‘Vanlife’ is a term utilised on social media sites, including YouTube, to denote images and video... more ‘Vanlife’ is a term utilised on social media sites, including YouTube, to denote images and videos that represent a lifestyle centred around long-distance travel using converted vans. The Vanlife phenomenon demonstrates the potential for networked culture and storytelling to combine to create emergent spaces, fostered not only by individual digital media objects but also the connected digital networks they occupy. In this article I ask how digital media practices are used by Vanlife travellers in order to construct such emergent spaces, and what the characteristics of these spaces might be. This investigation has a particular focus on the capacity for the creative practices used to tell visual stories online to combine representations of ‘real world’ experiences and environments, with the individual and communal desires, rhetoric and, at times, fictions, of the burgeoning Vanlife alternative lifestyle. Taking a netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2002), and guided by Henri Lefebvre’s trialectic model of space (1974), I conduct analysis of a set of Vanlife YouTube videos and explore the construction of different layers of spatiality as well as the productive tensions that arise between these. As Vanlifers undertake and document their freewheeling travels, their production of spaces serves to establish the unending road trip as a viable alternative lifestyle. Vanlife videos also work to formulate new cultural and aesthetic dimensions for the areas their creators explore, destabilising and redefining the meanings of the spaces, experiences and communities its travellers encounter. Equally, the idealised spaces of Vanlife are themselves disrupted by jarring intrusions from the external world and its everyday problems, a tension that further illustrates the continually negotiable nature of spatial meanings and highlights the role digital media might play in accentuating and accelerating this fluidity.
Higher education's rapid shift to online teaching during the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVI... more Higher education's rapid shift to online teaching during the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic raises questions about the suitability of conventional learning design models and the Continuous Professional Learning and Development (CPLD) approaches used to support these during times of crisis. We explore, through an autoethnographic inquiry into one institution's response to COVID-19 campus closures, the utility of the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) model of course (re)design (Dick et al., The systematic design of instruction, 6th edn. Allyn & Bacon, Boston, 2005) and crisis-specific training and support initiatives in preparing for Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) (Hodges et al., The difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. EDUCAUSE Review, 2020). We illustrate the pragmatic characteristics of learning design in such crisis-specific contexts, propose a version of ADDIE for Emergencies, and make recommendations for associated CPLD approaches to implementing this adapted version.
Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City has found new life in videogames during the three decades sin... more Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City has found new life in videogames during the three decades since its demolition, taking on unstable and sometimes contradictory forms when reimagined through virtual architecture. At stake in these acts of memory are the historical discourses surrounding everyday life in Kowloon Walled City, its uncertain political and cultural status, and ongoing postcolonial debates concerning Hong Kong identity. I analyze Kowloon's Gate, Shenmue II, and Mr Pumpkin 2: Walls of Kowloon to uncover the contestation of the city's histories through the types of spaces Michel Foucault described as heterotopic: at once real and unreal, and existent and non-existent. This analysis reveals the fluid nature of cultural memory and historical discourse in videogame spaces, as well as how virtual spatiality and the past can be used together to understand and define the present.
This article examines the relationship between players' exteroceptive senses and videogam... more This article examines the relationship between players' exteroceptive senses and videogame systems in the setting of a public game center. I address the zombie arcade game Left 4 Dead: Seizonshatachi (Neilo 2014), drawing on field observations of the game in situ and at play in the physical environs of two Taito game centers, as well as my own researcher gameplay. I discuss the spatial and sensorial context of the game's intended play experience, composed of unsettling smellscapes, variable lighting conditions, insistent noise pollution, and distraction by other customers. This play context is analysed as a space that mirrors the senses of disorder, contingency, and bodily vulnerability that lie at the heart of fictional zombie encounters. I contend that Left 4 Dead: Seizonshatachi and similar arcade experiences involving zombie texts accelerate the affective, narrative, and experiential tendencies of zombie media and intensify their impact for players.
