Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Ian Bogost: Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes… If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Bogost reminded the group that, despite the fact the room was arranged for a lecture, this is a roundtabe. Why is an academic talking about project management? “After all, uiversities are not exactly known…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005Sharon Sloane: Exploring Game-Based Instructional Methodologies that Reach the Cognitive and Affective Learning Domains (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) The presentation, by Sharon Sloane, president of CEO of Will Interactive, began with a long video clip showing a military leadership training game, focusing not on combat but routine decisions, careerism, inappropriate comaraderie (a superior…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005Michael Gibson: Creating Life Experience Through Dramatic Simulations (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I picked the wrong presentation to stroll in on a minute before the speaker started. It’s standing room only – three people jumped up and took chairs at the speaker’s table. I’m sitting on the floor, my knee touching the podium…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Dolly Joseph and Mable Kinzie: Boys [sic] and Girls [sic] Game Play Preferences: Survey Results (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m hemmed into an awkward back corner, so I hope the presentation’s good, since I won’t be able to get out easily. I didn’t catch the speaker’s name at first, but it was…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005Tim Holt: (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Remediating the classic Atlas body-building cartoon, Holt presented the scenario in which a big burly organization kicks sand in the face of a scrawny game designer. He suggested that modding is a way to create a great-looking game, that can be used to get further funding,…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005Perla and Whatley’s Keynote Address: What’s So Serious about Game Design? The Art or the Science? (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Quick Take: I thought both speakers did a fair job contextualizing serious games, but as a humanist I am used to attending conferences in which speakers are meticulous about plugging their individual observations…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Blogging (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Here’s my schedule for the first day of the Serious Games Summit, which starts in a few minutes here in Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington D.C. I do enjoy the mixture of commercial, government, educational and indie content, but the biggest draw is probably the dollars…
People are investing major chunks of disposable income and (astonishingly, in a flat-out work-obsessed society where no one has time) untold hours in modding. It’s one of the fastest up-and-coming social trends in the United States. And modding has already tumbled head-on into a legal snake pit. —Andy Oram —Control Freaks: Modding and the Clash…
Since we currently cannot make games of sufficient (accessible) complexity to rival the heights of our best storytelling, we perhaps should focus on the other side of the equation. Games produce play and implicit narrative: we can look at ways of making those implicit narrative situations tie into an explicit narrative, thus deepening the sense…
On Oct. 31, the Serious Games Summit gets underway in Washington D.C. Its sole focus: To bring together the computer gaming industry with other experts from various fields for more than just a good time. —Beyond ‘Flinch and Twitch’ Games (Cybershake) Thanks to some (partial) funding from SHU, I’ll be going to this event. My students…
In God’s atemporal view, the act of creation is simultaneous with the moment of your reading this. God doesn’t look back to creation, nor forward to your clicking on… more» —Arts & Letters Daily A wonderful little blurb that uses the context of encountering this bit of text in a web browser to draw the…
A complaint was filed against Miner because he used the word “subhuman” when writing about gay people. The university’s Judicial Affairs panel found that those remarks violated the school’s university code of conduct. […] As punishment, Duquesne University made Miner take the offending blog off his online profile. We checked that profile and the blog…
For the last decade, most game companies have been governed by one obsessive idea: that making games more lifelike?more three-dimensional and hyperreal?will make them more fun. But this hasn’t worked. Even the crappiest game today has an elaborate 3-D world you can wander around and marvel at the superb rendering of shadows, the elaborate tattoos…
The uncanny valley itself is where dwell monsters, in the classic sense of the word. Frankenstein’s creation, the undead, the ingeniously twisted demons of animé and their inspirations from legend and myth, and indeed all the walking terrors and horrors of man’s imagining belong here. In essence, they tend to be warped funhouse-mirror images of…
This is Denny Hastert and welcome to my blog. This is new to me. I can’t say I‘m much of a techie. I guess you could say my office is teaching the old guy new tricks. But I‘m excited. This is the future. And it is a new way for us to get our message…
But I, for one, do not believe that journalism’s future is gloomy. In fact, I think that when we look back on the early years of the 21st century, we will recognize it as a period of exploding opportunity for journalists and the start of an exciting new era for journalism. I also think it’s…
At first glance, it seems like a regular blog. But look closer and you’ll see there’s something very odd about the blog’s content: It’s very familiar. Too familiar. That’s because you wrote it, six months ago, on your own blog. The rest of the content doesn’t make sense: The same word repeated over and over…
SHU’s blogs are down for the moment. If the blogs don’t get fixed soon, my news writing students can leave comments on this entry in order to prepare for their oral presentations scheduled for Friday. Update: Blogs are back up. Nevermind.EL 227 Student Blogging
Officials at Proctor Jr.-Sr. High School have banned access from school computers to an Internet site that students have been using to post to weblogs, or blogs. Principal Chris Sousa said the decision to block the site from school was made because blogging is not an educational use of school computers. —Brendan McKenna —High school…
I wonder how an English professor would feel spending a week in a physics lab. Not about the scientific work, but about the frequent, ongoing interaction between students and peers, post-docs and faculty. Scientists see each other in the lab, if not daily, then at least weekly. They have frequent lab meetings, colloquia and interaction…