Thursday
May172012

R&D projects on the back burner

So I have a couple of research projects that I've had on the back burner for a while now. Both are essentially design based research work, and arguably are better thought of as R&D projects since they're really both more concerned with technical outcomes and technology development than theory (although both are valuable theory building tools as well).

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Wednesday
May162012

Games and narrative: The ludologist's lament

Some of you may have read Ted Castranova's post a few months ago over on Terra Nova titled Movies Stink. As I tried to convey in my comment there, I'm sympathetic to Ted's plight. Having novel and film shaped artifacts foisted upon you at the expense of game shaped ones really sounds like it sucks. Of course, I'm also more or less unable to have much empathy with him in this matter.

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Wednesday
May092012

Reflections of raid leadership

I had the opportunity the other day to give a talk in game in World of Warcraft for the r u game series by the Games and public libraries group which was a real blast. Although the attendance was light, my friend and colleague Mark Chen did jump on, and along with the series host Ellen Forsyth we had a rather excellent conversation about everything from my work on guild leadership, to games as texts, and more. One thing that came up, as it invariably does, was the question of leadership skill transfer between WoW and other settings.

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Sunday
Apr012012

Various cool stuff: An interwebs video roundup post

While others are scouring the internet for various April Fool's content, I'm using today as an excuse to post a roundup of some of the cool things I've come across recently through my feed reader. In this post: Adorable animals, Cool audio, Robots, and more!

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Wednesday
Mar282012

SimCity always-on and other crimes against humanity

I'm not going to be the only one saying this. In fact many people have been ranting about it already, and there has been much muttering of oaths and rending of...bits in the comment threads. But I'm going to say it anyway, because it needs to be said. It needs to be said multiple times, by many people with different voices, and it needs to be stated from a number of angles including education.

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