Given the increasing demand for online learning at the tertiary level, there currently exists a n... more Given the increasing demand for online learning at the tertiary level, there currently exists a need to modify or develop instructional design (ID) models/approaches that can effectively facilitate the collaboration between learning designers and teachers, as well as to research the effectiveness of these models/approaches. Against this backdrop, adopting a design-based research approach, we tested a practical ID approach that is developed on two prior models: rapid prototyping and collaborative course development. Accordingly, a 2-week rapid development studio—an agile, intensive, iterative ID process—was arranged. Data from multiple sources were gleaned during the study to generate a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the proposed approach. Overall, results suggest that the approach is effective for developing online courses in case of a limited time frame and was positively perceived by both course instructors and learning designers. Moreover, practical tips for replicat...
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2018
With growing knowledge about the effectiveness of collaborative or team-based learning in develop... more With growing knowledge about the effectiveness of collaborative or team-based learning in developing important skill sets among students, the development of collaborative and active learning space (CALS) classrooms has gained increasing momentum in recent years. However, there currently exists a paucity of research evaluating the impact of these CALS projects, especially from the perspective of the staff within the institutions that implement them. In view of this gap, this study, using secondary data, reports an institutional evaluation of a CALS project from the teachers’ perspectives. Both quantitative and qualitative results suggest that overall, the CALS project was positively viewed by the teachers. Nonetheless, challenges were also revealed such as, classroom settings, digital infrastructure, and technical support. The findings suggest that instead of viewing digital technology as a panacea, the implementation of a CALS project should be regarded as a systematic project, whic...
'Vanlife' is a term utilised on social media sites, including YouTube, to denote images and video... more 'Vanlife' is a term utilised on social media sites, including YouTube, to denote images and videos that represent a lifestyle centred around long-distance travel using converted vans. The Vanlife phenomenon demonstrates the potential for networked culture and storytelling to combine to create emergent spaces, fostered not only by individual digital media objects but also the connected digital networks they occupy. In this article I ask how digital media practices are used by Vanlife travellers in order to construct such emergent spaces, and what the characteristics of these spaces might be. This investigation has a particular focus on the capacity for the creative practices used to tell visual stories online to combine representations of 'real world' experiences and environments, with the individual and communal desires, rhetoric and, at times, fictions, of the burgeoning Vanlife alternative lifestyle. Taking a netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2002), and guided by Henri Lefebvre's trialectic model of space (1974), I conduct analysis of a set of Vanlife YouTube videos and explore the construction of different layers of spatiality as well as the productive tensions that arise between these. As Vanlifers undertake and document their freewheeling travels, their production of spaces serves to establish the unending road trip as a viable alternative lifestyle. Vanlife videos also work to formulate new cultural and aesthetic dimensions for the areas their creators explore, destabilising and redefining the meanings of the spaces, experiences and communities its travellers encounter. Equally, the idealised spaces of Vanlife are themselves disrupted by jarring intrusions from the external world and its everyday problems, a tension that further illustrates the continually negotiable nature of spatial meanings and highlights the role digital media might play in accentuating and accelerating this fluidity.
Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City has found new life in videogames during the three decades since i... more Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City has found new life in videogames during the three decades since its demolition, taking on unstable and sometimes contradictory forms when reimagined through virtual architecture. At stake in these acts of memory are the historical discourses surrounding everyday life in Kowloon Walled City, its uncertain political and cultural status, and ongoing postcolonial debates concerning Hong Kong identity. I analyze Kowloon's Gate, Shenmue II, and Mr Pumpkin 2: Walls of Kowloon to uncover the contestation of the city's histories through the types of spaces Michel Foucault described as heterotopic: at once real and unreal, and existent and non-existent. This analysis reveals the fluid nature of cultural memory and historical discourse in videogame spaces, as well as how virtual spatiality and the past can be used together to understand and define the present.
INTRODUCTION Within videogames, as in our own everyday lives, houses and places of residence ofte... more INTRODUCTION Within videogames, as in our own everyday lives, houses and places of residence often figure centrally. Their reasons for appearing in game environments include to offer players and their avatars sites of virtual rest, regeneration of avatar attributes and resources, access to narrative content, and interaction with extraludic functions (saving and loading game states, for example). A critical difference between the virtual homes of avatars and the ‘real world’ homes players inhabit is that, typically, players have no input into the aesthetic, architectural, cultural or political substance of an ingame residential space. Rather, game designers, developers and sometimes even procedurally-generating algorithms and engines act as architects and builders of these virtual spaces, and build them to suit their own purposes rather than those of the inhabitants’.
