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I have at times live-posted GDC sessions and now I’ve picked “Teaching Games with Games” where @alt254.bsky.social & @chouxsalad.bsky.social have designated this year’s 4-person panel topic as “teaching students about generative AI” without doing what S.B. describes as “cop shit” (policing AI usage)

“What are ways of playing against the ruling class,” asks @alt254.bsky.social — of transforming dominant narratives around AI via the way we play games rather than (only) the converse

And @chouxsalad.bsky.social is describing ways of teaching about the Turing Test, pointing out the neglected history of its inspiration as a gender-masking/detection game, and exercise using pre and post-generative chatbots (Eliza!) for a new version of the imitation game for students

Having students read @n-w-f.bsky.social’s 2009 writing on the Eliza effect and then comparing to the contemporary “GPT effect” including exercises and assignments trying to poke at a LLM chatbot to suss out limits of its abilities, tendencies, training data, etc.

Now each other panelists presents an exercise in this area, starting with textile-based play designer & educator @codingcrafter.bsky.social who starts off by summarizing higher ed’s polycrisis, and how everyone (admins, faculty, students) urgently needs more thorough, critical AI literacy

Oooh it turns out that game design educators are the best people to teach students about this topic, for all these reasons. I mean, makes sense to me (incredibly biased tone of voice). Gillian taught an AI, Design & Society class in a first year “great problems” seminar at WPI

The project was a reflexive/meta idea! Design a game to be played by every other first-year students, considering a future version of their school and how AI should or shouldn’t play a role. A couple games described are about tradeoffs (AI destroys academic workload faster but is less accurate)

…or e.g. a deck-builder simulating loss of critical thinking ability due to AI. Students were also involved in co-creating AI policies for class, to avoid prohibition dynamics and foster conversation. Mentorship from experienced students, playtesting and help desks (“benefits to going to a human!”)

Next up @recardona.bsky.social starts off by talking about Joan Morgan’s “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost” and the coining of Hip-Hop Feminisms out of a need to “fuck with the greys” (nuanced ambiguities, resist the need to solve problems, trust in lived experience)

Central problem — the AI Creative gap. Ability to produce what resembles creative material rapidly outstrips taste, the ability to evaluate, understand, appreciate and discern creative material. Rogelio pointing out that a lot of educational assessment relies only on quantifying output, not process

So, one way to go would be to shift every wholly into process education — lots of cycles of feedback and working through problems together, qualitative evaluation, etc instead of evaluating output. This is expensive! Shown, a student party game dealing in the messiness of “output”

Next up @cheesetalk.bsky.social who couldn’t enter the US in person; showing her 1001 Nights experimental game which uses a LLM King Shahyrar to evaluate the Sheherazade character’s stories. Talking about how vibe coding has affected her collaborative process with coders & artists

They have non-technical designers produce a vibe-coded prototype along with a design doc to communicate intent, then handing off to a Unity programmer. Unity programmer puts the design doc in context to guide code too

“Beware the beautiful chicken” — vibe coded demos look deceptively finished, when they may have no valuable gameplay.

“Even if AI is making you miserable and depressed — to be an artist who’s present in a historical moment where things are happening and something is at stake, that’s a kind of luck.”

It’s also our job to think about this stuff; game designers and all the artists who work with code are the R&D department of computation; we explore the limits of how it can mean things. So we have to take the opportunity to engage with these issues, especially if society has subsidized…

…an institution you work at, like higher education. Where the reason we have jobs is in part to figure this shit out. And it turns out to be MUCH harder than expected. In 2020, Frank thought AI would open a window into new kinds of games & experiences. Newly available forms of computation…