It’s that time of year again: EDTEC 670 is yawning and stretching after a nine-month nap. This year is unusual: we have more students in the online section than on campus. This should make for some different and interesting dynamics. Also new this year: a more formalized project based on Second Life. This will be [...]

What could be cooler? Two things I’m very interested in are combining. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter. I’m devoting part of Christmas break to mastering Drupal, a content management system and generalized toolkit for making all kinds of online things happen. And of course, I have a longstanding interest in Second Life. So today [...]

Want to make some money? Hidden Agenda is a contest that seems to be right up our alley: “Welcome to Hidden Agenda—a contest designed for the college student with a penchant for video games, a passion for innovation and a hankering for $25,000. If you think you’ve got the skills, pull together an ace design [...]

While pointing to this: ITworld.com – U.S. FTC’s Buddy Builder game teaches social-networking safety, someone on SlashDot had this to say: “Your tax dollars at work. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has launched an online quiz-show style game called Buddy Builder to test young users’ abilities to spot potential threats on social networking Web sites. [...]

Those of you working in corporate training shops might point your boss to this article. Forbes is about as close to The Establishment as one can get, and they’re taking games seriously. Many good links from the article to the conference web site and elsewhere.

Just came across a very nice list of Game Mechanics on the Board Game Designers Forum. What’s a game mechanic, you may well ask? It’s an element of game structure that describes, for example, how cards are drawn, or how the abilities of pieces differ from each other. The referenced page is part of a [...]

I hope so. Today’s mail brought word about Motley Fool Caps, a game that gets smarter about stocks as more people play it. How does it work? You get yourself a free account and pick a stock. Predict what direction the stock’s price is going and when. Your prediction is stored away and evaluated on [...]

Get ready for a fresh round of debate about violence in video games. News is out today that the sociopath in Montreal who shot 20 people listed an online game about Columbine as his favorite. Who knew there was such a game? What kind of heartless dope would take the time to design such a [...]

Now that the semester has started and a new round of EDTEC 670 is underway, it’s time to rev up this blog again. What better place to start than this Reuter’s article summarizing a recently published study. The key quote: “‘By providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have [...]

Interesting article from Australia about money making in virtual worlds. This is only the beginning, I think!

Interesting article from Australia about money making in virtual worlds. This is only the beginning, I think!

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It’s back again. The Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon aims to generate 50 games this semester. Four new ones every Wednesday. Each week has a theme, and this week’s is Temperature. Seems appropriate as we bake under these Santa Ana winds.

Games and geography… two of my favorite things are combined in Earth Contest. “A new online reality game where players face extreme challenges and face their worst fears all while trying to beat the GameMaster. Using Google Earth placemarks and web pages, we’ve created the world’s biggest interactive game. In order to beat the GameMaster, [...]

This week while you’re getting your game ready for playtesting, take a break and scan The Online Guide to Traditional Games. It’s a nice overview of the oldest board games and their variants. Might give you some fresh ideas. My favorite image comes from this description of Pachisi. “The Indian Emperor Akbar I of the [...]

Here’s an interesting email just posted to one of the lists I’m on: From: John Kirriemuir Hello, My first posting, so a short bit about myself. I am an independentresearcher, who is also part of GERN (Games and Education Research Network) at the University of Bristol in the UK: http://www.bris.ac.uk/education/gern/ I study the use of [...]

The Learning Annex is offering Finding Flow with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the evening of November 15. You’ll be reading about his flow theory in a few weeks, so this is extremely relevant. Thanks to 670 alum Jolie Kennedy for letting us know.

Someone in class asked whether a game always had to have a winner. Coincidentally, today I ran across this review of a cooperative game, Shadows Over Camelot, written by the always witty defective yeti. Players compete agains the game itself. Either they all win or they all lose. Check it out!

The course hasn’t really heated up yet, so you probably have lots of spare time on your hands. The Free Multiplayer Online Games site might provide an excellent way to blot up those pesky extra minutes in your day. And because they’re multiplayer games, you can drag your friends and family down the road of [...]