Distinctive narrative conditions arise when “speedrunning” the zombie narrative in Valve Corporat... more Distinctive narrative conditions arise when “speedrunning” the zombie narrative in Valve Corporation’s cooperative first-person shooter games Left 4 Dead (2008) and Left 4 Dead 2 (2009). Close analyses of two live speedruns recorded at the biannual Games Done Quick charity marathon, guided by concepts from Deleuze and Guattari, explain how the player’s narrative body, space, and time are impacted by the optimizations and exploits of the Left 4 Dead series’ zombie narrative. While the zombie story preprogrammed for players is largely bypassed, speedrunning through the Left 4 Dead series’ environments is a generative act of rupture that activates and deepens storytelling tendencies within zombie media that embrace chaos and decay. The speedrun is itself a form of collapse, where scripted meaning and intentionality fall away, replaced by the chance and ephemeral story of an emergent, optimized engagement.
In this article I ask how the appearance of the monstrous within contemporary video games reflect... more In this article I ask how the appearance of the monstrous within contemporary video games reflects an era of climate change and ecological collapse, and how this could inform the engagement of players with discourse concerning climate change. Central to this inquiry is the literary practice of ecocriticism, which seeks to examine environmental rather than human representation in cultural artefacts, increasingly including accounts of contemporary ecological decay and disorder (Bulfin 144). I build on such perspectives to address play encounters that foreground figures of monstrosity borne of the escalating climate crisis, and summarise case studies of two recent video games undertaken as part of this project — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) and The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog). An ecocritical approach to the monsters that populate these case studies reveals the emergence of a ludic form of ecological monstrosity tied closely to our contemporary climatic conditions and taking two significant forms: one accentuating a visceral otherness and aberrance, and the other marked by the uncanny recognition of human authorship of climate change.
Given the increasing demand for online learning at the tertiary level, there currently exists a n... more Given the increasing demand for online learning at the tertiary level, there currently exists a need to modify or develop instructional design (ID) models/approaches that can effectively facilitate the collaboration between learning designers and teachers, as well as to research the effectiveness of these models/approaches. Against this backdrop, adopting a design-based research approach, we tested a practical ID approach that is developed on two prior models: rapid prototyping and collaborative course development. Accordingly, a 2-week rapid development studio—an agile, intensive, iterative ID process—was arranged. Data from multiple sources were gleaned during the study to generate a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the proposed approach. Overall, results suggest that the approach is effective for developing online courses in case of a limited time frame and was positively perceived by both course instructors and learning designers. Moreover, practical tips for replicating the process in other contexts are also shared. It is our hope that the study will stimulate further exploration of alternative ID models/approaches to improve online course design efficacy in other higher education institutions.
This article examines the relationship between players' exteroceptive senses and videogame system... more This article examines the relationship between players' exteroceptive senses and videogame systems in the setting of a public game center. I address the zombie arcade game Left 4 Dead: Seizonshatachi (Neilo 2014), drawing on field observations of the game in situ and at play in the physical environs of two Taito game centers, as well as my own researcher gameplay. I discuss the spatial and sensorial context of the game's intended play experience, composed of unsettling smellscapes, variable lighting conditions, insistent noise pollution, and distraction by other customers. This play context is analysed as a space that mirrors the senses of disorder, contingency, and bodily vulnerability that lie at the heart of fictional zombie encounters. I contend that Left 4 Dead: Seizonshatachi and similar arcade experiences involving zombie texts accelerate the affective, narrative, and experiential tendencies of zombie media and intensify their impact for players.
In educational settings that engage students in analysis and development of digital games and int... more In educational settings that engage students in analysis and development of digital games and interactive media, a key equity issue and pedagogical challenge is the varied levels of prior encounters and experiences with relevant digital media students bring with them. This challenge becomes more acute in contexts where cohorts have a high proportion of students from a low socioeconomic status and demands responsive and inclusive pedagogies. In this essay I provide an example of an extended teaching activity in which a small group of students with varied levels of fluency with digital media were introduced to the concept of micronarrativein digital game design. This was a hands-on activity using arts and crafts materials within which key narratological and digital media design concepts were stripped down to their core elements.
