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Game Design as a Science

By Adam M. Smith | Published: July 30, 2009

In my recent PhD thesis proposal I described how I am going to tackle game design as a new domain for automated discovery.  A key piece of this is figuring out game design might be explained as the kind of knowledge-seeking effort you might expect from science or mathematics.  With successful systems performing discovery (such […]

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Edutainment and Lessons “Learned” from Commercial Video Games: Jazz Band Revolution

By Sherol Chen | Published: July 29, 2009

“Jazz Band Revolution” …. Trust me, this is a great idea. A fellow EIS labmate recently gave a class presentation about the “Edutainment Fail.”  To its credit, edutainment is responsible for my first interactions with desktop computers.  Games such as Oregon Train, Logo Writer, some lemonade stand game, and that typing game were widely used […]

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Kosmosis – Procedural rhetoric gone wrong (as usual)

By Mike Treanor | Published: July 27, 2009

Molleindustria recently created a new game prototype called Kosmosis: “A COMMUNIST SPACE SHOOTER AS AN ARCADE GAME FROM AN ALTERNATE PRESENT WHERE NON-DEGENERATED SOCIALIST VALUES ARE HEGEMONIC.”  The game was created as an entry for the Experimental Gameplay Project competition titled “Unexperimental Shooter.”  Molleindustria are known for tackling controversial subjects including free culture and religious […]

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Call For Papers: Foundations of Digital Games

By Michael Mateas | Published: July 25, 2009

Foundations of Digital Games is a fantastic “big tent” games conference that focuses on both technical and humanistic games research. If you’re looking for a one-stop-shop for submitting your games research to a high-quality, peer-reviewed venue, look no further. Hope to see you at Asilomar next June! FDG 2010: The 5th International Conference on the […]

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Learning in Games

By Teale Fristoe | Published: July 23, 2009

This summer, I’m working with Matt MacLaurin at Microsoft Research on Kodu Game Lab.  For those of you who aren’t familiar, Kodu is an environment for people with no programming experience to quickly create games.  Its visual programming language is designed to be intuitively understandable and its library of characters and objects facilitate rapid game […]

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Better Game Studies Education the Carcassonne Way

By Ken | Published: July 22, 2009

Following Noah’s lead, I thought I’d post the extended abstract and ask for comments on my upcoming DiGRA paper.  This is joint work with Noah as well as Sri Kurniwan at UCSC. ABSTRACT As game education programs grow, educators face challenges bringing formal study of games to students with varied backgrounds.  In particular, educators must […]

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