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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

Violent video games touted as learning tool - Yahoo! News - 1 views

news.yahoo.com/...us_games_for_learning

games learning gaming education educational_games

shared by Ed Webb on 28 May 10 - Cached
  • "As you know, most of us females just hate those action video games," she said. "You don't have to use shooting. You can use, for example, a princess which has a magic wand and whenever she touches something, it turns into a butterfly and sparkles."
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 28 May 10
       
      Wait, wut?
  • you learn to learn
  • Bryan Alexander on 01 Jun 10
     
    "You could use stereotype powers, too!" Sigh. This was odd: "Games for Learning, a daylong symposium on the educational uses of video games and computer games. The event, the first of its kind..." Really?
Bryan Alexander

Teachers Surveyed on Using Digital Games in Class - 0 views

www.gamesandlearning.org/...achers-on-using-games-in-class

gaming education K-12

shared by Bryan Alexander on 26 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 26 Jun 14
     
    Very useful data on K-12: "We have an early look at some of the interesting data coming out of a larger report on teacher attitudes around the use of games in the classroom. The numbers hint at wider use of games in the classroom and indicate teachers see the real benefit of games in helping low-performing students."
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.
Victoria Pullen

tiltfactor » LAYOFF - 1 views

www.tiltfactor.org/?page_id=598

3GSummit games education

shared by Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10
     
    "LAYOFF uses a simple casual game paradigm to comment on the current state of the US financial crisis. Both friends and strangers face tough times in an unstable economy. Part dark humor, mostly grim portent, in the game players play from the side of management needing to cut jobs, and match types of workers in groups in order to lay the workers off and increase workforce efficiency."
Victoria Pullen

TAKE ACTION games - 1 views

takeactiongames.com/HOME.html

3GSummit games education

shared by Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10
     
    Susana Ruiz's game design studio for "casual games for change": Darfur is Dying (genocide), Finding Zoe (gender stereotypes and abusive relationships), and In the Balance, a documentary game about the justice system in the US that uses animation and documentary footage of real prisoners. 
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

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. "
Ed Webb

Video games are the answer to the New Boring | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...video-games-versus-new-boring

gamification games gaming engagement television TV media opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • And then there's Saint's Row 3, an open-world crime shooter, that seems to have been concocted entirely by hyperactive 14-year-olds force fed on a diet of sherbet, Red Bull and Korean gangster movies. This is a game in which the player can, entirely at random, bludgeon passers-by with a giant dildo. To the best of my knowledge, Downton Abbey features nothing even remotely comparable – although, to be fair, I skipped most of season two, and may have missed a key scene in which Hugh Bonneville attacks his butler with some nightmarish Edwardian device intended for the cure of female hysteria.
  • Please, if you are a parent and you want something to do with your kids on a wet Sunday afternoon, don't rent the latest heavily marketed CGI bore-fest from a Hollywood studio more interested in selling you merchandise and the moral agenda of its self-serving financers, buy Zelda. Buy Zelda and share a genuinely thrilling, heart-warming escapist fantasy with your children. Certainly, it's not as 'good' as taking them to a museum or getting them to play footie in the park, but if the only alternative is Horrid Henry, it is spectacular – and they will never forget it.
  • Interactivity is a blunt but effective tool to ensure attention and alertness. And as such, video games have never sought to stultify or repress. Video games are not interested in teaching us to make the most out of our tired soft furnishings.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Forget mainstream TV, forget it. It's over – at least in terms of water cooler discussion. Apprentice and X-Factor may reliably trend on Twitter, but it's all ironic chatter mixed with barely-disguised collective embarrassment and culpability. There's nothing enriching there.
  • games demand immersion and investment. Traditionally, this has formed a stereotype of dead-eyed zombies slumped in front of monitors, but of course, through XBox Live and PSN, gamers now constantly communicate with each other, as well as share creative tasks in titles like Little Big Planet and Minecraft. New research from Michigan State University suggests that gamers are more imaginative story-tellers – the findings are far from conclusive, but they don't surprise me. The game worlds in Zelda, Uncharted and Dark Souls are rich and deep. They are cluttered with possibilities.
  • Games get to us on some primal level, they speak to the machine code of the human id – and that can be a good thing.
  • You have your doubts and so do I. But the very least mainstream games do is give us a platform to discuss amazing things. When you talk about Zelda or Uncharted 3, you can talk about beauty, art, mythology and adventure; when you talk about the forthcoming Bioshock: Infinite, you can cover architecture, paranoia and politics and it all makes perfect sense. These elements aren't hidden away, to be teased out by cultural studies students desperate to apply their knowledge of Derrida and Saussure. They're there in the very form, the very function of the games. Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 are idiotic and politically suspect, but give them five minutes and they'll show you more about the computerised lunacy of contemporary conflict than most of those MOD-arranged shaky cam war reports beamed into your living rooms by over-stretched 24-hour news channels
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.
Todd Bryant

