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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Constance recently posted a video that her group prepared for a MacArthur Foundation “Worked Examples” session at this past summer’s GLS 4.0 conference. Me (and my bald spot) feature in it, and it’s an interesting — and amusing! — look at some of the activities we’ve organized while starting to get an afterschool program up [...]

This is amazingly cool — someone’s implemented a simple calculator using built-in level design tools in the Little Big Planet beta. You might have seen this in my Google Reader shared items (it, and links to a variety of social networking sites, etc. are below under “Contact”). Check the video, and note that though the [...]