Distinctive narrative conditions arise when "speedrunning" the zombie narrative in Valve Corporat... more Distinctive narrative conditions arise when "speedrunning" the zombie narrative in Valve Corporation's cooperative first-person shooter games Left 4 Dead (2008) and Left 4 Dead 2 (2009). Close analyses of two live speedruns recorded at the biannual Games Done Quick charity marathon, guided by concepts from Deleuze and Guat-tari, explain how the player's narrative body, space, and time are impacted by the optimizations and exploits of the Left 4 Dead series' zombie narrative. While the zombie story preprogrammed for players is largely bypassed, speedrunning through the Left 4 Dead series' environments is a generative act of rupture that activates and deepens storytelling tendencies within zombie media that embrace chaos and decay. The speedrun is itself a form of collapse, where scripted meaning and intentionality fall away, replaced by the chance and ephemeral story of an emergent, optimized engagement.
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2018
With growing knowledge about the effectiveness of collaborative or team-based learning in develop... more With growing knowledge about the effectiveness of collaborative or team-based learning in developing important skill sets among students, the development of collaborative and active learning space (CALS) classrooms has gained increasing momentum in recent years. However, there currently exists a paucity of research evaluating the impact of these CALS projects, especially from the perspective of the staff within the institutions that implement them. In view of this gap, this study, using secondary data, reports an institutional evaluation of a CALS project from the teachers' perspectives. Both quantitative and qualitative results suggest that overall, the CALS project was positively viewed by the teachers. Nonetheless, challenges were also revealed such as classroom settings, digital infrastructure, and technical support. The findings suggest that instead of viewing digital technology as a panacea, the implementation of a CALS project should be regarded as a systematic project, which involves stakeholders across an educational institution, including administrative staff, teaching staff, support staff, and students.
‘Vanlife’ is a term utilised on social media sites, including YouTube, to denote images and video... more ‘Vanlife’ is a term utilised on social media sites, including YouTube, to denote images and videos that represent a lifestyle centred around long-distance travel using converted vans. The Vanlife phenomenon demonstrates the potential for networked culture and storytelling to combine to create emergent spaces, fostered not only by individual digital media objects but also the connected digital networks they occupy. In this article I ask how digital media practices are used by Vanlife travellers in order to construct such emergent spaces, and what the characteristics of these spaces might be. This investigation has a particular focus on the capacity for the creative practices used to tell visual stories online to combine representations of ‘real world’ experiences and environments, with the individual and communal desires, rhetoric and, at times, fictions, of the burgeoning Vanlife alternative lifestyle. Taking a netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2002), and guided by Henri Lefebvre’s trialectic model of space (1974), I conduct analysis of a set of Vanlife YouTube videos and explore the construction of different layers of spatiality as well as the productive tensions that arise between these. As Vanlifers undertake and document their freewheeling travels, their production of spaces serves to establish the unending road trip as a viable alternative lifestyle. Vanlife videos also work to formulate new cultural and aesthetic dimensions for the areas their creators explore, destabilising and redefining the meanings of the spaces, experiences and communities its travellers encounter. Equally, the idealised spaces of Vanlife are themselves disrupted by jarring intrusions from the external world and its everyday problems, a tension that further illustrates the continually negotiable nature of spatial meanings and highlights the role digital media might play in accentuating and accelerating this fluidity.
Higher education's rapid shift to online teaching during the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVI... more Higher education's rapid shift to online teaching during the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic raises questions about the suitability of conventional learning design models and the Continuous Professional Learning and Development (CPLD) approaches used to support these during times of crisis. We explore, through an autoethnographic inquiry into one institution's response to COVID-19 campus closures, the utility of the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) model of course (re)design (Dick et al., The systematic design of instruction, 6th edn. Allyn & Bacon, Boston, 2005) and crisis-specific training and support initiatives in preparing for Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) (Hodges et al., The difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. EDUCAUSE Review, 2020). We illustrate the pragmatic characteristics of learning design in such crisis-specific contexts, propose a version of ADDIE for Emergencies, and make recommendations for associated CPLD approaches to implementing this adapted version.
Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City has found new life in videogames during the three decades sin... more Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City has found new life in videogames during the three decades since its demolition, taking on unstable and sometimes contradictory forms when reimagined through virtual architecture. At stake in these acts of memory are the historical discourses surrounding everyday life in Kowloon Walled City, its uncertain political and cultural status, and ongoing postcolonial debates concerning Hong Kong identity. I analyze Kowloon's Gate, Shenmue II, and Mr Pumpkin 2: Walls of Kowloon to uncover the contestation of the city's histories through the types of spaces Michel Foucault described as heterotopic: at once real and unreal, and existent and non-existent. This analysis reveals the fluid nature of cultural memory and historical discourse in videogame spaces, as well as how virtual spatiality and the past can be used together to understand and define the present.
This article examines the relationship between players' exteroceptive senses and videogam... more This article examines the relationship between players' exteroceptive senses and videogame systems in the setting of a public game center. I address the zombie arcade game Left 4 Dead: Seizonshatachi (Neilo 2014), drawing on field observations of the game in situ and at play in the physical environs of two Taito game centers, as well as my own researcher gameplay. I discuss the spatial and sensorial context of the game's intended play experience, composed of unsettling smellscapes, variable lighting conditions, insistent noise pollution, and distraction by other customers. This play context is analysed as a space that mirrors the senses of disorder, contingency, and bodily vulnerability that lie at the heart of fictional zombie encounters. I contend that Left 4 Dead: Seizonshatachi and similar arcade experiences involving zombie texts accelerate the affective, narrative, and experiential tendencies of zombie media and intensify their impact for players.
Given the increasing demand for online learning at the tertiary level, there currently exists a n... more Given the increasing demand for online learning at the tertiary level, there currently exists a need to modify or develop instructional design (ID) models/approaches that can effectively facilitate the collaboration between learning designers and teachers, as well as to research the effectiveness of these models/approaches. Against this backdrop, adopting a design-based research approach, we tested a practical ID approach that is developed on two prior models: rapid prototyping and collaborative course development. Accordingly, a 2-week rapid development studio—an agile, intensive, iterative ID process—was arranged. Data from multiple sources were gleaned during the study to generate a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the proposed approach. Overall, results suggest that the approach is effective for developing online courses in case of a limited time frame and was positively perceived by both course instructors and learning designers. Moreover, practical tips for replicat...
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2018
With growing knowledge about the effectiveness of collaborative or team-based learning in develop... more With growing knowledge about the effectiveness of collaborative or team-based learning in developing important skill sets among students, the development of collaborative and active learning space (CALS) classrooms has gained increasing momentum in recent years. However, there currently exists a paucity of research evaluating the impact of these CALS projects, especially from the perspective of the staff within the institutions that implement them. In view of this gap, this study, using secondary data, reports an institutional evaluation of a CALS project from the teachers’ perspectives. Both quantitative and qualitative results suggest that overall, the CALS project was positively viewed by the teachers. Nonetheless, challenges were also revealed such as, classroom settings, digital infrastructure, and technical support. The findings suggest that instead of viewing digital technology as a panacea, the implementation of a CALS project should be regarded as a systematic project, whic...
