I whipped up a little banner for TerraNova today — they’re switching out their old “winter” banner for something new, and asked for submissions for a new banner image. I’m not sure that they’ll like mine, but what the hell, I have Photoshop and some pretty pictures of flowers on my hard drive, so I [...]

As we get closer to spring break, my projects have been kicked into high gear — I’m currently entering a pile of World of Warcraft data, analyzing discussion threads about The Legend of Zelda, and piloting an expertise study on Guitar Hero. I’ll have more to say on those when the projects reach fruition, but [...]

Just a quick post: For those of you who obsessively reload this weblog over and over and over again, you will now see the space that was formerly inhabited by a Guitar Hero logo change into a variety of other symbols and pictures every time you load the front page of the site. Most of [...]

In my last post, I sketched out, as a fan, some broad categories I see in the structure of genre TV. In this post, I want to speculate a little on how these might lead to very different kinds of fan involvement and learning. In the spirit of full disclosure, the two shows on my [...]

Last night’s Heroes was the last in the current batch of sweeps episodes, before it heads into six weeks of reruns. I won’t spoil anything for those of you who haven’t been watching, but there were a couple of twists that took me by surprise, as well one that clarified a lot about who the [...]

The cognitive science guy in me has always been interested not only in learning how we can apply videogames to new learning contexts, but what games tell us about fundamental aspects of how we learn. That is, are there deep biological, social, and cultural ways of perceiving games that we need to take into account [...]

A few days ago, the John Edwards Second Life HQ was allegedly vandalized by a number of Second Life members wearing “Bush ’08″ stickers. Click on the image above for more detail of what they did — making a picture of Edwards in blackface, placing a rainbow-colored penis on the HQ, and adding a sniper [...]