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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.
Todd Bryant

Games don't Equal Academic Achievement - 20 views

edugamesresearch.com/...g-home-computers-and-academics

pedagogy research

shared by Todd Bryant on 19 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Todd Bryant on 19 Oct 10
     
    Makes a good point. There's a big difference between showing games help students learn, and finding games that match the much more narrow objectives of a class.
  • ...7 more comments...
  • Bryan Alexander on 19 Oct 10
     
    Sure... compare with reading a book, or doing an experiment. It takes contextualization and reflection, which can be done by a learner (autodictat) or school (pedagogy).
  • Todd Bryant on 19 Oct 10
     
    It's also a higher level of learning that's difficult to quantify. Student A and B take History 101. Student A is given a book on US History after 1870. Gets test on same topic. If he read the book, does pretty well. Student B plays a history game, explains outcome, and compares with actual historical events. Certainly more impressive, but if given the standard 101 exam, would he do better? I think games are likely to get the short end of the stick with most standardized assessments.
  • Brett Boessen on 20 Oct 10
     
    I don't know -- it has much to do with the way the prof articulates her objectives. For us (who use games regularly), we can/will shape our objectives at least somewhat around existing titles (just as others do so around existing texts), or augment those games with other content that they don't cover (as others do with inadequate texts). So it seems the issue is more about trying to articulate why games could be useful to *others*, who don't yet use them. Trying to persuade our colleagues to try games when they've been using texts with which they're familiar to accomplish pedagogical objectives they've been using for years is going to be hard, and that's where identifying games that more directly support traditional objectives becomes a boon.
  • Ed Webb on 20 Oct 10
     
    I wonder if we could develop a few talking points tying games to Bloom's taxonomy (updated version), making clear that like all pedagogical tools, games address some student needs better than others. And, of course, that not all games address the same type of developmental tasks, just as all texts, A/V materials, classroom techniques do not address the same tasks. The computer/radio analogy is a good one. Expecting computers and/or games to replace some other educational and entertainment resource is missing the point - they are their own thing.
  • Brett Boessen on 21 Oct 10
     
    Ed, I feel like such a set of points might already exist and/or have been publicly expressed by game critics/designers, especially from the serious games side of things. But that shouldn't stop us from discussing whether they might be in need of update/reworking/extension. :) I'm interested -- could/should we try to look at some existing texts/posts and then come together in a conference call or something?
  • Ed Webb on 21 Oct 10
     
    I'm thinking something specific to liberal arts educators. We could brainstorm with an etherpad clone (e.g. ietherpad.com) or asynchronously via a google doc.
  • Bryan Alexander on 21 Oct 10
     
    Ed, would you object if I took that Bloom's approach in a forthcoming paper? "augment those games with other content that they don't cover (as others do with inadequate texts)" - nicely said, Brett.
  • Ed Webb on 26 Oct 10
     
    Go for it, Bryan. If you want to kick ideas around, let me know.
  • Bryan Alexander on 26 Oct 10
     
    Will certainly do.
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

BLOG « failbetter - 2 views

about.failbettergames.com/blog

games text storytelling platforms

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 17 Oct 12
     
    I sense possibilities. Maybe it will be a little more user-friendy than Inform 7.
  • Brett Boessen on 17 Oct 12
     
    I've been playing around with it a little bit; had my students look at it briefly last week. It is *more* user friendly in that there are forms and boxes for you to input your story elements (ie, a little more visual than Inform). It is *less* useful in that the product is always in the Fallen London format, ie, cards/decks are "dealt" and story elements are uncovered in a point-based system. So if you're not looking for that particular format to deliver your story, I'm not sure it's as flexible as Inform is. But I think it's pretty neat that they've opened up their process to the public, and their wiki is CHOCK full of ideas, tips, hints, and other useful stuff for producing an engaging story of the Fallen London variety. And, they've got a new game to play in addition to FL called Cabinet Noir which is set in Richelieu/Musketeers France and is fun in a more historically accurate (maybe?) way than FL was/is. Kudos to Failbetter all around, if you're into IF. :)
  • Bryan Alexander on 17 Oct 12
     
