Skip to main content

Home/ Gaming and the liberal arts/ Group items tagged war

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Ed Webb

Affective or Effective? War Child's Gamefication of Conflict Experience | Duck of Minerva - 6 views

  •  
    I'd like to use this to teach gaming to faculty. There would be blow-back, which could be useful.
Bryan Alexander

This Video Game Shows What It's Like to Be a Kid in a War Zone - 1 views

  •  
    The new campaign from War Child lets the viewer experience an armed conflict through the eyes of a child.
Todd Bryant

Controversial Videogame on the Battle of Fallujah | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com - 0 views

  •  
    Game being created about Battle of Fallujah. Touches on comparison to documentary, and history of backlash against new media and portrayal of war.
Todd Bryant

Cold War - Berlin - 5 views

  •  
    What a great story! 1) The Cold War lives on. 2) Nice case of fearsome media. 3) Good example of political game. 4) " " " teaching game.
  •  
    I love the music, too.
  •  
    Isn't it an academic game?
Ed Webb

Headteacher told primary school children World War Three had broken out | Mail Online - 1 views

  •  
    Now *that* is teaching with impact!
Ed Webb

Launch Your Own Gaza War - By Michael Peck | Foreign Policy - 4 views

  •  
    Very neat. Interesting to see that it's a solitaire game.
Ed Webb

War Games | Foreign Policy - 6 views

  •  
    Requires login?
  •  
    Yeah. FP has gone semi-arsehole, requiring free sign-up and log-in to see their stuff. Even some of their own staff are complaining. I suspect it will go away at some point.
  •  
    Yikes. Well, I logged in under my Facebook hat.
Bryan Alexander

Norwich gets contract for cyber war game - 0 views

  •  
    NORTHFIELD - A nonprofit organization controlled by Vermont's Norwich University is getting a $9.9 million federal contract to continue work on a cyber-warfare gaming system that helps financial institutions and others learn how to respond to attacks on their computer networks, officials said Thursday.
Todd Bryant

Iconic 20th century art is being turned into a series of experimental videogames - Kill... - 0 views

  •  
    When Russian artist El Lissitzky printed his 1920 Soviet propaganda poster "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge," he had no idea it would become iconic. It was its bold symbolism that did the trick. The Russian civil war was reduced to a potent display of shape and space. The Bolsheviks were represented by a violent-red triangle that had stabbed ...
  •  
    Fun idea. Can we play it with a keyboard?
Bryan Alexander

Tell Me How This Ends - 2 views

  •  
    Be the President. Learn the cost of war with Iran.
Ed Webb

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

  • "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.
  •  
    Interesting to compare this with those various US moves against Euro banks for trading with various enemies.
Brett Boessen

Unmanned: a Game by Molleindustria and Jim Munroe - 5 views

  •  
    Short little interactive fiction and/or game thing imagining one possible scenario for a military drone pilot.
  •  
    Fascinating. Found myself playing it through several times. Has Bioware-style dialog gone casual?
  •  
    ...and "serious"? ...and "persuasive"? Lots to like with this. I'll definitely be using it as a complex example in a games course in the Fall.
Ed Webb

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

  • 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

10 Years Of Civilization II: 1700 Virtual Years Of Hell - 1 views

  •  
    I'm not only amused by the way the author of this post has taken the simulation so clearly as an accurate analog for what could happen in the real world, but am also intrigued at how widely this story is being re-posted and commented on. I've seen it everywhere: blogs in my RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. I wonder if that is a function of how widely Civ has been played, how closely the analogy to RL adheres for readers, or something else?
  •  
    Good point, Brett. Perhaps it's a function of the game's horrible outlook, which resonates with our current stresses.
Bryan Alexander

One simulation exercise - 1 views

  •  
    Nice example of building on preexisting work.
Ed Webb

Meedan | Iranian gamers head to Europe to... - 0 views

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Iran's government-run Press TV says: Titles produced by Iranian videogames companies include an Iran-Iraq war tank shooter, a platform adventure set in Persia, an adventure game where you play the role of a girl called Sara, a young student caught up in events during the early stages of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and a role-playing game based on Iranian mythology called the Age of the Braves.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Heard Vit Sisler talking about some of these at a workshop on Iranian media earlier this year. If they ever do become available in the West, could be a very useful teaching tool, whether for Middle East Studies classes or for analyzing video games as rhetoric.
Ed Webb

Playing as the Enemy - 2 views

  •  
    I'd be very interested to play a level such as those myself. Quantifying "restraint," "remorse," or "laying down your arms" seems like a particularly tough assignment, though.
Ed Webb

Ian Bogost - Gamification is Bullshit - 4 views

  • gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway
  • The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about—a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter.
  • I realize that using games earnestly would mean changing the very operation of most businesses. For those whose goal is to clock out at 5pm having matched the strategy and performance of your competitors, I understand that mediocrity's lips are seductive because they are willing.
  •  
    via Kirk Battle on Buzz
  • ...1 more comment...
  •  
    Bogost seems to be getting more and more irritated by the gamification pseudo-movement. His response to McGonigal's book was contrary but professional. The exploitationware piece was critical and pointed, but I thought still civil. This is...angry. And that really comes through in his comment to the gamify.com guy's post. I'm mostly in agreement on the substance of his objections to much of gamification. But I wonder why this movement toward such vehemence? Do you suppose he's now fielding more annoying offers to help design game-like systems? Is Cow Clicker kindof backfiring, leading people to him as a designer instead of away from him? I don't know. But he sure is pissed, that's clear.
  •  
    I have no inside knowledge. But I suspect his irritation increases in proportion to the hype. The tone here is caustic, but the content is on the money. If you agree with him, and if you love games and their potential, you can understand the rage, I think.
  •  
    I don't know -- rage, really? Isn't the "games vs. gamification" tack ultimately more of a both/and thing than a conflict? I'm not sure why having gamification exist necessarily entails an undermining of what games are. I suppose there's the question of educating non-gamers on the great potential of actual games, and perhaps policing a boundary between the two concepts. But just as I don't really want the local police to become enraged when I cross a line, I find this kind of response (and again, I've seen Bogost do it far better and with greater restraint elsewhere) off-putting to say the least. One comment on his post referred to Bogost's "war" against gamification; I'm just not sure that's the most productive approach to addressing its rise.
1 - 20 of 25 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page