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’.
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’.
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’.
Matthew Kirschenbaum, over at UMD, is an Associate Professor of English and the Associate Director of MITH, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. His blog is chock full of interesting stuff, and his tweets are prolific. A year ago, he published a good little article in the Chronicle on why humanities students must [...] Read more – ‘Kirschenbaum’s Simulations Course at UMD’.
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’.
