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"Leading Website for Video Game Industry Professionals Breaks 4 Million Pageviews for the First Time in March, as Monthly Unique Visitors Reach an All-Time High"

Abstract: "The software engineering process for games has enough special structure that it can be formulated as a kind of game itself. This, in turn, p ermits the teaching of game construction in a unique way with new potential to motivate students. We present a new game design client program for an existing collaborative problem-solving website known as CoSolve. The client was built with an emphasis on increased interaction and fine control over a problem's state. With this comes the opportunity to more easily design and test games in the CoSolve space. It is our hope that this will teach and inspire student users to learn more about game design, problem posing, and programming in general."

From the introduction "The method described in this review is based on the Machinations tool, written based on the book by Dormans (2012) and the accompanying paper, also by Dormans (20 11). After having researched the necessary elements to create this tool and created the first iterations (Dormans, 2008; 2009), Dormans created Machinations as a response to the call of Doug Church (Dormans, 2012, 21) for "formal abstract design tools" whi ch Church (1999) posted on Gamasutra, a game developer website. Machinations is a framework that uses automated, interactive diagrams to simulate and test the gameplay of a game before development, to see if there are any serious flaws in the design and if the game would have plausible (and more importantly, entertaining) progression and emergence. The diagrams represent the flow of resources in a game during, and the feedback structures that exist in, the gameplay, which can be interacted with during the d iagram's runtime."

"A detailed set of guidelines has been published online to help video-games developers cater for users with accessibility issues."

In the next twelve months more schools will be setting homework assignments for their students to play computer games. This will be because schools, expecting more of their students, will be looking for ways to support them to develop a deep level of understanding in, say, science, maths, or in being effective creators and consumers of the digital world (how to code, mash-up websites, design apps and so on).

"Organized by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, GDC 2013 is the game industry's most comprehensive and longest running professionals-only event where game developers converge for a week of learning, networking and inspiration. GDC 2013 will take place March 25 - 29 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California. Session proposals can be submitted via the official GDC website at www.gdconf.com. PR Newswire (http://s.tt/1ifpS) "

A premier news aggregator for the tech startup culture,hosted by tech incubator YCombinator, featuring articles on programming, hacking, software and other topics of possible interest to game designers. Also hosts query functions, comments and job listings.

A regular stream of news stories from Ars Technica about video game development. Features RSS and Twitter feeds and comment forms.

A website of news, commentary and bibliography on digital games from Jason Rutter, Research Fellow at Catholic University of Leuven and inaugural vp of the International Digital Games Research Foundation (DiGRA)

A compilation of articles previously published on Chronicle of Higher Ed website on teaching with games, education and play, gamification, game software