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 [...]

Well, it’s getting to be that time again — the Games+Learning+Society 6.0 conference has been officially announced, with a call for papers posted to the official conference website. (Looks like this year’s elfgirl colors are a pretty pink, green, and aqua?) Here’s a blurb from the conference coordinator on this year’s focus and [...]

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 [...]

As I work on finishing up my dissertation this term, I’m also in the early stages of planning my courses for the Spring, 2010 term at Miami. I’ll be teaching two courses — Interactive Media Studies 238 (Narrative and Digital Media) and Interactive Media Studies 390.S (Games and Learning). I’m starting to try [...]

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) [...]

It’s been a long road, but I’m happy to announce that I’ve accepted a position as the School of Education, Health, and Society C. Michael Armstrong Professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. It’s an endowed, tenure-track, joint position between the School of Education, Health, and Society (EHS) and Miami’s Armstrong Interactive Media Studies [...]

I’m currently in the process of writing a chapter for the upcoming World of Warcraft and Philosophy (edited by Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger for Open Court), so my thoughts have turned back to the chapter in The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy that Jim Gee and I wrote. Out of curiosity, I popped [...]