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 media, [...]

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 [...]

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 theme (this [...]

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 games [...]

Whoa, it’s been a while. After a rather busy month and a half of travel (went to Ohio and California over the holidays, then back to Ohio this week), lots of writing and work, I’ve finally calmed down a little bit. Throughout this time, however, I’ve been diving back into gaming, trying out a few [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]