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 ...

Well, everyone seems to have been busy with their second assignment so there's not been a massive amount of activity online for H809 the last couple of weeks. I did finally get around to reading the last few papers but have been pretty busy myself as I've been preparing for my upcoming probation report. And I'm probably going to be quite busy with this for a while, as it's essentially a test of whether I sound like I have a good enough grasp on what I want to do, why it's worth doing and how I'm going to do it, so I can prove I'm ready for my second year of PhD study. If it sounds straight forward, it's not as these are surprisingly difficult questions to answer but I'm sure that the whole process means I'm at least going to come up with a plan! But yes, I'm probably going to be a bit quiet over the next couple of weeks (at least until my report is due in on May 18th) though I will be keeping an eye on what's happening on the blogs at lea...

You can also find the article the video blog is based on here . "Tangential learning is not what you learn by being taught rather it's what you learn by being exposed to things in a context with which you're already engaged in". This seems to fit in with something I've been thinking about for a while, namely that games seem to engage people who like games, and if that's the case then we do need more ways to get people 'tangentially' involved in other things. I guess what I'd like to know is, what is it that motivates that 0.1% of Final Fantasy fans to look up what a sephiroth is? Are they just more motivated than the rest of the players? Why? And doesn't this seem a little, well, shallow, in terms of learning? I mean I've played a lot of Civilization in my time but unless I really get stuck, I tend to ignore the Civilopedia and when I have looked at it, I usually just feel like I'm just skimming the articles as quickly as possible s...

Ok , I think I've always been about a week behind with the posts but it also looks like people on the course are trying to play catch up too, and I've been pretty busy with PhD work , so I am probably a bit more behind than usual. And yeah, I haven't caught up on the reading for weeks 8 and 9 either... But anyway. Week 7 has been interesting, but before I go on to that I wanted to post a couple of interesting links that have popped up on the forums since last week. The first is to a blog post called " How Online Communities and Flawed Reasoning Sound a Death Knell for Qualitative Methods ". The second is related to last weeks discussions on audiences, and is a link to a New Scientist article on how the media can distort research findings . There was a little more talk about audiences and ethics as well, with it being pointed out that often a researchers write for themselves in order to clarify and work through ideas (i.e. you are your own audience) and that the ...

I had thought about combining this post with a week 7 entry, as it is a little overdue, but the forums have been a bit quiet so I thought I'd focus on week 6 and wait a little longer to give people a chance to discuss the relevant activities. The theme of week 6 was audiences and ethics, and while there was no set reading to discuss, students were asked to listen to a podcast - which anyone can listen to from here (thanks to Juliette for posting the link). The podcast was discussion between James Aczel , Eileen Scanlon , Cindy Kerawalla , and Chris Jones about the impact of different audiences on the process of research and how it is reported. Discussions in the forums highlighted the importance of pitching proposals to funders in such a way as to justify the research planned (including a consideration of any ethical issues), the need to be cautious of distorting the findings by oversimplifying the message (e.g. when reporting to a non-technical audience), and how there can often...