Scribblenots

In between my three jobs and sleep, I've found a little bit of time to play the new WB Games game Scribblenauts. Since one of my colleagues has already reviewed it for the Star-News
blog, I figured I'd write a little about it here because I have...thoughts.

Firstly, the concept of the game is really the best part (and really appeals to my profession).

Scribblenauts is a puzzle game where the player tries to reach "starites," which are just stars, on various different levels. To do this, the player can literally materialize things onto the screen by writing the name of those things. So, for example, if you write "ladder" a ladder shows up on the screen and can be interacted with in various ways.

So, conceptually, the game is all about creativity, puzzles, and vocabulary, all things I'm a fan of.

But there is a bit of a flaw in the game's conceptual space.

Oddly enough, the issue arises out of something that we've been talking about in most of my classes: different Englishes. After reading Amy Tan's essay "Mother Tongue," we had conversations about how we communicate differently based on who we're talking to. For example, I might tell Bryan that he just said something stupid, but I would never say that to my students. The final result is that people develop different vocabularies and have different ways of communicating the same thing.

(By the way, most of my students wrote about their different Englishes in their blogs.)

Different Englishes become a problem for Scribblenauts because there's no way to know what the developers had in mind for a particular word that players might type in. For the most part, results are predictable, but more than once I've been completely surprised (and usually disappointed) by the object produced by one of my scribbled words. At these moments, the game is essentially a guessing game.

Generally, this isn't a considerable problem but more an exercise in both creative thinking and/or minor frustration.

Other times...

Question of the Week:

If you could materialize anything out of thin air, what would it be?

My take: Right now, I'd love some sort of machine to grade these 125 student essays I've received over the past few days. Or maybe just my own TA.