See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Paul Marino: Machinima: Using Games to Change Filmmaking and Instructional Video (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Executive Director, Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences Author of The Art of Machinima The presentation was a brief introduction to a demonsration of clips, many of which I’ve seen, so it wasn’t as immediately informative…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Derek Wischusen: Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using AI (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Began with a useful grid that recognizes that realism is not the only way to evaluate a game, and that realistic games are not the only kind of training games out there. Wischusen presented two binary pairs:…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Sande Chen and David Michael: Roundtable — Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) These are my very rough notes. Some of the speakers didn’t give their names, sometimes I couldn’t hear their names, and sometimes they gave their names while…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day II (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) (See also Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 1) Keynote: David Warner Riding the Cutting Edge of Distributed Intelligence Sande Chen and David Michael Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games Derek Wischusen Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using…
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 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…
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…
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
I couldn’t help but make a joke with the title, because it’s seemingly right on the money. You see, Google is getting ready to take the wraps off of a new service called Google Base. If it can be posted online, it would appear that they would, in fact, prefer it belong to them. At…
Rather than looking into my blog to see if I have any new comments and then staying on my own page to read and reply, I go to my blogroll and move out into other people’s blogs, to see what they are up to. —Torill Mortenson —Noted difference (thinking with my fingers) Torill comments on her…
I finished a three-hour binge of racing, clicked off my Playstation 2, and … it was over. My compulsion had vanished. I still enjoyed the game, and had plenty more challenges to complete. But I didn’t need to play it any more. For some mysterious reason, Burnout had suddenly released me from its talons. This…
Games and game technology are poised to transform the way we educate and train students at all levels. Education and information, skill training, even political and religious beliefs can be communicated via video games. But these games and repurposed game technology, collectively called “serious games,” have yet to be fully embraced by educators. It’s not…
As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day About…
A. A suburban teenager’s online diary, bursting with angst-y Goth poetry and “creative” grammar. B. An alternative news source that can break stories the mainstream media won’t touch. C. A scholarly notebook, where a professor reviews books, brags about student accomplishments, and posts occasional cat pictures. D. A list of web addresses, often focusing on…
You’ll not only be able to watch every film, but also every TV program, news show, documentary, music video, and video blog, and all of it will be playable wherever you go. Great, you think: Thousands of channels, millions of choices, and still nothing worth watching. Nevertheless, “nonlinear TV”—watching the tube on our schedule, not…