Last week, I was pleased to participate as an invited speaker at the State Department's Tech@State: Serious Games conference. Everyone there was terrific, and it presented a rich opportunity to learn from industry leaders and gifted designers. Our formal statements were short, generally 10 minutes each, but were followed by an hour or so of energetic exchange. A few members of the audience at our panel ("Academic Perspectives on Serious Games") asked for a transcript of my comments, so I thought I'd annotate them and post them to the blog. Read more – ‘Transcript of my comments at the Dept. of State’.
Always-thoughtful Georgetown alum and level–80 economist-mage Ted Castronova has been thinking about the ongoing recession and, in an interesting thought exercise, traces it back to the virtual world. An Exodus Recession? “I thought we would not see a real-world recession caused by the removal of consumption energy into virtual environments until sometime in the far [...] Read more – ‘Terra Nova: An Exodus Recession?’.
At some point in his reflections on the coming information society (better, société de contrôle), Deleuze pointed to the American highway system as a metaphor for the affordances, and phantasmatic freedoms, of technology. At first, he says, the highway system seems to grant you unlimited freedom. But upon further reflection, you realize that the system [...] Read more – ‘Kinect-ing to Deleuze’.
Reading Owen Good’s (excellent!) short article on the difficulties presented in bringing pro wrestling to the game console (The Spectacle Of Pro Wrestling, Played With A Straight Face), I came across this little gem: “Calling pro wrestling ‘fake’ is neither accurate nor informed. The term is ‘kayfabe.’ Kayfabe isn’t a euphemism for false. Kayfabe is [...] Read more – ‘The Spectacle Of Pro Wrestling, Played With A Straight Face’.
I’ve only just discovered analyst Nicholas Lovell’s terrific blog, Gamesbrief: The Business of Games. It’s an impressive, articulate, colorful exercise in the analysis of the games industry. Immediately clear to me, after reading an article like this one: Business can offer a flexible, concise vocabulary of critique that (out of old academic animosities) we’re ignoring. Read more – ‘Gamesbrief: The Business of Games’.
Worth reviewing: The Kotaku Guide To Fall Video Games Fall is supposed to be the best time of the video game year, the entree and the dessert after the first nine month’s meager salad and interactive appetizer. But in 2010, the winter and spring were bountiful and fall is at risk of seeming pathetic. Could [...] Read more – ‘The Kotaku Guide To Fall Video Games’.
This semester, my graduate course Arcade Theory (CCTP628) is looking at the ways in which gaming technologies (both figurative and literal) are being adopted outside of Huizinga’s “magic circle.” I call this phenomenon “game creep.” Blog Kotaku has this recent note about how Vail is gaming the slopes with RFID tags: “Starting this November five [...] Read more – ‘Powder Power-Ups’.
The White Sox of Chicago are on the eve of a do-or-die series with Minnesota’s noble Twins. But second baseman Brent Lillibridge’s mind is on the Array. From his twitter: Most important night of the year Halo coming out at 12 tonight and yes I’m in a line to get it… via Kotaku Read more – ‘America’s Future Pastime’.
If you haven’t yet read SF Weekly‘s delicious article on San Francisco-based Zynga, publishers of FarmVille, (“FarmVillains: Steal someone else’s game. Change its name. Make millions. Repeat.”), put down those seeds and drop that hoe and head over there now. Criticisms and speculation about Zynga’s theft of ideas have been aired before, chiefly in tech-industry [...] Read more – ‘FarmVillains: “I don’t fucking want innovation”’.
This semester, especially as we’re looking at material by James Paul Gee, we’ll talk about incentives to mastery, reward, and cognition. This (fun! animated!) excerpt from a recent RSA presentation by Daniel Pink is an excellent introduction to an interesting behavioral problem that the best games address in surprising ways. The dilemma is this: Economists [...] Read more – ‘Pink on Incentive and Algorithmic Cognition’.
Via GamePolitics, news that the new-ish Game Design BFA offered at GMU has met with“overwhelming” student response. A story in the Fairfax Times reports that the school has already enrolled around 200 students into the program, besting an internal goal of having 110 students in the program by 2012. As Scott M. Martin, Assistant Dean [...] Read more – ‘GMU “Overwhelmed” by Interest in Game Design BFA’.
For your consideration, I commend to you — without comment– the following article, from the closely-followed Opinions page of the Wichita Eagle. “Are Video Games Causing Achievement Gap?” by John Richard Schrock, “trainer of biology teachers.” Advanced readers will want to be sure and identify by name each logical fallacy that appears in the op-ed. Read more – ‘For Your Consideration’.
I’ve just discovered Boing Boing’s ongoing “Games to Get” series, a great collection of (mostly) indie studio games for various platforms. Many of my latest obsessions are there: Plants vs. Zombies, Chime, Clash of Heroes, Drop 7. Definitely worth reviewing. Read more – ‘Boing Boing: Games To Get’.
HASTAC (The Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is definitely worth getting to know: I’ve been to two of their conferences, and they are terrific. Today, their blog calls attention to a new Call For Papers (Trento, Italy, Sept 2010) that is interesting chiefly for its desire to blend game studies with STS: CFP: [...] Read more – ‘CFP: Digital Game Play as Sociotechnical Practice | HASTAC’.
Intriguing news from from Popsci (The weblog of Popular Science magazine): A school in New York City has announced that its emerging curriculum will be based entirely around games and play. The Manhattan-based NY City public school, called Quest to Learn (Q2L), boasts financial support from Parsons School of Design, MacArthur, Gates, and Intel, among [...] Read more – ‘NY School To Pursue Ludic Curriculum’.
Unable to sleep, Gail Nichols spent a lot of time in front of PopCap’s Bejeweled, a game notable for its non-competitive, flow–inducing modes. According to the Washington Post, Nichols liked the game so much that she got in touch with the manufacturer, PopCap Games. The inventors of the game were surprised to hear about its [...] Read more – ‘PopCap funds study on games, mental health’.
I know that it falls squarely into the “casual gaming” category, but PuzzleQuest has got to be one of my favorite games of all time. Lately, I’ve been playing it nearly as often as my wife plays Peggle (and my wife, like so many, is obsessed with PopCap’s Peggle). Read more – ‘Puzzling it out’.
