Mark Twain once said: “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” Twain, clearly, never worked with me! My favorite part of running my own consultancy is choosing who I work with, and on what, and where we can make it as playful as possible.
I was going to write this last spring, to share with you some of the cool things I get to do running my own consultancy. But then I did more things so I put it off. And then it was summer, when I did even more things. And the list got bigger. Then it was fall. You get the idea.
Now it’s the end of the year, and I just have SO MUCH to tell you about, so much to be proud of from the past year, so many people I am grateful to have gotten to work with. So hang on tight and join me for the ride!
A is for A.I.
In March I ran two sessions at the Jewish Education Project’s 2023 Jewish Future’s Conference. Picture me at the plenary, in front of 150 educators, running an A.I.-themed game show, with contestants armed with ChatGPT and Midjourney. It was awesome. That was followed by the A.I. Arcade, providing hands-on opportunities for attendees to play with these powerful and dangerous new tools and shape what they mean for the future of learning. This was the beginning of a year of workshops and presentations on the topic.
Events included work for OLAM (a network of Jewish and Israeli organizations working in the fields of global volunteering, international development, and humanitarian aid), Temple Beth Sholom (preparing Jewish educators for the coming AI onslaught in their classrooms), keynoting New York University’s EdTech unconference, and then into New Jersey to the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy (to both lead AI workshops and to close out their day of professional development for hundreds of educators with another game show “The AI is (not always) Right”).
I wrote a well received piece – Shall We Play A Game? How to Teach the Basics of Generative AI – on what I have learned so far.
A is (also) for AMLE
I had a great time working with the National History Museum of Utah at the AMLE conference in Maryland, promoting their free classroom resource, Research Quest, to middle school educators.
B is for the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum
Yeah, so this year I opened a museum. My own museum. Working with Alex Gomberg, the proprietor of the Brooklyn Seltzer Boys, we had a soft opening in spring and a hard launch this fall. We worked with graduate students at Teachers College and NYU to design it and I couldn’t be more proud.
Visit our web site here.
I designed the logo!
We received amazing press coverage, including this cover piece in the New York Times and this local TV coverage on NY1. And we ended up the year with this great piece in the Jewish Week.
B is (also) for the Borscht Belt Museum
Last year I lead the strategic planning process for the Catskills Borscht Belt Museum. They received great coverage last spring in the New York Times when it announced its opening plans.
F is for Friday is Tomorrow
My COVID-era memoir, Friday is Tomorrow, received a rapturous review on Amazon. I recommend checking it out. It begins “in its humble way, this will be a book studied for centuries”
F is (also) for 50 Years of Text Games
I like to promote the work of others here that have impacted me in the past year. This book – THIS BOOK – is one of the best, if not the best, works I’ve ever read delving deep into a game genre to understand it from the inside out. 50 years of text-based games, 50 case studies, stringing together disparate elements of my 50+ years into a coherent whole. And the games are STILL available to play. Since reading the book I have dove deep – into Fallen London, Hitchhikers Guide, Kinds of Dragon Pass, and so many more.
And maybe I’ll be announcing one day I’m writing my own…
G is For Games For Change
This year was the 20th anniversary of the Games For Change Festival, which I co-founded 20 years ago.
Before it started I wrote a blog post looking back 20 years, on the fourth day of the Festival this year I posted about how exhausted/elated I felt, and afterwards I posted video links to my two presentations (one being a lightening talk reflecting on our failures and the second an amazing panel of the original founders).
M is for MuseWeb
It was great to finally get to return to MuseWeb, after all of the pandemic-era disruptions. MuseWeb is the very conference where I first spoke about my project Crime Scene Neanderthal, which unexpectedly led to my new book (See N is for New Book).
So how cool is it that I now got to return to lead a half-day workshop to teach museum professionals the digital design skills I explore in the book? MuseWeb is also my FAVORITE museum-related conference.
I also co-lead How to Develop a Data-driven Strategy with my colleagues from both the Natural History Museum of Utah & Mutually Human. Fun for all!
N is for NEW BOOK launch
Making Dinosaurs Dance: A Toolkit for Digital Design in Museums came out this past spring. It is both behind the scene stories on what it’s like to work at an institution like the American Museum of Natural History and it’s a framework for leading one’s own digital design work.
