Dear Supporters,
This is a bit of a longer update, for those not caring about publication developments (most of them good) skip to the end for a small section on how games influence our teaching at the CLGS.
Change is on the wind. If you look around you the world is all a twirl. We are reaching out now in part, as an effort to get us to send out monthly updates (here is number one, we will see if June brings the second). With this update we want to let you know the state of Central Michigan University Press, where we have been this year, and where we are headed next year. This newsletter will mostly focus on game publication updates, but there are a few exciting personnel events and other elements that we hope you will find worthy of the reach. Also, not to be intentionally mysterious, but while we will nod to a couple of things, we won’t go fully in-depth on everything as we need stuff to talk about in future months as well (again, here is hoping for a second, third, and even fourth update).
We at the press tend to work on academic year calendars. It is where we are based, and we all live the academic calendar, so we think in the academic calendar. This past year July 2024-May 2025 has been busy. In July, we completed our crowdfunding campaign for Eyeball to Eyeball, August we attended Gen Con, and in September and October we fulfilled two crowdfunding campaigns (Five Hundred Year Old Vampire and Hydrologic Cycle). The beginning of 2025 saw the lone employee of the Center for Learning through Games and Simulations, Dr. Andrew D. Devenney, go to full-time. This correlated to our successful crowdfunding campaign of Keep the Faith and the now almost completed fulfillment of Eyeball to Eyeball.
During the long cold winter, we were also granted another position within the Center for Learning through Games and Simulations. Please welcome Veronica Gregory as our Coordinator of Outreach. She will start May 12th and will be helping run our social media, events, and helping with a number of things within the press itself. Veronica missed the fun video we did introducing ourselves to the world (you can see it here) so we will have to have her introduce herself in next month’s letter and maybe we can add her to a video down the road.
This May we also welcome Logistics intern Lauren Bonomo to the team! We will have her do an introduction next month as well!
Upcoming things:
1) Educator appreciation week we have a 20% sale. Check out cmichpress.com for great prices on our games and 50% off our curriculum guides. May 5th-May 9th.
2) Next crowdfunding campaign will be in June. We are going to crowdfund two games. Making History and Witch Hunt, 1649. Here is a tease of the Making History Cover. Witch Hunt’s is in process.
3) This fall we will launch the Art & System: Games for Expanded Play series, edited by Tim Hutchings of Thousand Year Old Vampire fame. The first three game books in the series will be:
- Dog Eat Dog by William Burke
- Princess with a Cursed Sword by Anna Anthropy
- The Mountain Witch by Timothy Kleinert
Expect a fall crowdfunding campaign. More details to come this summer.
4) Although this will happen before the launch of Art and System, we include it here because having the games lumped in one spot worked better for us on this list. In August, we will again return to Gen Con, but we are expanding our footprint. We will continue to have all of our normal locations on Trade Day and Community Row, but for the first time we will also be on the Trade Floor with our own booth!
This is by no means everything on our radar. But we think this tells you enough for now, and we will save some of the details for future postings.
Fire up for summer!
The CMich Press Team
Games and How They Influence Our Teaching
By Jonathan Truitt, Executive Editor, CMich Press
For any of the students who have taken our classes, they understand that publishing games is relatively new to what we do. But using games or even ideas from games that we have played is at the core of what we do. We talk about games and their mechanics in the center a lot. So much that I am constantly surprised when I talk to colleagues in K-12 or at other universities who don’t do it. Yesterday, I caught my 16-year-old explaining a game to me based on its mechanics and realized it is in someways at the center of my world both hobby and work alike. With that in mind I thought it would be fun to share one of the things I am doing at the end of the semester. With each letter we will try (if we succeed at writing the letter at all) to include some discussion of our success and failures in the use of games and mechanics in educational spaces.
Back in 2006 Epidia Ravachol and Nathaniel Barmore published the role-playing game Dread with The Impossible Dream. The game is in the horror genre but what is truly unique about it is the use of a Jenga tower to resolve actions instead of using the more traditional dice. While I was in grad school, my gaming group picked up a copy, and we played through a number of one shots using the system. The mechanism stuck with me, and about six years ago I introduced it to exam review for a group of students (there is a certain amount of glee in using mechanics from a horror game to help students prep for an exam).
The general idea behind the review was that students would generate study questions and then in groups they would ask and answer those questions on teams. If someone asked you a question and you answered it correctly, the questioner pulled a block; if you answered incorrectly then you pulled the block. It was simple fun that added tension to the review. The students thoroughly enjoyed it as review; unfortunately I haven’t taught that class since (COVID, enrollments, etc).
I continue to come back to the mechanic and something a friend of mine at Elon University, Professor Tony Crider, calls Epic Finales (instead of finals), the idea being: is there a way to both demonstrate your knowledge at the end of the semester and celebrate it as well? Each year I start my semester with an escape room syllabus (can be discussed at a future date); if the students manage to unlock it, they get a prize – usually they get to help decide the format of the final exam. That final exam has been fairly traditional for years, even with students getting the choice. This year I tossed an idea I got from Professor Kim Morse at Washburn University at them but tweaked it. During the pandemic Professor Morse started doing a discussion board as her final exam, and the results were pretty incredible. I liked what she was doing and tossed the idea to my students, and we all thought it over. In the process, I remembered Professor Crider’s Epic Finales, and then I remembered Dread. I spoke with my students about it, and we are now merging the three together. They are creating a series of open ended questions and writing up answers to them with citations from assigned readings and lectures from the class (this is the information I will be grading). During their final exam, we will break into three groups with a Jenga Tower each. They will then start pulling blocks. Each block that gets pulled will be recorded. The person who pulls the fewest blocks will win the round when the tower falls. I am still playing with it a bit, but the students are jazzed and they need to know their stuff as there is a social pressure that is greater than anything I could apply. And they are really excited about the Jenga Tower.
If you have questions or ideas about this feel free to reach out or post to our social media channels and we will try to respond.