Short biography
My academic and career background is statistics and information science. In May 2001 I went self-employed, undertaking research in the uses of games and virtual environments in education, learning and teaching. This included analysing evidence-based research and literature, evaluating contemporary evidence of how and why games work (and don’t work, and what ‘work’ in this context really means), and compiling relevant examples of good practice.
In addition the education sector, I’ve undertaken work for commercial, business and governmental organisations, mainly providing examples, and up-to-date texts, on effective game use in education.
When not working or researching I’m usually off on a long walk or hike. Ironically, I don’t play games as much in previous decades, instead aiming for an indoor/outdoor balance to life and screentime. When games are played, these tend to be either old-style text adventures, retro Sega Dreamcast games, or the Nintendo franchise Animal Crossing.
Very long biography
I’m from a small farming village in the Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire, England. Childhood life was rural, working on a smallholding, orchard and the associated farmshop, and mainly selling plums, apples, homemade jams, pickled onions and scrumpy cider.
Winter activities, especially in a small Worcestershire village before the Internet, consisted of a few television channels, a three mile walk to the nearest public library, and the occasional bus. It is not surprising that digital gadgets such as calculators and watches were a welcome distraction. And, in the mid-1970s, game consoles started to appear in my life.
My first was this brightly-coloured device from Binatone:
It was great; cutting-edge and something that would encourage schoolmates to visit. Though Binatone’s definition of ‘programmable’ was misleading, being solely toggle switches to control the bat size and ball speed.
Also, everything on the screen was a white rectangle on a black background. There were no colours and no curves. But it was still my first gaming epiphany.
In the 1980s more of my farm-earned cash went on gadgets. These were often bought from Tandy or WHSmith in the centre of Birmingham, or from a new tiny shop in the nearby town called Evesham Micros. They grew, moved several times, changed name and for a while became a substantial business.
Sidetrack: amongst handheld games, a mention must go to Astro Wars. During one particular winter of bad weather I played it frequently; a guide by another player:
But away from handheld games my life revolved, for a while, around TV-based home computer systems. In 1981 I saved up to buy a Sinclair ZX81, which was initially exciting but rapidly frustrating in its limitations. Amongst many issues was the 16Kb ram pack which, unless taped firmly, would sometimes fall off and waste several hours of laboriously typed program listings (which, even if successfully saved, didn’t work much of the time anyway).
I designed and coded one game on the ZX81. This was a crude (and rubbish) version of the game Lunar Lander. It was compiled into error-prone assembler and marketed through Evesham Micros on C30 cassettes, selling six copies (at the optimistic price of £3 each), two of which were returned with complaints. This marked the beginning and end of my earlier career as a game designer.
Next was the Dundee-made Sinclair ZX Spectrum – the 48Kb version as that’s where the cool games were. Christmas Day morning was, for many in my school year, either a delight – or a disappointment if parents had bought the cheaper 16Kb ‘Speccy’.
Despite the standard parental high hopes of the Spectrum being used for formal education, mine was primarily used for entertainment. I devoured most of the titles by Ultimate Play the Game, finishing Atic Atac on release day which earned me a letter of acknowledgement from one of the Stamper brothers.
Sidetrack: I visited Ashby de la Zouch in 2014 on a kind of pilgrimage to see the place where Ultimate was founded, but was disappointed to find no recognition or plate, and the staff in the town museum had no idea. Instead, the weary owner of a bike shop acknowledged the constant stream of gamer historians who visited his place as the business was based on the next floor.
Other home computers bought in the 1980s included the Amstrad CPC 6128, a semi-serious machine for programming with some nice games (and its own monitor so I could finally avoid using the family TV and have some privacy). And the Acorn Electron, a sawn-off version of the expensive BBC Micro with no Mode 7. Well, everyone is allowed one regrettable computer purchase and, despite having a lot of fun playing Chuckie Egg, the Electron was mine.
At school I took my English O-Level a year early; I achieved a grade A so there was no point in retaking it. This left me with a lot of spare school time during my final year and much was spent playing games on one of the BBC Micros (thank you, Computer Studies teacher Miss Chapman for turning a blind eye to access regulations and giving me the key to the otherwise-secured computer cupboard).
In 1988 I left rural farming life and went to university, encountering email and the Internet for the first time. Interest in gaming consoles was lost for several years, especially as the the WWW (World Wide Web) – started to emerge. In 1992 I wrote the first set of web pages for the Information Studies department at Sheffield University. They were basic. Really basic. But they were departmental web pages, and one of the first of their kind in UK academia. Most people in the department thought this web thing was an utter waste of time, though a few were interested…
…one being Nigel Ford. One thing led to another and we eventually ‘ran’ a course for the library school students of the time, “Cataloging in the Electronic age”. When I say ‘ran’, what we did was tell the students to get into groups, pick a subject, find websites on that subject, build a simple web index (basically a subject gateway) and only include the ‘good’ websites, justifying ‘good’ and those inclusions and exclusions in a presentation.
I’ll probably never do anything as controversial again. The sheer hostility from a few staff in the department was a blunt introduction to the academic obstruction of emerging technologies I’d encounter repeatedly over the years. But more importantly the students loved it and were good at it. It gave them a year or two of web experience advantage in the job market; many were employed by, or managed, digital library projects and services, and the course resulted in a publication for Nigel and myself.
