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I spent my whole Saturday morning working with 5 of the best educators I know. We're bringing gaming into the classroom. Once Suzie Boss pointed me to Jane McGonigal, I became a follower. So yeah, can I put follow McGonigal for Act1 in Evoke? Why not? After all she says things like this: "In "EVOKE," you're leveling up in world-changing superpowers like creativity and resourcefulness. You're unlocking achievements by completing real social innovation missions. Even though much of the game material is real and important and serious, you get the motivational push of game dynamics and the rewards and satisfactions of making real progress. Plus, it's a social network, and once you start making friends with other players, there's all the social stickiness that involves." In this quote, you can see that McGonigal is attempting to bring together the power connective powers of social network with the addictive and motivational mechanisms of games. Plus it's all about doing REAL missions, missions in real life. I'm still not sure that my students will see the connections between their addictions and the learning/doing/re-wiring that McGonigal is aiming for in Evoke. I'm not sure, but I've been VERY impressed so far with how Evoke feels, and I've been seeing that the gamers in my classroom are the first to "get" this game. I want to learn more about McGonigal now, because it gives me more confidence that she is up to something with Evoke, that it has the power of a massively multiplayer online game and the seriousness of a political action social network.

I'm looking into Jane McGonigal's work around ARG's - Alternate Reality Games. In particular I'm wondering how playing one of these games changes the way people interact because they are thinking differently. This is what McGonigal has to say about such changes: "Games, when you play them with other people, … actually strengthen the reward circuitry so it actually makes people more social and more likely to collaborate because their brains are actually more responsive to people online and offline. Games are transforming the brains of people who play them in largely positive ways." She is saying that by playing a game, we adopt a role and use our brains differently. This expands what is possible in our brains, and has impacts on what we do in life after we are finished playing the games. And this is what games should do: change how we live our lives when the games aren't there. Like art helps us see differently, games should help us live by different rules, recognize different systems than we saw before playing the game.

"On the other hand, Smith said that any game developer trying to build a game that attracts audiences around the world would do well to concentrate on proper localization. Mistakes that have annoyed regional audiences, Smith said, have included one social game offering virtual goods timed for Christmas that didn't make sense to South Americans because they featured snow-oriented scenes. "

"Still, it may not matter whether developers consider social games to be bona fide games, Reynolds said. Rather, succeeding in the Facebook era may mean learning a lot more about social interactions than about game mechanics. "The magic is in the social interactions," Reynolds said. "And so we have to devise game mechanics that are very, very light...get the social right, and then work on the game mechanics."

Recently gaming has been coming up everywhere! I was listening to Jay Rosen and Dave Winer's podcast, "Rebooting the News." Rosen reported on his panel at South by Southwest. He said that at the end he twittered about how interested he had become about looking at the intersection of gaming and journalism. Rosen also mentioned that they had set up a webset for their Future of Context panel. I went looking and I found a post about gaming and journalism that includes these paragraphs about how gaming might bring context into journalism. "The way I envision it is to create some sort of social gaming experience that fills in the gaps. Want to fill the audience in on why health care costs so much? Why not an audience scavenger hunt that takes them through insurance companies, doctors, service providers, employers who pay premiums, and such? Or why not a Farmville type of game run in a hospital where users have to try and actually bend the cost curve themselves lest they go bankrupt, a situation that allows them to experiment with different health care systems so they can see the cause and effect of the choices we make as a society (in terms of patient coverage, costs, profits, etc? If Mafia Wars on Facebook can take off, surely this could. And how do they make these choices along the way? With blasts of information, ideally pulled from well reported news stories, that the user can actually apply to the situation in a way that increases both recall and understanding." Littau is presenting his vision here, and what a fvision it is. I can totally imagine playing a game in place of reading an article about health care. Once again, just when I thought I understood what gaming is, I see that there is more to learn. This is exciting!

"Why pay attention to games? For starters, games are the "medium of choice" for many Millennials, with broad participation among the 30 and under population. Although part of a web of new media, technology, and social shifts, games are the quintessential site for examining these changes. Game cultures feature participation in a collective intelligence, blur the distinction between the production and consumption of information, emphasize expertise rather than status, and promote international and cross-cultural media and communities. Most of these characteristics are foreign, or run counter to print-era institutions such as libraries. At the same time, game cultures promote various types of information literacy, develop information seeking habits and production practices (like writing), and require good, old-fashioned research skills, albeit using a wide spectrum of content. In short, librarians can't afford to ignore gamers."

Discusses how social games like Farmville make money.

This is one of Mark Prensky's sites. Should be a good source for thoughtful links.