    Pretty usable. I quickly generated a French Revolution game/story. Would be fun to do that right.
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.
Brett Boessen

Playfic - 5 views

playfic.com

game webapp inform interactivefiction text

shared by Brett Boessen on 16 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Brett Boessen on 16 Feb 12
     
    Someone took Inform 7 and made a webapp out of it!
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Ed Webb on 17 Feb 12
     
    Nice find!
  • Bryan Alexander on 17 Feb 12
     
    Yes indeed. I wonder if it's easier than author in than Inform.
  • Brett Boessen on 17 Feb 12
     
    Looks like its just a port of Inform to a web interface: same two-part backstage/frontstage formatting of the screen, same language engine running it. The difference, which is pretty awesome, seems to be that you can post your stories to their site so others can read and comment on them. (If I'm reading it correctly.)
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.
Ed Webb

Admongo, the government video game that teaches kids about the perils of advertising. -... - 5 views

www.slate.com/2253449

gaming game government USG advertising education children kids K12

shared by Ed Webb on 11 May 10 - Cached
  • Admongo.gov, the new Web site from the Federal Trade Commission, seeks to educate kids ages 8 to 12 about the nuances of marketing. In the Admongo video game, players confronts advertisements at every turn—at bus stops, in magazines, on TV, even as part of other video games within the video game. Whenever an ad appears (they're all for fictional products, including a soda, a cereal, a movie, and an acne wash), the player is encouraged to ask three questions: Who is responsible for the ad? What is the ad actually saying? What does the ad want me to do
  • there's no evidence I know of showing that media literacy has an impact on consumer behavior. Ads target emotions, not logic. You can know you're being manipulated but still be manipulated. People talk about how media-savvy kids are these days, but that just means they recognize a lot of brands
  • the most interesting thing about Admongo is its emphasis on the ubiquity of ads. A previous FTC-designed game, called You Are Here, also urged kids to consider where ads come from and to examine the truth of marketing claims. But in Admongo, a major part of playing the game is understanding that ads can be anywhere and can take many different forms. The player encounters text-message ads, ads inside videogames, cross-promotions, and product placements. This element of Admongo is testament to the explosion of new advertising platforms and the fierce intensity of modern marketing. According to Linn, in 2008 American Idol—consistently a top-rated show for 2-11 year-olds—featured 4,151 product placements in its first 38 episodes, averaging 14 minutes of product placement on each show. Kids are now constantly in front of screens of all kinds, and those screens are brimming with ads that pretend they aren't ads. These days, just being able to recognize when you're being marketed to is a useful skill.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • check out the Admongo poster, which the FTC includes with the package of curriculum materials it makes available to teachers. The poster is meant to be hung up in classrooms. It's an illustration that helps kids spot all the different places ads can appear, from cereal boxes to magazines to blimps in the sky. Ironically, in the poster's lower right corner is the logo for Scholastic—which worked with the FTC on the Admongo project, and which sells books and other products through its catalogs to a captive school-kid audience. "The Scholastic name helps in terms of getting our curriculum into classrooms," said one FTC representative I spoke to. "With Scholastic, you're talking about a known commodity for teachers, while they might not be that familiar with the FTC." Behold the power of branding, kids. And consider this a learning opportunity
  • Ed Webb on 11 May 10
     
    Persuasive game about, er, persuasion
Brett Boessen

Codify - iPad - 6 views

twolivesleft.com/Codify

games gamedesign app ipad

shared by Brett Boessen on 30 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Erik Hanson on 31 Oct 11
     
    How is it?
  • Brett Boessen on 31 Oct 11
     
    I wish I knew -- I don't have an iPad. Looks like there's a fair bit of text entry, though; in the demo clip there's definitely an external keyboard of some kind in use. I would think that would make it pretty hard to have much fine-grained control without such a device. Still, I'd like to try it. Maybe my institution will foot for an iPad...if they do, I'll let you know. :)
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