Skip to main content

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

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Ed Webb

Thoughts on gaming and learning | TechTicker - 1 views

  • These sorts of enviroments are a fascinating phenomenon to me, not necessarily from the standpoint of the environments themselves, or the experiences they help facilitate, but with the degree of engagement, dedication and time investment that people willingly and independently put into them.
    • Ed Webb
       
      I concur - this has always been my main driver of interest in gaming and education - the sheer energy, focus, and ingenuity people will invest in games.
  • why the obsession with delineating where learning stops and open-ended fun begins? Why must there be a distiction?
    • Ed Webb
       
      My mantra: learning IS fun (i.e.there is no distinction)
    • Bryan Alexander
       
      That's a powerful mantra, Ed. Or even a koan.
Ed Webb

Fun Inc: Why Games Are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield | Book... - 1 views

  • Fun Inc.: Why Games are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield 288pp, Virgin Books, £11.99
  • games might involve a lot of effort, but the payoff is that "effort is always rewarded".
  • elf-and-safety roleplayer World of Warcraft
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • First, games are interesting in themselves, as constructions of space, logic and ideas (games are "a kind of playground for the mind"); second, they are interesting in their potential effect on other realms.
  • he possibility of using gamelike structures to produce empirical results in the social sciences
  • Chatfield's emphasis on games' fecund variety, on the other hand, will be valuable to non-specialists: he writes evocatively not just about Grand Theft Auto but about indie gems such as Passage, where your quest is meaningless and you die after five minutes. His comparison of videogames to installation art, meanwhile, is striking, and he even manages to make World of Warcraft sound interesting – though his awed description of a particular sword as being "the length of a full-grown orc" is rather lovable nonsense to someone who doesn't know how long orcs grow.
  • "the best games are a trigger for discussion, reading and writing – not an end to it"
  •  
    games might involve a lot of effort, but the payoff is that "effort is always rewarded".
Ed Webb

BLOG « failbetter - 2 views

  •  
    I sense possibilities. Maybe it will be a little more user-friendy than Inform 7.
  •  
    I've been playing around with it a little bit; had my students look at it briefly last week. It is *more* user friendly in that there are forms and boxes for you to input your story elements (ie, a little more visual than Inform). It is *less* useful in that the product is always in the Fallen London format, ie, cards/decks are "dealt" and story elements are uncovered in a point-based system. So if you're not looking for that particular format to deliver your story, I'm not sure it's as flexible as Inform is. But I think it's pretty neat that they've opened up their process to the public, and their wiki is CHOCK full of ideas, tips, hints, and other useful stuff for producing an engaging story of the Fallen London variety. And, they've got a new game to play in addition to FL called Cabinet Noir which is set in Richelieu/Musketeers France and is fun in a more historically accurate (maybe?) way than FL was/is. Kudos to Failbetter all around, if you're into IF. :)
  •  
    Pretty usable. I quickly generated a French Revolution game/story. Would be fun to do that right.
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
  • ...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
  •  
    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.
Ed Webb

BBC - Science & Nature - Human Body and Mind - Sheep Dash! - 1 views

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Oct 11 - Cached
  •  
    fun
Ed Webb

Denmark's TV2 Uses Assassin's Creed Game Image For Syria Report - 1 views

  •  
    Check your sources and always give attribution!
  •  
    And what a fun, lovely game it is.
Todd Bryant

Barbarian vs Civ game - 3 views

  •  
    Oh fun. I hope it succeeds.
Ed Webb

Rats in a cage: how games will teach us to love the police state | The Verge - 3 views

  •  
    I wonder what an overall survey of all current offerings from the gaming industry would reveal. Index each game along a continuum from Big Brother to V for Vendetta.
  •  
    If I get tenure, I might just write that article.
  •  
    Yeah! Would be fun for a class project, too.
Bryan Alexander

University Offers Class on Skyrim and Medieval Scandinavia | HackCollege - 2 views

  •  
    Money isn't everything, but not having it sure can but a dent in everything. In college, your money is thin and the things you can spend it on- trips, food and drinks- are everywhere. So with that in mind, here are five ways to stretch your money further. 1.
Ed Webb

