Okay, I normally don’t make these kinds of posts to my blog, and I feel like I should preface this by form of apology. People (us nerds especially) tend to get very bent out of shape when someone decries or criticizes their favorite media franchises, and I’ll do that here — um, the criticizing, [...]

I don’t know why this is, but this month has turned into a regular Space Invaders, uh, invasion. As I noted in an earlier blog post, I’ve been playing Space Invaders Extreme a bit the last few weeks (well, whenever I get a chance to actually play games, that is). It’s a really, [...]

Yesterday, I attended the latest GLS “Game Jam” — again, it was a lot of fun, even if the development of this game was much rockier than the previous week’s. This week’s theme was “loneliness,” and our product was a game entitled “Lonely Face,” a card game designed by me and Moses (apologies to [...]

I don’t post about music very much anymore, not because I’m not listening to anything, but because I feel like since I hit my mid-thirties, I’m always (at best) a few months behind everyone else. Oh well, I’ll thrown caution to the wind and talk a little bit about a genre of music that [...]

Lately, I’ve been interested in novel approaches to teaching interactive media. I’ve been looking (from afar) at how Jason Mittell (television and media scholar at Middlebury College and a fellow product of the University of Wisconsin-Madison) has been “teaching The Wire“ this semester, conducting a fascinating pedagogical experiment — how does one teach long-form [...]

I’ve been on the hunt for good, prescriptive game design books — I know many of the current big name texts (Crawford’s, Fullerton’s, Salen & Zimmerman, etc.), and was happy to recently hear about Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. My interest was recently piqued thanks to an interesting rave [...]

I’m a little late on this one, but it’s good news for those of us that occasionally run late on things. The deadline for this year’s excellent Games+Learning+Society 5.0 conference has been extended by a few weeks to March 2nd. Check out the full CFP below:

Games+Learning+Society 5.0: Learning Through Interaction
http://glsconference.org
June 10-12, 2009 Madison, [...]

Yesterday afternoon, I finally got the chance to participate in one of GLS’s weekend “Game Jams.” The last several Saturdays, a number of students (in Educational Technology and the Learning Sciences, primarily), have come in on the weekend for a fun three hour exercise in designing, iterating, and playtesting games. Provided with a [...]

Last week, Gamasutra posted a great preview chapter from Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton’s upcoming book, Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time. Focusing on Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set, they presented a great overview of a number of [...]