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Victoria Pullen

Participation Nation - 2 views

interactive.usc.edu/...20090327-participat.php

3GSummit games education

shared by Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10
     
    Tracy Fullerton's project with USC's Interactive Media Division. "The prototype focuses on the constitutional crisis surrounding school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. A set of webisodes and a graphic novel provide the background story of this crisis, while the central "Debate Game" asks players to use the people, laws and values from the era to support two out of three points of the argument for or against school integration, addressing questions like "Should the federal government intervene?", "Is media coverage swaying public opinion?", and "Are civil rights woth risking a constitutional crisis?" Players can take the side of the "Forces of Change" or the "Status Quo" in debate over the constitutional issues that shaped the country."
Ed Webb

Watching violent TV or video games desensitizes teenagers and may promote more aggressi... - 4 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...101018211820.htm

gaming games violence K12 adolescents

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 19 Oct 10
     
    Hmmm. I'd like some expert opinion on this...
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Brett Boessen on 19 Oct 10
     
    Well I wouldn't call myself an expert, although I _have_ looked at this issue several times before with students. The usual elements are here: very small sample size, heavily controlled experiment, undefined categories ("low," "mild"), and murky description of the results (although that could definitely be the fault of the journalist reporting the findings, too). However, these are all possible issues with any social science experiment. There are some other things that often come with media effects specifically. If you haven't seen David Gauntlett's "Ten Things Wrong with Media Effects Research," it's worth a look: concise but packed with criticism (and easy to use in class). http://www.theory.org.uk/david/effects.htm Otherwise, to me this sounds like the same research that occasionally comes out about games and violence, and has been so for at least a decade. The new wrinkle here could be the MRI readings, and I'll admit I'm no expert there either. But given the limited degree to which science really understands the relationships between thought, behavior, and brain activity, I'm not sure the correlations they're showing in the evidence are all that helpful either.
  • Bryan Alexander on 19 Oct 10
     
    I don't have much to add to Brett's fine comment. Yeah, this is part of a kind of study which shows that well-produced media tends to elicit emotions. Er, yes. There are some hilarious stories about porn like this. But yes, the big deal is MRI, over time. I don't know if the rest of the boys' experience has been successfully gapped out.
  • Ed Webb on 19 Oct 10
     
    MRI will maybe change things. Not for the better, I fear. I'm watching the emerging field here: http://www.diigo.com/user/edwebb/neurocinematics
Ed Webb

Could Minecraft be the next great engineering school? - Quartz - 4 views

qz.com/...-next-great-engineering-school

minecraft games education game simulation virtualworlds opinion engineering

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Brett Boessen on 01 Dec 12
     
    This is pretty great.
Ed Webb

On Game Centered Criticism | this cage is worms - 3 views

thiscageisworms.com/...on-game-centered-criticism

games gaming criticism opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 29 Nov 12
     
    I can't tell whether this is a 'moment' or 'turn' in games criticism or a minor spat among more or less thoughtful people. But I like Cameron's direction here.
  • Bryan Alexander on 30 Nov 12
     
    There's a lot going on there, once you follow the links. Feels like early 20th-century lit crit.
Brett Boessen

Why I Blog - Andrew Sullivan - The Atlantic - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...307060

Sullivan atlantic blogging opinion

shared by Brett Boessen on 29 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 29 Oct 12
       
      Instant Feedback -- blogging is the gamification of authorship?
  • The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness.
  • The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.
  • But the superficiality masked considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. The reason was a single technological innovation: the hyperlink.
  • in reading it on paper, you have to take the columnist’s presentation of the material on faith, or be convinced by a brief quotation (which can always be misleading out of context).
  • a hyperlink to the original source transforms the experience.
  • A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit.
  • The blogger
  • a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.
  • If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument.
  • Perhaps the greatest single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal’s Pensées, is a series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments, observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas.
  • Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth.
  • To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth
  • Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does
  • The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it.
  • He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.
  • You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard.
  • Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader.
  • The proximity is palpable, the moment human
  • friendship
  • Bloggers can be spun and misled as easily as traditional writers—and the rigorous source assessment that good reporters do can’t be done by e-mail. But you’d be surprised by what comes unsolicited into the in-box, and how helpful it often is.
  • A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.
  • There is a distinction here, of course, between the edited use of e-mailed sources by a careful blogger and the often mercurial cacophony on an unmediated comments section. But the truth is out there—and the miracle of e-mail allows it to come to you.
  • The reason this open-source market of thinking and writing has such potential is that the always adjusting and evolving collective mind can rapidly filter out bad arguments and bad ideas. The flip side, of course, is that bloggers are also human beings.
  • You can disappear into the partisan blogosphere and never stumble onto a site you disagree with. But linkage mitigates this. A Democratic blog will, for example, be forced to link to Republican ones, if only to attack and mock.
  • If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective.
  • To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading.
  • The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed.
  • Bryan Alexander on 30 Oct 12
     
