Most important night of the year Halo coming out at 12 tonight and yes I’m in a line to get it…

via Kotaku

Criticisms and speculation about Zynga’s theft of ideas have been aired before, chiefly in tech-industry blogs that have remarked on apparent design similarities between Zynga’s smash hits — including FarmVille, FishVille, PetVille, Café World, and Mafia Wars — and predecessors published by other companies. But company insiders have never discussed the frankness with which Zynga, led by Pincus, based its lucrative business model on exploiting the achievements of competitors.

While you’re at it, be sure that you check out this recent piece, courtesy Gawker, on Zynga’s weirdly secretive “Platinum Purchase Program,” where a $500 minimum purchase nets players “bonus loot” (first-hand corroboration here), and see this overview of the Apple-enabled and Google-backed Zynga’s dark (virtual) world.

Watch Getting Shot: A 103-Second Retrospective. While you’re at it, consider this footage, too.

“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 is important for professionals to be highly proficient in skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, resource management, and adaptive decision making. These skills are fundamental in Starcraft and therefore make the game a highly effective environment for students to analyze and take action in complex situations. Computer and video games of all types have become a major part of today’s entertainment and technology worlds. Also, online education is an area of intense growth with many employers and professions using online courses and workshops for career development. This course synthesizes the three threads of 21st Century skill development, gaming, and online education into an innovative and experiential approach that encourages students to identify, learn, and practice crucial skills and apply and relate them to real-world situations. It does not teach about Starcraft, but rather aims to utilize the game and the complex situations that arise within it to present and develop the important skills professionals will undoubtedly need in the 21st Century workplace.”

There’s clearly a lot of Gee’s thinking at work here, at least in the remove, and, by extension, a tradition of American pragmatist philosophy that goes right back to Dewey.

However, from another angle, isn’t this really just a course in remedial computational literacy? With really sexy, 32-bit reinforcement?

Via CrunchGear.

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 others.

In one sample curriculum, students create a graphic novel based on the epic Babylonian poem “Gilgamesh,” record their understanding of ancient Mesopotamian culture though geographer and anthropologist journals, and play the strategic board game “Settlers of Catan.” Google Earth comes into play as a tool to explore the regions of ancient Mesopotamia.

Students may also play the evolution-inspired video game “Spore,” but they get equally serious time with digital tools ranging from Maya 3D modeling to Adobe Flash. If anything, Q2L students may emerge as some of the most digitally savvy pupils of their peer group.

At the end of the day, however, it is important to remember that this is a school that must abide by the rules of New York State: Q2L students will still face the The Regents Exams, the misguided “standards of learning” tests through which every NY student must suffer. Essentially, this is the equivalent of training a young woman to build, maintain, and fly her own jet aircraft — and then judging her success by asking her to attach a team of horses to a stagecoach.

See also: Metropolis Mag.

The metaverse is emerging, through the increasing use of virtual world technologies that act as platforms for end-users to create, develop, and interact, expanding the realm of human cooperation, interaction, and creativity. The conference focus is scientific research on applications and developments of these metaverse platforms: Second Life, OpenSim, Open Croquet, Activeworlds, Open Source Metaverse, Project Wonderland, and others, providing a forum for the research community to present and discuss innovative approaches, techniques, processes, and research results.

For more information, see the JVWR site. (And be sure to check out their new issue — guest-edited by Mia and Mark and featuring, among others, a nice article by Burcu and a roundtable with amazing Sarah and brilliant Liz).

Like editorial games should, [Raid Gaza] takes a strong position. But unlike so many, it also offers coherent gameplay that is related to the conflict it critiques.

His insights here are typically acute, and deserve to be read. But I have reservations about the strong position Bogost himself takes with respect to the emptiness of what he calls “tabloid” games.

“Indeed, newsgames produced very rapidly, like the many small ones about the recent George W. Bush shoe throwing incident, risk becoming tabloid games, little meaningless pointers that commemorate an event only to draw attention to it rather than to comment upon it. These games often capitalize rhetorically: the payload of a game about throwing a shoe at President Bush is the very idea of a game about such a thing, rather than any kind of commentary on the event or its meaning.”

On his watercoolergames blog, Bogost points to one such game, Gaza Defender, with disdain.

I’ve just been made aware of another game on this topic, Gaza Defender. The player is asked to “Defend The Gaza Strip from the Zionist Bombs using your AK-47.” It’s less remarkable as a game and no more thoughtful a commentary than the many whack-a-mole clone newsgames we’ve seen in the past.

Implicit in his Bogost’s dismissal of this thought-less genre of games, of course, is his faith in the advent of a procedural literacy: A savoir-lire among the people. Bogost is worried that, disconnected from any representative or simulative engagement with the world they portray, whack-a-mole clones—tabloid games—don’t provide the opportunity for any kind of critical response in the player. As games, he therefore deems them devoid of value.

the advent of a new technology and its attendant rhetorics does not require the ouster of everything that came before.

But the advent of a new technology and its attendant rhetorics does not require the ouster of everything that came before. The advent of the written word did not require us to abandon orality. Instead, the two technics became imbricated in our every signification. Bogost’s critique of Gaza Defender is unnecessarily dismissive, and ignores the fact that the game is still a political text, in spite of the quality of gameplay.

I think it a mistake, for example, to extract the game itself from the context in which it is presented. The game itself is embedded on a page that features maps depicting (one) history of the Palestinian / Israeli conflict; a link to a Donations page at the Red Crescent website; a link to download Adobe Flash; an embedded stream of music from a Palestinian musician, Mawaal Al Quds. The page includes a tool to share or bookmark the page via any number of well-known social networking sites. This is more than a whack-a-mole clone.

Admittedly, a simple shoe-throwing game may not take advantage of the complexities of the simulative, and it may not be a sophisticated form of “procedural rhetoric.” But it is a voice that asks to be heard.

What’s more, I find myself drawn again to what M. Badiou says about theater: We go not to be cultivated, but to be struck. “Theater-ideas” are experiential, not necessarily critical-intellectual. Are we certain that there no value in arming a player with a shoe and saying, “let fly”?

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 therefore subject to spin. Blizzard is generally regarded as one of the most forthcoming and transparent of the online gaming services, as their definition of “subscriber” refers clearly to members who pay a monthly fee:

World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

This differs substantially from online services like Second Life or MMORPG competitors like Atlantica (which calls itself “#1 ranked”): While SL and Atlantica boast many million “subscribers,” their definition of a subscriber includes those who sign up for free (and may never even have subsequently returned to the site). Blizzard’s pricey subscription may be the source of much complaint, but that cost guarantees the relative equivalence of subscriber base and shard population.

I’d like to research this further, but for the moment, the math on WoW is sufficiently interesting. If, as of Dec 28, 2008, there are 11.5 million subscribers, and approximately 236 known shards (“realms” or game instances, probably equivalent to physical servers), then there is a mean of roughly 48,700 subscribers per server. One difficulty with this number: I’ve no way of knowing how many avatars each subscriber maintains: I have 3 characters on Thrall, 2 on Crushridge, and 2 on The Underbog; based on anecdotal evidence, I doubt that my arrangement is atypical. Consequently, that 48.7k subscribers/shard mean fails to reflect the reality of individuals who play across several servers.

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 title’s interface weren’t expounded upon, though The Times did note that users will turn pages by way of the DS’s touch screen.”