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Bryan Alexander

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

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/...abstract

gaming

shared by Bryan Alexander on 03 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 03 Mar 15
     
    "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

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

paxsims.wordpress.com/...alysts-into-strategic-thinkers

simulation pedagogy collaboration

shared by Bryan Alexander on 18 May 12 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 18 May 12
     
    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.
Brett Boessen

The "Rattomorphism" of Gamification | Critical Gaming Project - 3 views

depts.washington.edu/...-rattomorphism-of-gamification

games design production consumption theory criticism

shared by Brett Boessen on 21 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • 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
  • Erik Hanson on 23 Nov 11
     
    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.
Todd Bryant

How a Civilization V mod makes corruption the least of FIFA's Problems - Kill Screen - ... - 1 views

killscreendaily.com/...orruption-least-fifas-problems

shared by Todd Bryant on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
Brett Boessen liked it
  • Todd Bryant on 04 Jun 15
     
    Civ V mod as Fifa critique. World Cup is used as a "wonder"
  • Bryan Alexander on 09 Jun 15
     
    Excellent. Very clever and funny. Flyvbjerg does some interesting work.
Rebecca Davis

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

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/...full

preservation videogame games gaming research

shared by Rebecca Davis on 28 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 28 Apr 11
     
    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.
Bryan Alexander

Statecraft sim - 2 views

www.statecraftsim.com

game simulation

shared by Bryan Alexander on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 02 Mar 13
     
    "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."
  • Ed Webb on 05 Mar 13
     
    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.
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Mar 13
     
    That's weird. Are they aggressively courting players for other purposes, or pushing ads?
Bryan Alexander

'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...-mental-flexibility-says-study

games education

shared by Bryan Alexander on 26 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 26 Aug 13
     
    By Riva Gold Playing StarCraft can boost problem solving and creative thinking, according to a new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London. Researchers found that those who engaged in the real-time military strategy game improved their "cognitive flexibility," or the ability to adjust their thinking to meet different situations.
Bryan Alexander

Philip Sabin, "Wargaming in higher education: Contributions and challenges " - 1 views

ahh.sagepub.com/...1474022215577216.abstract

simulation gaming education

shared by Bryan Alexander on 20 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 20 Apr 15
     
    "Wargames, especially on historical conflicts, do not currently play much part in the booming academic use of simulation and gaming techniques. This is despite the fact that they offer rich vehicles for active learning and interactive exploration of conflict dynamics. Constraints of time, expertise and resources do make it challenging to employ wargames in academia, but a greater problem is the stigma which wargaming attracts due to its association with childish enthusiasts and its perceived deficiencies as a modelling technique. This article builds on my many years of teaching and research experience with wargames to show how playing and designing them can benefit students and scholars alike."
Ed Webb

Anyone for a game of GTA: Sodom and Gomorrah? | Adam Boult - 2 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...bible-computer-game-god

games gaming religion education

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Brett Boessen on 13 Sep 10
     
    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.
  • Todd Bryant on 14 Sep 10
     
    Nice find, it's hard to find games that deal with religion at all. I sent it on to Andrea
Bryan Alexander

How not to teach games in the humanities - 2 views

www.hastac.org/...how-not-teach-video-games

pedagogy

shared by Bryan Alexander on 27 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 27 Oct 10
     
    Very interesting discussion of problems with teaching gaming in humanities classes: student resistance, backwards scaffolding.
Ed Webb

M/C Journal: "Artificial Intelligence" - 0 views

journal.media-culture.org.au/...08-losh.php

bogost politics censorship USA Congress games rhetoric islamism jihad

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source.
  • The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists.
  • a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal.
  • The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property.
  • lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions.
  • To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses.
  • “oral tradition”
  • hroughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order.
  • The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era.
  • In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.”
  • The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries.
  • In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.”
  • Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see.
Ed Webb

