Becker Video Game Design

Aspects of game design that contribute to players' romantic feelings for characters

Reflection on game design and teamwork process

NASA Announces Student Winners in Space Game Design Challenge BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- Three school student teams in the fifth through eighth grades have been selected as the winners of NASA's second annual Spaced Out Sports challenge. The students designed science-based games that will be played by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Excitement is building on the campus of LIU Post, as the university prepares to host PlayExpo, a juried show of games and other interactive digital entertainment, on Sunday, April 15, 2012.

"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"

using digital games to promote learning and literacy in the elementary classroom in Australia

More commentary on the Smithsonian exhibition

The Learning Games Network, a non-profit spin-off of the MIT Education Arcade that bridges the gap between research and practice in game-based education, today announced a $1.99 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand Xenos, its flagship integrated social learning environment gaming platform, for Hispanic adults learning English (ESL) in libraries and workplaces. The goal of the Play Games-Learn English Project is to provide self-directed ESL instructional resources to adults in informal learning and vocational training settings. Pilot sites include the Boston and San Francisco Public Libraries and BJ's Wholesale Clubs."

"Three years ago, PAX East came to Beantown. It landed at the Hynes Convention Center and was seen by many as the acknowledgement that Boston was a worthy adversary against the perceived dominance of the West Coast gaming giants. They had EA and Microsoft, we had Harmonix and Rockstar New England."

"The Kamloops-Thompson school district is taking its video-game design curriculum to the next level. What started as a summer-camp program in 2007 and grew into a limited course offering last year is set to assume full-course status - meaning area high school students will have the opportunity to spend an entire semester studying nothing but video-game design."

"A BUDDING games designer is set to launch his first major title at The Gadget Show Live at Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre this week."

"Roll20 is an online tabletop gaming platform with a focus on storytelling as opposed to game mechanics. This is NOT a video game, but instead a virtual "table" to gather around with friends in order to play any number of role playing games."

"Show the world your word sleuthing skills!" "HTML5 real time word game"

" Apple's chief executive Tim Cook reportedly visited the Bellevue, Washington headquarters of Valve Corporation earlier today, inciting questions about new potential for collaboration between the two companies."

"As marketers invest more and more money into in-game brand placements, little research has tested the effects of videogame customization and controller type in relation to advertising effects, even though these factors have demonstrated importance in other areas of gaming research. Results from an experiment show that game customization significantly increases recall of an integral brand placement-one that is central to actual game play-but not of peripheral brands, which simply appear within the game. Regardless of brand type, players using a traditional controller exhibit significantly greater recall than those who use a newer, more naturally mapping controller. An interaction effect indicates that the influence of controller type disappears when customization is allowed; this effect is not specific to either type of brand. These results are interpreted through models of processing fluency and the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing. The article concludes with marketing implications regarding technological videogame advances."

"MassDiGi Game Challenge"

"Never mind that they're now among the most lucrative forms of entertainment in America, video games are juvenile, silly, and intellectually lazy. At least that's what Jonathan Blow thinks. But the game industry's harshest critic is also its most cerebral developer, a maverick bent on changing the way we think about games and storytelling. With his next release, The Witness, Blow may cement his legacy-or end his career. In a multibillion-dollar industry addicted to laser guns and carnivorous aliens, can true art finally flourish?"

Reverse engineering an XBox Live game with HTML5 for internet play

Abstract "The increasingly social nature of gaming suggests the importance of understanding the associated experiences, and influence on potential outcomes."

"more research and development still needs to be done to set game usability testing methods apart from usability methods used for productivity software or web site development. In this paper, I will detail the history of video games and video game usability, including the qualitative and quantitative importance of the subject; some of the current methods being utilized by game developers to test game usability; and some methods being researched and developed now to impact game usability testing in the future."