I will also be regularly checking into this blog. It is a really nice way to stay in contact and to bounce ideas. Even if no-one responds, just putting the ideas in writing seems to help. The second thing about blogging is that the “incubation” seems to be an important part for me. The only [...]

Just One of the Girls Just read a piece by Brenda Laurel, founder of Purple Moon, about the rise and fall of the company. Purple Moon, you may recall, had as its principal goal the creation of games that would appeal to girls. Here’s a quote: In our research about girls, we explored the social [...]

How the West was Won How Sony won the console game is an article discussing how Sony beat its competition in the PlayStation market and also giving insight to the conditions. one of the main reason is “Sony has a broader spectrum of games than either of its competitors and it will have up to [...]

What Girls Really Want Girl Games Inc. released a qualitative research study report titled Teen Girls and Entertainment on September 26, 2000. It looks at a variety of specialized segments of the entertainment industry from girls’ perspective, including Broadband, MP3, and DVD technologies and provides some recommendations for making current and future programming more girl-friendly. [...]

Computer Edge Computer Edge magazine’s Dec. 1 issue has 3 articles on games. One is titled “Online Games are Virtually Amazing”. It describes 3 online games, EverQuest, Asheron’s Call and Ultimate Ultima, that seem to have large followings. These games are multiplayer roleplaying games played over the internet. What surprised me was the amount of [...]

Gore Wins over Bushed Parents The blog is in response to Dave’s blog on 12/12. Dave, I think that you’re right about playstation 2 and gory games that are brought home. I talked to the manager of our local blockbuster and he said that some parents allow their kids to rent games that are beyond [...]

Not Just for Kids TV Guide (the small version) has a feature on video games. They briefly discuss how games have grown and changed since the early days of Pong to the new PlayStation 2. They also mention that games aren’t just for kids anymore. (They list 60% of Americans play interactive games, 32% are [...]

Sara’s Farewell Okay, and here’s the second thing I wanted to say… in response to Holly’s post about blogging. I actually kind of like it too, even though I don’t look at it every day. But I’d love to feel that I could keep a connection with what is going on in the Ed Tech [...]

Parental Responsibility Well, I just counted up my blogs and as far as I can tell I need 2 more which is good because I have 2 more things to say. The first is a comment on the presentations at our last class. I am always impressed at the variety of ideas and approaches that [...]

“Children Now” provides some recommendations for positive solutions to the negative game environment for girls. The article Girls and Gaming:Gender and Video Game Marketing focuses on gender and video games and the content available to girls in particular. In addition, it also identifies ways in which the industry can play a role in creating and [...]

“Children Now” is a national child advocacy organization that works to improve the quality of news and entertainment media for both children and about children’s issues. Yesterday, they released the new research relating Video Games and its headline was Top-selling Video Games ‘Unhealthy’ for Girls. According to the research, “Almost half of top-selling console video [...]

The Case of the Missing Blogs Hmmmm… I’ve generated the archive files again twice, and still the weeks from October 21 to November 10 don’t show up. I can only hazard a guess that this is somehow related to the server upgrade and general flakiness that Blogger experienced around that time. Your blogs are all [...]

Utopia Now that the semester is over, what are you going to do with all your free time? How about running your own feudal mini-kingdom? The web-based Utopia game will let you do that. Here’s the opening description: Welcome to Utopia, a world where reality and dreams come together, a world where the lowliest of [...]

Dave on Blogging I figure since this is my last blog, I should comment on my opinioins about this whole blogging thing. When it first started, I wasn’t sure about the whole thing because I figured others weren’t really reading my blogs. After a week or so I was getting some interesting feedback from other [...]

It Takes Napalming a Village to Raise a Child This blog is for those who cannot get enough of research found on violence in video games. It talks primarily about Clinton singling out the game Quake and studying its effects. In June, President Clinton ordered the surgeon general to study the effects of all violent [...]

What do a duck, a debtor and a politician have in common? A colleague came running up to me last week excited because they found a game just like the Glass Bead Game. Tribond is published by Patch Products Inc. The game asks the question. What do these three things have in common?A player gets [...]

