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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

Ed Webb

Google Develops a Facebook Rival - WSJ.com - 1 views

  • A Facebook spokesman said the company wouldn't speculate about Google's initiative but said the company expected new social-networking efforts by others and "looks forward to seeing what others have to offer."
    • Ed Webb
       
      Translation: "bring it!"
    • Bryan Alexander
       
      Indeed. I note that Google is seeking gaming assistance in this quest.
  • Many users now rely on their friends on Facebook—not just Google—to discover content and products they can purchase on the Internet. And much of the content generated by users on Facebook is generally kept out of view of Google's search engine.
  • In an interview this week, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt declined to confirm the development of a social-networking service that would incorporate social games, rumored to be called "Google Me." When asked if Google's service might resemble Facebook's, Mr. Schmidt said "the world doesn't need a copy of the same thing."
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  • For social-game developers, a successful Google offering would mean they wouldn't be so heavily dependent on Facebook, where the vast majority of users access the games. Consumers' appetite for social games is booming— Zynga's "Farmville" game has more than 60 million active monthly users—and that is attracting bigger players looking to tap new sources of growth. On Tuesday, Walt Disney Co. acquired Playdom for $563.2 million plus up to $200 million more if performance targets are reached. And retailer GameStop Corp. agreed to buy online game distributor Kongregate Inc. for an undisclosed amount.
  • Game developers pay Facebook 30% of the earnings from virtual-good purchases in their games. Google already has an online payment mechanism called Checkout that, in theory, it could use to collect payments for social games on its platform.
Rebecca Davis

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

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    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.
Victoria Pullen

3G Summit in Chicago - 1 views

I recently attended the 3G Summit (The Future of Girls, Gaming and Gender) at Columbia College Chicago. The presenters were: --Mary Flanagan, Professor of Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College --...

gaming education gender 3GSummit

started by Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10 no follow-up yet
Bryan Alexander

"Game-Based Learning: Developing an Institutional Strategy Thursday" - 3 views

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    ECAR report Author(s) Rhonda M. Epper (Colorado Community College System), Anne Derryberry (Sage Road Solutions, LLC), Sean Jackson (University of Virginia)
Ed Webb

Alan Kay, Systems, and Textbooks « Theatrical Smoke - 3 views

  • I discuss his key idea: that systemic thinking is a liberal art, and I explain a corollary idea, that textbooks suck
  • if you don’t have a category for an idea, it’s very difficult to receive that idea
  • the story of the last few hundred years is that we’ve quickly developed important ideas, which society needs to have to improve and perhaps even to continue to exist, and for which there are no pre-existing, genetically created categories. So there’s an idea-receiving capacity gap.
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  • Education’s job should be, says Kay, to bridge this gap. To help, that is, people form these necessary new idea-receiving categories–teaching them the capacity for ideas–early on in their lives, so that as they grow they are ready to embrace the things we need them to know. Let me say that in a better way: so that as they grow they are ready to know in the ways we need them to know.
  • cultivate the ability to conceive of, work with, create, understand, manipulate, tinker with, disrupt, and, generally, appreciate the beauty of systems
  • The point is to be able to see connections between the silos. Says Kay, the liberal arts have done a bad job at “adding in epistemology” among the “smokestacks” (i.e. disciplines)
  • a game, or a simulation, thought of as a thing we might create (rather than a thing we only act within), is a visceral example of systems thinking
  • It’s the Flatland story–that we need to train our 2D minds to see in a kind of 3D–and Kay’s genius is that he recognizes we have to bake this ability into the species, through education, as close to birth as possible.
  • Systems thinking is to be conceived of as a platform skill or an increased capacity on top of which we will be able to construct new sorts of ideas and ways of knowing, of more complex natures still. The step beyond seeing a single system is of course the ability to see interacting systems – a kind of meta-systemic thinking – and this is what I think Kay is really interested in, because it’s what he does. At one point he showed a slide of multiple systems–the human body, the environment, the internet, and he said in a kind of aside, “they’re all one system . . .”
  • Seeing systems is an epistemology, a way of knowing, a mindset
  • What happens when you’re stuck in a system? You don’t understand the world and yourself and others as existing in constant development, as being in process; you think you are a fixed essence or part within a system (instead of a system influencing systems) and you inadvertently trap yourself in a kind of tautological loop where you can only think about things you’re thinking about and do the things you do and you thus limit yourself to a kind of non-nutritive regurgitation of factoids, or the robotic meaningless actions of an automaton, or what Kay calls living in a pop culture
  • A downside of being epistemologically limited to thinking within a system is that you overemphasize the importance of the content and facts as that system orders them
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    Seems like, among other things, a call for learning with games.
Lisa Spiro

Game Builds Student Empathy | National News | United States | Epoch Times - 3 views

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    "Davidson met Dr. Kurt Squire, associate professor at the UW-Madison School of Education and director of the Games Learning Society Initiative, and they wrote a grant proposal to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They were soon awarded funds for the project. The team is developing two kinds of games. One is to cultivate attention and the other to cultivate empathy, kindness, and pro-social behavior. Davidson said that ¬attention is a building block for learning. "If you can learn to focus your attention more skillfully and concentrate, that will have ripple effects on all kinds of learning," he said."
Lisa Spiro

RELEASE: Educational games to train middle-schoolers' attention, empathy - 1 views

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    "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."
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.
Ed Webb

'Minecraft' Designer: Gaming Industry Should Emulate Board Games, Not Hollywo... - 3 views

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    *Very* interesting. I wonder what that would mean - selling low-cost units?
Rebecca Davis

Imagine Cup Finalists Make Video Games and Software to Solve World's Woes - Wired Campu... - 1 views

