just drafts

Behold the beauty of Unity’s giant strawman!

Heartbreaking.

Imagine all the paintings in the Louvre were hidden inside boxes and you could only read their descriptions.

No offense, but it’s high time Steam got its ass kicked.

Selling off some of your jewels in a fire sale to invest in cryptoshit seems totally reasonable.

I was blown away by SMBC’s metaphor of liberal education as an “old dank pub.”

Terrible news chasing terrible news.

Paging Dr. Benjamin.

An illuminating interview with FromSoftware’s game director Miyazaki Hidetaka.

Paid products only, all download-ready, no external keys or other bullshit.

Being open to buy-outs is now the fashionable thing to do if you’re a toxic publisher.

Haven’t played it for years, but it sure feels like the end of an era.

You can now turn your lovely little Wordle graphs into lovely little buildings.

Wordle is a rare game that doesn’t want much of your attention.

Turns out, I was still way too generous regarding Ken Levine’s 2014 GDC talk.

You’ve seen AI play within an environemnt, but here the AI is the environment.

“Radical Recognition” sounds catchy, but I’m not holding my breath.

Great podcast chat to listen to.

This is the bleakest assessment of teaching I’ve read in a very long time.

A few minor changes to my Secret Level.

The problem with cognitivism is not that it doesn’t want to die, it’s that is hasn’t noticed it’s already dead.

Photographs don’t merely focus, but narrow down and even constrict our memories to those moments we chose to illustrate.

There are three intrinsically distinct challenges for combating extremism in online media, and Germany is probably going to drop the ball on all three of them.

True to its nature as a fetish, schools demand the willingness to sacrifice.

Today, on the last day of Hanukkah, we will wrap everything up; talk about period style, game type, and game loop; and draft a list of tasks needed to advance this conceptual sketch toward a pitchable game treatment.

Today, we will engage with the fourth and final design territory of the Ludotronics paradigm, Architectonics.

Narrativity, our design territory for today, is all about “emotional appeal,” seen from the viewpoint of narrative qualities or properties that work toward conveying specific meaning in a specific dramatic unit for a memorable gameplay moment.

So what’s the aesthetic experience of our Hanukkah game going to be? To answer this question, tentatively, we will look at the game’s style and sound.

Today, we will explore the first design territory for our Hanukkah game, Interactivity.

Today, on the third day of Hanukkah, we will explore possible target audiences and the game’s unique selling proposition, or USP.

Today, we will turn to the meaning Hanukkah has acquired over time, from the Talmud until today, to find our game’s theme and its core experience.

Along the eight days of Hanukkah, of which today is the first, let’s sketch a game concept about Hanukkah along the Ludotronics paradigm as an exercise.

Calling in native informants as consultants is exceptionally useful for avoiding mistakes, designing convincing characters, and broadening a game’s reach beyond its mainstream audience.

“Tests” in well-designed games not only test the player exclusively on what the game has taught them, but push their proficiency even further.

If games and new technologies can’t be integrated into the classroom, then we should start building our own multilearner online game-based learning classroom today.

To become a true knowledge society, learning and teaching must become a shared quest of lifelong exploration.

In terms of learning outcomes, game levels have a lot in common with university lectures and can be planned in similar ways.

Release of my book Ludotronics: A Comprehensive Game Design Methodology From First Ideas to Spectacular Pitches and Proposals for intermediate and advanced game designers.

Academic Paper: “Learning to Play, Playing to Learn: An Integrated Design Approach 
for Learning Experiences in Video Games”

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

Academic Paper: “Tuning Aristotle: An Applied Model of Emotions for 
Interactive Dramatic Structures”

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

Academic Paper: “Making Sense: Juxtaposing Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic 
Design Elements to Create Meaning, Reinforce Emotions, and 
Strengthen Player Memory Formation and Retrieval”

Academic Paper: A Functional Model for Dialogic Speech in Video Game Design

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.