Reading this week’s papers from Pat Kane (2005) and Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) were a sheer joy and delight compared to the James Newman chapter the other week. I think the issue between these three writers is one of how an argument is being presented to the reader. We start with Sutton-Smith (1997) who sets that scene […]
I’ve been fortunate enough last weekend to have had a go on some of the different games consoles that are currently out on the market without hemorrhaging my wallet or bank balance. A work colleague has a Nintendo Wii and my partner’s brother has a Microsoft Xbox. The Nintendo Wii (or simply “Wii” as the […]
I chose Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile” – the computer game that is, not the book, film, play, an episode from the TV series or, more recently, a graphic novel that have lent itself to the Christie brand – for two simple reasons: I like murder mysteries and this story is very familiar to […]
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 […]
Week 4 of the course saw the teams being given an exercise that involved building a game around the Google Earth platform. Team 2 member, Nicholas Palmer, got the ball rolling by providing a useful mind map of the task at hand – this instantly gave us a quick, ready visual aid. There was some […]
Let’s get one thing clear. I’ve never read anything by James Newman before other than “Chapter 2: What’s a videogame? Rules, puzzles and simulation” – without reading Chapter 1 or a preamble, it’s hard to say where James Newman sits on the pantheon of videogame scholars. To say that this chapter iritated and angered me […]
Before I launch into my (recent and past) experiences with Pac-Man, the arcade game developed by Namco, I would like to say something about this week’s reading, Chapter 7: “Video Games” from Greenfield (1984). Greenfield (ibid, p. 88) makes an important statement by saying that “children with a television background develoop a preference for dynamic […]
Gee is such an absorbing read and lots of wonderfully quotable nuggets like: But all learning is … learning to play ‘the game’. For example, literary criticism and field biology are different ‘games’ played by different rules. (They are different sorts of activities requiring different values, tools, and ways of acting and thinking; they are […]
I had deliberately left it quite late in the evening last night before venturing into Second Life (SL) as I wanted some time on my own to refamiliarise myself with the SL environment, the user interface and to ensure I had the latest update from from SL as I knew that there would be a […]
As part of the “Introduction to Digital Game-based Learning”, this semester’s cohort have been made up of 4 teams of 6 people who will work together as a team to either construct game-based tasks (for others to participate in) or take part in game-based tasks that have been given to us, as well as giving […]