Parents Find Children With Autism Benefit From Video Games | TheLedger.com - 0 views

  • Children (on the Autism spectrum) take games that call you a loser or say other things like that very personally
  • Garth Chouteau, spokesman for PopCap Games, says the company has received an immense amount of calls and letters from parents of children with an ASD diagnosis, such as Schramek, stating the positive effects their games have had on children. "These games are created with no purpose in mind other than fun, but people say these games help them relax and provide cognitive activity for their children. These are side effects of a really good game," says Chouteau.
  • "Kids on the autism spectrum have a hard time with emotional control. From a social standpoint, one of the things the games are helpful with is teaching the children to take turns."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Chase Lebron, who was diagnosed with autism in 2004 at the age of 2, loves to play MarioKart and Pokemon. She found that allowing him to play these games teaches Chase how to cope with the difficult concept of winning and losing. "Their ability to cope with not always winning is not the same as with other children. Their expectations when playing these games can be a bit unrealistic so in playing them it helps teach how to deal with the concept of losing. I've also noticed that playing these games helps with hand-eye coordination," says Torres.
  • "The games on an iPhone, such as ‘Angry Birds" and ‘Jetpack Joyride,' are really great, simple games that you can use to work on goal setting. Every game has a goal that you are supposed to accomplish," says Hull. "Kids lose focus when there is too much going on around them, so having goals in a game teaches them to focus beyond the distractions to complete the mission."
Bryan Alexander

Super Planet Crash - 1 views

  •  
    An easy to play simulation of solar system dynamics. Also a fun way to teach exoplanet detection.
Todd Bryant

2015 Games for Change Awards nominees announced | Games for Change - 5 views

  •  
    Drumroll, please! Here are your nominees for the Games for Change Awards, which celebrate the year's best social impact games. Come to the Festival to play and
  • ...2 more comments...
  •  
    Have you played any of these yet?
  •  
    I did play Vi Hart's "playable blog post, "Parable of the Polygons," and found it a fascinating and innovative experiment in procedural learning. Reminded me of a series of mini-lectures on game design or game theory that were a combination of animated lecture and playable exercises...started with a version of Pong? I can't find it in my bookmarks at the moment, but they had a similar combination of commentary and interactivity as her Parable does.
  •  
    OK - just tried "That's Your Right" too, and it's a fun little digital card game, like Blizzard's Hearthstone, that definitely had me more familiar with the five sub-clauses of the first amendment by the end of it than I was before my 15-minute play session. I'm curious what political science faculty in higher ed would think of it's cutesy interface and music, and of it's fairly straight-forward political content regarding the Bill of Rights, but I found it engaging enough during my first playthrough that I (re-)learned something.
  •  
    Thanks, Brett.
Todd Bryant

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

  •  
    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 ...
  •  
    Fun idea. Can we play it with a keyboard?
Rebecca Davis

"Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill" - 1849 Murder of Dr. George Parkman, Beacon Hil... - 0 views

  •  
    This looks like fun! Lots of good angles from which one might draw inspiration: local history, archival work, spatial learning.
Ed Webb

Cyber Nations, an online nation simulation game - 0 views

  •  
    Lots of fun, once you get into the down & dirty politics.
Ed Webb

Вне зоны комфорта - Fallout 2009 «Ничто человеческое» - 0 views

  •  
    Fallout 2 ARG - fun!
Ed Webb

Auditorium - The Online Experience - 0 views

  •  
    That's a fine project, Ed. I like the combination of puzzles with soothing music, a minimalist exploration.
Todd Bryant

Phylo Genetics Game - 3 views

  •  
    Fun game, and not easy!
Ed Webb

YouTube - BBC Panorama: ADDICTED TO GAMES? - Part 1 of 2 - 2 views

  •  
    See Part 2 also
  •  
    Goodness. Love how they use WoW's own music against it...game addiction jujitsu!
  •  
    I gather that Panorama has gone downhill. And did have some fun poking at this on Infocult.
1 - 20 of 31 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page