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Brett Boessen

Reacting to the Past - 4 views

Agreed. That last, Bryan, can be an excellent way to draw non-"gamer" folks into game principles and design, too. This looks cool; passing it along to my historian colleague.

games simulation role play pedagogy

started by edremy on 27 Jul 11 2 follow-ups, last by Brett Boessen on 28 Jul 11
Erik Hanson liked it
Ed Webb

Do Role-Playing Simulations Generate Measurable and Meaningful Outcomes? A Simulation's... - 2 views

www3.interscience.wiley.com/...abstract

IR games gaming simulation assessment

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Feb 10 - No Cached
  • Role-playing simulations are frequently claimed to be effective pedagogical tools in the teaching of international relations (IR); however, there is a surprising lack of empirical evidence on their classroom utility. The assessment of simulations remains mostly anecdotal, and some recent research has found little to no statistically significant improvements in quantitative measures of academic performance among students who participated in them [for example, International Studies Perspectives (2006), vol. 7, pp. 395; International Studies Perspectives (2008), vol. 9, pp. 75–89]. Scant research has been conducted on how role-playing simulations might affect students' perceptions of the instructor's teaching. This paper investigates whether a simulation had statistically significant effect on students' exam scores in an IR course or on student teaching evaluation scores.
Ed Webb

M/C Journal: "Artificial Intelligence" - 0 views

journal.media-culture.org.au/...08-losh.php

bogost politics censorship USA Congress games rhetoric islamism jihad

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source.
  • The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists.
  • a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal.
  • The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property.
  • lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions.
  • To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses.
  • “oral tradition”
  • hroughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order.
  • The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era.
  • In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.”
  • The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries.
  • In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.”
  • Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see.
Bryan Alexander

History 293 (Fall 2010): Avatar Project - Life from a Chilean and Argentine Perspective - 1 views

languages.oberlin.edu/...hist293

role-playing education

shared by Bryan Alexander on 27 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 27 Jan 12
     
    Fascinating project to teach history through role-playing.
Ed Webb

Meedan | Iranian gamers head to Europe to... - 0 views

beta.meedan.net/index.php

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Iran's government-run Press TV says: Titles produced by Iranian videogames companies include an Iran-Iraq war tank shooter, a platform adventure set in Persia, an adventure game where you play the role of a girl called Sara, a young student caught up in events during the early stages of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and a role-playing game based on Iranian mythology called the Age of the Braves.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 24 Aug 09
       
      Heard Vit Sisler talking about some of these at a workshop on Iranian media earlier this year. If they ever do become available in the West, could be a very useful teaching tool, whether for Middle East Studies classes or for analyzing video games as rhetoric.
Bryan Alexander

Global Conflicts - 0 views

www.globalconflicts.eu

gaming

shared by Bryan Alexander on 16 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 16 Jul 09
     
    Several educational games, role-playing, based on the perspective of being an investigative journalist. One concerns Palestinian-Israeli conflicts, the other Latin American politics.
Rebecca Davis

Teaching Matters: Creating Lives in the Classroom - Commentary - The Chronicle of Highe... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...49211

gaming simulation role_play avatar history

shared by Rebecca Davis on 25 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 25 Nov 09
     
    description of avatars and role playing for a history class
Bryan Alexander

Where's the curtsy button? I test-drive the online Jane Austen role-playing game | Book... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...-jane-austen-role-playing-game

game simulation

shared by Bryan Alexander on 30 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 30 Sep 17
     
    "Gossip is our weapon of choice," reads Tyrer's Kickstarter pitch. "Instead of raids, we will have grand balls. Instead of dungeons, we will have dinner parties." Ever, Jane, currently a free playable prototype, has strict social rules. To navigate its mazes of etiquette, my character keeps a Lady's Magazine to hand. Drinks with characters are scheduled via requests sent by letter, while the importance of social conduct is reflected in the fact you have three buttons, each offering a different kind of curtsy or bow. "It was about finding out what the characters in her novels did," says Tyrer, "coupled with the etiquette of Regency period."
Ed Webb