OnLive game streaming - 2 views

use this as a solution to purchase games for lab? So far, US only, also need to check license.

streaming rent virtualization purchasing

shared by Todd Bryant on 19 Mar 10 - No Cached
  • Todd Bryant on 19 Mar 10
     
    Could be great way to purchase/rent games for colleges and the lab. US only for right now and have to check the license
  • Bryan Alexander on 19 Mar 10
     
    How much throughput is required? I imagine bandwidth issues could crop up. And downloading - desktop management, installation control, etc.
Ed Webb

Soviet Gamification - 2 views

www.kmjn.org/...soviet_gamification.html

games gamification USSR CCCP

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • the claim that we've never explored using game-like mechanics for non-entertainment purposes keeps us from using knowledge we actually have: gamification's rhetoric claims that this is a new, unexplored space in which we're just learning things for the first time. But in fact we already know a lot of things about how gamification works and doesn't work, and have done a lot of thinking about the relationships between things like extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, and gameplay, and pretending that we don't know any of that isn't a good way to make progress. I mostly ignored gamification for a while, considering it a brief marketing trend. But if it's here to stay, perhaps we ought to retroactively broaden it, and include things like "socialist competition" as an experiment in gamification worth learning lessons from
  • Ed Webb on 14 Aug 11
     
    via Bryan Alexander
  • Bryan Alexander on 17 Aug 11
     
    The humorous punch is good, like Ed Tufte's "Cognitive Style"'s cover. I wonder if we'll see an old left-right political spin to criticism.
Bryan Alexander

US Department of State launches educational game about 'American English' language and ... - 2 views

www.polygon.com/...al-game-about-american-culture

game

shared by Bryan Alexander on 09 May 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 09 May 13
     
    Interesting political/cultural game concept.
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.
Lisa Spiro

Games in Education - home - 3 views

gamesined.wikispaces.com

gaming education

shared by Lisa Spiro on 21 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Lisa Spiro on 21 Apr 12
     
    "Using gaming as a vehicle for learning is a very powerful idea and one that is under-utilized. This wiki is an attempt to create a comprehensive resource about gaming that we can all learn from - all contributions welcome!"
  • Brett Boessen on 23 Apr 12
     
    This is great -- lots of info here. Who's running it / who are the admins? Or is it just kindof crowdsourced?
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.
Ed Webb

BBC News - Blizzard cuts off Iranian access to World of Warcraft - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-19399375

games gaming mmorpg WoW Iran sanctions

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • "This week, Blizzard tightened up its procedures to ensure compliance with these laws, and players connecting from the affected nations are restricted from access to Blizzard games and services," read the statement. Unfortunately, said Blizzard, the same sanctions meant it could not give refunds to players in Iran or help them move their account elsewhere. "We apologise for any inconvenience this causes and will happily lift these restrictions as soon as US law allows," it added. Although the block on Wow has been imposed by Blizzard, other reports suggest a wider government ban might have been imposed. Players of Wow and other games, including Guild Wars, said when they had tried to log in they had been redirected to a page saying the connection had been blocked because the games promoted "superstition and mythology". Blizzard said it had no information about Iranian government action against online games.
  • Bryan Alexander on 17 Sep 12
     
    Interesting to compare this with those various US moves against Euro banks for trading with various enemies.
Bryan Alexander

Simulating spooks? The CIA, simulations, and analyst recruitment - 0 views

paxsims.wordpress.com/...ations-and-analyst-recruitment

simulation liberalartscampus

shared by Bryan Alexander on 09 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 09 Jan 12
     
    Some liberal arts campuses involved, like SBC: "While many might associate the CIA with dissimulation as much as simulation, the Agency uses serious games and simulations in a number of ways. They are used, for example, in analyst training at CIA University (indeed, one well-known game designer teaches there).
Ed Webb

Oh No! Video Games!: Who's That Video Game?! » The Fascist Politics of the In... - 4 views

ohnovideogames.com/litics-of-the-infinite-respawn

video games games ideology politics

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 02 Jan 12
     
    Objectification of the other is not exclusive to fascism, by any means. Many other 'isms' do it - colonialism being a fine exemplar. But it is true that states use this consistently to mobilize their populations.
  • Bryan Alexander on 03 Jan 12
     
    Interesting argument re: dehumanization. The examples he picks involve voiced, named characters, rather than anonymous hordes. This is another fine teachable issue.
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