This week Democrat Congressional (Maine) candidate Colleen Lachowicz was outed by Republicans. Lachowicz is not, as far as we know, gay, but she is a gamer. Lachowicz’s opponents have started their own site, Colleen’s World (You can Google it because I refuse to give them an active link), in an attempt to […]
Games and Education
87 posts
The following video asks the question of whether or not video games are art. Enjoy! Games featured: Journey, Bastion, Braid, Sword and Sorcery, Limbo and The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom.
Yesterday’s article at Kotaku about the representation of African Americans in Assassin’s Creed: Liberation hit really close to home because we were looking at two sides of the same coin. While Evan Narcisse over at Kotaku thinks that the Canadian developers are off point with their depiction of a few […]
I have finally gotten around to editing my video and adding voiceover from my portion of the CCCC Access Happening. I recorded the portion of the talk that went with the video and was actually scripted. There was an introductory bit that was done extemporaneously, but that is not included. […]
So I’ve been thinking about my posts lately, plus a comment a friend made to me, and I realize that a lot of what I do is talk about talking about video games rather than talking about the video games themselves. It led me to think more about the role […]
I just gave a talk at CCCC’s about the project Sam and I did on female video game podcasters. I talked about the research we had done, what we found, and what I hoped our community of academics could do with the information we found. There are two (sort of […]
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 […]
Sometimes things stick with you for a reason…bits of a comedy show, a disturbing news story, and the hundreds of hours that you spend playing farming/social simulations on a handheld device. And sometimes those things come together in a perfect storm that allow you to write a post like the […]
These days I am spending a whole lot of time slaying dragons and yelling at folks in Skyrim. This week as I was raging through a dungeon that I had just happened upon and didn’t have an assigned quest for I did the unthinkable…I googled the dungeon to see what […]
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 […]
Episode 14: Dashboard Jesus: On Religion and Video Game Critique (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) Revisiting religion and video games because it was too big for one episode (and probably for 2). We talk about a boatload of games including Supergiant Games’ Bastion, Sid […]
So I’m reading this book called Finite and Infinite Play by James P. Carse, a religion professor. His take on play has inspired some interesting possibilities that I can see being very useful in the current debate about gaming and education. First, and he makes this very clear, “whoever […]
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 […]
Episode 7 is here! Gamification; It’s More than Just Playing Games (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) The episode where we talk about gamification and education and clear up some of the mis-conceptions. dr. b. rants a bit and drops an f-bomb, Alex drinks like […]
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 […]
Episode 6: It’s Getting Hot in Here: Intersectionality and Video Games(“Save As” to download) The sixth episode of the Not Your Mama’s Gamer podcast where we talk about intersectionality and video games, identity, racism, football, and yes, the Nintendo 3DS. Alex sends a shout out to the Game Dames, Sarcastic […]