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Bryan Alexander

Learning the art of creating computer games can boot student skills - 2 views

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    Computer games have a broad appeal that transcends gender, culture, age and socioeconomic status. Now, computer scientists think that creating computer games, rather than just playing them could boost students' critical and creative thinking skills as well as broaden their participation in computing." id="metasummary
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    I totally agree. But from my experience having students write interactive fiction in a senior seminar, this is a very time- and resource-intensive way to impart those skills. Not sure it is doable as part of a broader course. Perhaps a full course in game design is yet another thing to add to the stack of basic literacies in the general curriculum...
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    Perhaps thinner and/or lighter projects would work better. Thinner: spread the work even further across a class. Individual projects ->groups, groups ->whole class. Lighter: even easier to use tools. Inform is pretty easy, though...
Beast Marketing

Diablo 3 Dueling - 0 views

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    This is the only and best Diablo 3 dueling and tournament league online today, guaranteed.
Todd Bryant

Games don't Equal Academic Achievement - 20 views

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    Makes a good point. There's a big difference between showing games help students learn, and finding games that match the much more narrow objectives of a class.
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    Sure... compare with reading a book, or doing an experiment. It takes contextualization and reflection, which can be done by a learner (autodictat) or school (pedagogy).
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    It's also a higher level of learning that's difficult to quantify. Student A and B take History 101. Student A is given a book on US History after 1870. Gets test on same topic. If he read the book, does pretty well. Student B plays a history game, explains outcome, and compares with actual historical events. Certainly more impressive, but if given the standard 101 exam, would he do better? I think games are likely to get the short end of the stick with most standardized assessments.
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    I don't know -- it has much to do with the way the prof articulates her objectives. For us (who use games regularly), we can/will shape our objectives at least somewhat around existing titles (just as others do so around existing texts), or augment those games with other content that they don't cover (as others do with inadequate texts). So it seems the issue is more about trying to articulate why games could be useful to *others*, who don't yet use them. Trying to persuade our colleagues to try games when they've been using texts with which they're familiar to accomplish pedagogical objectives they've been using for years is going to be hard, and that's where identifying games that more directly support traditional objectives becomes a boon.
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    I wonder if we could develop a few talking points tying games to Bloom's taxonomy (updated version), making clear that like all pedagogical tools, games address some student needs better than others. And, of course, that not all games address the same type of developmental tasks, just as all texts, A/V materials, classroom techniques do not address the same tasks. The computer/radio analogy is a good one. Expecting computers and/or games to replace some other educational and entertainment resource is missing the point - they are their own thing.
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    Ed, I feel like such a set of points might already exist and/or have been publicly expressed by game critics/designers, especially from the serious games side of things. But that shouldn't stop us from discussing whether they might be in need of update/reworking/extension. :) I'm interested -- could/should we try to look at some existing texts/posts and then come together in a conference call or something?
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    I'm thinking something specific to liberal arts educators. We could brainstorm with an etherpad clone (e.g. ietherpad.com) or asynchronously via a google doc.
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    Ed, would you object if I took that Bloom's approach in a forthcoming paper? "augment those games with other content that they don't cover (as others do with inadequate texts)" - nicely said, Brett.
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    Go for it, Bryan. If you want to kick ideas around, let me know.
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    Will certainly do.
Brett Boessen

MIT TechTV - Part 2 of 3-Games As An Aesthetic Form - Frank Lantz (NYU Game Center) - 3 views

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    Lantz, designer of Drop7 and head of the NYU Game Center, which has a new game design MFA, talks about aesthetic characteristics of games in this second part of his three-part talk at MIT (part 1 lays out his thinking about aesthetics and art in general, and part 3 is the QnA). I especially like his provocations that "all games are digital" and "games created computers", both of which have to do with his definition of games as "the aesthetics of interactive systems."
Ed Webb

10 Interactive User Interfaces For The Future - Gizmo Watch - 0 views

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    New UIs could be important for extending the appeal of games and gaming.
Rebecca Davis

Game Center researchers to reinvent computer games :: UC Irvine TODAY - 0 views

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    New center for computer games and virtual worlds
Ed Webb

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto: CTBTO Preparatory Commission - 0 views

    • Ed Webb
       
      The retro computer game aesthetic really works for this atompunk artwork
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    Note the retro computer game aesthetic!
Bryan Alexander

Creative uses of computer games - 2 views

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    Nice set from 2012.
Brett Boessen

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

  • 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
       
      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
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  • 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 PensĂ©es, 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.
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    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.
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    If you think of it, drop me a line; I'd be interested to see what came of that discussion.
Bryan Alexander

Learning about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through simulations: The case of PeaceM... - 3 views

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    Peacemaker (2008) is a computer game produced by ImpactGames, in which players seek to bring about a successful negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the guest blogpost below, Dr. Ronit Kampf (Tel Aviv University) and Dr. Esra Cuhadar Gurkanyak (Bilkent University) examine the impact of the game on the attitudes of Israeli, Palestinian, Turkish, and American students,...
Ed Webb

How to make a Twitter bot - 0 views

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    Learn to code!
Bryan Alexander

Norwich gets contract for cyber war game - 0 views

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    NORTHFIELD - A nonprofit organization controlled by Vermont's Norwich University is getting a $9.9 million federal contract to continue work on a cyber-warfare gaming system that helps financial institutions and others learn how to respond to attacks on their computer networks, officials said Thursday.
Ed Webb

Violent video games touted as learning tool - Yahoo! News - 1 views

  • "As you know, most of us females just hate those action video games," she said. "You don't have to use shooting. You can use, for example, a princess which has a magic wand and whenever she touches something, it turns into a butterfly and sparkles."
    • Ed Webb
       
      Wait, wut?
  • you learn to learn
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    "You could use stereotype powers, too!" Sigh. This was odd: "Games for Learning, a daylong symposium on the educational uses of video games and computer games. The event, the first of its kind..." Really?
Bryan Alexander

A Quaker plays first-person shooters - 1 views

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    Audio with novelist Nicholson Baker, who describes learning about computer games and respecting their art. Check out which title he thinks is most novelistic. There's also a full article, but not online yet.
Ed Webb

Anyone for a game of GTA: Sodom and Gomorrah? | Adam Boult - 2 views

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    Well it sounds like from the review that this is pretty uninspired. But it does raise an interesting design question, namely "what kind of game mechanics would prompt calls of 'great game' by regular Bible readers/users?" That is, how could designers approach this problem in a way that would invite players to experience the stories in the Bible interactively? Or maybe that's over-simplifying a complex cultural issue, and there really isn't a way to do this without having it come across as trite because "the Bible" is too multivalent in contemporary society.
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    Nice find, it's hard to find games that deal with religion at all. I sent it on to Andrea
Ed Webb

cyoa - 3 views

  • 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.
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    Very nice to see this. CYOA is a vital antecedent for digital storytelling, from hypertext to gaming to branching YouTube videos.
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    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.
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    This might be a good time for humanists to identify a bunch of easy, low-cost tools for that. Like Wordle.
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    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.
Bryan Alexander

Undergrads built computer game to encourage voting - 0 views

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    Heck, the Chronicle is catching on!
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