Academics vs. 'Gaming' Academics: Let the Snark Begin

Serious Games at MIT

Henry Jenkins runs the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program at MIT. He also blogs more words per day than Kotaku. Over at his eponymous website, Jenkins has been posting articles about the various serious games projects MIT CMS students have undertaken over the years.

Titles covered include Revolution, a game about life in colonial Williamsburg; a series of handheld augmented reality games; Backflow, about the environmental issues of sewage; and Labyrinth, a game about math literacy.

Each post about the games includes a comprehensive article detailing its design and learning goals.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming [Henry Jenkins]

It's time for more game studies goodness. This one comes from Jesper Juul, a Danish scholar who studied and then taught at the IT University, Copenhagen.

In his article "Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three," Juul conducts a history of matching tile games, attempting to create a genealogy of the form. The image above is the family tree he presents as a part of the analysis.

In addition to the inherent value of studying the development of a genre, Juul's paper also had practical application. He used it as a kind of design inspiration when he created his own casual game, High Seas - The Family Fortune, which is a matching tile game with physics and a few other twists.

Juul is also the author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, published in 2005 by the MIT Press.

Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games [The Ludologist]

New Anthology on Player Experiences

As I promised yesterday, during my run as Bizarro Brian I want to share some recent activity in the field of game studies.

Videogame, Player, Text is a new anthology with articles focused on player experiences in games. Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska are the editors, and contributors include Marie-Laure Ryan, Matteo Bittanti, Henry Lowood, Jesper Juul, and others. These are some of the names you might want to Google around for if you're interested in the academic study of games.

Table of contents after the jump.

Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle

Quick recap: a year and half ago, Reuters reported on a congressional briefing in which modders had turned Battlefield 2 into a terrorist training game. The report confused a lot of people, including Kotaku, because most of the details were incorrect. The truth was, the mod wasn't even a game, it was a satirical send-up that used footage from Battlefield and soundtrack dubs from Team America: World Police.