Becker Video Game Design

A 13-year old's game, winner in several categories in National STEM challenge, is recognized at White House science fair.

A forum from HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) inviting commentary on questions including games for digital humanities, video game pedagogy and gamification

Complaints and lawsuits against potentially derivative games

From Iowa State University students, Metalblast : "The game takes place in the year 2052. Plants are dying, and there is a developing ecological crisis. At the same time, an expert team of plant scientists has disappeared. The player, represented by a novice undergraduate student in the research lab, must shrink to microscopic size, enter the plant cell, rescue the lost scientists, discover what is killing the plants, and save the world - all in the game's virtual, 3-D environment. Along the way, players must solve problems and answer questions about the cell and metabolic biology. "

Profile of 25-year old game and graphic design major graduated from Carnegie Mellon and named to Forbes' 30 under 30 list

Reports on student projects and feedback, p. 170 of this document (complete journal issue)

Preview in Google Books

Abstract: "In this paper, the researchers use an educational technology and instructional design framework to explore key aspects of game design used by educators and university students to teach road safety rules in general. The use of a framework is inspired by the game design literature and graduate students' prior domain experience in their respective fields of teaching. The study also looks at whether student-collaborated game design can lead to more effective learning and/or teaching constructs. Finally, the study explores the steps involved in game design and development, and through student interviews the researchers explain how collaboration plays a major role. To evaluate the proposed framework, a study was conducted with the participation of 6 graduate students using four phases: brainstorming, design, prototyping, and implementation. The students were then interviewed on their goal setting and design methodologies and shared their perspectives on whether these games provided a more creative setting for road safety learning. The study indicated that the proposed framework may simplify the game design process with effective and efficient collaborative design sessions in an educational setting."

Overview of the Mass. game industry (Tim Loew is quoted extensively) and courses and activities in Cape Cod schools

design of two games and observations on changes in spatial mobility and executive function

A bill in the Oklahoma Legislature "proposed under "emergency" rules because it is "immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health and safety," according to the text. After being read on the House floor next week, the bill will need majority votes in both the Oklahoma House of Representatives and Senate before being sent to the governor. After that, if it doesn't receive a three-fourths majority in both houses, it will be put on a November ballot to be approved or rejected by Oklahoma voters."

19-year-old's peaceful video game, shared in snippets on YouTube, and similar products

"The 12(th) Annual Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA), the peer-awarded highest honors in video game development, have revealed the recipients of two of its Special Awards - the Pioneer Award, given to developers for creating breakthrough video game genres or concepts, and the Ambassador Award, given to those who have helped the game industry advance to a better place. "

Teams of independent game developers given space and technology to pursue products in San Francisco

White House OSTP looks at games that improve health and other serious applications

From a book on haptic interfaces ,"Currently, a diverse spectrum of games available in the market take advantage of the force feedback stimuli effects offered by mainstream haptic interfaces. Here we intend to give a broad view of past and present developments aimed at enabling game environment with haptic augmented interfaces, while discussing the strengths and weaknesses of such developments."

"first, we give empirical evidence that shows the extent to which productive training (i.e. vocalizing words) is superior to receptive vocabulary training, and discuss the use of scaffolding hints to "unpack" factors in the learner‟s linguistic knowledge that may impact reading. Second, we discuss what our results suggest for future research in HCI."

Abstract: "The most popular Facebook games are being played by millions of users, sometimes only a few weeks after introduction. Although several of these games and their users have been studied, there currently exists no open-source version of such a game. In this thesis we present the design, implementation, and performance analysis of WebHack, a Facebook-integrated multiplayer game. WebHack is built upon the classic, but still popular, game of Nethack. We discuss the technical difficulties with file handles, process limits, communication networks, and handling failures. Further, we consider aspects specific to legacy applications, for example legal issues and technical limitations. We propose methods to circumvent these issues, and show a successful integration of the legacy game Nethack into our Facebookintegrated game system. We present the design of our system and evaluate the performance of the design in various scenarios. Among other results, we show that WebHack is a highperformance system, able to support over 300,000 concurrent players, handle arrival rates for up to 1,750 new players per second for over 60 seconds, and is able to recover within 10 seconds from a server failure."

Thesis Rekyavik, 2012