Peter McDonald
Peter McDonald researches playfulness, designs games, and is on the lookout for new ways to play. He currently holds the position of assistant professor at DePaul University, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2018. His dissertation, “Playfulness 1947-2017” explores the connections between mid-century art games and the design of contemporary video games.
Peter’s research focuses on the ways that players make sense of and interpret games. Sometimes that means looking closely at the patterns of rhythm and rhyme of the songs that accompany children’s ball games, sometimes it means examining game controllers as semiotic systems. His work has appeared in Games & Culture, The American Journal of Play, and Analog Game Studies, among other publications.
As a game designer, Peter is fascinated by large-scale and pervasive forms of play, particularly Alternate Reality Games. While at the University of Chicago, he worked on several large scale games with funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the NSF, including The Project, The Source, SEED, and The Parasite. These games involved hundreds of players exploring elaborately staged worlds across the south side of Chicago and online. He finds these games exciting, because they offer an invitation to a whole community and explore utopian alternatives to everyday life.
Peter’s research focuses on the ways that players make sense of and interpret games. Sometimes that means looking closely at the patterns of rhythm and rhyme of the songs that accompany children’s ball games, sometimes it means examining game controllers as semiotic systems. His work has appeared in Games & Culture, The American Journal of Play, and Analog Game Studies, among other publications.
As a game designer, Peter is fascinated by large-scale and pervasive forms of play, particularly Alternate Reality Games. While at the University of Chicago, he worked on several large scale games with funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the NSF, including The Project, The Source, SEED, and The Parasite. These games involved hundreds of players exploring elaborately staged worlds across the south side of Chicago and online. He finds these games exciting, because they offer an invitation to a whole community and explore utopian alternatives to everyday life.
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Papers by Peter McDonald
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been implemented across all levels of education, with the rapid developments of chatbots and AI language models, like ChatGPT, demonstrating the urgent need to conceptualize the key debates and their implications for a new era of learning and assessment. This adoption occurs in a context where AI is dramatically remapping “the human,” the purposes of schooling, and pedagogy.
Focus of Study:
The paper examines how different formulations of “human” became interwoven with the sliding signifier of “intelligence” through a series of violent exclusions, and how the shifting contour of “intelligence” produces uneven and unjust ontological scales undergirding both education and AI fields. Its purpose is to engage the education research community in dialogue about biases, the nature of ethics, and decision-making concerning AI in education.
Research Design:
This paper adapts a historical-philosophical method. It traces the effects of colonialism and racialization within humanism’s emergence through Sylvia Wynter’s historiography of “figure of Man,” especially via the invention of “intelligence,” which has linked education and computer science. It also investigates themes central to modern education such as justice, equity, and in/exclusion through a philosophical examination of the ontological scales of “human.”
Conclusions:
After outlining how “intelligence” has shifted from reason-as-morality to concepts of natural intelligence, we argue that current examples of AI in Education (AIEd), like classroom chatbots and social agents, constitute an intermediary point in the arc toward a new computational superintelligence—the emergence of man3—illustrating the opportunities, risks, and ethical issues in pedagogical applications based on emotion. We outline three differing visions of AIEd’s future, concluding with a series of provocations (onto-epistemological, practice-based, and purposes of schooling) that exceed such models and that, given rapid innovations in machine learning, require urgent consideration from multiple stakeholders.
play in these games from intimate groups to large collectives exceeding the size of typical classrooms. They use a case study of The Source (2013), an ARG they designed (with funding from the National Science Foundation) for urban youth of color from the South Side of Chicago in an out-of-school setting using play across several platforms. The Source aimed to promote the academic areas of STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics), as well as twenty-first-century literacies and social justice. The authors argue that such ARGs facilitate learning by engaging semifictional and immersive play made flexible and extensible through game forms. They suggest that, although designers determine the challenges in an ARG, the players shape the experience and shared game world through collaborative actions.
Talks by Peter McDonald
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been implemented across all levels of education, with the rapid developments of chatbots and AI language models, like ChatGPT, demonstrating the urgent need to conceptualize the key debates and their implications for a new era of learning and assessment. This adoption occurs in a context where AI is dramatically remapping “the human,” the purposes of schooling, and pedagogy.
Focus of Study:
The paper examines how different formulations of “human” became interwoven with the sliding signifier of “intelligence” through a series of violent exclusions, and how the shifting contour of “intelligence” produces uneven and unjust ontological scales undergirding both education and AI fields. Its purpose is to engage the education research community in dialogue about biases, the nature of ethics, and decision-making concerning AI in education.
Research Design:
This paper adapts a historical-philosophical method. It traces the effects of colonialism and racialization within humanism’s emergence through Sylvia Wynter’s historiography of “figure of Man,” especially via the invention of “intelligence,” which has linked education and computer science. It also investigates themes central to modern education such as justice, equity, and in/exclusion through a philosophical examination of the ontological scales of “human.”
Conclusions:
After outlining how “intelligence” has shifted from reason-as-morality to concepts of natural intelligence, we argue that current examples of AI in Education (AIEd), like classroom chatbots and social agents, constitute an intermediary point in the arc toward a new computational superintelligence—the emergence of man3—illustrating the opportunities, risks, and ethical issues in pedagogical applications based on emotion. We outline three differing visions of AIEd’s future, concluding with a series of provocations (onto-epistemological, practice-based, and purposes of schooling) that exceed such models and that, given rapid innovations in machine learning, require urgent consideration from multiple stakeholders.
play in these games from intimate groups to large collectives exceeding the size of typical classrooms. They use a case study of The Source (2013), an ARG they designed (with funding from the National Science Foundation) for urban youth of color from the South Side of Chicago in an out-of-school setting using play across several platforms. The Source aimed to promote the academic areas of STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics), as well as twenty-first-century literacies and social justice. The authors argue that such ARGs facilitate learning by engaging semifictional and immersive play made flexible and extensible through game forms. They suggest that, although designers determine the challenges in an ARG, the players shape the experience and shared game world through collaborative actions.
Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump, Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games and examines how abstract and formal design choices have kept players playing. McDonald argues that there is a rich layer of meaning underneath, say, the quality of an avatar's movement, the pacing and rhythm of level design, the personalities expressed by different enemies, and the emotion elicited by collecting a coin.
To understand these games, McDonald draws on technical discussions by game designers as well as theoretical work about the nature of signs from structuralist semiotics. Interspersed throughout are design exercises that show how critical interpretation can become a tool for game designers to communicate with their players. With examples drawn from over forty years of game history, and from games made by artists, hobbyists, iconic designers, and industry studios, Run and Jump presents a comprehensive—and engaging—vision of this slice of game history.