College Professors Drop Slavery Role-Playing Lesson Over Concerns It Upsets Students - WSJ - 2 views

www.wsj.com/...it-upsets-students-11652446800

games history simulation slavery racism

shared by Ed Webb on 15 May 22 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 15 May 22
     
    ""They are scared to death of confronting racism in American history because it could blow up in their face," said Dr. Higbee. "They want to rework it and take out all the controversy and leave it as a viable game but there is no way to do that." "
Rebecca Davis

Videogame preservation and massively multiplayer online role-playing games: A review of... - 0 views

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/...full

preservation videogame games gaming research

shared by Rebecca Davis on 28 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 28 Apr 11
     
    Videogames are important cultural and economic artifacts. They also present challenges that anticipate the problems inherent in any complex digital interactive system. Not only are they digital and hence very difficult to preserve but they also are software systems that have significant hardware, peripheral, and network dependencies, which are difficult to collect and formally represent. This article reviews the literature related to videogame preservation. In addition to covering the traditional technology-related issues inherent in all digital preservation endeavors, this review also attempts to describe the complexities and relationships between the traditional acts of technology preservation, representation, and collection development. Future work should include the identification of important user groups, an examination of games' context of use, and the development of representational models to describe interaction of players with the game and the interactions between players playing the game.
Bryan Alexander

Warco: an FPS where you hold a camera instead of a gun - 5 views

arstechnica.com/...-a-camera-instead-of-a-gun.ars

shared by Bryan Alexander on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
Ed Webb liked it
  • Bryan Alexander on 22 Sep 11
     
    Warco is a first-person game where players shoot footage instead of a gun. A work in progress at Brisbane-based studio Defiant Development, the game is a collaboration of sorts; Defiant is working with both a journalist and a filmmaker to create a game that puts you in the role of a journalist embedded in a warzone.
  • ...2 more comments...
  • edremy on 23 Sep 11
     
    I find the comment that "It will be difficult to market a First Person Shooter where you don't shoot" very odd. How many copies of Portal were sold? Prior to that, the Thief series sold well and won tons of awards. It's not even the first game to feature a camera as the primary mechanic- I can't remember the name but there was one I played years ago where that was the primary role. Step outside the box a bit guys.
  • Ed Webb on 23 Sep 11
     
    Thief is a great example of an FPS where the S isn't about shooting people. First-person sneaker, some people called it. One of my personal favorite games of all time. I agree with edremy that there is no marketing problem here at all. Quite the reverse - war correspondent is a glamorous kind of profession (from the outside) and likely to attract not only the usual FPS fanbase but also appeal more broadly.
  • Brett Boessen on 23 Sep 11
     
    I wonder about attracting the usual FPS fanbase, but I do take your point that there's no a priori feature of the gaming market that would make this a hard sell. Now politics, however, if they're foregrounded here, could be bad for the bottom line, as, of course, could clunky gameplay. If the levels require a significant amount of challenge and variety to complete, this could be quite popular. Did anyone see any kind of release date and cost?
  • Bryan Alexander on 23 Sep 11
     
    Agreed, edremy. Makes me think of _War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning_. Not yet, Brett.
Bryan Alexander

Bringing new life to a 'dead' language | News Center | Wake Forest University - 0 views

news.wfu.edu/...ng-new-life-to-a-dead-language

gamification pedagogy

shared by Bryan Alexander on 22 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 22 Apr 13
     
    Published: April 19, 2013 Role-playing game energizes Latin class Choose your character, write spells, map the dungeon and move up levels. It sounds like Dungeons and Dragons, but it's not. It's Latin class. Each student plays a hero from Graeco-Roman myth with a backstory, personality and actions determined largely by the student.
Ed Webb

