Katie Salen

Katie Salen Tekinbaş
Katie Salen during Union Square Adventures in March 2009
Occupation(s)	game designer, animator
Notable work	Waking Life

Katie Salen Tekinbaş is an American game designer, animator, and educator. She is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught at DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media, Parsons The New School for Design^[1] the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has an MFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Salen has received grants as principal investigator or co-principal investigator from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and Intel. She is one of the co-authors of Rules of Play, a textbook on game design, and the co-editor of The Game Design Reader, a Rules of Play Anthology, as well as the co-editor of The International Journal of Learning and Media.^[2] She is the former Director of Graduate Students for the Design and Technology Program at Parsons The New School for Design, as well as the former Director of the Center for Transformative Media, a research center focused on emerging trends in design and media. She is the Executive Director of Institute of Play, a non-profit learning design studio that bases its work on the principles of games and play.^[3] In 2009, she helped design and launch Quest to Learn (Q2L), a public school in Manhattan, New York City,^[4] and later participated in developing ChicagoQuest, a charter school in Chicago.^[2]

Salen's work has involved the development of slow games, online games, mobile games, and big games, both commercially and institutionally.^[2]

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>>It's really cool school. I've never gone to a school quite like it. >>Well, we get to design games and play each other's games, so instead of just doing work, work, work all day. >>Well, we have the basic classes of a school, but we gave them different names, like math is called Code World. Science is the Way Things Work. >>We learn everything that all the other schools learn. We just learn it differently. >>My name's Katie Salen and I wear a couple of different hats. One, I'm a professor at Parsons, the New School of Design and I teach in a program there called Designing Technology. I also run a nonprofit called the Institute of Play, which is a games and learning space where we develop all kinds of stuff around games and learning. And then my last hat is, I'm an executive director of design at this new middle school called Quest to Learn in New York City. >>Quest to Learn is a new sixth grade through twelfth grade public school that opened in New York City in Fall 2009, and it's a school that has the tagline, school for digital kids. And all that means is that we believe that kids can and do learn in different ways outside of school, often via access to digital media and access to kind of online community support. And that if we know that learning outside of school matters a great deal to kids' ability to learn well in school, we have to pay attention to that. >>So it's a school that from the ground up has been designed to leverage the kind of digital lives of kids, and it also looks at the notion of how games work as learning systems, and it's developed a pedagogical approach that delivers what we call game-like learning. And all that means is that kids are dropped into complex challenge based context, that they have no ability to solve at the beginning of ten weeks. And then that ten week structure, what we call a mission, is broken down into a series of smaller challenges, that scaffold and really engage that kid in learning how to do something that will allow them to solve that complex problem. >>In watching these games, you realize the reason why these games are so popular, is they're so carefully balanced between offense and defense. There's so many choices, there's so many challenges. >>We're trying to prove that game design can help kids think deeper and more abstractly about everything else. And that we feel that the thing about game design is that that's this generation's mode of discourse. It's a fully mainstreamed art form, just like cinema is, but a hundred years ago, you couldn't study cinema in a school. Now every school has a cinematography class, and game design has now reached a sort of mainstream acceptance. It's how kids socialize, by playing games. >>A lot of concerns that parents have when we start talking about games is a concern around competition, and a concern around notions of kind of incentives and rewards. And what they get worried about is, "Oh, there's this game stuff where kids get addicted and all they wanna do is get better, better, better." And so we've tried to strike a balance with that to say that, "Well, what's really awesome about that is that kids are driven to get better." And one thing games do do very, very well, is they understand how to incentivize players to want to get better. >>And then you have two goals, but one of them is impossible to get to. >>Teacher: Okay. >>My game has two goals that are both possible to get to. >>So the way that our curriculum is structured in mission and quest based, so it actually builds on that trope from online gaming. And the idea is that quests actually get harder as you move through them, because you're actually developing tools and developing knowledge and developing experiences. And the goal is that you actually can't move to a quest until you've completed one prior. They're proceeding through some kind of challenge and they're getting closer to some kind of end goal, and we have found that that's very motivating for kids, that they know where they're at, they know how far they've come and they know what they need to work on. >>Game design is not just sitting in front of a computer and creating a game where somebody runs around collecting coins or something. Game design is all about trial and error and figuring out all these things that would make a good game. >>Two of the big ideas that kids have been working on all year, one is ideas of teamwork and collaboration, which we think is a central skill in the twenty-first century. Being able to not only work together with somebody, but to have a specific expertise and being able to talk with someone about that, share with someone about that, and kind of co-build something together. The second idea is around this idea of multi-modality, of kids being able to read and encounter text and stories and image making in a lot of different kinds of mediums. >>This trimester in the Sports for the Mind class, which is one of the central systems thinking classes, where kids are making games as a way to learn about systems, we decided to work on a kind of translation project. So they're studying a story, studying Aesop's fables, and they're looking at, what does it take the translate the components of a story into a live, three D game environment? And so we're moving from things like a static page, into an environment where the kids have created and costumed characters, they've built sets. And then the final exhibition is, the kids will, in this three D game, perform this story live. So it's a little bit like a virtual theater performance of a story that has come from a kind of oral tradition of storytelling, moved to a printed page, moved to a kind of graphic novel format, now into a three D game environment. >>We think that design thinking is actually a way of looking at the world. It's a way of looking at the world as someone who is active in thinking about how to solve problems, is active in kind of analyzing and understand how things work, and we think that's a great stance to have, to look at the world generally. So we believe these kids are gonna grow up through work in our school as design thinkers. That doesn't mean that they're all gonna go on to be designers in professional lives. We would imagine and love that some of those kids will step into roles as wanting to be scientists, wanting to be writers, wanting to be musicians, you know, wanting to be whatever. But they still will have this perspective on how they look at the world, and that will inform any discipline that they go into. >>Well, I think at the kind of heart of everything we're doing is, we're trying to help kids understand how to be in charge of their own learning, and continue to grow as learners across their whole life, because we just understand that's critically important these days. These kids are not gonna graduate, enter a job and be in that job for the rest of their lives. They're gonna need to be able to adapt. They're gonna have to learn new things constantly. And so that's the type of learner that we're looking to graduate.