Teaching Students How to Fail: Simulations as Tools of Explanation. Brent E. Sasley. 20... - 2 views

www3.interscience.wiley.com/...abstract

IR games gaming simulation

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Feb 10 - No Cached
  • Instead of always teaching students how to succeed—as is the norm in higher education—it might also be useful to teach them about failure. Understanding failure (that is, why actors fail to reach common objectives in inter-group settings) gives students deeper insight into how to resolve global problems, and the conditions under which success can be achieved. This enhances student awareness of complexity in world affairs, including the nature of inter-group relations. Simulations are a good way to teach students about the possibility of failure, and how to learn from it, because they allow students to go through the learning process on their own. In this article I discuss how a simulation I ran on Middle Eastern politics can be used as an example of how to instruct students about failure as much as about success.
  • Bryan Alexander on 02 Feb 10
     
    Very cool idea. I need to snag a copy of the article, now.
  • Ed Webb on 02 Feb 10
     
    I'm an ISA member and will have a paper copy quite soon - I'll scan it for you.
Bryan Alexander

Warco: an FPS where you hold a camera instead of a gun - 5 views

arstechnica.com/...-a-camera-instead-of-a-gun.ars

shared by Bryan Alexander on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
Ed Webb liked it
  • Bryan Alexander on 22 Sep 11
     
    Warco is a first-person game where players shoot footage instead of a gun. A work in progress at Brisbane-based studio Defiant Development, the game is a collaboration of sorts; Defiant is working with both a journalist and a filmmaker to create a game that puts you in the role of a journalist embedded in a warzone.
  • ...2 more comments...
  • edremy on 23 Sep 11
     
    I find the comment that "It will be difficult to market a First Person Shooter where you don't shoot" very odd. How many copies of Portal were sold? Prior to that, the Thief series sold well and won tons of awards. It's not even the first game to feature a camera as the primary mechanic- I can't remember the name but there was one I played years ago where that was the primary role. Step outside the box a bit guys.
  • Ed Webb on 23 Sep 11
     
    Thief is a great example of an FPS where the S isn't about shooting people. First-person sneaker, some people called it. One of my personal favorite games of all time. I agree with edremy that there is no marketing problem here at all. Quite the reverse - war correspondent is a glamorous kind of profession (from the outside) and likely to attract not only the usual FPS fanbase but also appeal more broadly.
  • Brett Boessen on 23 Sep 11
     
    I wonder about attracting the usual FPS fanbase, but I do take your point that there's no a priori feature of the gaming market that would make this a hard sell. Now politics, however, if they're foregrounded here, could be bad for the bottom line, as, of course, could clunky gameplay. If the levels require a significant amount of challenge and variety to complete, this could be quite popular. Did anyone see any kind of release date and cost?
  • Bryan Alexander on 23 Sep 11
     
    Agreed, edremy. Makes me think of _War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning_. Not yet, Brett.
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.
Ed Webb

Tom Bissell on Dead Island - Grantland - 2 views

www.grantland.com/...o-games-killed-video-game-star

games gamification opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • You leveled up and rolled the dice in Dungeons & Dragons because it was impossible to run such systems under the game's hood. You know why? Because there wasn't a hood. Video games not only have hoods but also engines, and all manner of delightfully invisible computation can be dealt with and handled there. So I ask: Why isn't it invisible more often? Why this useless Gamification of what are already games? Why do we tolerate it? What do we actually get out of it, other than some mouse-brain satisfaction of knowing exactly where we are in the maze?4
  • I recently asked a game-designer friend if one of the reasons these skill-tree and leveling-up systems actually show up in games is due to the fact that some poor bastard actually had to work for months and sometimes years refining them and planning them and gaming them out, so that everything made sense and demonstrably kept players from getting too powerful too quickly. He said, with a sigh, "Pretty much." Which means that one problem with game design today is the game designer's emotional inability to hide his or her hard work. Oh, the humanity.
  • Techland consulted some real geniuses of nomenclature in coming up with Dead Island's weapons' subclass names: We have the Flimsy Cleaver, the Tiring Knife, the Frightening Mace, the Spiteful Pistol. It all sounds like the work of two Poles with a big bag of weed and a thesaurus. What's next? I wrote in my notes. The Recalcitrant Hoe? Two minutes later, no joke, I found the Languid Pistol.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In a game about running from things that want to eat you, what is more important: the emotional experience of running from things that want to eat you, or knowing that the thing that wants to eat you is a Level 23 thing that wants to eat you? Knowing that the machete in your hand can take its head off, or knowing that the machete in your hand is capable of doing 320+ hit points of damage? On second thought, don't bother answering. That this game exists is answer enough.
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