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"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."

"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."

Seems like, among other things, a call for learning with games.

Too bad: "ERROR - This project has been removed by the author. It may return later."

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.

Nice find, it's hard to find games that deal with religion at all. I sent it on to Andrea

Via @notjessewaker

Very interesting idea. I wonder about RTS implementations, too.

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.