One sunny day shortly after the start of the fall term, Robert M. Dawley was preparing to spend the afternoon tutoring two students on how to measure the DNA content in the cells of tadpoles. But first he walked briskly out of his building and over to a small lounge with white cinder-block walls, stretched…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2A Debate Between Jan Cannon-Bowers and Marc Prensky (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Do we need instructional design in serious games, or is making a good game enough? This debate is part of an ongoing turf battle within the serious games movement. As is generally the case with conference liveblogging, these are…
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 2Keynote: David Warner, Riding the Cutting Edge of Distributed Intelligence (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Warner identified himself as “dangerously overeducated.” Characterized his presentation as “confessions of a serial stunt scientist,” and warned that he would jump topics around. The cup of tea I brought to the table went cold untouched —…
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 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…