`Champions' to unleash virtual heroes and foes - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...us_games_champions_online

champions games gaming creativity RPG

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Launching next month, the new massively multiplayer online role-playing game "Champions Online" will let gamers create their own virtual superheroes.
  • "One of the things I like about having the `Champions' universe to play with is that players don't know what to expect," he said. "So they get to explore. They get to build, and they get to become the important heroes in the world, as opposed to having to live in the shadows of iconic characters that they've known and been reading about forever."
  • the hairy beast organically spawns in the game's Monster Island enclave and can only be taken down with a team of other superheroes.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • players can try to stop their adversary solo or invite other players to assist in throwing him in The Stronghold, a supervillain prison located in the game's virtual desert.
Ed Webb

cyoa - 3 views

samizdat.cc/cyoa

games virtualworlds interactive cyoa books

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Oct 10 - Cached
  • I’d be very curious to know the reason for this progression toward linearity. Presumably the invisible hand was guiding this development, but whether the hunger was for less difficulty in the books or simply for something with more in the way of traditional storytelling is harder to unravel. I could also imagine that this balance between interaction and exposition was peculiar to the individual writers, so this could merely reflect a changing set of practitioners. In another way, this trend mirrors the adoption of more recent new media. In the early days of the web, people flocked to what was unique to HTML, namely links, animated gifs, and the <blink> tag. A similar cautionless exuberance marked the appearance of affordable typesetting systems – the first time people without phototypositors had access to typefaces beyond a choice of monospaced typewriter fonts.When a world of new possibilities has just opened, it’s hard to find the will for restraint. But, in time, people scale back the more gratuitous uses of this sort of glitz, moving from what’s possible to what best suits the material. It could be that the glut of choices in the early books reflected more a rush toward the new than a well-considered balancing of storytelling and reader-directedness. As the genre developed, the choice-based structure ceased being so novel that it was an experiential end in itself. Perhaps only then could it recede into its proper role as a gameplay mechanic – all the more potent when used judiciously.
  • a peek into the construction process the authors went through as they folded their nonlinear stories into a sequential medium
  • In a computer game, tracking this kind of inventory state is a simple matter. By flipping bits in memory, the program itself can keep a running tally of items you’ve encountered and possibly picked up. In a book this responsibility falls to the reader, and with it an expectation of honesty. To encourage a degree of fair play, the Cavern of Doom engages in a form of entrapment by asking the reader, in the midst of a dicy situation, whether they have a magic item that would clearly save the day. What the book knows and the reader may not is that this item does not even exist. Woe upon the adventurer who angers the gamebook in this way.
  • Bryan Alexander on 05 Oct 10
     
    Very nice to see this. CYOA is a vital antecedent for digital storytelling, from hypertext to gaming to branching YouTube videos.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Brett Boessen on 06 Oct 10
     
    I feel sheepish for not tagging this to our group when I saw it months ago, but thanks to Ed for remedying that. :) I wish I had the skills in infographic production the author has, but it reminds me that enriching your argument with different media forms is becoming more and more essential.
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Oct 10
     
    This might be a good time for humanists to identify a bunch of easy, low-cost tools for that. Like Wordle.
  • Ed Webb on 06 Oct 10
     
    Agreed, Bryan. There are quite a few low-cost (in terms of learning curve and the general attentive economy) visualization tools that we could all learn to use more frequently. I've been playing again, after a break of a couple of years, with Dipity, for instance, to generate timelines. Word clouds and mind maps might be forms with applications in discussing digital storytelling in games and other media.
Brett Boessen

Why I Blog - Andrew Sullivan - The Atlantic - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...307060

Sullivan atlantic blogging opinion

shared by Brett Boessen on 29 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 29 Oct 12
       
