This is the story behind Stamps ‘N Stories—a story within a story.
It all started in art school. Small wonder, since Stamps ‘N Stories is
an art game. That’s what students called their time at the school: the
art game. There it was a game within a game, too, if you consider life in
an institution like the University of Washington and life in the real
world. There are hazards in both worlds, though, and not everyone
survives.
The worst thing that can happen to an art student is that the art
professor doesn’t like his or her artworks when it’s time to get up
for a critique of all the students’ works. It’s also the worst
experience an art professor has if he or she is conscious of the impact
the critique can have on a student. The experienced professor learns, too,
that a positive critique can also be a bad thing. Should the student get
too much praise at this stage, will they be prepared for the inevitable
bad review?
It’s a crap game, I think, when students in an art class submit
their work for a general critique. When I had taught a dozen or so years
on the college level, I began to see the bad and the good of critiques and
I wanted to change something about them. I came up with the idea of Crit
Craps, my first learning game.
Crit Craps was a success. I learned something, too, and that is
that not everyone can play games in art. I abandoned Crit Craps and
went on to other game forms in my teaching. I created a management game (Students
Can Manage) and, in my first video art course, Video Game. In
all these experiments I found that structured learning can be made fun,
and participation by both the students and myself helped us all grow.
I left the campus after 19 years there. But if I return to teaching,
I’ll teach along the lines of game-play. I’ll structure almost
everything around games you can learn from because I discovered people in
the arts can learn better if there’s a challenge and an element of fun
and entertainment. I have a theory that the spirit of this kind of
learning would feed back into the quality of the art that the students
would make. I believe a more positive outlook would prevail, and art of a
positive kind would grow.
I was not alone in this; in fact, if it hadn’t been for one of the
students who was in my classes at that time, I don’t know if the idea
would have developed. He is Carl “C. T.” Chew, and he was more of a
gamer than I was—or am. He invented a game called Stop the Clock
for me when I wanted to have an auction of my work to raise funds for a
video project. The idea was that prices for my art would go down as a
computer clock meted out the increments. Bargain hunters loved it, but
there was also tension in the event, as bidders couldn’t wait for the
price to go too low or someone else would get it.
C. T. Chew continued to dream up games of all kinds—board games,
computer games, and games for his young daughters. Another thing he
contributed to the game I’m working on today—Stamps ‘N Stories—is
his imaginary place, Stamp World. It’s a universe where the
postage stamp is the highest form of intelligence. Carl made thousands of
stamps during this period, stamps that are known as cinderella by
philatelists. They are not government-issued, and they have no postage
value. They are, in sense, miniature works of art.
His stamps are not only good to look at, but they carry on them a
variety of images, symbols, numbers and words. Everything has a story
attached to it, or a narrative. Most people don’t know the stories
unless they ask Carl. I urged him to write the stories that go with them,
but he expressed doubt, explaining that he didn’t feel like his writing
was good enough.
I miss the students and some of the colleagues I had with my teaching
job. I miss the supporting staff people--the engineers and the information
managers. It’s too bad I couldn’t stay at the UW, but there was no
hope at the time that my ideas about art, technology and education would
grow in that environment. Today I don’t’ think of going back; however,
I believe there is a way I can resume my role as a professor of art,
focused on traditional printmaking and new technology. I think that I can
work through the learning games we can, thanks to new technologies, now
enjoy with a computer and an Internet connection.
For the past ten years I’ve been designing a game I named Emeralda.
The idea of digital game-based learning has caught hold big time; and the
trend to make learning more learner-centered is accelerating. It’s a
time of opportunity for me. The question that I must answer now is, Who
is the market? For one thing, art education is long overdue for a
tune-up, in my opinion, and the market for something new is ripening
When I was a professor, I didn’t’ have to search for the market
because students enrolled voluntarily in my classes. I could experiment
with a game and if it worked, fine; if not, I’d start something new. The
students were a captive but willing audience. That’s partly because
everyone knew the UW is a major research university, and this was
research. We learned by doing, sometimes.
In business and the world where player is king, a game producer has to
know who the market is and then make it so that the design of the game
sticks to that market profile. I was advised: Find a need and fill it. So
far, Emeralda fills my need, which is to learn how to be an
artist/professor or mentor without being limited to a traditional campus
curriculum and its assumptions regarding the art professions. Here are
some ideas about potential markets:
Retired professors of art (like me) who
want to keep up with the latest developments.
Art students, either in school now or
who graduated and would like to (or are required to) continue their
education.
Museum visitors who want to take home a
piece of the museum.
Teachers of art in conventional schools
or home-schooling, and teachers of non-art courses who want to learn more
about artist’s ways and means.
Retirees who want to learn a new art or
craft technique.
Collectors who want to learn more about
collectibles such as art and stamps.
Stamp collectors who specialize in
Cinderella.
As I closed this article, I took a walk to a nearby Internet café and
looked through the offerings on artist’s stamps and cinderella on-line.
I browsed the Disney collection on the Stamp2.com Web site again—I’m
charmed by it. I saw the Ben Mahmoud stamps (I met him decades ago). I
wished C. T. Chew’s stamps were on-line, and his video, Prehistoric
Post Office. Then, when I got back from that stroll into caffeine and
cyberspace, back to my own pages, this I noted:
My current stamp works are based on my
prints—actual fine art prints I printed myself from plates I made
myself.
Many of the prints that comprise the
images on my stamps are in other peoples’ collections, because they are
multiples. A few are unique works, so I may no longer own the work.
Some images were created entirely in the
computer during the time when I was working more in computer graphics than
in traditional media. They have no counterpart in the world of paper and
ink unless I revise them and print them.
There’s something in my work I view as “open” as compared to a
finished work, something that invites a user of a computer game to do
something themselves. Maybe that’s the important thing about art
education. We’re not supposed to stop at telling students what went
before them, in history, but what they can do in the future. I think the
benefit of the digital media is that it allows us to test the waters, as
it were, before we dive in.
And we don't drown, and there are no sharks.
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Bill H. Ritchie, Jr. is an Itinerate Professor based in Seattle. He
taught college (UW) and after promotion to full professor of printmaking
and media arts, he resigned at 43. He then launched several teaching,
research and practice companies. In 1992 he discovered Emeralda, a fantasy
region accessible only by computer. He invented the rules-of-play and
created an operating system for online interactivity for himself.
He writes for the benefit of discipline, using a PDA when he's
wandering around and a desktop PC to organize his essays. He has a
thousand or more saved, which you can see listed on the ten
"islands" on the Web. An example is www.seanet.com/~ritchie/oszine.html,
on the island of O'Studios in the Emeralda Region.
For
further information contact Bill H Ritchie via e-mail at ritchie@seanet.com.
His professional Web site is at www.seanet.com/~ritchie
and his first portal for Emeralda is www.artsport.com.
The company name is Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha, Seattle, WA 98109. He can
be reached by telephone at (206) 285-0658. Statistics: 1472
Words. 6680
Characters. 2
Pages. ios30527
We Build the Game As We Play It. ©2002 Bill H Ritchie, Jr.
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