The EdGames blog goes dormant from December to September in between class offerings. But now it’s yawning, stretching, scratching the crud out of its eyes and getting ready to be a useful source of information sharing for this class and others. It’s good to be back.

Imagine this: the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon aims to create 50 to 100 games in one semester. each game must be made in less than 7 days each game must be made by one person, including all art, sound, and programming each game must be based around a certain “toy” ie. “gravity”, “vegetation”, [...]

Here’s something vaguely akin to the Glass Bead Game: “The Wiki Game is a hypertextual game designed to work specifically with Wikipedia. It was first conceived by a collection of avid Wikipedia enthusiasts at Amherst College in Massachusetts. The Wiki Game requires no purchase of product, just a web browser and a time-keeping device (optional). [...]

From Technology Review: Technology Review: Chasing Bees, Without the Hive Mind “Alternative reality gaming immerses players in a place somewhere between the real world and cyberspace. What they learn about communication is already translating into collaborate, problem-solving communities.” Interesting stuff. You’ll be hearing more about ARGs in the coming years, I think.

What greater gift could one ask for than an elevated state of consciousness? In these cantankerous time, who wouldn’t want a dose of transcendental bliss? Since no one has time for a stint in a Tibetan monastery while holding down a job, the marketplace has responded with The Journey to Wild Divine: “the first ‘inner-active’ [...]

Here’s a game that is harder than it looks. My score was 5.4 seconds. I don’t know what that means, but I’m feeling sorta good about it. There’s an explanation, and a research paper.

Isn’t designing an egame fun? Well, if not, it will be in a week or two. Do you think you’d like to do it for a living? You might want to read the inside dope published here, and in the blogs she links to.

Would you like to watch the process of game development unfold in real time? Visit the uDevGames Official Website, where voting by the public begins today. There are 32 entries this year, all for Mac, and the site links to blogs maintained by the developers themselves. Among the entries: ShineBug! – Collect bubbles of moonshine [...]

Well, here’s a pretty good depiction of my idea of Hell: “Hello Kitty World will allow thousands of players to live and participate in Hello Kitty’s magical and cute online world. You will be able to roam the streets of Kitty Kingdom, XO Federation, and Melody-land. Enjoy the beautiful landscape and architecture of Puroland or [...]

There’s an interesting website up describing a 2-hour PBS program about The Video Game Revolution. Here’s the blurb: “The Video Game Revolution is primarily an entertaining look at the world of games, but all is not fun and frolic in that world, and the program touches on that as well. Many games are extremely violent [...]

Well, this is timely. Kuma Reality Games is about to release a simulation game of John Kerry’s missions in Vietnam, according to The New York Times. With regard to the anti-Kerry accounts floating about: “We will present the controversy and different perspectives on it in the video news show that will accompany the mission,” she [...]

670 students who are local to San Diego will be interested in Games Workshop for Teachers coming next month to the museum in Balboa Park. “The San Diego Museum of Man is pleased to present a 2-day workshop on games taught by Dr. Wayne Saunders, educator, game historian and collector. This workshop is designed for [...]

This site will soon reawaken as EDTEC 670 starts up again on August 30. I’m looking forward to trying out some new things this year while keeping the best aspects of what we’ve done before. As part of dusting off the site, I’ve updated the EdGames blog format. We’ve now got an RSS feed and [...]

Thanks to Mike Guerena, here’s word about an upcoming conference sponsored by The Education Arcade. “The Education Arcade represents a consortium of international game designers, publishers, scholars, educators, and policy makers who are exploring the new frontiers of educational media that have been opened by computer and video games. Our mission is to demonstrate the [...]

I was curious to see what types of wikis exist, so I did a google search simply using the work “wiki.” The results were disappointing as I searched through pages of poorly organized work. However, I finally came across the StoryTellingWiki, which is a compilation of stories, fairy tales and myths from around the world. [...]

