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Some interesting notes from Gabe Newell's keynote at Games for Change. This is interesting because it's the first time a president and figurehead for one of the biggest game developers out there has really put a stake in the ground for using games as educational tools.

Google is already taking some major flack about putting Games on Google+, mainly from people that don't want to re-live the Facebook spam days of Farmville and Mafia Wars. Looks like they're listening and trying to make the games transparent for those that don't want to play. Solid list of launch titles though, including Angry Birds, Zynga Poker and a Dragon Age game.

Interesting blurb about the new Star Wars game winning an award for accessibility.

Interesting read on some of the hooks game designers use to keep people motivated and engaged, with a few plugs from educators on how we can use things like autonomy and agency to better engage.

Interesting read regarding the game Portal being used in a freshman humanities course, alongside classics like Gilgamesh and readings about Aristotle.

Good post from Zac on design elements for game achievments.

Gamification, including examples from Nike, health month (the game), Khan academy, Nissan's MyLeaf, the email game, etc. Great quote "Games are the only force in the known universe that can get people to take actions against their self-interest, in a predictable way, without using force." Zichermann Great slideshare, but time consuming.

Average age of gamers continues to rise (now 37). Female population continues to rise due to casual/mobile games (42%). Who buys most games? 41 year olds (was 39 last year). Males average 13 years of gaming, females 10 years. Lots of good data points, but they ALWAYS fail to answer a huge question about methods: how do you define a gamer? Depending on how you define a gamer dictates who is included/excluded in these types of studies and drastically impacts all the age/gender data.

"Zombies, Run! is an ultra-immersive game for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android where you help rebuild civilisation after a zombie apocalypse. By going out and running in the real world, you can collect medicine, ammo, batteries, and spare parts that you can use to build up and expand your base - all while getting orders, clues, and story through your headphones."

Interesting concept: you play this game by running in the real world. The app tracks your run, but also unlocks items (ammo, vitamins, medical supplies). When you're done, you get to distribute those supplies throughout your city. During the run, there is an interactive experience where you're being chased by zombies and getting instructions through your headset. They're releasing this next year. I'll definitely try it out.

PResentation by the creator of the social game creation site, double happy 

This is pretty wild. Google managed to reproduce several top mobile and PC games in chrome, but nothing of this scale yet. Bastion is up for all sorts of awards this year, cool to see Google managed to port this to a browser at such an extreme level of detail.

A nice summary with stats from Nick Smerker about the Media+Gaming event that was held at the Harrisburg campus. This is a good example of a lightweight debriefing report.

"The game EteRNA, which was started by the Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das and the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Adrien Treuille, allows researchers to farm out some of the intellectual legwork behind RNA design to 26,000 players, rather than a relatively few lab workers. Players are given a puzzle design-an RNA molecule in the shape of a star or a cross, for example-that they must fill in with the components, called nucleotides, to produce the most plausible solution. The community of players then votes for the blueprint it thinks will have the best chance of success in the lab. The Stanford researchers select the highest-rated blueprints and actually synthesize them. The scientists then report back the results of the experiments to the crowd to inform future designs. The crowd-sourcing has produced results that tend to be more effective than computer-generated arrangements. "Computational methods are not perfect in making these shapes," says Mr. Das, "and as we get to more and more complex ones, they essentially always fail, so we know that there are rules to be learned." Players are figuring out these principles on their own, says Mr. Treuille. He says that while they're more like a grandmother's instructions on baking a cake than a strict scientific formula, they work remarkably well in practice. "EteRNA players are extremely good at designing RNA's," says Mr. Treuille, "which is all the more surprising because the top algorithms published by scientists are not nearly so good. The gap is pretty dramatic.""

Interesting example of crowdsourcing to work on scientific issues.

Good read on gaming and crowd sourcing to solve long-standing scientific problems.

I'm not certain I agree with Bogost, but he does raise some interesting points (and he's approaching this from a similar viewpoint; tenured faculty at georgia tech). The most interesting dialog takes place in the comments...

It seems like he wrote this in reaction to the activity of fly-by-night business consultants. Personally, I see a lot of value in gamification in education. Stubbs and I participated in writing the ELI white paper about gamification: http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutGamif/233416

Gamers have solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had stumped scientists for more than a decade. The gamers achieved their discovery by playing Foldit, an online game that allows players to collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules.

A marriage of flixel game creator and wordpress social networking. On this site you can create games, publish and share them, and discuss them.

Kind of wild...TF2 now has the ability to not only record your in-game footage, but now edit it as well with some custom tech. Even more interesting, you can toggle the camera from FPS view, to 3rd person view, to a 'free roam' view, allowing you to get different angles out of replay. Figures they also have direct links to YouTube, tied the video making/editing to achievements, as well as offering special in-game items if youtube vids hit certain view thresholds.

A collection of examples of rubrics used for assessing Web 2.0-based assignments (Twitter, Blogs, Wiki, Podcasts, multimedia, gaming, etc...)

This is a good starting point to share with faculty and IDs who are looking for ways to assess assignments in new media. It should only be a starting point though. Not every blog/twitter/multimedia assignment is created equally.