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Ed Webb

10 Years Of Civilization II: 1700 Virtual Years Of Hell - 1 views

coilhouse.net/...-ii-1700-virtual-years-of-hell

games gaming civilization future simulation war politics

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Brett Boessen on 14 Jun 12
     
    I'm not only amused by the way the author of this post has taken the simulation so clearly as an accurate analog for what could happen in the real world, but am also intrigued at how widely this story is being re-posted and commented on. I've seen it everywhere: blogs in my RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. I wonder if that is a function of how widely Civ has been played, how closely the analogy to RL adheres for readers, or something else?
  • Bryan Alexander on 25 Jun 12
     
    Good point, Brett. Perhaps it's a function of the game's horrible outlook, which resonates with our current stresses.
Ed Webb

What I Learned From Civilization II | The Long Game - 3 views

longgame.org/civilization

civilization history games gaming education opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 23 Jul 10
     
    "I was getting a ridiculous Texas-style history and science education before it was funny." Love it.
  • Bryan Alexander on 23 Jul 10
     
    More seriously, it's a good story about gaming eliciting academic content interest.
Ed Webb

Civilization V - 2 views

www.civilization5.com

gaming games simulation education civilization

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 01 Mar 10
     
    Sid just keeps on going...
Todd Bryant

How a Civilization V mod makes corruption the least of FIFA's Problems - Kill Screen - ... - 1 views

killscreendaily.com/...orruption-least-fifas-problems

shared by Todd Bryant on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
Brett Boessen liked it
  • Todd Bryant on 04 Jun 15
     
    Civ V mod as Fifa critique. World Cup is used as a "wonder"
  • Bryan Alexander on 09 Jun 15
     
    Excellent. Very clever and funny. Flyvbjerg does some interesting work.
Todd Bryant

Iconic 20th century art is being turned into a series of experimental videogames - Kill... - 0 views

killscreendaily.com/...lissitzkys-revenge

art russia

shared by Todd Bryant on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Todd Bryant on 09 Apr 15
     
    When Russian artist El Lissitzky printed his 1920 Soviet propaganda poster "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge," he had no idea it would become iconic. It was its bold symbolism that did the trick. The Russian civil war was reduced to a potent display of shape and space. The Bolsheviks were represented by a violent-red triangle that had stabbed ...
  • Bryan Alexander on 09 Apr 15
     
    Fun idea. Can we play it with a keyboard?
Victoria Pullen

Participation Nation - 2 views

interactive.usc.edu/...20090327-participat.php

3GSummit games education

shared by Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10
     
    Tracy Fullerton's project with USC's Interactive Media Division. "The prototype focuses on the constitutional crisis surrounding school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. A set of webisodes and a graphic novel provide the background story of this crisis, while the central "Debate Game" asks players to use the people, laws and values from the era to support two out of three points of the argument for or against school integration, addressing questions like "Should the federal government intervene?", "Is media coverage swaying public opinion?", and "Are civil rights woth risking a constitutional crisis?" Players can take the side of the "Forces of Change" or the "Status Quo" in debate over the constitutional issues that shaped the country."
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.
Ed Webb

Why Mass Effect is the Most Important Science Fiction Universe of Our Generation - 4 views

io9.com/...ion-universe-of-our-generation

games gaming scifi sciencefiction

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • The value of Mass Effect as a science fiction universe is that it is a critical starting point for discussion about the purpose of humanity in a materialistic universe. Without an answer to that question, there is no real reason for Ender to defeat the Buggers, or for humanity to seek out new life and new civilizations, or for us to not let non-organic life be the torch bearer for intelligence in the universe. Mass Effect confronts us with a female hero of our own creating, with the deepest implications of diversity, with the most dramatic questioning of the value of what it means to be human. Whether you are a feminist, a transhumanist, a theologist, a proponent of space exploration, a pacifist, a human exceptionalist, a bioethicist, a scientist, or a philosopher, Mass Effect demands you rethink your world.
  • Bryan Alexander on 23 Feb 12
     
    Bold claims, but 1+2 are really good.
Bryan Alexander

One simulation exercise - 1 views

paxsims.wordpress.com/...dents-in-a-simulated-civil-war

game simulation

shared by Bryan Alexander on 14 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 14 Aug 13
     
    Nice example of building on preexisting work.
Rebecca Davis

News: 'The Warcraft Civilization' - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...bainbridge

gaming virtualworlds

shared by Rebecca Davis on 12 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 12 Feb 10
     
    new book on world of warcraft
  • Rebecca Davis on 12 Feb 10
     
    Anyone read this yet?
  • Bryan Alexander on 12 Feb 10
     
    Not yet. Do you have a copy? If not, I'll get one and we can share. Different person than this guy, maybe: http://www.professorbainbridge.com/
Ed Webb

Ian Bogost - Gamification is Bullshit - 4 views

www.bogost.com/...gamification_is_bullshit.shtml

gamification bullshit games gaming bogost

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway
  • The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about—a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter.
  • I realize that using games earnestly would mean changing the very operation of most businesses. For those whose goal is to clock out at 5pm having matched the strategy and performance of your competitors, I understand that mediocrity's lips are seductive because they are willing.
  • Ed Webb on 08 Aug 11
     
    via Kirk Battle on Buzz
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Brett Boessen on 09 Aug 11
     
    Bogost seems to be getting more and more irritated by the gamification pseudo-movement. His response to McGonigal's book was contrary but professional. The exploitationware piece was critical and pointed, but I thought still civil. This is...angry. And that really comes through in his comment to the gamify.com guy's post. I'm mostly in agreement on the substance of his objections to much of gamification. But I wonder why this movement toward such vehemence? Do you suppose he's now fielding more annoying offers to help design game-like systems? Is Cow Clicker kindof backfiring, leading people to him as a designer instead of away from him? I don't know. But he sure is pissed, that's clear.
  • Ed Webb on 09 Aug 11
     
    I have no inside knowledge. But I suspect his irritation increases in proportion to the hype. The tone here is caustic, but the content is on the money. If you agree with him, and if you love games and their potential, you can understand the rage, I think.
  • Brett Boessen on 09 Aug 11
     
    I don't know -- rage, really? Isn't the "games vs. gamification" tack ultimately more of a both/and thing than a conflict? I'm not sure why having gamification exist necessarily entails an undermining of what games are. I suppose there's the question of educating non-gamers on the great potential of actual games, and perhaps policing a boundary between the two concepts. But just as I don't really want the local police to become enraged when I cross a line, I find this kind of response (and again, I've seen Bogost do it far better and with greater restraint elsewhere) off-putting to say the least. One comment on his post referred to Bogost's "war" against gamification; I'm just not sure that's the most productive approach to addressing its rise.
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