Education

Salen graduated from the University of Texas in 1990 with a B.A. in Fine Arts.^[5] She holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.^[5] At RISD, she studied semiotics with Tom Ockerse, who focused on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. She also worked with designers Jan van Toorn of the Netherlands, Michael Rock, and Sharon Poggenpohl. She has an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Bank Street College of Education.

Early career

2001–2003

In 2001, Salen started to work at gameLab, where she still serves as a member of the advisory board as of 2010. In 2002, Creative Time in New York hired Salen to develop the curriculum and workshops for the Blur Conference. From 2002–2003, she was a writer and animator for music videos for the band Zero7,^[6] which had extended play on MYV, MTV and VH1. Also from 2002–2003, Salen was asked to design the Big Urban Game (BUG), a citywide multiplayer game which was to be played by the residents of Minneapolis and St.Paul in Minnesota as part of the Twin Cities Design Celebration.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center engaged Salen to co-curate with Graham Leggatt, the director of the society, "Game Engine", an evening of programming for the New York Video Festival in 2003. In that same year, Salen started writing for RES Magazine, which focuses on film, design, culture, art and music;^[7] She continued as a contributor until 2006.

Also in 2003, Salen worked as part of a research team to create and design an interactive, animated storytelling experience that was to be distributed through Xbox Live!

2004–2006
In 2004, the Hewlett Foundation took on Salen as the co-director for the Games to Learn Symposium. She was also a consultant for the Digital Kids initiative through the MacArthur Foundation, and served as a game designer for a large motion capture game called Squidball that was developed with the Media Research Lab at New York University. In 2004, the Comtech Group (COGO) hired Salen as a consultant for a mobile phone game, and for their online world. The MSN division of Microsoft engaged Salen as a consultant for the redesign of the website in 2004. ATTAP, a group devoted to new web technologies, used Salen as an interactive game designer for their new tools. Salen was also involved in 2005 as a game design consultant with The Rapunzel Project to teach girls computer code. ^{[citation needed]} The Buckminster Fuller Institute partnered with the Game Culture & Technology Lab at the University of California, Irvine to create a spaceship earth game, which Salen also worked on in 2005.

From 2004–2006, Mememe Productions in Melbourne, Australia, had Salen design a game for a children's television show and for their online community site, while from 2005-2006 she worked on the ISEA2006 Symposium in San Jose, California. This was presented by CADRE Interactive City residency. From 2003 until 2006, Salen was the Director of Graduate Students for the Design and Technology Program at Parsons The New School for Design. Salen is currently faculty at DePaul University's College of Computing and Digital Media in Chicago, USA.

Early projects

Karaoke Ice

Salen worked on this project alongside Nancy Nowacek and Marina Zurkow in August 2006.^[8] The project transformed an ice cream truck into a mobile karaoke unit which roamed the streets of San Jose, California, inviting people towards it with free popsicles. Everyone and anyone was invited to participate in a live karaoke session which would be recorded to be played over loudspeakers later. The songs that were available to sing included "Hey Ya!" by Outkast, "These Boots are Made for Walking" by Nancy Sinatra, and "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." by Aretha Franklin.