Drop-Com This blog doesn’t really have to do with technology and games but technology and corporations, so I thought I would talk about it anyway since I think it applies to our field. Anyway I have been hearing a lot of discussion on the news and radio about the fall of dot.com companies lately. Everyone’s [...]

This blog is in response to Amy’s arcade experience. Just to let you know Amy that you don’t have to go all the way to the arcade to see graphics as realistic and gruesome as the ones you saw. I know that Playstation 2 is supposed to have the best graphics and quality of all [...]

Now that I see Blog in a different light, I would also like to start one. I would like to create one for high school students. However, I don’t know how effective it would be. I have been searching for teachers that have done this, but I have not been successful. I would like to [...]

Handbook of research for educational communications and technologySubject: 26.4.3 Dynamic Pictures and Knowledge Acquisition In this section, author reviews earlier and recent studies of examining the effect of dynamic visuals on learning. It concludes that there is no rationale of incorporating animation or other special effects into instruction existing because of the inconsistent results of [...]

By mistake/please delete

Looking for games especially for girls? Wondering what’s out there in the recent market? Here is the place for you to dig in. The following is a list of brief explanations of girls’ games. From here, you may get a sense of what girls’ games look like and log on to the specific web page [...]

Most girls enjoy software which involves creativity and mystery. There is a web site listing the games that are especially designed for girls, The Review Zone It also contains the description of game including price, features, etc.

Ok, I’ll go ahead and do one more blog. After reading through all the past blogs (again – yes, I was reading them every week as we went along), I realized that I really have enjoyed “blogging.” I was a little hostile to the idea at first – especially when the interface wasn’t (in my [...]

Bernie, I have just spent the past 35 minutes going day by day through all of the blogs from 10/21 to 11/11. Why? Well, as you indicated on 12/9, “all” we needed to do was to go to the archives and search through the weeks to count up our past blogs. However, i immediately noticed [...]

Has anybody visited Free-Game website? On this website you can find free hints, cheats, tips and downloads for the pc, Playstation, Dreamcast and Nintendo 64. I like playing Civilization, and I found a lot of cheats for it. Player are sharing how to chet the game with other players. It is pretty interesting. Maybe you [...]

What do software companies believe girls want from computer games, and are their views accurate?? recently, many software companies have become interested in designing a computer game for girls. Mattel Interactive and Electronic Arts are one of these companies. Mattel Interactive and Electronic Arts had workshop in March to address the question “What do software [...]

I realize that I my last blog sounded pretty negative. Let me also share something positive about my arcade experience. There was one game, MTV Drumscape that was a drumming simulation, where were a drummer and you had to keep the beat to music played to you by the game. You sat inside this box [...]

Arcade experience – violence in games I know that we’ve spent time discussing violence in games over on blogger, but I didn’t really get it until I went to an arcade last week. Have you guys been to an arcade recently? First let me say that I haven’t been to an arcade since I was [...]

Simulations in real life. In Las Vegas at Circus Circus, they have this simulation in the Arcade called CyberCoster. It allows you (for $5 per person) to “design” a roller coaster ride from a series of pre-set selections (example, loops, dips, etc). Then you sit inside the simulation car (it looks like a smaller version [...]

A Different Kind of Game Bot Want a PlayStation 2? So does everyone else. They appeared briefly in US stores and were snatched up in hours. New shipments appear sporadically and disappear in instants. How do you find a PS2? Crank up a Shopping Bot, of course. According to a CNET article Bots Snarl Sites [...]

No Tokyo Roses Bernie, Having lived in Japan for three years, the article on Japanese men practicing their romantic skills is pretty interesting. I was listening to the radio one day when a Japanese man called in and argued that foreign men should not date Japanese women due to the fact that they were bestowing [...]

Count Your Bloggings Want to take a walk down memory lane and see how many postings you’ve made here? Visit the blog itself, not via Blogger, and scroll down to the bottom of the page. There you’ll see a link to the Archives which contain each week’s Blog since October. You don’t need to be [...]

