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Rationalization – a new game

I created a short game called Rationalization to help me think through some ideas. The game is very abstract and its message is primarily procedural.  I look forward to hearing any reactions you may have. _

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The Great Flu: Pandemic Education for the Masses

In my last post, I discussed how games are being used to communicate, not just to entertain.  Today, I want to discuss The Great Flu, a game recently released by Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.  The game attempts to educate the public about the dangers of and difficulty in containing flu pandemics. In […]

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Learning from Games

I don’t need to tell this audience about the momentum building behind educational games.  Even when I was an elementary student, going to the computer lab to play Math Blaster, Odell Down Under, or Oregon Trail was a special treat.  These days, kids grow up on video games: game consoles are nearly as common as […]

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Kosmosis – Procedural rhetoric gone wrong (as usual)

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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Learning in Games

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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Game Designers Design Players Too

I’ve got a whole philosophy of game design I’m sitting on here, but today I’d like to share just one little provocative tidbit: game designers design players too. Imagine you thinking through the design of some cute little dungeon crawl.  You are going to have caverns connected by twisty passages, a hero/jerk who is capable […]

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