My book launch party at NYU blew my mind. Everyone who helped pull it together or attended was just so generous. You can watch the video below.
Over the year I gave presentations to the NYC Hive at the New York Historical Society and at Teachers College.
You can buy your own copy (digital and analog) from Amazon; if you do please give me a high rating and a comment! However, the more economical option is to buy a copy directly from my publisher, Rowman.com, and use my super secret code (“RLFANDF30“) to get 30% off. (or, if you write me, I’d be happy to send you a pdf for free.).
You can read the origin story of the book at this American Alliance of Museum’s Blog Post on the book.
O is for Old Morris Cave
I am a major fan of the work of game designed Tim Hutchings. I was immediately infatuated with his latest solo journaling RPG, perfectly entited: Thousand Year Old Campfire, or Old Morris Cave: A Continuous Use Campsite in Mammoth Cave National Park, an Excavation.
It is brilliant, beautiful, thrilling. I often found myself wanting to cut out pages and frame them for the wall – procedural diagrams, lovingly rendered, for example, of sun light tracing the arc of a cave bouncing off a nearby lake. Get two copies – one for yourself and one to give away.
P is for PBS KIDS
R is also for Random
So how is this for random? On the many topics I’ve been interviewed by reporters, this one ended being on the history of Dr. Browns soda!
S is for Stephen Sondheim
This is the year I landed a publisher for my latest book: Matching Minds with Sondheim: The Games and Puzzles of the Broadway Legend. Coming summer 2025.
It is such a privileged to work on this book. To date, I have spoken with 64 subjects for my book, 45 of those through interviews which have totaled 32.5 hours. In addition I have worked with 36 people from research centers around the world (like the Library of Congress and Yale) as well as organizations and individuals with access to unique Sondheim-related content. I have also worked with the assistants to nine celebrities who worked with Sondheim to gather reflections and puzzle-related artifacts, as well as eight authors and journalist who have written about Stephen Sondheim (including David Benedict).
With the research behind me, this fall I dove into writing the book, whose manuscript is more than half way complete.
This fall I started doing presentations on the book, to work the material with an audience. It kills every time! I can’t wait to take THIS show on the road.
I have almost 400 followers already on the Instagram account. Will you be the next one?
S is (also) for SeltzertopiaLive!
I had a blast this year spreading the joy of seltzer to communities around the Northeast. Below is a good video from one of them.
When my book launched in Oct 2018, I figured after two years people would have heard enough of seltzer. I feel very fortunate that now, in its sixth year, the book tour continues!
T is for Teen Second Life
Do you remember Second Life? Did you ever hear of Teen Second Life? A documentary was posted this year on YouTube; in it an adult who was a teen in Global Kids’ summer camp in Teen Second Life talks about his experience and then – boom – there I appear in some archival footage. How fun!
U is for Unreleased Games Arcade
One of my projects all year has been producing events for Gaming Pathways, centered at the City College of New York, that bring together high school students, college students, and the gaming industry. One of the best was the Unreleased Games Arcade.
Watch the video we produced, and view photos and more, here.
U is (also) for Uncannny Valley
Over the year I have been designing a card game to welcome our future A.I. overlords (cue nervous laughter). It is a beautiful deck and aims to help players develop visual literacy about the ways generative AIs create graphic images, understand how they view the world around us, and highlight the uncanny valley that can emerge in the gap between what is real and what they represent as real.
I have presented it to educators on many occasions and its been very rewarding to see them take to it.
You can sign up here to receive a copy for playtesting.
You can follow the project on Instagram.
V is for Video Game: The Great Connector
I am excited to end this year in review announcing that tickets are available – for free – for the pop-up exhibit I am curating, for the Harlem Gallery of Science, that will be housed at the Harlem School of the Arts.
Video Games: The Great Connector is designed to inspire Black and Latinx youth (and the adults in their lives) to explore the academic and career opportunities found within NYC’s digital gaming community.
After reviewing other exhibits – in NYC and around the world – I’m fairly confident we’ll be offering something never before seen: an exhibit about video games that centers the youth experience and foregrounds racial equity throughout.
It is one of the most exciting projects I have worked on all year (with the amazing team pictured above) and I can’t wait for it to open February 4th.
Thanks to all the people who helped me get through the year – all my clients, colleagues, family, and friends. I wish you all the best going into 2024.
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