Gaming and the liberal arts

Gaming an earthquake for public safety.

I sense possibilities. Maybe it will be a little more user-friendy than Inform 7.

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. :)

Pretty usable. I quickly generated a French Revolution game/story. Would be fun to do that right.

Awesome! Can't wait. My kids imbibed a lot of medieval and early modern history from the series.

Good game to demo.

"As the gaming in education continues to grow, one of the foremost experts in the field, Constance Steinkuehler, makes the case for why it's important to pay attention to what works in gaming and how it could be applied to learning. At the recent Aspen Ideas Festival, Steinkuehler, who's now a Senior Policy Analyst at the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President, spoke with author and researcher John Seely Brown about some of the more prominent issues in gaming and education."

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

"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."

A bit like Fold-It.

This is the only and best Diablo 3 dueling and tournament league online today, guaranteed.

Useful report.

Materials for a game about Lincoln's slave emancipation policy.

Lincoln presidential game.

Utah Game Forge is an independent publisher for games developed at the University of Utah

Many universities offer programs that teach video-game design, but the University of Utah has taken the unusual step of creating a company to help its students bring their electronic amusements to market. The company, Utah Game Forge, opened in May and just released its first game, Heroes of Hat!

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.

Peacemaker (2008) is a computer game produced by ImpactGames, in which players seek to bring about a successful negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the guest blogpost below, Dr. Ronit Kampf (Tel Aviv University) and Dr. Esra Cuhadar Gurkanyak (Bilkent University) examine the impact of the game on the attitudes of Israeli, Palestinian, Turkish, and American students,...

"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."