It should be pretty obvious what my political leanings are if you’ve more than skimmed the surface of this blog in the past few months. I’ve tried to keep it from taking over the site, as (1) I’m not sure I have a lot to add to the public political discourse that other, more amazing [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This has been a particularly blah, grey, rainy morning, so I’ve spent more time than usual poking around blogs and cleaning out my Google Reader. Oh, before I forget, here’s another plug for my shared items from Google Reader — this, and my Twitter, are really my “blogs” these days (serving up links to things [...]

It looks like Wired is now reporting on the paper that Constance and I recently had published in The Journal of Science Education and Technology (yay, it’s no longer “in press” and is available online) on scientific reasoning and literacy in World of Warcraft. Constance was interviewed by Clive Thompson last week, and the article [...]

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 [...]