'Vanlife' is a term utilised on social media sites, including YouTube, to denote images and video... more 'Vanlife' is a term utilised on social media sites, including YouTube, to denote images and videos that represent a lifestyle centred around long-distance travel using converted vans. The Vanlife phenomenon demonstrates the potential for networked culture and storytelling to combine to create emergent spaces, fostered not only by individual digital media objects but also the connected digital networks they occupy. In this article I ask how digital media practices are used by Vanlife travellers in order to construct such emergent spaces, and what the characteristics of these spaces might be. This investigation has a particular focus on the capacity for the creative practices used to tell visual stories online to combine representations of 'real world' experiences and environments, with the individual and communal desires, rhetoric and, at times, fictions, of the burgeoning Vanlife alternative lifestyle. Taking a netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2002), and guided by Henri Lefebvre's trialectic model of space (1974), I conduct analysis of a set of Vanlife YouTube videos and explore the construction of different layers of spatiality as well as the productive tensions that arise between these. As Vanlifers undertake and document their freewheeling travels, their production of spaces serves to establish the unending road trip as a viable alternative lifestyle. Vanlife videos also work to formulate new cultural and aesthetic dimensions for the areas their creators explore, destabilising and redefining the meanings of the spaces, experiences and communities its travellers encounter. Equally, the idealised spaces of Vanlife are themselves disrupted by jarring intrusions from the external world and its everyday problems, a tension that further illustrates the continually negotiable nature of spatial meanings and highlights the role digital media might play in accentuating and accelerating this fluidity.
Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City has found new life in videogames during the three decades since i... more Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City has found new life in videogames during the three decades since its demolition, taking on unstable and sometimes contradictory forms when reimagined through virtual architecture. At stake in these acts of memory are the historical discourses surrounding everyday life in Kowloon Walled City, its uncertain political and cultural status, and ongoing postcolonial debates concerning Hong Kong identity. I analyze Kowloon's Gate, Shenmue II, and Mr Pumpkin 2: Walls of Kowloon to uncover the contestation of the city's histories through the types of spaces Michel Foucault described as heterotopic: at once real and unreal, and existent and non-existent. This analysis reveals the fluid nature of cultural memory and historical discourse in videogame spaces, as well as how virtual spatiality and the past can be used together to understand and define the present.
INTRODUCTION Within videogames, as in our own everyday lives, houses and places of residence ofte... more INTRODUCTION Within videogames, as in our own everyday lives, houses and places of residence often figure centrally. Their reasons for appearing in game environments include to offer players and their avatars sites of virtual rest, regeneration of avatar attributes and resources, access to narrative content, and interaction with extraludic functions (saving and loading game states, for example). A critical difference between the virtual homes of avatars and the ‘real world’ homes players inhabit is that, typically, players have no input into the aesthetic, architectural, cultural or political substance of an ingame residential space. Rather, game designers, developers and sometimes even procedurally-generating algorithms and engines act as architects and builders of these virtual spaces, and build them to suit their own purposes rather than those of the inhabitants’.
Distinctive narrative conditions arise when “speedrunning” the zombie narrative in Valve Corporat... more Distinctive narrative conditions arise when “speedrunning” the zombie narrative in Valve Corporation’s cooperative first-person shooter games Left 4 Dead (2008) and Left 4 Dead 2 (2009). Close analyses of two live speedruns recorded at the biannual Games Done Quick charity marathon, guided by concepts from Deleuze and Guattari, explain how the player’s narrative body, space, and time are impacted by the optimizations and exploits of the Left 4 Dead series’ zombie narrative. While the zombie story preprogrammed for players is largely bypassed, speedrunning through the Left 4 Dead series’ environments is a generative act of rupture that activates and deepens storytelling tendencies within zombie media that embrace chaos and decay. The speedrun is itself a form of collapse, where scripted meaning and intentionality fall away, replaced by the chance and ephemeral story of an emergent, optimized engagement.
In this article I ask how the appearance of the monstrous within contemporary video games reflect... more In this article I ask how the appearance of the monstrous within contemporary video games reflects an era of climate change and ecological collapse, and how this could inform the engagement of players with discourse concerning climate change. Central to this inquiry is the literary practice of ecocriticism, which seeks to examine environmental rather than human representation in cultural artefacts, increasingly including accounts of contemporary ecological decay and disorder (Bulfin 144). I build on such perspectives to address play encounters that foreground figures of monstrosity borne of the escalating climate crisis, and summarise case studies of two recent video games undertaken as part of this project — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) and The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog). An ecocritical approach to the monsters that populate these case studies reveals the emergence of a ludic form of ecological monstrosity tied closely to our contemporary climatic conditions and taking two significant forms: one accentuating a visceral otherness and aberrance, and the other marked by the uncanny recognition of human authorship of climate change.
