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[ by Charles Cameron — one bead from NASA for the glass bead game as rosary ]
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photo credit: Norman Kuring, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
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Consider her sacred, treat her with care.

[ by Charles Cameron — games in education — written in 1996 for friends on the Magister-L mailing list — for background, see In response to Lewis Shepherd ]
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I’ve been thinking about education, “edutainment” and games, with special reference to Myst-type games, Glass Bead Games and Universities not unlike my own alma mater, Oxford…

Here are some preliminary ideas…

I: Proposal

There is no reason why the books in a MYST-like game shouldn’t be real books.

Yeah? So?

There is no reason why studying the books in a MYST-like game to gain access to the information needed to “solve puzzles” within the game structure and gain access to more advanced levels of the game should be any different from studying the same books in an OXFORD-like university to gain access to the information needed to “pass exams” within the academic structure and gain access to more advanced levels of knowledge…

There is no reason why education and game should not merge. OXFORD is a walk-thru MYST, and the puzzles are exams. Education is Game, the supreme Game of life itself.

The only thing needed to make the future of computer game playing and the future of computer education one thing is a concept of gaming which extends as far as the concept of education — and Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game does this.

A future Glass Bead Game with Myst-like properties could encompass the entirety of education, because (a) unlike chess it deals in the sum of human culture and knowledge while (b) its own skills involve a chess-like mastery: its game aspect stretches as high as its knowledge base.

We already know from such things as Sesame Street that learning about “fiveness” can take place at the intersection of education and entertainment, with a kangaroo bouncing five oranges on a trampoline and gleefully calling out “five, five”. We suspect that at this level, the entertainment element adds to the student’s interest in learning.

We also suspect that at higher levels of learning, entertainment quite naturally gives way to the “more important” educational element. No need to entertain, the subject itself fascinates…

But Feynmann — the Nobel Prize man, the drummer, the CalTech fellow — entertains while he educates, educates while he entertains: it’s an aspect of the nature of his genius…

The future of education lies in a Game involving mastery in the acquiring and manipulating of knowledges, both in depth within individual disciplines, and in breadth across them. This is the future of the Glass Bead Game…

It is stored on megacomputers. It is accessible through cable lines coming into your home. It is displayed on your new hi-res TV screen. Think of a terabyte holographic storage device which could transfer info in or out a gigabyte per second… Its architecture contains “rooms” at all levels of learning from K through post doctoral, in all subject areas. Any student of whatever age can access any “room” to which he has solved the “prerequisite” puzzles. The “rooms” contain a massive library of “books” and an equally impressive video library…

Imagine a world in which the very best classes taught at Harvard, Yale, MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, the Sorbonne are accessible on the web in video form…

Imagine a world in which students can supplement their “live” classes with access to a virtual environment of this sort…

The arts — at the level of a Mozart, a Bach, a Yeats, a Shakespeare, a Leonardo, a Michelangelo — are games. Creative play with a very high order of skill…

Imagine the Great Game…

II: Background

That’s the main thrust of where I’m going, but it may help if I add in some background, in the form of the following notes:

I am wondering about a number of “threads” that seem to come together somewhere hereabouts:

(i) a recent effort in California to put together all the information in a “geography” curriculum from kindergarten through — I think — the second year of college on videodisks, in such a way that a student of any age could move as far and as fast through it as his/her ability to give “correct” answers to the quizzes along the way permitted…

(ii) the notion that large film archives such as those maintained by the studios may in the not too distant future be accessible on-line, with real time delivery along fiber optic “phone” cable for display on the “tv” screen…

(iii) the notion that all the classes in, say, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg… could be videotaped, also in the not too distant future, and be made available in a similar fashion…

(iv) efforts to put large libraries online in toto: I gather from an IBM commercial (!), for instance, that the Indiana musicological library is now available to the daughters of Italian vineyard owners over the net…

Putting these all together, I see the possibility of computers storing and delivering enough in the way of first class lectures and libraries to allow students of whatever age to move as far and as fast through self-education as their interest and capacity to pass quizzes permits…

III: Invitation

The “proposal” and “background” above, taken together, represent the thinking I’ve done so far, and the direction I hope to take — they’re my personal “state of the art” on all this. I suspect there are people already working on many of the ideas that go into this mix — but that the overall vision here is a “gourmet” version, and that we’ll get pretty thin soup if we leave it to people outside the GBG environment to do all the cooking.

There’s further background on the origins of Myst-like games in the classical Art of Memory in my piece The Mysts of Antiquity.

Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in discussing these ideas in more detail.

