Category Archives: Games and Gaming

Liveblogging From State of Play, Session 4

On Virtual Economies Julian Dibbell’s introduction: maybe virtual economies were not so important, or not as important as we thought in the way that we thought they were. Maybe RMT doesn’t have to be quite the battleground that it was. … Continue reading

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Liveblogging From State of Play, NYC, Session 3

“Breaking the Magic Circle” We had a prior discussion at my table about whether there’s anything much left of use in “the magic circle” as a concept, and someone mentioned a recent discussion by Jesper Juul on the issue. Jerry … Continue reading

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Liveblogging From State of Play, NYC, Session 2

Government and governance in virtual worlds panel. Tori Horton, description of how virtual worlds can link to public diplomacy, reviews weaknesses and strengths of virtual worlds for servicing public diplomacy. My comment: same issue as with Raph’s framing of Metaplace, … Continue reading

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Liveblogging From State of Play, NYC

Raph Koster, “A New Kind of World”, keynote Focused on Metaplace. Had to ban his own brother from UO. Brother is now cyberactivist. But virtual worlds don’t have that relevance, really. Nothing has happened in them that matters by comparison … Continue reading

Posted in Games and Gaming, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 2 Comments

“The Vice-President Has Been Reclassified as a Pet”

You won’t get the joke at this link if you don’t play online games like World of Warcraft, but for the initiated, this post is full of win.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Politics | 1 Comment

Irreparable Complexity, Game and World

I’m interested in the kind of complexity that arises through emergent processes, in which relatively simple rules governing the action of autonomous agents within a given environment can give rise to permanent structures or changes within the environment which then … Continue reading

Posted in Games and Gaming, Miscellany, Politics | 8 Comments

Cup Running Over

I’m trying really hard not to look at election-related news right now. I want to wait until it’s meaningful news rather than punditry, plus I’m feeling very burned out about national politics any way. So instead, a quick gaming round-up, … Continue reading

Posted in Games and Gaming | 2 Comments

Spore Needs More (and Less)

Will Wright’s The Sims is the best-selling digital game of all time, and probably one of the games most disliked by people who play a lot of digital games. Wright’s new game Spore seems to be producing a very similarly … Continue reading

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Why Some Learning Games Continue to Suck (Games + Learning + Society Liveblogging)

This isn’t a reaction to the panels I’ve attended at the meeting: they had some educational or learning games that I thought were terrific, smart, well-designed, and educationally effective. It’s more a reaction to some of the games I saw … Continue reading

Posted in Games and Gaming, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 3 Comments

Games + Learning + Society Liveblogging 4

I’m at a roundtable panel on World of Warcraft with seven presenters (Bielema, Bielema, Chen, Hay, Kelly, Malone, Steinkuehler.) P. Bielema argues that you could map “real things” onto the Warcraft template to make it educational. E. Bielema is looking … Continue reading

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