Yay! My author copies of The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy arrived today. I’ve mentioned this a bunch of times on the blog lately, so I apologize for spamming the blog with it — I’m just real excited to have this book chapter finally see print. I started working on this nearly two years ago [...]

News flash: Apparently “Web 2.0″ has only existed in order to eventually foster “back end” moneymaking by its contributors. Who knew?! The ever-blind Andrew Keen, that’s who. The author of The Cult of the Amateur — which, frankly, I can’t get through, it’s so terrible — has recently chimed in on the implications of the [...]

It’s not much of a secret that I really enjoy the The Legend of Zelda series of games. Jim Gee and I have a paper in the upcoming The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy book (pictured above; click here if you wanna preorder from Amazon). It’s also not much of a secret that, while I [...]

In the past few weeks, Alex Games and I have been planning a talk and set of workshops that we’ve been invited to deliver in Galena, Illinois on November 5th. Called Networking For Information (or NFI), the meeting will bring together a number of teachers, educational technologists, and researchers; Alex and I are leading a [...]

I’ve been a fan of Kongregate for a while now, and was pleasantly surprised to see the rollout of their newest feature — Kongregate Labs. If you’re unfamiliar with Kongregate, it’s probably most easily described as a “YouTube for Flash games,” though with added achievements (a la the Xbox 360 and Blizzard’s games), a leveling [...]

World of Warcraft was my first MMO, while certainly not my first “virtual world” (assuming that one counts text-based spaces such as LambdaMOO). Lately, I’ve been feeling rather tired of World of Warcraft — though researching the game is fascinating to me, and a big chunk of my dissertation work, I’m yearning for something different [...]

Constance recently posted a video that her group prepared for a MacArthur Foundation “Worked Examples” session at this past summer’s GLS 4.0 conference. Me (and my bald spot) feature in it, and it’s an interesting — and amusing! — look at some of the activities we’ve organized while starting to get an afterschool program up [...]

This is amazingly cool — someone’s implemented a simple calculator using built-in level design tools in the Little Big Planet beta. You might have seen this in my Google Reader shared items (it, and links to a variety of social networking sites, etc. are below under “Contact”). Check the video, and note that though the [...]

Another day, and more press about the videogames and learning research going on in Madison. Today’s New York Times features an article by Motoko Rich entitled “The Future of Reading – Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers” (it’s a follow-up to her earlier “The Future of Reading Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really [...]