      Instant Feedback -- blogging is the gamification of authorship?
  • The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness.
  • The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.
  • But the superficiality masked considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. The reason was a single technological innovation: the hyperlink.
  • in reading it on paper, you have to take the columnist’s presentation of the material on faith, or be convinced by a brief quotation (which can always be misleading out of context).
  • a hyperlink to the original source transforms the experience.
  • A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit.
  • The blogger
  • a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.
  • If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument.
  • Perhaps the greatest single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal’s Pensées, is a series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments, observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas.
  • Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth.
  • To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth
  • Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does
  • The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it.
  • He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.
  • You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard.
  • Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader.
  • The proximity is palpable, the moment human
  • friendship
  • Bloggers can be spun and misled as easily as traditional writers—and the rigorous source assessment that good reporters do can’t be done by e-mail. But you’d be surprised by what comes unsolicited into the in-box, and how helpful it often is.
  • A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.
  • There is a distinction here, of course, between the edited use of e-mailed sources by a careful blogger and the often mercurial cacophony on an unmediated comments section. But the truth is out there—and the miracle of e-mail allows it to come to you.
  • The reason this open-source market of thinking and writing has such potential is that the always adjusting and evolving collective mind can rapidly filter out bad arguments and bad ideas. The flip side, of course, is that bloggers are also human beings.
  • You can disappear into the partisan blogosphere and never stumble onto a site you disagree with. But linkage mitigates this. A Democratic blog will, for example, be forced to link to Republican ones, if only to attack and mock.
  • If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective.
  • To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading.
  • The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed.
  • Bryan Alexander on 30 Oct 12
     
    Good one, Brett. Some people were talking about social media as gamification, in terms of checking points (hits, links) and getting rewards. Can't remember where.
  • Brett Boessen on 31 Oct 12
     
    If you think of it, drop me a line; I'd be interested to see what came of that discussion.
Beast Marketing

Diablo 3 to Become the Greatest MMORPG of 2012 - 0 views

newspuff.com/e-greatest-mmorpg-of-2012.html

diablo diablo 3 blizzard entertainment blizzard rpg roleplaying role playing mmorpg games gaming video games diablo iii diablo ii

shared by Beast Marketing on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Beast Marketing on 21 Jan 12
     
    Great game, A+
Ed Webb

With video games, public diplomacy by mobile phone - SmartPlanet - 0 views

www.smartplanet.com/...387

games gaming public_diplomacy phones mobilephones mobile

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Aug 09 - Cached
  • MetroStar Systems, a 75-employee tech start-up contracted by the State Department to bring a better understanding of the United States to the countries with which it has less-than-amicable relations. The company plans to do so with X-Life Games, an initiative that effectively wraps a U.S. history lesson inside a downloadable video game for a mobile phone.
  • The products of this initiative — so far, “Driven,” a car-racing trivia game, and “Babangar Blues,” a music-based role-playing game — are intended to “demystify” the U.S. to foreign audiences, starting with the Middle East.
  • Ironically, the trivia very much resembles the test administered to new citizens. I asked Manouchehri if it was really fair to expect an Iranian to know who Patrick Henry was. “The hope is that they’ll look them up,” he said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the State Department gathers and receives behavioral data that helps it track “macro behavioral trends,” particularly among the Generation Y demographic MetroStar is targeting, born between 1981 and 2000.
  • Manouchehri is looking at deploying his mobile games in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in nations with more mature telecom networks, such as Egypt, Indonesia and Lebanon.
Ed Webb

Random House Sets Up Videogame Team - WSJ.com - 2 views

online.wsj.com/...4089904575093562727862740.html

gaming games news story storytelling publishing

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Random House, eager to cash in on the lucrative videogame business, has set up an in-house team to create original stories for videogames and provide story advice for games in development. The book publisher, a unit of Germany's Bertelsmann AG, has started looking for a buyer for two original projects, one a fantasy adventure and the other a horror thriller. Each of the proposed games has a cast of characters, suggested stories, and an analysis of the type of gamer in mind.
  • Bryan Alexander on 02 Mar 10
     
    I wonder if Heavy Rain played a role in this.
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