All work and no play?

Although I have been keeping up with my course readings, writing regular posts into my blog and doing a spot of game creation using Google Earth, this course has given me an opportunity, or is that licence?, to reacquaint myself with computing / video / arcade games that I haven’t really touched since my very late teens.

My peers have come up with some rather wonderful web-based games that include the sublime Grow v.1 by Eyemaze and the wonderful Fantastic Contraption; both of which enchanted me and brought out a child-like wonder in me (not seen since 1999) much in the same way as the “Living Books” CD-ROM series did in the early 1990s with Mercer Mayer’s “Just Grandma and Me” (1992). Then there is the ingenious Wiki Paths: The Great Link Race, described as a “Wikipedia-based scavenger hunt game” though I would say that it would have more in common with the “six degrees of separation” idea and would seem to lend itself nicely to Prensky’s suggestion that the, now irrelevant, digital native have hypertext-like minds – all I can say is that I found it frantic especially as you are up against the clock.

For my part, I have also reacquainted myself to the classic text-based “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” game which is now online over at BBC Radio 4 and graphical. I also did something that I haven’t done since my late teens and that was to buy some computer games for the PC that were on sale. Like Gee, I went for something that interested me and were of very different gaming and literary genres – Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile“, “Lost” and Clive Barker’s “Jericho“.

Tune in tomorrow for a report on my experiences with the “Death on the Nile” game.