The Disaster Dynamics project is dedicated to preparing policy makers, academics, students, etc. to make informed and analytical decisions during a disaster. In order to achieve this goal, the project is seeking to create effective learning environments for the unique challenges surrounding natural disasters. At this time, the chief focus is on creating games and [...]

Now that the semester is almost over, you may be ready to take a break from this far too busy world and chill out in a virtual one. Virtual Worlds Review has links and commentary on 18 different virtual spaces where you can don an avatar and be someone else somewhere else for awhile.

Matthew Baldwin, author of the very funny Defective Yeti blog, has a very good list of suggested board games for the gifting season.

“The uDevGame Contest is an effective process for equipping novice and veteran game developers alike with the knowledge they need to create great Mac games. The competitive nature and short development time of the contest forces entrants to develop an appreciation of good game design. uDevGame also helps to teach developers how to pace themselves [...]

In researching one of my Wiki topics, I came across an article by Howard Tomlinson in the September, 2003 edition of the T.H.E. Journal about the increased use of PDAs in the classroom. The PDAs are seen as a less expensive alternative to laptop or desktop PCs for each student. They can be used by [...]

The Liemandt Foundation, a non-profit foundation focused on promoting technology-enabled education, is hosting a college student video game development contest to challenge students to build entertaining games that “secretly” teach middle school subjects. Games will be judged in May for a chance at the grand prize of $25,000. Advising the contest are Richard Garriott and [...]

In an article in the October, 2003 edition of his on-line newsletter, Play for Performance , Thiagi writes about the effectiveness of instructional games compared with other training methods. His response to the question of which is better can be summed up by the title of the article, “Stupid Research Questions.” He says that comparing [...]

Wikis + Games, a familiar sounding combination, eh? I just ran across this Game Design Wiki which is taking a design patterns approach to the topic. Like all wikis, it’s a work in progress but still worth checking out.

From MIT’s Technology Review, here’s an interesting analysis of the relationship between war and games. Is it too soon to be designing ways to play Iraq?

Desk Chair Adventurer has one of several positive reviews I came across regarding the educational game Pepper’s Adventure. Created by Sierra, Pepper’s Adventure follows a girl who is jettisoned back to the colonial period and must repair the damage caused by her mad scientist uncle who introduced weird quirks to the era. In the process [...]

According to two reports recently issued by the Department of Education, 99% of US public school classrooms have internet access. The reports also show that 90% of people ages 5 to 17 use computers and 59% of them use the Internet. The report also shows that the gaps between the use of computers by boys [...]

A new site at Mesa State College in Colorado is pulling together resources and dialog about agent-based modeling. They focus on the use of NetLogo, a cousin of StarLogoT, both of which are cross-platform and free. There’s a list you can join to keep up with the latest developments in this realm, and links to [...]

I saw an article about this game in the Union-Tribune and then went to the website, The Wild Divine Project , for more information. The game uses bio-feedback monitors to teach you to self-regulate your body. The monitors fit over three fingers on your left hand and measure heartrate and perspiration. In order to progress [...]

Doug Holton, the brainy and eclectic Vanderbilt grad student who created the Ed Tech Wiki, has set up a page called LearningWithGames within the wiki. It might bear watching, given what we’re all working on for the next few weeks!

The newly hatched Terra Nova weblog provides commentary on the rapidly emerging synthetic worlds of cyberspace. “We include in that definition massively multiplayer role-playing games such as Ultima Online, Lineage, and Everquest; toy worlds such as the Sims Online and Toon Town; social worlds such as Game Neverending, Second Life, and There; and occasionally other [...]

Here’s what newsgaming.com is all about: “Simulation meets political cartoons. We are a team of independent game developers who believe video games are not simply an amusement. Games and simulations can also make us think about what is going on in this world. Periodically, we will use games and simulations to analyze, debate, comment and [...]