[ by Charles Cameron — prescience, edutech, a twitter exchange — Glass Bead Games, Harper’s magazine and Microsoft ]
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Twitter avatars, left to right: Mark Safranski, Enriqueta Turanzas, Lewis Shepherd
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Mark Safranski, whom I like to think of as the Zen of Zen since there are now three of us who blog here, was tweeting with Lewis Shepherd and Enriqueta Turanzas about the future of education the other day, and Shepherd — who blogs at Shepherd’s Pi and is, as far as I know, Director of the Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments — tweeted a phrase that caught my eye:

Education’s future = MMPORG

My friend Mike Sellers had released the path-breaking game Meridian 59 in 1996, and Richard Garriott coined the term MMORPG (for massively multiplayer online role-playing game) in 1997 — so the tech side of things was just swinging into view in 1996-97, though it would be another five years before MIT began offering courseware (2001), and eight years before Games for Change was founded (2004).

Back in 1996 and 1997 I was writing up my ideas on education and games for the Magister-L mailing list, and pushing them on anyone who would listen at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference — now renamed the GDC, since it has since become obvious that games and computers are a match… and to shorten a long story, my ideas back then seemed to me to rhyme with Shepherd’s tweet this week.

And rhymes between ideas are important to me.

I tweeted back to Shepherd, offering a link to a piece I’d written in 1996 titled Myst-like Universities, Oxford-like Games? — and along with the link, my tweet said, ee cummings style:

if i wrote this in 1997 i was prescient, eh?

To which Enriqueta, bless her, quickly agreed, while Shepherd responded:

Prescient, yes. And if you patented it in ’97. you should get a call from Sebastian Thrun : )

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So.

That got me thinking, and I went back to look a little more carefully at what I’d written back then, and decided I should re-up it here on Zenpundit, which I will do in a follow up post to this one.

But first I should respond to Lewis Shepherd on the question of patenting.

I am a lot closer to a hermit than a man of business, to be honest – for reasons that Zenpundit regulars will have intuited from my two recent posts about Trevor Huddleston, and which followers of my games will know from my recent biographical sortie on the Sembl pages.

So, no – I didn’t patent my ideas, and indeed am deeply indebted to whoever engraved the words “to give, and not to count the cost, to labour, and not ask for any reward” on my heart early enough for me to be something of a Creative Commons type avant la lettre.

I’m not a purist, some of my writings have that dastardly little © mark attached, and I don’t mind getting paid on occasion – but to be honest, much of what I love about blogging is the free circulation of ideas and the cameraderie of bloggers…

The other thing that’s just a tad ironic about all this, though, is that back in April of 1997, Lewis Lapham, who was then editor-in-chief of Harper’s, wrote an extended editorial called Notebook: The Spanish Armadillo in which he recommended that Microsoft should consult me – publishing my email address for their convenience, no less:

Hesse’s bead game lends itself so obviously to the transcendent aspirations of the Internet that it’s probably only a matter of months before Microsoft buys the rights to his name for one of its software programs. The company’s marketing strategists might first want to consult Charles Cameron, reachable on the Internet at hipbone@earthlink.net, the foremost of 263 correspondents concerned with the implications of Hesse’s novel.

Well, I never got the email from Microsoft. I came to the conclusion they likely didn’t read Harper’s, or not at the requisite level for initiating consultations. And I was busy writing and thinking, thinking and writing, and taking pauses.

I still am.

But perhaps if Microsoft had called on me back then, I’d have blurted my thoughts out to them in greater detail than I was able to in that one HTML 1.0 post, so many years ago.

And perhaps they’d have thought I was prescient — and patented my idea or ideas, back in 1997.

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It’s interesting to compare my thoughts back in 1996-97 with what we’re up to these days with the Sembl project.

Next up, for your amusement: the text of that 1997 post of mine, giving my thoughts on games and education sixteen years ago – when I thought a terabyte was huge, huge.

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from Sembl ]
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image credit The Movie Poster Art Gallery / http://www.rock-explosion.com/catpage2.html

1.

I’m always looking around for ways to describe the leap between two ideas (concepts, people, events, things) that occurs when you make a move in a Sembl game. On the game board, the ideas are shown as circles and the links as lines between them.

In the case of the museum version, the “ideas” are objects in the Museum’s collection – but the same principle applies whether we’re talking objects, concepts, events or people: entities of whatever type go in the circles, the lines between them signify the exploration of their resemblances and differences.
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2.

Okay.

In more technical terms, Arthur Koestler in his classic book about the conceptual structure of creativity, The Act of Creation, diagrammed the intersection of two conceptual frames as representing the place where the joyous aha! of discovery, the gasped ah! of tragedy or the delightful ha! of laughter is generated, and this more recent version of his diagram gets the essence:

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3.

But wait!

There’s a lot going on here, there’s a distinct leap – think: creative leap, even perhaps leap of faith.

It was the leap between two ideas – electricity and magnetism – that gave Faraday his dynamo, Maxwell his equations, and the modern world almost its whole existence. It was the leap between two ideas – modular forms and elliptic equations – that gave Taniyama his conjecture and Wiles his proof of Fermat‘s Last Theorem.

