In July, I presented several times at our own Games, Learning, and Society Conference — first, a talk on expertise in Guitar Hero (based on this paper), next a poster on a taxonomy I’m working on of the different kinds of design practices that go on in online gamer forums (which won a poster award; [...]

I’m interested in interactive fiction again lately, so when I stumbled across a picture of a younger Dave Lebling on The Computer Chronicles from 1985, I had to track down the episode and watch it. My Dad and I used to watch this show every Saturday morning when I was a kid!
It’s actually a [...]

Constance forwarded the absolute best, most hilarious bit of “press” (sort of) about our talk at the American Psychological Association in Boston the other day. Here’s an excerpt:

The forums present that gamers are “creating an surround in which epistolatory scientific thinking practices are state learned,” said Sean Dancer, a student intellect who worked on [...]

APA went pretty well — I saw a few interesting talks, and saw a bunch of stuff that I found frankly perplexing. I’ve never fully understood this odd mish-mash of clinical practitioners and social scientists, I admit, and it was odd to be at an academic conference which had more opportunities for massage than [...]

So, ever since I upgraded my iPhone a few weeks ago, I’ve been poking through the AppStore, waiting to see apps that would replicate some of the fun stuff found on jailbroken iPhones. Frotz, an interactive fiction (IF, formerly “text adventure game”) emulator, was one of them, and it’s finally here! Looks like [...]

Had a pretty good reception for my talk at Sandbox 2008 today. It was a tough crowd; trying to convince ACM people that the collaborative construction of stories can be considered “design” was a bit of a task, but I think it worked out pretty well. I chatted with a few folks I’m [...]

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve posted — I keep meaning to redo this site so it’s less a blog and more a repository of my current research info, but I’ve been busy. I’ll try to get to that soon, but, hey, that might mean another month or so. Oh well, [...]

A great little video of Steve Meretzky — game-design genius formerly of Infocom, responsible for Planetfall, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (with Douglas Adams), etc. It’s a hilarious little video that is, finally, the straw that’s going to break the camel’s back; I’m going to go out and buy The Orange Box [...]

For a course this semester, I was asked to spend some time familiarizing myself with some kind of Internet-related technology that I wasn’t previously adept with, and track some of what I did in learning how to use it. Since I was already experienced with most of the topics covered in the course (blogs, [...]