So this activity is a great way to playfully teach how AIs view the world. 

The first section is also secretly the game show recruitment phase; all participants who suggest words are invited to join a team. In the second phase, those teams are introduced to the audience. Like in an improv show, the audience is then invited to provide some prompts (ideally related to the topic of the gathering), in categories like character, settings, genre, and challenge. Then each team has a few minutes to rapidly write a story with chatGPT, as a creative collaborator, and share it; the audience then votes while guessing which prompts were selected. 

After each phase, teams get points. In the final round, with double points, each team takes one sentence from their story and generates a related image in Midjourney, to accompany their story. While all these stories are being written and images being generated, my and my co-host banter and highlight key aspects of the opportunities and challenges (ethical and otherwise) of working with generative AI. 

A small trophy is given to the winning team but everyone goes home happy… and a little more informed about how generative AIs work and the role we can all play to advocate for a pro-social outcome. 

AI Arcades

While the game shows are designed for an audience, AI Arcades are designed to maximize crowds and hands-on engagement. The first one I did set out 8 stations – some at tables, some at high boys for those standing. Each one had a guide and a different form of generative AI to play with. The idea here is that until you get past that first hurdle, you’ll never get over the fear of the unknown and start to have agency around your relationship with the tools and the impact they are having. In March we focused on:

  • ChatGPT (text generation)
  • Midjourney (image generation)
  • Lensa (personal avatar generation)
  • Parodist (celebrity voice/video generation)
  • Character.ai (chat bot generation)
  • Alexa (voice chat)
  • Otter.ai (AI-driven audio transcription) 
  • Uncannny Valley (my card game to welcome our future AI overlords!)

(On the first time I did this, I read the news on the way into the session: Character.ai had just been given a valuation of $1B).

AI Roleplay

The third approach I’ve been offering is for the more serious-minded. This maximizes hands-on, but focuses on the immediately practical applications of these tools. 

Everyone gets assigned to a team, representing a department within a company. Our company then sets out a new mission, such as to launch a new fundraising campaign. Each team then uses a different tool to collaborate with AIs to produce their piece of the project. One group writes a press release. Another creates a social media campaign. Another produces image assets for the first two to use. And so on.

At the end of the session, each “department” shows off their piece of the project and then, breaking roles, we explore the advantages and challenges of using generative AIs to super-power our work. 

Unlike with other consulting, this space is changing so fast, not just technologically but socially. There is much more concern this summer than in spring that generative AIs are built on unpaid labor. It is informing nation-wide strikes and lawsuits. And whether or not people are more informed, they are certainly more aware. 

Take for example this webinar that was canceled today. I am a member of the Author’s Guild. This summer over ten thousand members signed a petition that essentially says, “You can’t steal our jobs.” Next week was a webinar called “How to Use AI Writing Programs to Your Benefit” that they offered in response to members interest in the use of AI applications in their writing profession. In advance, registrants submitted hundreds of questions, and so far outside the scope of the Webinar they decided to scrap it and redesign it as a series later this fall, which will “allow for discussion and questions around the more nuanced elements of AI use.” 

That’s all well and good. But what I’ve learned, given the current rate of change, they might as well offer it now. Because whatever they plan to do in a few months is going to likely be outdated by the time it is offered. 

Luckily, I am comfortable with a high rate of change. 

All photos from the Jewish Education Project
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