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Ed Webb

Google Develops a Facebook Rival - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3292704575393531040685308.html

google facebook casual social games gaming

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jul 10 - Cached
  • A Facebook spokesman said the company wouldn't speculate about Google's initiative but said the company expected new social-networking efforts by others and "looks forward to seeing what others have to offer."
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 28 Jul 10
       
      Translation: "bring it!"
    • Bryan Alexander
      Bryan Alexander on 28 Jul 10
       
      Indeed. I note that Google is seeking gaming assistance in this quest.
  • Many users now rely on their friends on Facebook—not just Google—to discover content and products they can purchase on the Internet. And much of the content generated by users on Facebook is generally kept out of view of Google's search engine.
  • In an interview this week, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt declined to confirm the development of a social-networking service that would incorporate social games, rumored to be called "Google Me." When asked if Google's service might resemble Facebook's, Mr. Schmidt said "the world doesn't need a copy of the same thing."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • For social-game developers, a successful Google offering would mean they wouldn't be so heavily dependent on Facebook, where the vast majority of users access the games. Consumers' appetite for social games is booming— Zynga's "Farmville" game has more than 60 million active monthly users—and that is attracting bigger players looking to tap new sources of growth. On Tuesday, Walt Disney Co. acquired Playdom for $563.2 million plus up to $200 million more if performance targets are reached. And retailer GameStop Corp. agreed to buy online game distributor Kongregate Inc. for an undisclosed amount.
  • Game developers pay Facebook 30% of the earnings from virtual-good purchases in their games. Google already has an online payment mechanism called Checkout that, in theory, it could use to collect payments for social games on its platform.
Ed Webb

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

www.theledger.com/...120529985

games gaming autism

shared by Ed Webb on 21 May 12 - No Cached
  • 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."
Ed Webb

56 Million Americans Are Playing Social Games [STATS] - 1 views

mashable.com/...social-gaming-study

gaming social demographics survey

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Aug 10 - Cached
  • A new study from market research firm NPD Group shows that one out of every five Americans over the age of six has played an online social game at least once
  • Social games can help create a new revenue stream, one that solely relies on end users opening their wallets to third-party applications. Virtual goods and currencies are a huge part of the social gaming market, and they turn a casual user experience into big business for the startups, developers and platforms that offer them.
  • 10% of respondents had spent money playing social games and 11% said they planned to do so in the future
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the social gaming crowd tends to be older and female; around 53% of players are women
Ed Webb

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

www.guardian.co.uk/...fun-inc-games-tom-chatfield

gaming games book review socialscience

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Apr 10 - Cached
  • 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"
  • Ed Webb on 02 Apr 10
     
    games might involve a lot of effort, but the payoff is that "effort is always rewarded".
Ed Webb

The Life-Changing $20 Rightward-Facing Cow - 4 views

kotaku.com/...anging-20-rightward+facing-cow

bogost casual games gaming social facebook

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The A Slow Year limited sets include the poetry book and the game on Atari cartridge, all set in black velvet and red leather, gold foil stamping, all hand-numbered, hand-made. While a manic counter was screaming the end of Bogost's journey to challenge social gaming norms, the creator was quietly, manually, assembling a physical art object. Only 25 will ever be made; they will sell for $500 apiece. Most have already been sold. To Bogost, like the poetry book that accompanies the Atari game, the handcraft and limited nature of A Slow Year's special edition help establish the project uncompromisingly as an art object, a creation bigger than "video game."
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 04 Oct 11
       