Given the increasing demand for online learning at the tertiary level, there currently exists a n... more Given the increasing demand for online learning at the tertiary level, there currently exists a need to modify or develop instructional design (ID) models/approaches that can effectively facilitate the collaboration between learning designers and teachers, as well as to research the effectiveness of these models/approaches. Against this backdrop, adopting a design-based research approach, we tested a practical ID approach that is developed on two prior models: rapid prototyping and collaborative course development. Accordingly, a 2-week rapid development studio—an agile, intensive, iterative ID process—was arranged. Data from multiple sources were gleaned during the study to generate a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the proposed approach. Overall, results suggest that the approach is effective for developing online courses in case of a limited time frame and was positively perceived by both course instructors and learning designers. Moreover, practical tips for replicating the process in other contexts are also shared. It is our hope that the study will stimulate further exploration of alternative ID models/approaches to improve online course design efficacy in other higher education institutions.
This article examines the relationship between players' exteroceptive senses and videogame system... more This article examines the relationship between players' exteroceptive senses and videogame systems in the setting of a public game center. I address the zombie arcade game Left 4 Dead: Seizonshatachi (Neilo 2014), drawing on field observations of the game in situ and at play in the physical environs of two Taito game centers, as well as my own researcher gameplay. I discuss the spatial and sensorial context of the game's intended play experience, composed of unsettling smellscapes, variable lighting conditions, insistent noise pollution, and distraction by other customers. This play context is analysed as a space that mirrors the senses of disorder, contingency, and bodily vulnerability that lie at the heart of fictional zombie encounters. I contend that Left 4 Dead: Seizonshatachi and similar arcade experiences involving zombie texts accelerate the affective, narrative, and experiential tendencies of zombie media and intensify their impact for players.
In educational settings that engage students in analysis and development of digital games and int... more In educational settings that engage students in analysis and development of digital games and interactive media, a key equity issue and pedagogical challenge is the varied levels of prior encounters and experiences with relevant digital media students bring with them. This challenge becomes more acute in contexts where cohorts have a high proportion of students from a low socioeconomic status and demands responsive and inclusive pedagogies. In this essay I provide an example of an extended teaching activity in which a small group of students with varied levels of fluency with digital media were introduced to the concept of micronarrativein digital game design. This was a hands-on activity using arts and crafts materials within which key narratological and digital media design concepts were stripped down to their core elements.
Distinctive narrative conditions arise when "speedrunning" the zombie narrative in Valve Corporat... more Distinctive narrative conditions arise when "speedrunning" the zombie narrative in Valve Corporation's cooperative first-person shooter games Left 4 Dead (2008) and Left 4 Dead 2 (2009). Close analyses of two live speedruns recorded at the biannual Games Done Quick charity marathon, guided by concepts from Deleuze and Guat-tari, explain how the player's narrative body, space, and time are impacted by the optimizations and exploits of the Left 4 Dead series' zombie narrative. While the zombie story preprogrammed for players is largely bypassed, speedrunning through the Left 4 Dead series' environments is a generative act of rupture that activates and deepens storytelling tendencies within zombie media that embrace chaos and decay. The speedrun is itself a form of collapse, where scripted meaning and intentionality fall away, replaced by the chance and ephemeral story of an emergent, optimized engagement.
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2018
With growing knowledge about the effectiveness of collaborative or team-based learning in develop... more With growing knowledge about the effectiveness of collaborative or team-based learning in developing important skill sets among students, the development of collaborative and active learning space (CALS) classrooms has gained increasing momentum in recent years. However, there currently exists a paucity of research evaluating the impact of these CALS projects, especially from the perspective of the staff within the institutions that implement them. In view of this gap, this study, using secondary data, reports an institutional evaluation of a CALS project from the teachers' perspectives. Both quantitative and qualitative results suggest that overall, the CALS project was positively viewed by the teachers. Nonetheless, challenges were also revealed such as classroom settings, digital infrastructure, and technical support. The findings suggest that instead of viewing digital technology as a panacea, the implementation of a CALS project should be regarded as a systematic project, which involves stakeholders across an educational institution, including administrative staff, teaching staff, support staff, and students.
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