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indiePub announces video game development competition. Deadline for entries is December 15, 2011. Awards to presented at SXSW, March 9-11, 2012

16-year-old winner of National STEM Video Game Challenge profiled.

"visualizing the 48 hour game making challenge"

"Kim Swift has built a name fohttp://groups.diigo.com/group/becker-video-game-designr herself as a creative indie game developer. She was the lead designer of Valve's highly original Portal game. While a student at Digipen, she co-created a project dubbed Narbacular Drop, which served as the inspiration for Portal."

"Digital technology empowers one to access vast amounts of on-line data. From a learning perspective, however, it is difficult to access meaningful on-site information within a given context. The Hypercontextualized Game (HCG) design model interweaves on-site resources, translated as content, and the digital game. As a local game design process, HCG builds on the resources available on-site (context) and transfers them beyond their origin (hyper). A successful example is the HCG stories in LieksaMyst, an application developed for the Pielinen Museum, in which the player is guided through a series of activities by a virtual host from the historic past. It took three years of extensive work and research for the LieksaMyst HCG stories to mature from brainstorming concepts to a fully-fledged museum service. Curators, educational technology experts and a total of 476 visitors (from 6 to 77 years old) contributed to the design process. The analysis of the context and feedback from the visitors enabled us to choose media, content and activities suitable to the Pielinen Museum. Our findings indicate that quality time, sincere reflection and communication between local experts and potential players, are indispensable when designing a HCG based game. The analysis benefits researchers and practitioners who are interested in the ways in which a game can bridge the gap between people and relevant on-site information"

"Networking is one of the biggest obstacles facing HTML5 game developers. While WebSockets provide a TCP-like communication mechanism, game networking often relies on UDP, and there's no way to do UDP-like communication in the browser without a plug-in. Why do games often rely on UDP?"

A Game Jam involves designing a game in as much as an entire weekend,either individually or in teams

"Motion-based games help to increase the likelihood that a patient will complete therapeutic exercises at home by using a game context to motivate the patients. The scope of this paper is to explore the interactive technologies that are used to develop these games, and their value in the context of stroke rehabilitation. The games will be evaluated from both a result focused perspective and patient usability perspective."

"This site is here to encourage more people to get involved in making their own video games by providing advice and direction. Making video games has never been easier and so if you've got any interest in developing games we'll do our best to help you get started." Features tools such as game engines and other resources.

From the abstract: "Our goal is to create a better understanding on how to design encounters that affect interest levels in linear FPS games. Specifically, how exactly a player's interest levels can be raised intentionally. To accomplish this, we developed a method for measuring and comparing player interest levels based on electroencephalogram (EEG) data measured using a "Neurosky Mindset" unit, which is a commercially available EEG device. We measured player EEG data for the first 4 levels of the FPS game "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" and calculated player interest levels for the entire length of gameplay. By referring to recorded gameplay videos, we were able to associate each increase in interest levels for each player to a specific point in game. From this data, we found and isolated points in each level where most players showed a rise in interest levels, and discovered that certain patterns existed between these situations. These findings led to another study where we further analyzed these situations and found out what factors caused most players to show a rise in interest levels. We were able to divide these factors into 6 different categories called Triggers: "Anticipation", "Concentration", "Surprise", "Frustration", "Overwhelm" and "Fear". As these triggers represent mutually exclusive elements that affect a player's interest levels, we found that in most situations where many test subjects showed a rise in interest levels, more than one trigger is present, a phenomenon we call Stacking. While our study is still ongoing, we believe that by using these triggers as guidelines, game designers will be able to intentionally plan and control the player's interest level for FPS games with a certain level of guarantee"

A defunct game releases its code into the public domain. What opportunities does this present for developers and students?

"he Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS), GameStop Corp. (NYSE: GME), and The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University are proud to announce that Closure was awarded the top prize at the third annual Indie Game Challenge. The winning team was named on the closing night of the annual D.I.C.E. ™ (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit at the Red Rock Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. " Also category winners listed.

A bibliography from a wiki on gamification also includes books related to gaming behavior, psychology and design

"What we want to make sure, when the next wave builds, that people see that there's an infrastructure already in place in Worcester,'' McGovern said. "We want this to be the video gaming corridor of not only the Northeast, but the country.'' Becker College offers an academic program in digital game development that was ranked among the top 10 in the nation by Princeton Review Inc., a test prep and online learning company.

"a video game developed at the University of Utah to help children with cancer during their treatment." Results of making connection between medical devices used to encourage healing and video game technology.

Potential applications for therapy, electronic health records, operating rooms

Air Force Research Agency in support of Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)

Notng a Pew study showing 97 percent of adolescents playing video games, this article notes a correlation between developing STEM skills and video game design