just drafts

A brief essay on passages in game design that I wrote for my university’s news room page.

A brief essay on “flow” in game design that I wrote for my university’s news room page.

What I feel now is the powerful urge to immediately move to Finland.

Or, in the immortal words of Harlan Ellison: “Pay the Writer.”

Game-based learning can provide us the tools to learn and create collaboratively, and to teach us to learn and create collaboratively, for sustained lifelong learning-experiences.

8th European Conference for Game-Based Learning & 5th International Conference on Serious Games Development & Applications in Berlin, October 9–10, 2014.

“I got into the game industry to make games. And it’s time for me to get back to it.” —@spacekatgal

We should keep our defenses up but not let GamerGate eat up our time and energy anymore. Now is a better time than ever to develop great games that make a difference.

Please note: You might not be able to sign out again. Ever.

I like to thank Elizabeth Simins for providing this article’s headline for free.

In most video games most of the time, non-player characters are the meat in the player character’s power fantasy sandwich.

This week, I’ll be off to the ECGBL 2014 in Berlin.

Game-based learning should be designed in such a way that a) you can walk up to it and start playing and b) you can walk up to it and start learning.

The only thing this “apology” demonstrates is that Intel’s PR department is run by spineless weasels.

Two fatal mistakes the humanities must avoid at all costs: putting themselves on the defensive about their own self-worth and/or positioning themselves in the “training” camp.

Puppyblog’s long, rambling, and eminently realistic blog post about indie game customers everybody interested in gaming culture and indie games should read.

Five recommendations for critical readings on games and learning from ProfHacker.

“Maybe what we want are not ‘serious’ games, but earnest games. Games that aren’t just instrumental or opportunistic in their intentions.”

Common knowledge, and often among the main rationales for developing simulation games, is that wrapping entertainment around course material will boost motivation.

I think the peripatetics got it right.

While Gunter et al.’s paper is not a rigorously written research study, we can still extract its basic idea and expand on it.

With their often defensively positioned arguments and study designs, game-based learning proponents paint themselves into a corner.

Worth checking out. I almost missed this.

Microsoft’s never been education-centric, to say the least, and Minecraft is huge in game-based education across STEM.

When “Trust” as an educational objective has to take dynamically changing contexts into account, most serious game mechanics are not even close to being useful.

Impressive, but I wonder whether tablets are particulary suited for collaborative game-based learning (which playing games in the classroom was all about in the first place).

LEGO should be ashamed. And the whole videogame industry suffers from the same problem.

At the Joburg Serious Games Conference, Ernest W. Adams mentioned “stealth learning” as a very effective way to convey a specific message in a serious game.

just drafts is one part news ticker with commentary and one part real-time research about game-based learning & education, game design, and game & media ethics.