Project Review

Henry Jenkins III

Faculty presenting lectures serve as resources for the teams and team leaders throughout the week. They consult briefly following their lectures; they are available via e-mail to address questions; and in some cases, where appropriate, they go around to the groups and see if they can help with the brainstorming. The supervising faculty member of the event should also check regularly with the student leaders to be aware of any problems that might be emerging and to make sure that they are remaining more or less on schedule. Some of the judges should be experiencing the presentations fresh on the final day of the process, but other judges should get a sense of the process which led up to the presentations. The key here, however, is to remain objective, making sure each group receives the help that it needs to do its best in the competition.

One can imagine an alternative structure in those cases where you are working with younger students - having a parent or other adult leader assigned to each group to help it throughout the process. I would be reluctant, however, for the groups to become too dependent on this adult since part of the goal of the process is to give students experience in leadership and brainstorming and you would not want the adult to take over the whole show and push them out of the way. The challenge is to provide information, to answer specific questions, to make suggestions, but to allow the students to make final decisions.

At mid-week, we have instigated a mandatory review session. Each team enters the room and meets with a panel of three or four of the faculty involved in the process. All team members are present but the session is closed to members of rival teams. The students take about ten minutes to informally sketch out their core ideas, focusing as much or more on problem areas as on those things that they feel they have under control. The faculty ask questions, give advice, or otherwise offer what help they can in enabling the team to move pass impasses in their own thinking about the project. Ultimately, this works best if the spirit is one of consultation and collaboration and if evaluation is withheld until the day of the competition.

Faculty should understand this consultation both as part of the mechanics of the competition and as another opportunity for teaching during which key lessons which may be relevant to a particular project get repeated in a just in time fashion. Not everything in the lectures is equally relevant to all groups. Part of the power of this process is that students see immediate application for more abstract concepts through the design process. Participating faculty have a chance through this review process to make sure they absorbed what they needed for their project.

Ideally, the participating faculty represent different areas of expertise. For example, in the session shown on our video, the participants included Henry Jenkins, who had lectured to the group on transmedia storytelling, narrative, space, audiences, and the social impact of games; Philip Tan, who had lectured the group on game play mechanics and on game genres; and Sande Scorodes, who had lectured the group on the production process within the media industry and on visual design. In a school setting, one might imagine a panel consisting of a literature teacher, an arts teacher, a music teacher, and a computer science teacher, each looking at the proposal through their own area of expertise.

In some cases, students need to be reminded of the core rules and criteria for judging the competition. In other cases, there are fundamental disagreements in the group which need to be resolved if the project is going to go forward. In almost every case, there are blind spots that the students have not yet confronted but which need to be addressed if their presentation is to be a success. At this point in the week, for example, some teams are still focused entirely on the content of the presentation and have not yet considered what the actual presentation will look like. They need to be encouraged to think about how to create excitement around their proposed game. They need to think through the assignment of roles, the timing of the presentation, and so forth. More often, the teams are at a slightly earlier stage and are still asking fundamental questions about visual design, game play, or audience appeal.

Coming in from outside, the judges often see things the students do not and advice at this point may make or break the project. The judges need to be open to new approaches, given a key goal of this project is to encourage students to think creatively about what games might do and about the expressive potential of this medium more generally. You need to question your own assumptions and allow students to convince you of the value of what may seem at first to be unorthodox approaches. At the same time, you may need to push the students to think more deeply about what they are trying to accomplish and about the value of their ideas, which at this point may still seem a little unformulated. This may be a place where aesthetic differences come into play -- should students be governed by the popular aesthetic shaping games that actually reach the marketplace or should they aspire towards a more high art aesthetic which will result in more experimental but decisively less marketable approaches? Ethical issues, such as those surrounding stereotyping or violence, may get negotiated between faculty and students at this point. Students may also need to be pushed to recognize some of the technical limitations of the current game medium at this point. Some teams become preoccupied with relatively minute details that may or may not reap benefits for them in the public presentations. You don't want to close off their exploration of those themes but you also need to help them to put them into proportion.

Students often come out of this session more motivated and more focused. Good intervention by faculty can serve a coaching function, leaving them more confident in their choices, resolving old conflicts, pinpointing the next steps they need to take, and giving them some sense of how the judges are apt to respond to the directions they are taking. We see the mid-week review as a key element helping us to insure that the teams that enter the competition actually cross the finish line and get to share their ideas with each other.