Group items tagged

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."

Great example of how the process of game design can be powerfully educational. If they've carried out the R&D process well, including beta testing, then the end-product should be educational as well, of course. I hope we'll see more of this kind of project, particularly from liberal arts institutions.

Neat! I like the way she worked in anti-gamification.

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.

HASTAC has started a forum (a blog post with lots o' comments) to discuss video game studies.

Nice. Also good is the free download.

TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL Special Issue: Teaching with and about Games Video Game Studies How to Play Games of Truth: An Introduction to Video Game Studies Novel Interfaces for Interactive Environments Educational and Serious Game Design: Case Study In Collaboration Introduction to Games Design Representing the Past: Video Games Challenge to the Historical Narrative Learning Through Making: Notes on Teaching Interactive Narrative Video Games as a New Form of Interactive Literature Writing In and Around Games Hints, Advice, and Maybe Cheat Codes: An English Topics Course About Computer Games Teaching Network Game Programming with the Dragonfly Game Engine Root of Play - Game Design for Digital Humanists Alternative Reality Games to Teach Game-Based Storytelling "Continue West and Ascend the Stairs": Game Walkthroughs in Professional and Technical Communication Annotated Bibliography for Game Studies: Modeling Scholarly Research in a Popular Culture Field

"Dr. Keller: I designed the simulation with two main goals in mind. First, it had to be an effective teaching tool. I wanted to take abstract concepts and theories that my students often had difficulty grasping, and make these vivid and clearly understandable. I wanted students to personally experience the challenges and complexities of world politics-to get off the sidelines and become players. Although the countries, domestic factions, and global issues in Statecraft are fictional, they have been carefully designed to provide maximum insight into parallel real-world dilemmas: as students grapple with the Orion slavery issue, the threat posed by the melting Ice Mountain, and the temptation to seize Sapphire Island's vast resources they come to understand the security dilemma, the collective action problem, two-level games, the challenges of cooperation under anarchy, and many other constructs not as theoretical concepts but as visceral truths that permeate their conversations with classmates, friends, and parents, and may even keep them up at night."

I like the concept of Statecraft, and took an early look at them. But boy, I wish they would stop spamming up my inbox with invitations to lunch etc. Quite pushy.

That's weird. Are they aggressively courting players for other purposes, or pushing ads?

Designed to show conflict between realism and modernism. Can find the game here: http://www.gamezhero.com/games/avantgarde

A thorough compendium of Koster's blogging over the past several years.

Persson produced this in 48 hours for a game design competition.

Just walk up to it and press X -- it opens the window, which lists everything you can make and which/how much resources are needed to make the item. If you have gathered enough, it will list those you are able to make at the top of the list. It does not seem like you can pick up a workbench like you can in Minecraft, but maybe I'm missing something.

I guess I need to gather more resources. ...or get back to work! Click to focus indeed.

"With Kurt Squire, an associate professor in the School of Education and director of the Games Learning Society Initiative, Davidson received a $1.39 million grant this spring to design and rigorously test two educational games to help eighth graders develop beneficial social and emotional skills - empathy, cooperation, mental focus, and self-regulation."

Shalom Staub spotted this - may be of interest to some of the group

Ed and I both had the opportunity to listen in to some of the sessions. We agreed that the most interesting and useful information for our community was presented by the developer of A Force More Powerful. A newly designed, open-source, game on conflict resolution will be released in November 2009. The open-source design will allow people to add real or imaginary conflict scenarios as game modules.

Susana Ruiz's game design studio for "casual games for change": Darfur is Dying (genocide), Finding Zoe (gender stereotypes and abusive relationships), and In the Balance, a documentary game about the justice system in the US that uses animation and documentary footage of real prisoners. 

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.

Nice find, it's hard to find games that deal with religion at all. I sent it on to Andrea

Third science game in a month. Check out the blog for a bit of controversy. It seems at least one advisor to the game is a proponent of "intelligent design", but I agree it makes sense for the game to focus on cell mechanics. Just because you control the cell, doesn't mean the game is making an argument for an omnipotent creator of all living things. Found it via an article in Kill Screen magazine "Back to School" (no online version)

Is there a better description of the concrete skills a liberal arts education offers than the description of what transmedia producers do outlined here?

Brett, the liberal arts connection really sings in passages like this: "The best architects draw on a range of influences, disciplines, and perspectives, taking into account history, theory, and criticism to develop innovating concepts. Likewise, I see a similar approach to the emerging field of transmedia studies..."

Agreed, Bryan. Media Studies has always been deeply interdisciplinary, and transmedia strikes me as pushing it even further in that direction (or perhaps pulling into itself the most interdisciplinary facets of MS).