The leap that intuits similarities, particularly rich similarities between rich concepts in widely separated fields, is the most powerful tool of the thinking mind – and playing Sembl amounts to nothing more or less than a repeated, playful, delightful invitation to make leaps of exactly that kind.

So a Sembl leap of resemblance can be anything from training wheels for creativity to a prize-winning long-jump at the conceptual Olympics.
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4.

Maria Popova at Brainpickings quotes Steve Jobs:

Creativity is just connecting things.

And she quotes James Webb Young, back in 1939:

Consequently the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.

This isn’t some hidden secret, but it’s not exactly common knowledge either, it’s not something many schools teach — which is why the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson famously told his fellow Regents at the University of California:

Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality.

Which is also why Eliot Eisner, Stanford professor and former President of the American Educational Research Association, said of Sembl’s precursor HipBone Games, “the cognitive processes you are interested in developing are critical to a decent education”.
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5.

And just what does this have to do with Van der Graaf Generators, you might wonder?

There’s a cracking sense of energy discharged when you connect two ideas in a Sembl game move – not unlike the discharge of energy between the spheres of two Van der Graaf Generators picture here:

Imagine the spheres as two ideas in place on a Sembl game board, and the electrical discharge as the excitement of seeing how they mesh together to create that ah!, aha! or ha!

Or watch the whole, ultra-short video from which that image was taken, courtesy of the folks at MIT:

[ by Charles Cameron — from the Glass Bead Game via the HipBone Games to Sembl ]
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Play most assiduously is how Edgar Wind translates the motto of Marsilio Ficino — the man who more or less single-handed, built the Florentine Renaissance: studiossime ludere. Play most studiously.

Play as if your life depends on it.

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Hermann Hesse crowned his life-work with the great, boring, utterly riveting novel Das Glasperlenspiel, The Glass Bead Game, sometimes better known in the English-speaking world by the (Latin) title, Magister Ludi — which means both school-teacher and Master of the Game.

And game there is: the Glass Bead Game itself, or GBG for short.

The book centers around a game of ideas — a game in which the most profound conceptual systems of all human cultures are brought together in a grand architecture that Hesse calls “the hundred-gated cathedral of Mind”:

A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts.

Here Hesse mentions astronomical, musical and textual concepts — the game, like the digital world of the internet, allows mathematical, textual, musical and visual elements to be juxtaposed and combined, just as Sven Birkerts described in an interview with Cliff Becker:

There are tremendous opportunities, and we are probably on the brink of the birth of whole new genres of art which will work through electronic systems. These genres will likely be multi-media in ways we can’t imagine. Digitalization, the idea that the same string of digits can bring image, music, or text, is a huge revolution in and of itself. When artists begin to grasp the creative possibilities of works that are neither literary, visual, or musical, but exist using all three forms in a synthetic collage fashion, an enormous artistic boom will occur.

Birkerts was concerned that these “tremendous opportunities” might drown out “the old quiet pastime of reading mere words” — but Hesse’s great game is a contemplative one, in which Hesse proposes:

Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

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Play…

We play, we play games, we play music… we play wargames… all the world’s a stage, and we are (merely) players.

Consider: Play is what children do to learn, so brilliantly, language, languages, geography, mathematics, history, chess, go, music, politeness, discipline, excess, consequences, moderation… And play is what masters do to express their mastery — Picasso plays, Casals plays, Einstein plays… And the motto of Ficino, mentor to the Florentine Renaissance, is play most assiduously.

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The Glass Bead Game is a game, then, to compare with the greatest of games — Chess, Go, name your poison — indeed, with the greatest of intellectual endeavors — the Encyclopédie, the gesamtkunstwerk, the long-sought Theory of Everything…

All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

How can taking that idea and making it playable not be a worthy challenge, in this world that is daily more absorbed in digital play in its arcades and cinemas, on its consoles, tablets, phones, and computers?

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Just reading the book made me want to play the game, but I like to keep things simple. I needed to be able to play it with a pencil and paper napkin over a cup of coffee — or on an email list or in the online forums that were beginning to spring up while I was figuring out some early boards and rules. I took Hesse’s basic concept of juxtaposing ideas and applied it on simple graph-like boards, on which each circle represents an idea, and each line a resemblance. I called my playable variants the HipBone Games.

More recently, my friend and colleague Cath Styles has been working on the development of iPad and web-playable versions of the games. We call them Sembl, because they explore the resemblances between things, ideas — and at a deeper level, the patterning of the world itself.

But the game remains the same: to juxtapose one thing — an idea, an object, a work of art, song, person or event — with another, in a way that generates the aha! of creativity. And to do that repeatedly, weaving an architecture of related ideas, on our way to weaving Hesse’s cathedral of Mind.

Our world has never been in greater need of creativity and connectivity — our future depends on them — and in the Sembl game, every move you make is a further link in the pattern that connects, every move you make is a creative leap. More on that in my follow up post, The crackling energy of a Sembl move.