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Scott Laidlaw is slowing down the pace on educational math games. More »
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Brothers Ondrej and Marek Spanel—who spent their childhood in communist Czechoslovakia playing Atari games "bought on the black market"—are the surprising originators behind a military-training game employed by the governments of at least five major nations. Among the brothers' sources of inspiration: heavy metal music. More »
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Armed with M-4 automatic rifles, swathed in body armor and combat fatigues, the five man U.S. Special Forces Airborne entry team stacks up outside the entrance to the house. More »
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The Dubai Police Force is looking for a game developer to help them create a virtual training program for their department, according to a Gamasutra job posting. More »
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Serious Games Interactive's newest 3D role-playing game touches on the tough topic of Child Soldiers in African countries. More »
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After what she says was ages of misrepresentation in books, films, and television, Norfolk University history professor Cassandra Newby-Alexander wants to tell the true story of the slave-liberating Underground Railroad using a video game. More »
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Is it possible to educate about teen dating violence through a violence-free video game? More »
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A Washington, D.C. school is one of the first in the nation to get Wii Music in their school. More »
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We first wrote about newsgame Airport Security back in 2006, today Ian Bogost reports that an iPhone version of the game is now available in the App Store. More »
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Whosegame is right in the middle of their first annual Serious Games competition which runs from Dec. 8, 2008 to Mar 31, 2009. More »
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Chris Bateman (of Only a Game) has a thought provoking article on his new, games only blog on whether or not a game has ever made you cry. More »
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Another weekend, another call for papers! This time around it's the Games+Learning+Society 5.0 conference, June 10-12 in Madison, WI. More »
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We mentioned the somewhat odd BusinessWeek Arcade back when it launched; now Ian Bogost has taken up the whys and wherefores over at the Journalism & Games Project blog. More »
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A few weeks ago, designer Brice Morrison talked about how a game designer outgrew games; since kicking off a flurry of discussion, he's returned to GameSetWatch with some in-depth answers to common questions and a challenge. More »
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A couple of Kotakuites have written to underline what I'd already noticed — the lists of the 2009 Independent Games Festival entrants are finally up. More »
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Gamasutra has a fabulous postmortem up — easily one of the best I've read — on Tale of Tales' The Graveyard. More »
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If you happen to be in Denver tomorrow, around noonish, and have nothing to do, you might want to swing by the Denver Film Festival. More »
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L.B. Jeffries has a nice essay up on the idea of 'games as languages' — a combination of coercing players to take certain actions and encouraging certain responses, creating a dialogue of sorts. As Jeffries says, "It’s not exactly talking to another person…but it’s not just rolling dice or pressing shoot either." As games get more complex, so does the 'language' aspect — choices are expressive elements, and the more choices one has, the more opportunities for unique combinations. Even the simplest of games involves communication — 'go here, do that.' With the influx of more diverse and user-created building blocks, it seems reasonable that the 'languages' would begin to emerge more clearly: More »
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Well, militaries across the world may soon have a new war game to their arsenal, and it could have a trickle down effect to retail games — British researchers have come up with a game system that incorporates a 'smell box,' in an attempt to see if they can make training stick better. In what sounds like an unpleasant experience, various smells are triggered as users 'take an authentic walk' around hostile areas. If it's determined this is making training more useful, it could be rolled out next year and be used in training actual soldiers: More »
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In an interesting opinion piece over at GameSetWatch, designer Brice Morrison expounds on why it is that he 'outgrew' games — even though he's a designer. It's not exactly treading any new ground (any 'why is gaming an immature medium?' essay traverses the same ground), but it's an interesting perspective from someone who has built a career on designing games — games that he says he's outgrown. What do we need more of? Boring games (sort of): More »