      Sounds like something in a Wm Gibson or Bruce Sterling story
  • "I never expected that would happen," reflects Bogost. "A lot of the serious players… just like clicking a cow sometimes. It's very innocent; they just like clicking a cow."
  • Cow Clicker was never supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be silly, insultingly simple, a vacuous waste of time, and a manipulative joke at the expense of its players-–in other words, everything Bogost thought that Facebook games like the Zynga-made hit FarmVille are. In Cow Clicker, players get a cow, they click it, and then they must either pay to click it again or wait six hours; an embarrassing, joyless labor that to him represented the quintessential aspects of the games that were flourishing all over the social network.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • the story of a person whose joke project became more successful than the one on which he lavished love and intellect, the climate that caused that to happen and how ultimately he decided to learn from it instead of becoming upset
  • Then came the Gamification movement, the shiny new idea that if people were assigned goals and extrinsic "rewards," they'd be more motivated to engage with tasks-–and brands-–than they would have otherwise been
  • Cow Clicker developed an active player base–-people who missed the humor and attached to it as if it were a "real" game. These players unquestioningly spent real-money Facebook credits to enjoy their cows and sent Bogost innocent player feedback in the hopes of improving their experience. It subverted every expectation that he had, even as it reaffirmed his worst fears about the exploitive sadism of Facebook game design. Its success also became something to dread.
Todd Bryant

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

www.gamesforchange.org/...ange-awards-nominees-announced

shared by Todd Bryant on 06 Apr 15 - No Cached
Brett Boessen liked it
  • Todd Bryant on 06 Apr 15
     
    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...
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Apr 15
     
    Have you played any of these yet?
  • Brett Boessen on 07 Apr 15
     
    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.
  • Brett Boessen on 07 Apr 15
     
    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.
  • Bryan Alexander on 07 Apr 15
     
    Thanks, Brett.
Brett Boessen

Press Start to Continue: Toward a New Video Game Studies | HASTAC - 3 views

hastac.org/...-toward-new-video-game-studies

games criticism hastac pedagogy theory forum

shared by Brett Boessen on 08 Feb 12 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • being a gamer is less an inherent attribute—either you are or you aren’t—than it is a malleable description of practices that change throughout one’s lifetime, whether from “hardcore” to “casual,” single-player to “social,” or genre to genre
  • one could argue that part of the origin story of game studies was the struggle to establish the idea that games are not narratives--that they were a radically "new" textuality, but this just delayed the needful discussions of how games related to the inherited media ecology, how they used narrative, music, video, etc. to new effects
  • students tend not to be "well-played," on an analogy to "well-read," but knowledgeable in one or a few genres
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • what about our students' physical abilities and skill sets? How does skill play into their experiences of games?
  • Can or should one philosophize about a medium one has not embraced to the point of design?  I vote:  no.
  • In an academic paper, I don't think that I would feel legitimate in citing something from a designer. It doesn't feel credible, even though the designer may be someone like Ron Gilbert
  • a senior-level seminar in “Digital Games and Culture”
  • Betty Hayes and I have been teaching an undergrad games studies course uniting new media reading/writing, academic readings across disciplines, and gameplay across genres for two years now
  • Brett Boessen on 08 Feb 12
     
    HASTAC has started a forum (a blog post with lots o' comments) to discuss video game studies.
Joe Murphy

When Games Try to Save the World - 2 views

medium.com/...to-save-the-world-35a3aabdbe99

games

shared by Joe Murphy on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Joe Murphy on 14 Jan 16
     
    It seems logical that games which have players wrestle with social issues might change social attitudes, but there's a lack of data to prove it.
  • Bryan Alexander on 15 Jan 16
     
    Good points. It's early days in long-term research. Plus there's the long, long track record of social science failing to find long-term effects from 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.
Lisa Spiro

Game Builds Student Empathy | National News | United States | Epoch Times - 3 views

www.theepochtimes.com/...ds-student-empathy-279500.html

gaming

shared by Lisa Spiro on 17 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Lisa Spiro on 17 Aug 12
     
    "Davidson met Dr. Kurt Squire, associate professor at the UW-Madison School of Education and director of the Games Learning Society Initiative, and they wrote a grant proposal to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They were soon awarded funds for the project. The team is developing two kinds of games. One is to cultivate attention and the other to cultivate empathy, kindness, and pro-social behavior. Davidson said that ¬attention is a building block for learning. "If you can learn to focus your attention more skillfully and concentrate, that will have ripple effects on all kinds of learning," he said."
Lisa Spiro

