In anticipation of its soon-to-be-released next-gen MMO, GuildWars 2, Seattle-based ArenaNet has published this short promo video that characterizes the company and its employees in all the right ways: They are portrayed as intensely collaborative, resolutely non-hierarchical, game-oriented, fun-loving geeks who believe in the power of digital community. I have no way of knowing whether [...] Read more – ‘ArenaNet’s First Ten Years’.
Via Kotaku (via USAToday), word that Erskine Bowles has contacted Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to chat about a game built around balancing the U.S. budget. It’s an interesting idea that’s actually been done (and done well) already. In 2008, MarketPlace, from American Public Media, launched Budget Hero: Budget Hero tries to bring a level of clarity [...] Read more – ‘Obama Administration Asks Ballmer About Gaming the Budget’.
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’.
How much “fun” will NASA’s much-touted Unreal 3-based MMO be when it is released next year? If the captions to still images released on developer Project Whitecard’s website are any indication, not much. Here’s how they describe the Regolith Grinder (aka “The Taurus”): “Contructed from an advanced smelting process and lunar factory, it is a [...] Read more – ‘Joyride: NASA MMO and the Rhetoric of the Military Industrial Complex’.
Raph Koster revisits his book on A Theory of Fun as he points to Loodo’s Calabouço Tétrico, a highly-polished, deeply disturbing Flash-based Tetris variant that replaces colored blocks with human beings in different states of distress. Speaking of it on his website, Ian Bogost points back to his text, Persuasive Games (wherein he rejects as [...] Read more – ‘Tetris and Torture’.
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’.
Today’s New York Times features a brief article on video games and U.S. Army recruiting efforts in a Philadelphia mall. The facility, which opened in August, is the first of its kind. It replaces five smaller recruitment stations in the Philadelphia area, at about the same annual operating cost, not counting the initial expenses, said [...] Read more – ‘Be All You Can Be (For A Quarter, To Start)’.