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L.B. Jeffries has a nice piece up arguing for more relevant and provocative settings in games in order to raise awareness and perhaps do something a little greater for disastrous (real world) situations. He points out that violence isn't incompatible with this, thus many classic genres would probably be quite at home dealing with nasty current day situations (as he points out, film has already done this — though not always through violent means — though Jeffries uses Rambo 4 as a cinematic touchstone). Of course, this comes with some problems: More »
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Kotakuite Daniel Novais sent me an email this past week, asking me to take a look at his "little short artsy game" called Estamos Pensando (Portuguese for 'We Are Thinking'). Inspired in part by Jason Rohrer's Passage, Estamos Pensando is a sweet, sad, and polished little game. Daniel said that he's now trying to work on something a little happier, since one comment on Rohrer's Gravitation noted that these 'artsy' games are usually depressing. There are Portuguese and English versions of the game, and gameplay is quite simple. The game has apparently gotten some nice initial reviews since its submission to the Brazilian symposium SBGames 2008 festival, and it's worth a little bit of your time. More »
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Ian Bogost has a timely piece up on the issue of political-themed games, and their use — or lack thereof. Bogost draws a clear demarcation between politicking (which he feels most of these games do) versus politics — games have the potential to really speak towards politics, but wind up being more or less meaningless tools for politicking: More »
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It's a bit of a nostalgic day today at Kotaku (or maybe I've just done a poor job of getting out of the historian mindset this weekend), but a post over at Educational Games Research brought back memories of childhood and elementary school — Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (I vaguely remember a PBS television show that we were required to watch once a week), typing teachers (though we used PAWS in the 3rd grade, not the Mavis Beacon mentioned). Ah, memories: More »
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'Matthew Wasteland' of Magical Wasteland has a thought provoking essay up over at GameSetWatch on how we think of games as art — and why it may not work, or what our current limitations are. His opinion is the more we think about this stuff, the more we can work on overcoming current problems — certainly not an unreasonable point of view. My favorite section was on the problem of 'systems as art' (his example is a little gem called The Marriage, which is lacking in context to say the least) — a pretty nice critique of some of the intentionally 'artistic' games that seek to 'rise above' the entertaining masses: More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5055945&view=rss&microfeed=true I sort of hope the Zero Punctuation knock-off dies a quick death, but reader Nathan M. sent us this video, which is based off an article by designer James Portnow. There's nothing ground breaking here — the idea that educational games simply try too hard, while regular 'fun' titles can inspire learning without having to try and teach themselves is nothing new, but the video is certainly a lot more fun than the average essay. Nathan said, "I'm a 5th grade social studies teacher. I still like to play games as much as I can but I've always been disappointed with state of educational games. This gives the best explanation of this phenomena and the best approach to correcting it I've seen." More »
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Ian Bogost has a short little note on a 'serious game' called Packaging Man, which was apparently intended 'to raise awareness about the destructive impact fast food paper packaging has on Southern forests.' Unfortunately for Dogwood Alliance, the creator, the game is a slightly retooled version of Pac-man, and the 'environmental message' seems confined to the (skippable) intro. Ian wasn't terribly impressed: More »
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Ian Bogost has an interesting editorial over at Edge Online entitled 'The End of Gamers,' a title which he admits doesn't really capture the main argument: "["The End of Gamers"] is lurid but might not capture the main argument of the piece, which is more like "Things People Do with Games." Much of his point is that other media has a wide variety of applications, and isn't shoehorned into a few limited types of uses ('entertainment' vs. 'serious' and so on). Bogost isn't arguing for 'games as art' or 'games as useful' or anything else, just pointing out that some perceptions about the industry start to break down when one considers the wide range of applications current games can have: More »
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Ever wanted to decimate the world's population or see if you could develop a super-bug that would leave the globe in utter pandemonium? If the answer is yes, browser-based Pandemic 2 is your game; even if the answer is 'uh, no,' it's an interesting way to while away some time. Watch as your customized disease of choice is let loose on the world, then use your 'evolution points' to mutate the perfect delivery method for a global pandemic — the goal is to have a trail of devastation (and bodies) left in your wake. There are two different modes, 'realistic' and 'relaxed,' so if you're not sure you're ready for a realistic onslaught, you can try your hand with the easier mode. More »
