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) festival at [...]

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 (AIMS) [...]

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 onto [...]

Yesterday, I attended the latest GLS “Game Jam” — again, it was a lot of fun, even if the development of this game was much rockier than the previous week’s. This week’s theme was “loneliness,” and our product was a game entitled “Lonely Face,” a card game designed by me and Moses (apologies to Moses [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]