Gaming and the liberal arts

Kumawar is still going on? This is perfect for them.

Simon Ferrari now writing for Kill Screen. Entertainment likely.

Awesome. Think I'll play this with my Games class next Friday; maybe we'll use game titles instead of celebs. And I'll be sure to pretend I'm thick if one of my neighbors gets too far ahead of me on points. (Also, am glad Kill Screen exists.)

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.

Uses real historic artifacts but creates fictional dystopian future.

This would be teachable as heck. I like the FPS-RTS combination.

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.

Chris Fee's talk about teaching with Inform.

Interesting - I'm not sure if this applies better to design or after-action narration.

NB Roger Travis' remark in Buzz here: https://profiles.google.com/schrmr/posts/S6p2Hknyxez

Nice article on Spielvogel's work!

Basically a pyramid scheme/game for charity. You pay $1 to join. If you get someone else to join, you receive a dollar which you can keep or give to charity.

Via @notjessewaker

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