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”’.
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’.
In January of this year, on the day following the death of historian Howard Zinn, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz delivered a thoughtful little talk at SUNY Buffalo. In so doing, I think he managed neatly to extend Zinn’s 20th Century civitas a little further into our own time. “I’m worried that students will take their [...] Read more – ‘What Would Tocqueville Make of the American (Digital) Farmer?’.
This has been covered in a few places, including Hypercompendia and Eastgate‘s useful HTLit.com, but it’s worth mentioning again. Digital literacy scholar Dennis Jerz set his eleven-year-old child in front of Colosal Cave Adventure and — using a piece of software like Screenflow — captured both the unfolding of the game on-screen and the young [...] Read more – ‘A Neophyte Takes on the Command-Line Interface’.
