Skip to main content

Home/ Gaming and the liberal arts/ Group items tagged creativity

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Ed Webb

Video games are the answer to the New Boring | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...video-games-versus-new-boring

gamification games gaming engagement television TV media opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • And then there's Saint's Row 3, an open-world crime shooter, that seems to have been concocted entirely by hyperactive 14-year-olds force fed on a diet of sherbet, Red Bull and Korean gangster movies. This is a game in which the player can, entirely at random, bludgeon passers-by with a giant dildo. To the best of my knowledge, Downton Abbey features nothing even remotely comparable – although, to be fair, I skipped most of season two, and may have missed a key scene in which Hugh Bonneville attacks his butler with some nightmarish Edwardian device intended for the cure of female hysteria.
  • Please, if you are a parent and you want something to do with your kids on a wet Sunday afternoon, don't rent the latest heavily marketed CGI bore-fest from a Hollywood studio more interested in selling you merchandise and the moral agenda of its self-serving financers, buy Zelda. Buy Zelda and share a genuinely thrilling, heart-warming escapist fantasy with your children. Certainly, it's not as 'good' as taking them to a museum or getting them to play footie in the park, but if the only alternative is Horrid Henry, it is spectacular – and they will never forget it.
  • Interactivity is a blunt but effective tool to ensure attention and alertness. And as such, video games have never sought to stultify or repress. Video games are not interested in teaching us to make the most out of our tired soft furnishings.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Forget mainstream TV, forget it. It's over – at least in terms of water cooler discussion. Apprentice and X-Factor may reliably trend on Twitter, but it's all ironic chatter mixed with barely-disguised collective embarrassment and culpability. There's nothing enriching there.
  • games demand immersion and investment. Traditionally, this has formed a stereotype of dead-eyed zombies slumped in front of monitors, but of course, through XBox Live and PSN, gamers now constantly communicate with each other, as well as share creative tasks in titles like Little Big Planet and Minecraft. New research from Michigan State University suggests that gamers are more imaginative story-tellers – the findings are far from conclusive, but they don't surprise me. The game worlds in Zelda, Uncharted and Dark Souls are rich and deep. They are cluttered with possibilities.
  • Games get to us on some primal level, they speak to the machine code of the human id – and that can be a good thing.
  • You have your doubts and so do I. But the very least mainstream games do is give us a platform to discuss amazing things. When you talk about Zelda or Uncharted 3, you can talk about beauty, art, mythology and adventure; when you talk about the forthcoming Bioshock: Infinite, you can cover architecture, paranoia and politics and it all makes perfect sense. These elements aren't hidden away, to be teased out by cultural studies students desperate to apply their knowledge of Derrida and Saussure. They're there in the very form, the very function of the games. Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 are idiotic and politically suspect, but give them five minutes and they'll show you more about the computerised lunacy of contemporary conflict than most of those MOD-arranged shaky cam war reports beamed into your living rooms by over-stretched 24-hour news channels
Bryan Alexander

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

www.sciencedaily.com/...100121101124.htm

gaming pedagogy

shared by Bryan Alexander on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 25 Jan 10
     
    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
  • Ed Webb on 26 Jan 10
     
    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...
  • Bryan Alexander on 26 Jan 10
     
    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...
Bryan Alexander

World of Warcraft Finds Its Way Into Class | MindShift - 1 views

blogs.kqed.org/...craft-finds-its-way-into-class

pedagogy gaming

shared by Bryan Alexander on 27 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 27 Mar 13
     
    World of Warcraft Students' passions can be a powerful driver for deeper and more creative learning. With this knowledge, some educators are using popular commercial games like World of Warcraft (WoW) to create curriculum around the game.
Bryan Alexander

Creative uses of computer games - 2 views

www.popsci.com/...-great-gaming-experiments-2012

games

shared by Bryan Alexander on 03 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 03 Jan 13
     
    Nice set from 2012.
Bryan Alexander

NYU Game Center » Graduate Program - 2 views

gamecenter.nyu.edu/...graduate

education

shared by Bryan Alexander on 23 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 23 Dec 11
     