RELEASE: Educational games to train middle-schoolers' attention, empathy - 1 views

www.news.wisc.edu/17368

gaming

shared by Lisa Spiro on 30 May 12 - No Cached
  • Lisa Spiro on 30 May 12
     
    "With Kurt Squire, an associate professor in the School of Education and director of the Games Learning Society Initiative, Davidson received a $1.39 million grant this spring to design and rigorously test two educational games to help eighth graders develop beneficial social and emotional skills - empathy, cooperation, mental focus, and self-regulation."
Ed Webb

Digital: Facebook, YouTube, Gaming Time Spent Grows - Advertising Age - Digital - 1 views

adage.com/...article

use socialmedia email gaming US statistics USA

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Aug 10 - Cached
  • according to research by Nielsen Co. The time spent on social media accessed from PCs rose from 15.8% in June 2009 to 22.7% in June 2010, according to Nielsen, while online gaming gained more modestly to 10.2% of online time from 9.3% a year earlier. But that was enough to push gaming past e-mail, which fell to 8.3% of online time spent at the PC from 10.5% a year earlier.
  • separating social-media time from gaming time has become tougher, given that a growing portion of online gaming takes place via Facebook applications such as Zynga's Farmville, Nielsen analyst Dave Martin acknowledged.
  • . The shift of e-mail use from PCs to mobile devices accounts for some of the decline of time spent on e-mail at PCs
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • online video time still only averaged an hour and 15 minutes per person per month, an amount of time many people spend with traditional TV on the morning of the first day of the month
  • Instant messaging also lost share of time at the PC, Mr. Martin said, which was likely a result of increased use of mobile texting in part.
Rebecca Davis

PERFORMING THE SOCIAL TEXT: Or, What I Learned From Playing Spore -- Jones 17 (2): 283 ... - 2 views

commonknowledge.dukejournals.org/...283

gaming simulation spore digital_humanities

shared by Rebecca Davis on 25 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 25 Apr 11
     
    this article compares video games and digital texts, not in terms of their supposedly shared narrative content (not in terms of their content at all) but, rather, formally-in terms of how they model complex systems, how both video games and digital-text environments work by creating networked environments for the production, reproduction, transmission, and reception (indeed for the continual reediting) of their respective content-objects. Both texts and video games are systems, with their own special affordances and constraints, that provide both "spores" and "spurs," seeds and provocations, prompts for new performances of meaning.
Bryan Alexander

Transition Town game - 2 views

transitionculture.org/...ansition-ingredients-card-game

game

shared by Bryan Alexander on 13 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 13 Jul 11
     
    Interesting use of analog game to build social planning.
Brett Boessen

Food for Thought: game-based learning and pedagogy « Gaming & Learning - 3 views

gamingandlearning.wordpress.com/...me-based-learning-and-pedagogy

experiential learning pedagogy education games

shared by Brett Boessen on 24 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • You’re told that Animal Farm is a commentary on Socialism, told where Bhutan is. Games don’t work that way; they are experiential.
Bryan Alexander

Where's the curtsy button? I test-drive the online Jane Austen role-playing game | Book... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...-jane-austen-role-playing-game

game simulation

shared by Bryan Alexander on 30 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 30 Sep 17
     
    "Gossip is our weapon of choice," reads Tyrer's Kickstarter pitch. "Instead of raids, we will have grand balls. Instead of dungeons, we will have dinner parties." Ever, Jane, currently a free playable prototype, has strict social rules. To navigate its mazes of etiquette, my character keeps a Lady's Magazine to hand. Drinks with characters are scheduled via requests sent by letter, while the importance of social conduct is reflected in the fact you have three buttons, each offering a different kind of curtsy or bow. "It was about finding out what the characters in her novels did," says Tyrer, "coupled with the etiquette of Regency period."
Rebecca Davis

Library of Funded Projects - 2 views

www.neh.gov/...Default.aspx

digital_humanities gaming games education social archives

shared by Rebecca Davis on 02 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 02 Jun 10
     
    Grant proposal for Metadata Games
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
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