Clearly, we still have a LONG way to go, and a lot of work to do.
Citing ‘violent threats,’ SXSW canceled a panel about harassment in games, as well as a pro-GamerGate panel that cropped up as a counterpunch. But the story is much stranger than that.
Source: This Is Not a Game: How SXSW Turned GamerGate Abuse Into a Spectator Sport – The Daily Beast
Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “What are the relative merits of learning baseball versus football?” You just ran around the playground and played baseball and football. You built sand castles and played tag and asked silly questions and looked for bugs and dug up grass and pretended you were a sewer monster.
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But more importantly, what I want to say to these people is this: that’s the whole point — “not knowing” is the whole fucking point. Life is all about not knowing, and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. All of it. And it’s not going to get any easier just because you found out you love your job cleaning septic tanks or you scored a dream gig writing indie movies.
The common complaint among a lot of these people is that they need to ‘find their passion.’
I call bullshit. You already found your passion, you’re just ignoring it. Seriously, you’re awake 16 hours a day, what the fuck do you do with your time? You’re doing something, obviously. You’re talking about something. There’s some topic or activity or idea that dominates a significant amount of your free time, your conversations, your web browsing, and it dominates them without you consciously pursuing it or looking for it.
It’s right there in front of you, you’re just avoiding it. For whatever reason, you’re avoiding it. You’re telling yourself, “Oh well, yeah, I love comic books but that doesn’t count. You can’t make money with comic books.”
Fuck you, have you even tried?
The problem is not a lack of passion for something. The problem is productivity. The problem is perception. The problem is acceptance.
The problem is the, “Oh, well that’s just not a realistic option,” or “Mom and Dad would kill me if I tried to do that, they say I should be a doctor” or “That’s crazy, you can’t buy a BMW with the money you make doing that.”
The problem isn’t passion. It’s never passion.
It’s priorities.
Source: Screw Finding Your Passion
Day Two at IEEE-GEM: 2015 IEEE Games, Entertainment, and Media (GEM) Conference
The first full day of presentations (yesterday were the workshops).
Highlights:
Another interesting keynote by Dan Scherlis. This tal emphasized the importance of having the marketing team on board right at the start along with the designers. I’ve long thought that having all the key players on board at the start is really important…too often in educational games this doesn’t happen.
Day One at IEEE-GEM: 2015 IEEE Games, Entertainment, and Media (GEM) Conference
Highlights:
It may be helpful for any of your students taking a research methods course or working on a research based thesis or dissertation. It is particularly useful for those in education or the social sciences but may also have some applicability to those in the humanities or professional disciplines like business or health sciences.
This framework will be also discussed (alongside chapters from educational scholars from around the world) in the forthcoming HETL book titled, Emerging Directions in Doctoral Education, to be published by Emerald
Publishing in January 2016.
Click to View PDF of ERM Framework See http://www.patrickblessinger.com/ermf for DOI, citation, and sources.
Source: Educational Research Methodology Framework | Dr. Patrick Blessinger
Here’s a great resource for anyone interested in using games and gamification in the classroom.
Source: The Ultimate Alternate Reality Gamified Transmedia Classroom Toolkit
Nope.
Certainly not always; I would even go so far as to say that there is a point of diminishing return. At some point a game can become so complex that it becomes too much.
Looking at complexity with respect to ‘realism’, it is fairly well known in the design of simulators for training that novices have trouble attending to the task if the simulated environment is too complex. Too many distractions interfere with learning, so they start off with a fairly simple environment which becomes more complex as they become more experienced. If we look at it in terms of fun, people tend not to have fun when things are too hard.
In entertainment games, especially RPGs, complexity of environment can definitely make a game more fun – Skyrim is an excellent example. Visual complexity can also add to the fun – it is one of the things I like about both Machinarium and Tiny Bang Story, but I don’t think visual complexity can compensate for poor functionality or gameplay.
However, the opposite can also be true. Games can be fun precisely because of their simplicity. One of the games I like to play is Flow Free and part of the appeal is the simplicity of the mechanic and play as well as its visual simplicity.
If we are talking about educational games, I think we have to be very careful about adding anything that does not directly support our instructional goals. That’s not to say we should avoid it, but we should always ask how this adds to our objectives. Sometimes, making it more fun by adding extra options can be a good thing, but I think it all depends on how it is designed. Adding complexity per se does not, in and of itself, make anything more fun.
Something to be thankful for: Real turkeys make a comeback | Grist.
In 1997, The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC) took a turkey census. For about half a century, nearly every turkey farm in the U.S. had been raising a breed known as the Broad Breasted White. (This cost-efficient, big-breasted bird has a lifespan of only 18 weeks and can neither fly, nor reproduce without artificial insemination). So when the ALBC went looking for other, older breeds of turkey, what they found was startling: They counted only 1,300 turkeys not bred for industrial purposes. In the whole country.
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When it comes to turkeys, or any kind of food, the existence of multiple, diverse varieties (i.e. biodiversity) is crucial to food security. “The analogy we like to use is a stock portfolio,” says Alis
on Martin, also of the ALBC. You wouldn’t want to put all your savings behind one stock, but “essentially that’s what commercial agriculture has done. In a time of global climate change and economic stress, doesn’t it make sense to have options for other production methods?”
