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Rebecca Davis

Interactive Games Studies Undergraduate Program | St. Edward's University, Austin Texas - 6 views

www.stedwards.edu/...interactivegamesstudies

interactive games gaming liberalarts

shared by Rebecca Davis on 08 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 08 Aug 11
     
    This is a full-time bachelor's degree for students who want a traditional 4-year college experience. The Bachelor of Arts in Interactive Games Studies at St. Edward's prepares you to turn your passion for video games into a fulfilling career.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Brett Boessen on 09 Aug 11
     
    Wow. Is this the first full-size (major) program at an LAC in game studies? Computer Science and I have started some very early conversations here, but I don't think we'd do anything more than a minor.
  • Bryan Alexander on 09 Aug 11
  • Brett Boessen on 09 Aug 11
     
    Cool. I especially like the Design Challenge as a requirement for acceptance into the program. I wonder if they had issues when they started with people declaring the major without sufficient commitment? At ND when I was an undergrad, the Program of Liberal Studies, my major, required a short essay as part of an application to be a major. The Chair later admitted they don't really even evaluate them, but they found just having such a requirement was a deterrent to those on campus who (erroneously) saw the degree as light and fluffy. I'm not sure how I feel about that as the sole motivation for the requirement, but I'd definitely like to see what students who applied to Champlain's program submitted. :)
Bryan Alexander

NYU Game Center » Graduate Program - 2 views

gamecenter.nyu.edu/...graduate

education

shared by Bryan Alexander on 23 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 23 Dec 11
     
    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.
Rebecca Davis

Techne » Virtual Programming Addresses Technology for Teaching Global Cultures - 0 views

blogs.nitle.org/...y-for-teaching-global-cultures

gaming virtual_world simulation global

shared by Rebecca Davis on 27 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 27 Oct 09
     
    mentions several games used for teaching global cultures
Ed Webb

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

www.astd.org/...1009_aldrich.html

games gaming education simulation virtualworlds virtual_world opinion theory

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Nov 09 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Ed Webb on 01 Nov 09
     
    via @timbuckteeth
Bryan Alexander

What Can a Videogame Tell Us About How Economies Work? - 3 views

www.popsci.com/...lls-us-about-how-economy-works

simulation

shared by Bryan Alexander on 01 Apr 12 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • Bryan Alexander on 01 Apr 12
     
    By Jamin Warren Posted 03.29.2012 at 10:13 am On October 3, 2008, President George W. Bush signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program bill into law, delivering $450 billion to failing banks on the premise that it would prevent their collapse and stimulate a faltering economy.
Bryan Alexander

U. of Utah to Help Students Publish Video Games - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Highe... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...37181

education games

shared by Bryan Alexander on 25 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 25 Jun 12
     
    Many universities offer programs that teach video-game design, but the University of Utah has taken the unusual step of creating a company to help its students bring their electronic amusements to market. The company, Utah Game Forge, opened in May and just released its first game, Heroes of Hat!
Bryan Alexander

Ivanhoe | A Praxis Program Project - 2 views

ivanhoe.scholarslab.org

game pedagogy

shared by Bryan Alexander on 03 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 03 Sep 14
     
    Connect * Create * Inspire The Ivanhoe Game is about making connections, bridging disciplines, highlighting subjectivity, and engaging students with an alternative pedagogical approach. This WP Theme allows teachers to convert WordPress, already often used in the classroom, into an exciting environment where students can manipulate and play with a cultural object.
Rebecca Davis

3G Summit | - 2 views

imamp.colum.edu/3gsummit

gaming games girls gender

shared by Rebecca Davis on 06 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 06 Jul 10
     
    games and girls
  • Bryan Alexander on 07 Jul 10
     
    Excellent! Would love to hear from the program.
Ed Webb

cyoa - 3 views

samizdat.cc/cyoa

games virtualworlds interactive cyoa books

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Oct 10 - Cached
  • 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.
  • Bryan Alexander on 05 Oct 10
     
    Very nice to see this. CYOA is a vital antecedent for digital storytelling, from hypertext to gaming to branching YouTube videos.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Brett Boessen on 06 Oct 10
     
    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.
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Oct 10
     
    This might be a good time for humanists to identify a bunch of easy, low-cost tools for that. Like Wordle.
  • Ed Webb on 06 Oct 10
     
    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

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

Home : Inform - 1 views

inform7.com

writing interactive inform programming tools simulation games

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 06 Jun 11
     
    New home of Inform 7 interactive fiction platform
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Jun 11
     
    Very different presentation. Thanks, Ed.
Bryan Alexander

Special Issue of Syllabus: Teaching with and about Games - 1 views

www.syllabusjournal.org/...1168

gaming games pedagogy

shared by Bryan Alexander on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 22 Feb 15
     
    TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL Special Issue: Teaching with and about Games Video Game Studies How to Play Games of Truth: An Introduction to Video Game Studies Novel Interfaces for Interactive Environments Educational and Serious Game Design: Case Study In Collaboration Introduction to Games Design Representing the Past: Video Games Challenge to the Historical Narrative Learning Through Making: Notes on Teaching Interactive Narrative Video Games as a New Form of Interactive Literature Writing In and Around Games Hints, Advice, and Maybe Cheat Codes: An English Topics Course About Computer Games Teaching Network Game Programming with the Dragonfly Game Engine Root of Play - Game Design for Digital Humanists Alternative Reality Games to Teach Game-Based Storytelling "Continue West and Ascend the Stairs": Game Walkthroughs in Professional and Technical Communication Annotated Bibliography for Game Studies: Modeling Scholarly Research in a Popular Culture Field
Bryan Alexander

Can a Video Game Teach Just as Well as a Professor? - 2 views

www.bloomberg.com/...h-just-as-well-as-a-professor-

pedagogy game simulation

shared by Bryan Alexander on 22 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 22 Oct 15
     
    "The chance to learn about leadership and management from top corporate strategists is part of the business school guarantee. But what if your B-School professor could be replaced by technology, without sacrificing any educational payoff? An experiment conducted by John Beck, Ph.D., at Hult International Business School found that a business strategy video game proved just as effective in teaching students as a professor...."
  • Brett Boessen on 22 Oct 15
     
    Seems like Beck's conclusions are largely in line with other literature on games and learning. I'm curious about the fact that this has come up in the context of an MBA program and not another field.
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