Yesterday was the final day of the Global Game Jam here at Miami, and saw each of our five teams working madly (and blearily) toward completion of their games. As the participants — fueled by doughnuts — caught their third (or fourth or fifth) wind, the games started coming together.

Art and sound assets were [...]

On the second day of the Global Game Jam, I had much less to report — not for lack of interesting things going on, but, because, after a point, the training wheels were off and every team was deep into development mode — today’s recap is mainly pictures, with a little connective text.
I showed up [...]

It’s the beginning of the second day of the Global Game Jam here at Miami. If you’re unfamiliar with the Global Game Jam, it’s a pretty simple idea — a group of teams gets together at a location somewhere in the world, finds out this year’s theme and constraints, and then has 48 hours [...]

I’m working on revising a draft of my dissertation thesis at the moment, and, on a flight of fancy, decided to see what a Wordle of my entire dissertation would look like. A Wordle is basically a pretty graphical representation of word counts in any document — the higher number of occurences for a [...]

I’m beginning to prep several new courses to teach at Miami in the spring, as I’m also finishing up the dissertation. I recently posted about the Games and Learning course I’ll be piloting next semester, and I’ll also be teaching a section of IMS238 — Narrative In Digital Technology. Historically, the course has been [...]

Just a quick note that today I began semi-regular posting on Miami’s Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies’ (AIMS) blog. Today’s post was just a short introduction to me and what I study, but it’s something. I talk a bit about my interests in studying online communities, design thinking within them, and games:

So, [...]

Whew, what a tiring month. Since mid-May, I’ve been out and about at several interesting conferences — all games-related and all communities that I’d like to continue to be a part of in the coming years. First, I was on a panel about promoting the “designer mindset” at the Games For Change (G4C) [...]

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’m taking a brief break between major writing projects to pop in on the blog and let you all know that I’m still alive. It’s been a rather busy few weeks, and looks to continue to be that way until the end of the holidays. I suppose it’s quite telling that, in this [...]