Group items tagged

"What is gaming's future? Sony's betting that they have a pretty good idea, as shown with the new portable gaming device, the PSP Go. Not only is the PSP Go slimmer, lighter and thinner than its predecessor, the PSP, but it can also play movies, connect to the PS3 and has Bluetooth capability. Most importantly, the PSP Go is the first game console to abandon conventional media. "

Who has played with a Go? I've heard mixed reviews.

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

Shell turns to sims to power its scenarios.

Lots of dark stuff in there, from Skinner to addiction. Did the hype bubble burst?

Interesting short speech by Jobs on gaming as a learning tool. Note that he connects it to libraries. And that he emphasizes an evolutionary arc: games -> simulations. And also that it's from 1990, early on when Macs had barely no gaming at all.

Uses real historic artifacts but creates fictional dystopian future.

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.

Whoa! A glimpse of the future?

I'm not only amused by the way the author of this post has taken the simulation so clearly as an accurate analog for what could happen in the real world, but am also intrigued at how widely this story is being re-posted and commented on. I've seen it everywhere: blogs in my RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. I wonder if that is a function of how widely Civ has been played, how closely the analogy to RL adheres for readers, or something else?

Good point, Brett. Perhaps it's a function of the game's horrible outlook, which resonates with our current stresses.

PAXsims is pleased to feature a number of blog posts from David Romano (Missouri State University) on teaching International Relations through popular games, culture and simulations. Today he introduces the topic. Stay tuned for parts two, three, four, and five in the near future. * * * Introduction Politics as "the struggle for power" surrounds us.

Nice, just sent the general paxsims site to Mike Fratanuano last week.

"These spaces threaten world order" - I've been waiting for the panic to start for a while, now.

Game as prosthetic - stick your finger in to manipulate the virtual finger. See also discussion at http://schulzeandwebb.com/blog/2009/07/30/preparing-us-for-ar-the-value-of-illustrating-of-future-technologies/

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).