Big Urban Game

Along with Frank Lantz and Nick Fortugno, Salen was asked to help design this large-scale urban game for part of the Twin Cities Design Celebration. All residents were encouraged to participate in the race, the goal of which was to move a 25-foot high inflatable game piece through a route throughout the Twin Cities, hitting several "checkpoints." Salen created this game to engage a large community with culture and with each other, in an effort to make the residents more aware of urban design.^[9]^[10]

Waking Life

Salen worked as an animator for this critically acclaimed feature film, directed by Richard Linklater. The film explores topics such as free will, determinism, dreams and the nature of reality.^[11]

Recent projects

Institute of Play

Salen is the Executive Director of Institute of Play, an organization that promotes games as a learning tool for the 21st century. Institute of Play has used games, play and the principles that underlie them to design schools, programs, games, events, digital platforms and products.^[3] Some projects Institute of Play has produced include Quest to Learn,^[12] SMALLab (Situated Multimedia Art Learning Lab) Games, Mobile Quest summer camp, and Gamestar Mechanic Strategy Guide.^[13] Institute of Play also produced the video game design lab GlassLab, which is developing game-based assessments in partnership with Electronic Arts and Entertainment Software Foundation.^[14]

Quest to Learn (Q2L)

Salen is a designer of Quest to Learn,^[15] a public school in Manhattan, New York City created out of a collaboration between Institute of Play and the New York City Department of Education, with backing from the MacArthur Foundation and support from New Visions for Public Schools. The school began in the 2009–2010 school year with one sixth grade class, and will add a new grade every year until 2015, when it will be a fully functioning combined middle and high school encompassing grades 6-12. It is located in the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Q2L's standards-based curriculum is developed collaboratively by teachers, game designers, and curriculum designers. Curriculum design mimics the design principles of games by framing every piece of the curriculum as a mission that involves game strategies like collaboration, role-playing and simulation. The school encourages hands-on problem solving,^[16] and is designed to promote learning of 21st Century Skills many experts say are necessary for college and career success, such as systems thinking, collaboration, and digital literacy. Not only do students play games in the classrooms, they learn to make them in order to demonstrate their systems thinking skills.^[15]^[17]

Embodied play

One of Salen's current projects is a collaboration with David Birchfield and Mina Glenberg-Johnson from Arizona State University. It focuses on "embodied play in mixed reality environments."^[2]

Connected Camps

Another of Salen's current projects is connected camps.^[18]^[19] She is co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Connected Camps.

Works

(editor) The Politics of Design (Zed 1). Center for Design Studies, 1995. ISBN 1885801009
(editor) Zed 5 / Beyond the Object: The Implications Project. Center for Design Studies, 1998. ISBN 0971544468
(with Eric Zimmerman) Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, 2003. ISBN 0262240459
(with Eric Zimmerman) The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. MIT Press, 2005. ISBN 0262195364
(editor) The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. MIT Press, 2007. ISBN 026269364X
(with Robert Torres, Loretta Wolozin, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, and Arana Shapiro) Quest to Learn: Growing a School for Digital Kids. MIT Press, 2010. ISBN 0262515652
(with Melissa Gresalfi) Gaming the System: Designing with Gamestar Mechanic. MIT Press, 2014. ISBN 026202781X

References

^ "Salen, Katie", New School faculty page
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d "Salen, Katie", DePaul University faculty page
^ ^a ^b Institute of Play website
^ Quest to Learn website
^ ^a ^b "Katie Salen" on Gamers Mob website. Accessed: 25 February 2010
^ "Katie Salen" Archived 2010-02-28 at the Wayback Machine on Games and Storytelling website. Accessed: 28 February 2010
^ "RES Magazine" Archived 2005-10-29 at the Wayback Machine RES Media Group website. Accessed: 28 February 2010
^ Stakenas, Carol. Karaoke Ice Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2006) Accessed: 28 February 2010
^ von Borries, Friedrich, Steffen P. Walz, and Matthais Bottger. Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: the Next Level Basel:Birkhauser, 2007. pp. 390-391
^ Fitzgerald, Courtney. "Cinematexas Games Without Borders." Austin Chronicle (19 September 2003)
^ Holden, Stephen. "Waking Life (2001)" New York Times. Accessed: 28 February 2010
^ Weidle, Lisa. "Using Technology to Teach". Examiner 23 December ???? Accessed: 28 February 2010.
^ Olsen, Stephanie. "Education Video Games Mix Cool with Purpose" New York Times (November 1, 2009)
^ Reinwald, Christina. "Developing a Generation of Video Game Learners" Archived 2013-01-15 at the Wayback Machine USA Today' (30 June 2012'
^ ^a ^b Davidson, Cathy. "Game School Opens in New York: Quest to Learn" HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and technology Advanced Collaboratory) website. (16 February 2009) Accessed: 28 February 2010
^ Mooney, Allison. "The Job's A Game" Google Think Quarterly
^ Corbett, Sara. "Learning by Playing" New York Times Magazine (September 15, 2010)
^ "Why Minecraft Rewrites the Playbook for Learning | Boing Boing". 6 June 2015.
^ "Mimi Ito: Minecraft & Progressive Learning". 30 December 2019.