Here is my seasonal newsletter about my work across a wide range of fields. If you would like to receive these by email, please sign up here.
Winter 2022 BJC NEWSLETTER
KEEPING BUSY
Is it March already? Here in New York spring has sprung early, the ice-cream truck has returned to its perch downstairs, and mask mandates are receding with the cold weather. Meanwhile, I am as busy as ever with work for BJC and couldn’t be more thankful.
- In December I announced that I would be producing new racial equity policy games with and for the RAND Corporation. At this point we have chosen a topic and development is well underway. I look forward to being able to share more, such as the topic of the game and its mechanics, in a few months.
- I continue to support the Natural History Museum of Utah in the development of their digital engagement strategy for Research Quest, their online tool to develop critical thinking among middle schoolers. We are developing something new that will launch before the end of this year that will be of interest to educators around the country. Watch this space!
- New work has begun with a century-old organization exploring how their services might transfer into the digital age while work continues to help the Utah Education Network better meet the needs of their users.
- After moving in fits and starts over a number of years, work has progressed rapidly on a legacy board game I am developing about families and museums. We’re always looking for playtesters, so if you’re game for a session on Tabletop Simulator, please let me know! When we get closer to the Kickstarter campaign, I look forward to sharing much much more.
- I’ll dig deeper below into other projects, but before I do I just want to acknowledge that all of this is made possible because of the support of people like you. Without your recommendations and support, none of this would be possible. My family and I thank you.
I’ll dig deeper below into other projects, but before I do I just want to acknowledge that all of this is made possible because of the support of people like you. Without your recommendations and support, none of this would be possible. My family and I thank you.
Launching a New Public Pathway to Gaming Careers (breaking news)
Last year I shared about my work developing a pathway for NYC youth in low-income communities to explore educational and career pathways into game-related fields. I shared links to our study on NYC youth and gaming here and a public event last summer (re: eSports Students Use Video Games for College Outreach) (all under the auspices of the City College of New York and Science and Arts Engagement New York).
All this – the research, the pilot programs – were exploratory activities to support a fundraising process.
The formal announcement will come in April, but, well, it’s happening!
NYC Mayor Adam’s just released his “Rebuild, Renew, Reinvent: A Blueprint for New York City’s Economic Recovery”. Under the topic “Further diversify the economy by investing in promising growth industries,” we find “Make New York City a leading hub for digital game development.” It lists ways the Mayor’s Office intends to advance the industry in NYC in four ways, one being “establishing a game development curriculum at CUNY to train New Yorkers for opportunities in this field.”
This program is just one piece of the pathway. There will be new after school programs for high school students, new industry opportunities for college students, new venues for NYC’s gaming industry (both AAA and indie) to connect with both sets of students, and new events to bring CUNY’s academic programs in a wide-range of disciplines into the mix.
This spring, for example, I will be producing events that bring ALL of these stakeholders together. Watch my #CCNY tagged blog posts for details, but for now I can share that:
In April there will be two public events, both for NYC high school students and for (and co-led by) CCNY college students. The first will be a public esports competition, in which CCNY esports Club will play in front of a live (and streamed audience), exploring such topics as countering toxicity in online gaming cultures and how participation in the league helps them advance their academic and career goals. A range of Club members are co-leading this project, their broad diversity of interests exemplified by a quick review of their majors: nursing, political science, architecture, english, civil engineering, and environmental engineering.
The second event will be part of a Well Played series, inspired by the talks and publications from ETC. With this season’s theme of esports, audiences will watch one game dissected by a collaboration among a gaming professional, a gaming scholar, and a CCNY esports competitor.
In May we will hold a second round of each, then culminate the season in a June day-long game jam.
Two decades ago I launched perhaps the first pro-social youth game design program in the country and co-founded Games For Change. Now, all these years later, I can hardly begin to explain how excited I am, both by the very existence of this new public pathway and for any role I am fortunate enough to play within it.
The New Book I Published
And in January I published a new book. I was not sure if I would mentioned it here – it is as personal as it gets – but I wrote it to get it out into the world, so here you go.
Friday is Tomorrow, or The Dayenu Year is a true story of learning to grieve and thrive during the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Within the first month of the lock-down, I lost my father to the disease and then, soon after, my job.
Through the support of my family, friends, and community, Friday is Tomorrow tells the uplifting story of how one man learns to maintain traditions in a time of uncertainty while reaching for his dreams.
At times moving, at times humorous, the ups and downs of this New Yorker were originally penned (quite literally, with a physical pen) for Columbia University’s NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive. Edited together for the first time, Friday is Tomorrow is more than just an opportunity to read one person’s struggle with the world wrought by the recent pandemic.
It is an invitation for the reader to take the time and space they need to consider and better understand their own story.
If you would like to learn more, please go here.
What Amazon readers are saying:
“It is a story of loss and gain, sadness and happiness, connection through separation, and most of all of resilience… It shows how we can help pull each other through hard times. His family’s story is my story too, and elements of it will be your story as well.”
“So many of us have experienced loss during this pandemic – loss of the life we knew, loss of a loved one… This book reminded me how important it is for all of us to spend time with the people in our lives – our family, friends and community so that we become resilient and move forward together.”
Recommendations
This month I only want to recommend one thing: Before Yesterday We Could Fly.
This new permanent exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is not just a novel way to reckon with the Museum’s association with the 1857 erasure of Seneca Village (a vibrant Black community that was destroyed in part by racist smear campaigns in order to clear space for Central Park, where the Met now sits). The exhibit is also a radical and brilliant reframing of how museums can grapple with the artifice within our tools without losing their power to influence and inspire.
In short, the Met – which is full of “period rooms” – exposed the fiction within those constructs by leaning into the process of its creation. In this case, we experience a room belonging to a Seneca Village resident – as if the community remained to this day, as if through the power of afrofuturism they had a device to transport items from across space and time to decorate their abode.
Waiting online to enter the museum (it took an hour) I asked the older Black woman in front of me what brought her to the museum that day. She said, it turned out, to see this very exhibit, which she described as being “about the community that Robert Moses destroyed, when those in power took land from…” and then she paused, unsure how to end her sentence. “Those without power,” I suggested.
She corrected me, saying, “I don’t like to say ‘without power’. That can make us feel helpless. I like to say we have different power.”
“Without political power,” I amended, and to that she agreed.
In Before Yesterday We Could Fly, that “different power” is on full display. The next time you have the time in NYC, I recommend you stop by for a visit.
