I’m on the fifth floor of the National Library in Singapore, in a room with Ian Livingstone, Caryl Shaw, John Buchanan and a whole bunch of interesting researchers and developers, taking a break from an intensive day of thinking about a whole load of different projects – mobile games, games to help teach film language, a campus-wide ARG making use of ad-hoc bluetooth networks and a whole load of other projects. I took a break from that last sentence to talk to someone from animationxpress.com and read about the New Games Movement before going for karaoke and then coming back for a second day of talks ad conversations, including a chat with Caryl from EA about Spore, a new game she’s working on, and an introduction to ACID.

I’d meant to write everything up here as soon as it happened, but to be honest, my brain’s full. It’s been overstimulating. Which is always better than boring.

Communication over here is something I’m finding much less straightforward than I thought it might be – apparently, there’s more to it than just memorising all the HSBC ads. Although I knew about Singlish, and was looking forward to finding out more about it, everything I’d read suggested that, in the kind of contexts I was going to find myself, what we laughingly call Standard English would be in use.

Of course, an idea this welcome can be hard to let go of, and it’s taken me a while to stop thinking that people are trying to speak the same language as me, just because they say they are. In most of my meetings so far there’s been a moment where I start to wonder if I’ve been passing out every few minutes, fugueing violently in a kind of delayed jetlag, consequently missing the information that would make the last few sentences comprehensible. My colleagues here are used to looking at me now in complete bewilderment as I try to make a link between sentences that come after one another but are otherwise utterly unconnected.

So I’m doing some homework. I bought a copy of “English in Singapore” (Ling & Brown, 2005), which is recommended by Anthea Fraser Gupta. (Brown, with Chia Boh Peng, considered whether Estuary English might be an alternative to RP as a teaching model: he’s published hugely, according to google, but so far this is my favourite).

For more references, Roles and Impact of English as a Global Language (Doms, 2003) seems useful, as does this summary from David Deterding (also from the English Language & Literature department at NIE). I’m looking out for English as a Global Language by David Crystal, mainly because I loved Stories of English. I might leave the SAAL for the time being.

This whole are of new Englishes is fascinating : having only encountered the idea in the context of emerging discourses online, discovering its relevance offline at first-hand can’t help but be eye-opening. Imagine that, offline life being fascinating.

Legitimising these new forms of English is a direct challenge to the ethos of the Speak Good English movement, which is either a well-meaning attempt to make sure people from Singapore can be understood outside the immediate area, or “a triumph of the relentless, hegemonic forces of globalization”. Regardless of whether it’s a reactionary echo of colonial orientalism, or a practical effort to help Singaporeans continue to take over the world, what’s interesting to me is that the kinds of speech it identifies as not being “good English” aren’t the bits that cause me such confusion. There are lots of kinds of Singapore English, and I’m fine with Singapore Colloquial English, or at least, I understand why I don’t understand it. My confusion comes from Standard Singapore English. People saying “lah” to intensify something is easy to understand – it’s being kindly asked to discuss on something all the time that gets to me. I don’t know what is that.

Tune,
originally uploaded by kokeshi.

I was going to write about meeting Jeff Burke from REMAP at UCLA, and the conversation we had about using the existing network of mobile phones as data-gathering tools to support civic participation, and I will, but I’ve been distracted.

Tune is a game that was developed as part of a course at the Art Institute of Phoenix, in order to give art students the chance to understand the subtleties of tuning game mechanics. In the creator’s words,

Tune is a game about game design, about tuning game mechanics. Besides controlling the game in the typical way, the player must constantly change the balance of parameters against one another. Depending on the current goal, different tunings of the mechanic will be more or less effective. The successful player will be constantly experimenting with the various parameters, looking for the tuning that best equips them to complete the current goal. Each goal brings a new challenge, and may require a different tuning.

I got really lost in the pacing of the game, working out the best numbers to make it so that my pogo-stick thing fell over slowly enough for me to time my jump movements, the best way to make it possible to chain actions together, not controlling my character’s movement around the screen but nudging it now and again to direct it where I wanted. Of course, this only happened a few times, but each time might be the time I managed to make it happen again (almost, but not quite, classical random reinforcement). Making it happen was a particularly game-y combination of skill on my part and the values of the parameters: one of the things I had to ask myself was whether I should tweak the controls when I’d spent time learning to use them in this configuration. A good way to find an hour’s passed in five minutes.

As a game, this might not sound like the most fun ever, and if that’s what you think then you’re not alone:

the core game isn’t very fun, its yet another physics platformer with kind of dodgy control. I know the point of the game is to tweak it to something you can control, but you can’t change the nature of the character, a weird spinning pogo stick that is pretty difficult to control no matter what the physics values are.

It might be that I enjoyed it just because I was really good at it and this commentator was rubbish. More likely, I’m imagining it in the context of a lesson, one that was “was surprisingly fun” and “quickly became a favorite”. It’s a good example of the kind of thing we’ve been discussing, that the context in which a game is played, the expectations of the players and the goal playing it works towards all determine how well it’s received.

Of course, what it also demonstrates is that games are a really good way to learn about game design, which doesn’t help me understand how they might be good for learning about other domains.