Category: Computer Games

How are computer games presented to parents and teachers? The Concerns About Video Games | Excessive Playing is one in a collection of resources available for parents and teachers at the Media Awarness site (search for games and you get more). See especially the work by Stephen Kline from the Media Analysis Lab at SFU, Video Game Culture: Leisure and Play Preferences of B.C. Teens | Study. The study comments on the disparity between the economic importance of games and the amount of research into the effects of computer games. On the whole Kline’s study and the Awareness site seems balanced – they avoid the sort of hyped criticism of “we’ve found another bad thing you didn’t know about” journalism.
Continue reading Media Analysis and Computer Games

Peter Suber, Nomic is a page by the philosophy prof Peter Suber on the game he invented in 1982 called Nomic which is a game where changing the rules is a move. Rebecca could, if each move involved changing one program, become a programming form of Nomic.
Continue reading Nomic

What would a Creative Technology programme look like? Would there be a need for graduates?

Following on Beyond Productivity I have been asking if there is a need for such arts/computing graduates. Here is a story in the Globe and Mail in the Globetechnology section. The game industry seems especially hungry for appropriate employees.
Continue reading Creative Technology Curriculum

Guardian Unlimited: Playground evolution is a review of a book by games designer Eric Zimmerman called “Rules of Play.” This presents itself as an examination of the field of game design. Should be good. From MIT.

Flak Magazine: Baking a Progress Quest, 12-17-02 is an article about the game Progress Quest which satirizes RPGs. You run it, you chose your character, and then it just runs a story that never ends.
Continue reading Progress Quest, RPG

“Go West” is a game by Gentian Shkurti that is about escaping Albania to emmigrate to Italy. It looks like a first person shooter that calls into question certain issues.
Continue reading Go West – Immigration Video Game

Rebecca is the daughter of Ivanhoe game that Steve Ramsay and I have been trying to imagine. (See previous Rebecca post.) Here are some more thoughts on features to the game.

– Limiting moves to the output of others
– Algorithmic spirit
– Challenges
– Journals
– Code and Literary Programming
– Literary Moves
– A Game of Collaborative Algorithmic Interpretation
Continue reading Rebecca 2

The Rebecca Game is a child response to the Ivanhoe game. Games like Ivanhoe are interventions and Rebecca, as its given name suggests, is an intervention after Ivanhoe. It is entranced by Ivanhoe. It is a daughter.

These notes are from my conversation with Steve Ramsay.
Continue reading Rebecca

Terra Nova is a blog by multiple authors on MMORPGs, toy worlds, social worlds and other “realms of emergent collective reality”. The authors discuss things like how “Avatars Become Storefronts” – how markets emerge slowly, but irresistably, for/in games for exchanging things.
Continue reading Terra Nova, Game Blog

LUCKY WANDER BOY is a novel about a character obsessed with computer games. Like “Run Lola Run” (the movie) the structure of the novel has game-like features as does the plot. The narrator moves through levels. There are a number of “replay” chapters at the end that play out different endings.
Continue reading Lucky Wander Boy