Group items tagged

"The Border House is a blog that celebrates diversity in gaming from a wide variety of cultural angles. We aim to be a friendly space for women, feminists, people of color, gay, lesbian, transgender individuals, those with disabilities, and any other marginalized group and their allies to read news and opinion on and discuss video games, MMORPGs, virtual worlds, and social media. Our goal is to provide up to date relevant news and opinion journalism without cultural bias and using a feminist lens."

"At some point, you have to grow up enough to realize that language matters. The words you say affect people. The media you create affects people. The media you read affects you."

With educators finally embracing electronic games as a legitimate context for learning, there are a lot of questions and some debate about how to situate games in school. In addition to figuring out the place of gaming in school, I'm interested in exploring the ways gaming and gamers transgress the limitations of institutional/formal learning and what we can learn from authentic gaming cultures and contexts outside of school - as a key to learning with games but also the very future of education.

As an educator, I am more interested in gaming as assessment. I would love to see students perform at their best within the competitive gaming environment and at the same time, have some clever software to tag and classify their abilities. If the software can be written to assess that experience, I would be a happy teacher.

"Below is a list of selected reading materials that are helpful to understanding the culture here at The Border House. This is not a comprehensive list of great anti-oppression blogs (of which there are many!), but a collection of mostly 101-geared articles and communities that should be helpful to people new to these topics."

"We've spoken with other groups of academics who band together in guilds, and they don't always progress very far or become truly embedded into WoW's player culture. Is Cog Diss actively raiding? "

One way to invest gaming with the same cultural relevance of other forms of media would be to place players inside compelling, sophisticated stories.

Phantom Compass founder Tony Walsh talks about his Second Life avatar and current projects with new-school virtual world reporter Draxtor Despres.

""It's supposed to be a game," says de Castell. "And a game is supposed to be relatively insulated from the rules and norms of everyday life. And when that is breached, it's not a game anymore.""

"It's not about virtual worlds; it's about the real world. It's about people. That's what makes virtual worlds the killer app. It's us. It's other people." Must read if you're at all interested in where this stuff is going. (via Liam O'Donnell

"most of the time that people spend in our prisons is wasted time - bang-up is the most abundant commodity in the prison system. So the prison service has to provide some means of helping the thousands it confines not to go mad - or worse, to become uncon

It's an introduction to what many of us have either experiences first hand, have friends who've experienced abuse online, or we have read stories about it. The article notes that game developers are trying to crack down on it:

"Back in February, Georgia Tech Digital Media and SCAD Atlanta held the Art History of Games conference, which I organized along with Michael Nitsche and John Sharp. We had an amazing group of speakers as well as an opening for three commissioned games"

The future of video games is social.