I spent a large portion of my winter break on the road. I went up to Minnesota to visit my parents for a week, and as soon as I touched down in Indianapolis I began my drive South to visit my partner in Kentucky and my friends in Alabama. Other […]
games and learning
16 posts
It’s the holiday season, and I’m seeing a lot of interaction from friends talking about visiting families and holiday parties. Some friends are back at homes where they are loved and accepted; some friends are not. Some friends are with the family they were born into, and some friends are […]
I’m always trying to figure out ways to improve inclusion in my classroom and help students begin to recognize the implications of various technologies or arguments. I’ve written before about the LEGO Serious Play methodology and how I see it contributing to project in the technical communication classroom and projects […]
Last week a good bit of our mama and me gaming revolved around Minecraft Story Mode…until Pea watched her first episode of StampyCat playing Super Mario Maker. Oddly lots of our gaming choices revolve around StampyCat. Doesn’t every 7 year old want to play what Stampy plays? But this time […]
I remember sitting up way past bedtime playing King’s Quest when it originally released. I was just starting high school and it was one of the first actual graphics based computer games that I played. I played the game far into the night (many nights) trying to figure out where […]
Miguel Sicart defines games as systems “in which the rules force the player to face ethical dilemmas, or in which the rules themselves raise ethical issues.” The game rules force players to interact in specific ways in order to confront ethical issues. In this manner, Life is Strange asks players to […]
Somebody once told me that if I had put as much effort into my school work as I did with videogames, I would have been a straight A student. I shrugged my teenage shoulders and rolled my teenage eyes but deep down that comment hurt. I knew I was smart […]
Trigger Warning: the game about to be described (The Day the Laughter Stopped) and the content of this article discusses and addresses rape and sexual assault An interactive fiction game – although in truth it more closely resembles an interactive narrative/fiction experience than what I’d personally define as a game […]
Games scholar James Paul Gee introduces the idea of an intersection between identity and learning in his book entitled What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, through which he infers that video games are particularly able to encourage the player to assume the identities and mindsets […]
Let me tell you a little story of how a video game made me tell my little girl a lie. Pea and I are nearing the end of the main quest line of Ni No Kuni. And in true RPG fashion we are about 60 hours in. Going in to […]
I’ve kind of fallen behind in a lot of things in recent weeks and one of them has definitely been my posts on what it’s like to game with children. Not as in having children, but physically with a child. As we wait for the new Lego City Wii U […]
Episode 38: Teacher, There’s a Game in My Classroom!: Games and Learning (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we talk about games and education in like of some new moves in the field from the likes of EA, Valve, and the White House. […]
Gaming is a huge part of both the academic and leisure sides of my life. I have been playing video games as a leisure activity for more than 30 years so the overlap into other areas of my life are both inevitable and undeniable. Lately I have been looking at […]
So, I wanna get a bit more serious than usual for a second here. There have been a number of posts about games and education floating around in my head and in various states of completion digitally for a while now. Perhaps it’s time they come to light. Rather than […]
Below is an edited and (hopefully contextualized) version of the talk that I did at CCCC 2011 in Atlanta, GA. I have added some images and video but not the entire PowerPoint presentation from the talk. Ian Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as “a technique for making arguments with computational systems […]
The reserve army of the bored zombie the earth, fiddling with their cell phones, checking their watches. Boredom is the meter of history. –McKenzie Wark I love games. My friends love games. My students love games. We are a society in love with games: game-shows, reality games, board games, online […]