This in turn led to being hired by Lorcan Dempsey (librarian, writer and advisor) as the Information Officer of UKOLN, the UK Office of Library and Information Networking, in 1995. I worked on several emerging web projects, most notably as the (web) editor of the first ten issues or two years of Ariadne. This was followed by research projects at the Institute for Research and Learning Technology, then the manager of OMNI, a web-based health and medical subject gateway.
During that last role I bought a Nintendo N64 console and spent much of the winter and spring on what started my personal second era of video gaming. In addition to GoldenEye, Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie, one game in particular stood out – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I spent two months playing a few hours each day and remember my landlady avoiding all social contact during the especially stressful “Water Temple fortnight”.
At one particular game point, Gerudo’s Fortress…
…I realised how compelling and whole-world-within-a-game this felt, and that games were emerging as a major form of entertainment I very happily wanted to examine more. Perhaps that was my first gaming epiphany as an adult.
The next few years saw a move to Scotland; first Glasgow and then westwards to increasingly rural communities (eventually living on an island in the Outer Hebrides for five years) as I gradually moved away from 9-to-5 academia and its obsessions with meetings, and meetings about meetings. That time also led to more game play and consoles, and starting to write a little about games in education.
The Neo Geo Pocket Color was a particulary good handheld console with, unfortunately, a short life. And speaking of short life spans, the Sega Dreamcast was a console I’ll remember fondly as my favorite, due to the considerable array of unconventional games. It would also be the first console I’d spontaneously buy without prior research, after seeing a demonstration of Soul Calibur and running to the bank to draw out enough money for purchase.
Sidetrack: through Phantasy Star Online, the Dreamcast rewarded me with another epiphany. This one concerned the potential for using digital games in online education. Here was a console game which was also a full-on MMORPG, expansive and engaging, encouraging the player to explore, but was also playable – over dial-up! – with seemingly no lag. PSO also offered a multitude of ways to communicate with other people. Real people. And without delay, so you could have conversations. There was … something … of interest here. I wasn’t sure exactly what, but there was something.
That epiphany nudged me to more extensively read around, then write about, the potential and actual uses of digital games in education, learning and teaching. This became a strand of research which gradually became my line of work; a variety of projects and reports were produced for companies in the private and public sectors. But with Phantasy Star Online, I can draw a direct line from the many nights exploring that digital and online world, communicating with real people within, and trying to figure out why it was designed as it was, to experimenting with other virtual worlds, being introduced to Second Life by Aleks Krotoski, and eventually being funded by the Eduserv Foundation to create and run Virtual World Watch for several years.
Other console purchases included the original Xbox, on which I played Halo for many hours. Or rather, didn’t so much play as experimented, using the environment as a sandbox to see what it could do and how the game dealt with certain situations. This turned into an extended meditation on the game as real-world simulation, though this didn’t go down well with friends who played it. While they were running around killing each other in multiplayer games, I would be testing the realism of the physics by attempting to fly a banshee down a cave, or trying to nudge vehicles off cliff edges to see how they would tumble and fall. To me this was far more interesting than just ‘shoot everyone and complete the game as quickly as possible’. We have ‘Slow TV’ and ‘Slow cooking’, so I guess ‘Slow gaming’ was a thing for me.
Another console around that time was the Nintendo GameCube, a slight disappointment in comparison to the Dreamcast. But, the GameCube hosted Animal Crossing, a franchise I’ve returned to nearly every time a new version is released. As Animal Crossing works in real time, I played it very nearly every day for a calendar year to “attend” all of the events that the game contained (or generated) as the seasons changed. One of my great regrets is not keeping any kind of diary, as this could have made for an interesting article or paper.
After the GameCube I owned a Nintendo Wii, then the Nintendo 3DS from its launch. This handheld console was a particularly fascinating and under-utilised box of tricks, with its well-known 3D graphics and not so well-known augmented reality functionality. Perhaps inevitably, I used it for a multi-year play of Animal Crossing (New Leaf). Here’s a few of my screenshots.
Roughly 2011 through to 2015 was spent undertaking works for various clients in the academic and private sectors (especially the UK school sector), but also becoming disillusioned with the cuture around games and gamers. In addition, a long run of learning games of this time felt contrived and disappointing in implementation. There were exceptions, and some great learning games during the first half of that decade, but I became ambivalent and increasingly bored at seeing the same ineffective and derivative mechanisms and tropes in a large number of (often expensive) educational games.
In 2015, I started to work on several projects concerning environmental issues and food distribution chains. These gave me deeper perspectives in these areas, and led to a greater appreciation of climate, environmental and food issues, as well as a healthier lifestyle.
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I’ve returned to the field with a fresh feeling and some new perspectives, especially on games for teaching issues around climate change and the environment.
As for playing games themselves? While I’ve given the most recent iteration of Animal Crossing a miss because of the time I’d dedicate to it, the retro world of text adventures has appealed again. This may seem a little odd; in this time of graphically highly-polished games, I find myself reading text-based location descriptions and typing commands such as “North”, “Inventory”, “Eat cheese” and “Shoot arrow at Grue”. But, like reading a good book, the text is and has been a primer for the imagination and images in the mind, and they’re simple, quick to download and play, and above all, fun.
Who knows; just maybe one year I’ll finally finish writing one myself, several decades after that first and not-great experience of game design and publishing.