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”’.
It’s Gun Week over at Kotaku (seriously, though, when are guns not an issue on a video gaming site?), and Mike Fahey has compiled a 102-second historical overview of 18 years’ worth of getting shot, First Person Shooter-style. The video is interesting, and somewhat depressing: The calculus of projectile weaponry meshes so well with the [...] Read more – ‘Getting Shot: A 103-Second Retrospective’.
From the University of Terra Florida University of Florida Honors Courses – Fall 2010 catalog. “21st Century Skills in Starcraft is an 8 week entirely online course that uses the popular real time strategy (RTS) game Starcraft to teach valuable 21st Century Skills through a hands-on approach. With society becoming increasingly technology-based and fast-paced, it [...] Read more – ‘University of Florida Honors Courses – Fall 2010’.
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’.
D. Linda Garcia and I, together with Hanan Gazit at H.I.T., will serve as guest editors for a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. In addition to regular papers, the special issue will feature some of the papers presented at the SLACTIONS conference in late September. The metaverse is emerging, through [...] Read more – ‘The Metaverse (Some Assembly Required)’.
In a recent post over at the Georgia Tech Journalism & Games Project (Raid Gaza! Editorial Games and Timeliness), the indefatigable Ian Bogost holds up a recent editorial game, Raid Gaza!, as exemplary of the kind of critical work games (“newsgames”) can do for journalism. Like editorial games should, [Raid Gaza] takes a strong position. [...] Read more – ‘On Newsgames’ Newsworthiness’.
According to a recent press release, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft now boasts 11.5 million subscribers world-wide. Subscriptions and virtual-world populations are a frequent topic of discussion in game studies, but the facts are notoriously hard to come by, since population density — often perceived as an index of popularity — is a selling point, and [...] Read more – ‘Warcraft population’.
GameSpot: Shakespeare booked on DS “The Times of London reports today that Nintendo has partnered with preeminent book publisher HarperCollins to bring a slate of literary classics to the DS. Labeled The 100 Classic Book Collection, the software will reportedly include works from Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters. Details on the [...] Read more – ‘GameSpot: Shakespeare booked on DS’.