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A new report has been released on the utility of 'serious games' and in-game marketing in virtual spaces like Second Life; OTOinsights, the research arm of One to One Interactive, takes a look at the success (or lack thereof) of marketing attempts by major firms. They describe the results as 'uneven' and make some suggestions on how companies can better utilize virtual spaces to pitch their product(s): More »
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Ian Bogost has an interesting essay up on Gamasutra, this one on the performative aspects of video games. The beloved word of anthropologists and linguists the world over, the concept of something being 'performative' is when something has the ability to do something itself when it is thrown out in the big bad world. So, what does this have to do with games?: More »
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Chris Plante has posted a plea over at GameSetWatch — one for bringing more global entertainment to the West (well, America specifically). His idea? Some sort of portal that will be able to showcase games from all over the world, dragging American gamers kicking and screaming into acknowledging foreign countries that are outside of East Asia. Interesting concept, and one that could theoretically be implemented right now: More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5020521&view=rss&microfeed=true Missed UCSD's SoftWhere 2008 conference and curious what went on? Well, video of the public portion of the conference is now popping up on the SoftWhere 2008 page in QuickTime and YouTube. A lot of big names (like Ian Bogost, above) had some very interesting presentations on a variety of topics — even my Japanese historiography professor showed up and had a lot to say about history, time, and software. It was a pretty diverse group, and owing to the zippy format, you can get a good feel for a lot of the research and ideas without spending half an hour or more listening to one presentation. Confining academics to such a short period of time? Sheer brilliance. More »
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Tale of Tales has an interesting little interview up with Takayoshi Sato, who was responsible for the art and CGI direction of Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2; after relocating to the US, Sato did art for some big titles, then made the switch to 'serious games.' On making the switch, he has this to say: More »
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We've mentioned Jason Rohrer's weird little works before, in the form of Passage and Gravitation; now with his 'Game Design Sketchbook' column at the Escapist, he puts up new little games monthly. This month features the theme of life, death, and immortality (appropriately called Immortality): More »
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I poked my head in to the public 'pecha kucha' session for UCSD's SoftWhere 2008, but couldn't stay for the whole thing since I had a paper to write and was feeling really under the weather; I did get a chance later to talk with one of my professors, who participated in the event, and have been checking out the roundups floating around the internet at this point. I've got my own opinions on the '___ Studies' ghetto, being part of it myself — though an attempt to create a field of 'software studies' is, at the very least, not burdened with Cold War politics. Anyways, there are some concise (and not so concise) appraisals of the event floating around. Anne Helmond, who presented on the relationship between search engines and the blogosphere, had this to say: More »
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In mid-1980s Nicaragua, a woman stood beside a burnt out bus in a tiny, remote town. Game designer Jim Gasperini was in the region to visit his brother, a journalist covering Contra issues during the Reagan administration. More »
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In an effort to make learning Chinese less painful (and ostensibly to capitalize on the 'MMO as language learning tool' trend that's been talked about a bit in the past few months), Michigan State University's Zhao Yong (professor of education technology and educational psychology) has designed Zon!, where players can graduate from tourist to resident to citizen of this little virtual slice of China: More »
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Games For Change, a nonprofit organization that addresses games as "agents of social change," will be holding its fifth annual festival in New York City next week, June 2-4 at Parsons The New School For Design. Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor will give a keynote, as will MIT's Dr. Henry Jenkins and Arizona State University's Dr. James Paul Gee. More »
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The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has revealed 12 universities that will receive grants to research the use of video games as healthcare tools. Games have shown clear potential to serve healthcare, from helping stroke victims rehabilitate, encouraging seniors to exercise and teaching behavior for therapy. Exhaustive research and hard data will further drive the growth of games as healthcare tools for people of all ages, and the grant recipients aim to support this goal. More »
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