  • In the game-design category, a team from Central Piedmont Community College and the University of North Carolina won with a game that involves a series of quest challenges. The main character is a child in a developing country who must go through obstacles to meet a need, such as finding clean water. The name of the game, "Sixth," refers to the one-sixth of the population in developing countries that live in slums.
Victoria Pullen

Bombcast - Giant Bomb's Gaming Podcast - 2 views

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    E3 Day One of the Bombcast is especially interesting. The first half is a conversation with game developers, including Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid), and some industry folks from Microsoft. It was a fascinating peek at the industry. The second half is the normal Giant Bomb crew and is quite good as well. Highly recommend giving this one a listen.
Ed Webb

Virtual Worlds, Simulations, and Games for Education: A Unifying View - 2009 - ASTD - 0 views

  • It is more useful, and perhaps more complete, to see virtual worlds, games, and simulations as points along a continuum, all instances of highly interactive virtual environments (HIVEs).
  • The ease with which the children in the pool, the students in the virtual class, and the pilot in the flight simulator move from exploratory virtual-world behaviors to structured but simple games to taking on rigorous simulation challenges illustrates both the differences across these three instances and the connections that link them. It is only by building from open experimentation to increasingly rigorous rules, structures, and success criteria that children learn transferable water survival skills and pilots learn critical flying skills.
  • A virtual world will not suffice where a simulation is needed. The virtual world offers only context with no content; it contributes a set of tools that both enable and restrict the uses to which it may be put. An educational simulation may take place in a virtual world, but it still must be rigorously designed and implemented. Organizations routinely fail in their efforts to access the potential of virtual worlds when they believe that buying a virtual world means getting a simulation. Likewise, a game is not an educational simulation. Playing SimCity will not make someone a better mayor. Some players of, for instance, World of Warcraft may learn deep, transferable, even measurable leadership skills but not all players will. The game does not provide a structure for ensuring learning. Just because some players learn these skills playing the game, that does not mean either that most players are also learning these skills or that it should be adopted in a leadership development program. Conversely, a purely educational simulation may not be very much fun. The program may have the three-dimensional graphics and motion capture animations of a computer game, but the content may be frustrating. Specific competencies must be invoked, and students' assumptions about what the content should be, likely shaped by their experiences with games, will be challenged.
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  • One example of the commonality across all HIVEs is the need for introductory structures. These asynchronous, self-paced levels or locations allow students to learn and demonstrate basic competencies in manipulation, navigation, and communication before moving on to the "real" exercise.
  • the need for communities around games and simulations
  • Virtual environments provide a natural way for people to learn by nurturing an instinctive progression from experiencing to playing to learning; instructors should encourage the shifting across experimentation, play, and practice in which students naturally engage. In fact, instructors can exploit that behavior by providing stages that accommodate each stage. Light games and self-paced introductory levels can be used to get students comfortable with basic concepts and the interface necessary to exist in the virtual world, and the complexity can be increased to encourage students to move on to play and practice stages.
  • While best practices in content structuring may be transferred from stand-alone educational simulations to virtual world-based simulations, metrics and learning objectives for the different contexts should be different. Learning objectives and assessments around games, for instance, should be focused on the engagement, exposure, and use of simple interfaces while those for educational simulations should measure the development of complex, transferrable skills.
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    via @timbuckteeth
Bryan Alexander

Agne Suziedelyte, "Media And Human Capital Development: Can Video Game Playing Make You... - 0 views

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    "ABSTRACT According to the literature, video game playing can improve such cognitive skills as problem solving, abstract reasoning, and spatial logic. I test this hypothesis using the data from the Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The endogeneity of video game playing is addressed by using panel data methods and controlling for an extensive list of child and family characteristics. To address the measurement error in video game playing, I instrument children's weekday time use with their weekend time use. After taking into account the endogeneity and measurement error, video game playing is found to positively affect children's problem solving ability. The effect of video game playing on problem solving ability is comparable to the effect of educational activities. "
Bryan Alexander

Apple blocks simulation game from Apps Store - 12 views

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    Should colleges create simulation games as iOS apps, if this kind of blockage can happen?
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    Well there's always Android - I really like my Nexus 7 a lot; take it everywhere. And I've found downloading bits directly from the web for Android to be not too bothersome (the Humble Bundle folks have a workable system going).
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    Is the Play store more open?
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    I thought it was, though I can't find any particular article attesting to that fact (maybe the respective Wikipedia pages would give a clue). But I also thought that it was not possible to install an app on an iOS device without a jailbroken phone - on Android if you have the .pks or whatever-type file on the web somewhere, you can install it, even on the standard version of Android.
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    Sounds like a potential Play/Android advantage. Then there's the Web.
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    Yes, and especially since tablets are becoming more common, tools formatted for the web don't have to be squished onto a smartphone screen as much as they once might have been.
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    Good point. Perhaps we'll see phones hew to apps, and tablets cleave to the Web.
Bryan Alexander

The evolution of the analyst: turning tactical analysts into strategic thinkers - 4 views

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    The post below is courtesy of Tom Fisher of Imagenetic simulations, who writes about his recent work developing a simulation for use in training financial intelligence units in strategic analysis.-RB I knew we were on to someone when, mid-course, a student approached me with a problem. Tom, we've got a problem.
Bryan Alexander

Utah Game Forge - 2 views

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    Utah Game Forge is an independent publisher for games developed at the University of Utah
Bryan Alexander

NYU Game Center » Graduate Program - 2 views

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    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

  • 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
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  • 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
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    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

IARPA funding serious games - 1 views

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    These games are supposed to teach players to recognize their biases.
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