    Good one, Brett. Some people were talking about social media as gamification, in terms of checking points (hits, links) and getting rewards. Can't remember where.
  • Brett Boessen on 31 Oct 12
     
    If you think of it, drop me a line; I'd be interested to see what came of that discussion.
Ed Webb

Banana Pepper Martinis: Content Degradation in Modern Warfare 3 - 3 views

literatigamereviews.blogspot.com/...ation-in-modern-warfare-3.html

gaming analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 18 Nov 11
     
    design/content dichotomy
  • Bryan Alexander on 18 Nov 11
     
    First off: that blog has the greatest header image. Second, I think he's dead right about gradual degradation. Sequel syndrome.
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
Ed Webb

Ian Bogost - Against Aca-Fandom - 2 views

www.bogost.com/...against_aca-fandom.shtml

culture criticism fandom television games opinion blog bogost

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Aug 10 - No Cached
  • Scholars need to make more kinds of things
  • I also question whether traditional academic distance may not often be as lazy, as simple-minded, as the kind of "vulgar aca-fandom" you are critiquing. It seems to me that it often comes from a refusal to engage with texts and the people who consume them. It often starts from an easy dismissal of the value of the work, a disdain for its fans and creators, and a desire to signal one's distance from anything commercial or popular. It often does not ask the kinds of hard questions you are claiming for the virtue of skepticism. For me, then, there is no special virtue from either starting place -- only the need to be honest about where you are starting from and your own stakes in the analytic process and to be unsettled and multivalient in constantly questioning the texts in which you are engaged. To me, this represents the virtues of the best fan criticism and it represents the virtues of the best outsider criticism.
  • I'm not suggesting that fans of pop culture artifact X (for any X) are wasting their time and ought to read Chaucer instead. Rather, I'm just not sure I agree that intense fans are sharp critics. I think they are pedantically detailed and vehement investigators, but I don't know that such digging leads to criticism. Let's take this further: it's a criticism I would extend to most academics too... many "careful readers" of whatever (Chaucer, even!) aren't really any better. In that respect, I agree with you that traditional academic distance isn't a salve (as I begin to suggest above, most "traditional" academics suffer from the same negative fandom that concerns me).
  • Bryan Alexander on 04 Aug 10
     
    I like the distinction between criticism and investigation. Cf the devoted readers of Tolkien, Austen, etc. I wonder how often liberal arts folks interested in gaming get accused of being (just) fans?
Ed Webb

What I Learned From Civilization II | The Long Game - 3 views

longgame.org/civilization

civilization history games gaming education opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 23 Jul 10
     
    "I was getting a ridiculous Texas-style history and science education before it was funny." Love it.
  • Bryan Alexander on 23 Jul 10
     
    More seriously, it's a good story about gaming eliciting academic content interest.
Ed Webb

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

multiplayerblog.mtv.com/...board-games-developer-pop-quiz

games gaming opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 19 Oct 10
     
    *Very* interesting. I wonder what that would mean - selling low-cost units?
Ed Webb

Simulation - 3 views

alliereedsblog.blogspot.com/...simulation.html

simulation game opinion blog

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 15 Nov 10
     
    First of several posts by students playing Peacemaker as a way of thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Bryan Alexander on 17 Nov 10
     
    Are these from that Army College down the road from you guys?
  • Ed Webb on 17 Nov 10
     
    These are students in my Int'l Politics of the Middle East Class: https://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user/02949324672354748984/bundle/IntPolMidEast Shalom's Conflict Resolution class also recently did an exercise with Peacemaker, and will shortly be invited to comment on this series of blog posts.
  • Bryan Alexander on 17 Nov 10
     
    Oh great!
Bryan Alexander

Avatar shows greater influence of gaming - 0 views

terranova.blogs.com/...nelfs-on-pandora.html

culture

shared by Bryan Alexander on 14 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 14 Jan 10
     
    Interesting argument. I have a pretty mixed opinion of the movie, personally, but perhaps Avatar can help win a wider audience for gaming in education.
Ed Webb

Gamification has issues, but they aren't the ones everyone focuses on - O'Reilly Radar - 1 views

radar.oreilly.com/...ation-ownership-addiction.html

games gamification gaming opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 15 Jun 11
     
    Via James Schirmer on Buzz. As I commented there:  This is quite sensible. Since I do want to dismantle capitalism, I don't agree with that bit. More subtly, I am concerned about the entrenchment of simplistic binary thinking in western, particularly US, culture, so "Game designers often like to see an epic battle between good and evil - even where there isn't one - but that's part of the charm" - for me that's a significant drawback. To the extent that a game includes an argument about how the world is or how the world should be, then reinforcing oversimplification (rather than the simplification necessary in any model of the/a world, be it a book, movie, academic article or game) is problematic. I like my myths/theories/stories multifaceted.
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.
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