    The Game Center MFA starts Fall of 2012 The Game Center MFA is a 2-year Masters of Fine Arts degree that explores the design and development of games as a creative practice. The curriculum is centered on the creation of games and includes game design, criticism, programming, and visual design.
Brett Boessen

The "Rattomorphism" of Gamification | Critical Gaming Project - 3 views

depts.washington.edu/...-rattomorphism-of-gamification

games design production consumption theory criticism

shared by Brett Boessen on 21 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • the revelation born out in long term studies is that ultimately it backfires. Over time, people engaged in activities that are structured by and sustained through operant conditioning grow to resent or hate those activities, and their creativity in approach as well as their productivity declines.
  • Ian Bogost has done an excellent job identifying gamification rhetoric as bullshit, and suggesting many of its products are exploitationware. In light of Kohn’s work we are compelled to add that the logic of gamification is the logic of corrosion
  • If the goal is to get users to simply DO something, then the logic of gamification may not read as corrosive – just effective
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But if quality of action, emotional engagement, and development over time matter at all, we should be concerned about the corrosive conditioning the techniques of gamification entail
  • The problem is that there is no such thing as a “game layer,” if we understand “game” to mean something more than an assemblage of techniques we find in games
  • What we are really talking about here is more like a “reward layer,” or more abstractly, an activity “feedback layer” that draws its inspiration from techniques associated with games, and thus evokes expectations of gameplay
  • Erik Hanson on 23 Nov 11
     
    The final bit is what I said to Bogost when he was in town earlier this year, shortly after his post in the link. If there's an upshot to "gamification" as a movement and idea, it's that our feedback systems are woefully underdesigned. Not everything needs to be made "fun," but clear goals and feedback could make a lot of things less un-fun.
Bryan Alexander

'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...-mental-flexibility-says-study

games education

shared by Bryan Alexander on 26 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 26 Aug 13
     
    By Riva Gold Playing StarCraft can boost problem solving and creative thinking, according to a new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London. Researchers found that those who engaged in the real-time military strategy game improved their "cognitive flexibility," or the ability to adjust their thinking to meet different situations.
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

digital digs: Welcome to badge world - 3 views

www.alex-reid.net/...welcome-to-badge-world.html

gamification education change11 opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • That's what this is about: making things count, commodifying life and passion in the context of a marketplace of education and expertise. However, it is painfully obvious how quickly that gets reversed, how quickly we shift from pursuing something because we are interested in it (and then retrospectively looking for a reward) to pursuing something strictly for the reward.
  • When we look at all the free, DIY learning that is out there now, it's free precisely because it hasn't been commodified. You can download stuff from MIT's Open Courseware because that kind of learning has no commerical value. If you want to get a badge though, that's going to cost. All the big textbook publishers and educational technology companies will just jump right on badges. All those Sylvan learning type companies will be selling badges. Edutainment video games and such will come with badges and thus be more expensive.  Badges won't make learning cheaper. We'll be spending more money on education than ever, and we won't get any better results because the motives for learning will still be all wrong.
  • I'm trying to imagine my kids' lives (ages 10 and 12) in badge-world. We already live in what I consider a college-crazy community where parents of 12-year olds wonder whether keeping their kid in travel soccer is the best way to get a college scholarship or if they should switch to golf or oboe or fill-in-the-blank. Imagine a world where every potential after-school activity is commodified as a badge. The first thing parents ask is "which badge is most valuable for getting my kid into college or a good job?" Then it's all about the badges. My kids can just give up on ever having a single moment of joy in their lives. Even if they were going to enjoy something, how can they when they've already committed to this transactional experience instead?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Extrinsic rewards like badges might be good incentives for certain kinds of rote behaviors or to get someone to try something new. But, as I understand it, they have a negative impact on creative, problem-solving activites (i.e. the kinds of things we really need our students to learn to do). These are the things you have to want to do for some intrinsic reason, not to get some badge.
  • Bryan Alexander on 16 Sep 11
     
    I'm still gathering my thoughts. A few stabs: 1) MIT's OCW is seeking corporate endorsements in order to survive. Is that commodified? 2) "We already live in what I consider a college-crazy community" - doesn't seem to be the main people these badges are after.
1 - 9 of 9
Showing 20▼ items per page