My Games Design

Last week, CALRG (Computer and learning research group) had it's annual conference in the Jennie Lee building on campus. Unfortunately, I had to miss 30th anniversary celebrations on the Monday as I was coming back from Cyprus but Dave Perry was kind enough to photoshop me into the photo below so in a few years time, I'll probably think I was there! (It's a scanned copy of the photo so it's not too clear but I'm at the end of the top row next to Josie . If you look closely though, you might notice one or two others who have been added...). From the sounds of it, I missed a good day. For a breakdown of the talks given, Doug Clow seems to have live blogged the entire event, separating the day into sessions 1 , 2 , and 3 . You can also access the twitter archive and cloudspace for the event here , where each talk given has a cloud (thanks to Patrick McAndrew for putting up summaries of these). I did have a poster up based on my MRes work for last, and apparently, Ti...

First off, apologies to H809ers for my absence over the last couple of weeks. I'm afraid that submitting my probation report, going back home for a family wedding and presenting at my research group conference ( CALRG ; a post on the conference to follow soon) has meant that H809 has had to take a bit of a back seat. So I haven't been doing the reading for Block 3 but for excellent summaries and commentary on the last few weeks, please have a look at Juliette Culver's blog . In week 11, she raises some wothwhile points about how candid (or not) people are when filling in surveys while also discussing the notions of validity and reliability (where she notes "reliability is about whether you can consistently achieve the same results using methods, validity is about whether your methods tell you what you claim they do"). I think she also raises some interesting issues surrounding the concept of ethnographic research in weeks 13&14 , especially in relation to virt...

This is going to be a quick post, so I can bring your attention to t he Professional Gamer's (or Costas from LostInGames ) post on some smaller budget games he has been playing. I can thoroughly recommend " Today I die " which is free and essentially some form of interactive poetry, while Braid has been on my list of games to play for quite a while now and I'm almost embarrassed by how long it's taking me to get round to play it. I do want to add a game to the list though - The Path from Tale of Tales . It's a horror game inspired by Little Red Riding Hood but instead of following the path to Grandma's house as instructed, you're encouraged to wander off into the woods - where all the interesting stuff is... It only costs $9.99 and can be downloaded from here . It's already been reviewed e.g. Leigh Alexander's review on Kotaku and for a much better description of it than I could give check out Fullbirght's take on it here . I think the ...