Love Bots More signs that there’s a market for AI agents that play with us. Japan’s Men Date Hot, Sexy Bots, an article in Wired, described a subscription service in Japan which allows you to practice the writing of love letters via e-mail.

Pharaoh It’s hard to get away from The Sims nowadays. I have seen plenty of articles in non-game publications and The Sims have been getting good reviews. However, if you feel like playing God in Egypt, check out Sierra’s PHARAOH. It’s kind of the same concept of The Sims, but only in Egypt. I’ve heard [...]

A hacker stole my email Hi all, This is not about games, but I think that it is important to know. I just would like to warn you about hackers. I don’t know how a hacker did, but he got my password of hotmail account and changed it. He left a message for me at [...]

Demos to the Rescue I’m not sure whether people who are frantically trying to finish their project will be visiting the blog, but I’ve got a helpful tool for you if you do. Need some software that you don’t currently have on your computer such as Media Cleaner? Go to http://www.hotfiles.zdnet.com to find demos and [...]

Okay, I know we aren’t supposed to blog just to blog, but I am wondering how we find out how many we have done (tired of hearing about this Bernie?) Anyway, I can’t use the Archive feature because I am not an administrator. Any ideas besides finding the beginning somehow, scrolling and counting?

Semi-Private Bloggery I was just looking that the patterns webquest and noticed that you had your own blog going. What a great idea for communicating with your team and still getting in your blogs. I wish we had thought of that. The only drawback I saw was that the rest of us could not respond [...]

Legoland Robotics The Lego Robotics Network website sounds like an attraction at Legoland. Teams of kids can program a robot to move and turn. The decide how far it goes and how much it turns. For example, they can have it move ahead 3 inches, turn 45 degrees left and them move ahead 6 more [...]

Lego Robotics</h3Kids are building and programming a robot to achieve the mission. Does anybody visit the Lego Robotics Network website? There are alot of 3D simulations. Aim of the simulations is to build and program robotics invention in order to achive specific goals, such as creating a robot that can complete a lap around three [...]

Meet the Sims Here’s a story from CNN that ties together gender, violence and simulations. The Sims game is at the top of the charts because it manages to appeal to a wider than usual demographic. The appeal of playing God in a universe of your own design is apparently very deep. An interesting quote [...]

Channel 8 on Violence Set those VCR’s! While we’re in class on Monday, Channel Eight News at 5:00 M is supposed to be revealing their “10 Most UNwanted list.” Apparently it is made up of violent video games or has something to do with them. I have only seen the commercial for this,but thought it [...]

Channel 8 on Violence Set those VCR’s! While we’re in class on Monday, Channel Eight News at 5:00 M is supposed to be revealing their “10 Most UNwanted list.” Apparently it is made up of violent video games or has something to do with them. I have only seen the commercial for this,but thought it [...]

Newsweek Newsweek magazine has come up with a special issue this winter named e-LIFE. It has a lot of cool techie christmas gifts. It also ranks the top 20 new video games, an alphabet of the best web sites, and unfortunately a little too late, an article that surveys children about violence on video games. [...]

Children’s Museum Online I have a really cool website for you! It’s sponsored by the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and it’s at http://www.childrensmuseum.org/cosmicquest/index.html. On this site, you can choose to build your own space station. In the process, you learn a lot and have fun doing it! It’s not a game per se, but it [...]

Share Websites I haven’t had time to surf this week, so I thought I would go through my bookmarked sites to see if I had anything to share. When we were building a website last semester, we spent some time looking at good websites to get ideas. This site had some great ones. http://websiteawards.xe.net/winners1.htm

Games on the Birthday List We have been busy with Thanksgiving and my son’s 9th birthday. We got him to write a wish list. At first, he could think of only two things, Pokemon Silver and Marioland. These are both GameBoy games. I don’t quite know how the people at Pokemon have kept this game [...]

Feed the needy…Not a normal blogger posting, but I thought that this would be a good idea for the Holiday Season ! Quite clever of the UN to do this. Go to the Hunger Site at the UN. All you do is click a button and somewhere in the world a hungry person gets a [...]