Humane Games

May 23

kadrey:

Game Designer Creates Board Game Meant to Be Played Thousands of Years from Now
“American Jason Roher has recently won a game design competition after creating a board game that no one is likely to play anytime in the near future, if ever. Called A Game for Someone, Roher’s game was made from titanium, to stand the test of time, and buried somewhere in the Nevada Desert, where it will probably be discovered by an advanced civilization, or zombies, thousands of years from now…”
http://www.odditycentral.com/news/game-designer-creates-board-game-meant-to-be-played-thousands-of-years-from-now.html

Game Designer Creates Board Game Meant to Be Played Thousands of Years from Now

“
American Jason Roher has recently won a game design competition after creating a board game that no one is likely to play anytime in the near future, if ever. Called A Game for Someone, Roher’s game was made from titanium, to stand the test of time, and buried somewhere in the Nevada Desert, where it will probably be discovered by an advanced civilization, or zombies, thousands of years from now…”

http://www.odditycentral.com/news/game-designer-creates-board-game-meant-to-be-played-thousands-of-years-from-now.html

Computer Games as Gateway to STEM The Story of “Game Goddess” and ATLAS Ph.D. student Kara Behnke By Ira G. Liss Kara Behnke could be on track to become the unofficial “Game Goddess” of the world. Having a passion for computer games – playing them, designing them, teaching others to design them and using them as teaching tools – she is working towards her Ph.D. in Technology, Media and Society at CU-Boulder’s ATLAS Institute. (via CU ATLAS)

Puppy Chow Recipe

hangingfire:

Look, that thing about playing Cyberpunk hit me in the face with a blast of nostalgia, okay? We used to play the Sisters of Mercy, and my friend Brian’s mom always made a giant batch of Puppy Chow. Crispix cereal + chocolate + peanut butter + powdered sugar = a bunch of slightly crazed but pretty happy nerd kids pretending to be hackers and street samurai.

(My character was a blatant Molly-from-Neuromancer ripoff, a Eurasian street samurai with fingerblades and a monofilament katana, who once—by virtue of a dice roll that was nothing less than miraculous—narrowly avoided getting turned into cold cuts by a monofilament web that someone else had strung up in a doorway, and which neither I nor the GM remembered until the other player reminded us as my character was charging down the hallway to the door. The GM let me roll to see if she would successfully slide under the web at the last second, and incredibly, it worked.)

(I was a prize dork, and I’m proud of it.)

(Yeah, I know, I know—”was?”)

:D

Brain can be trained in compassion, study shows

to read…

May 20

laughingsquid:

Dungeons & Dragons Clue, Classic Clue With Dungeons & Dragons-Themed Game Pieces and Game Board

emergentfutures:

Nintendo claiming ad revenue for user-created YouTube videos

The Japanese game giant is not following the path of music publishers and film studios in demanding this content be blocked, but rather wants to place ads surrounding videos featuring Nintendo games, like Let’s Play videos. The revenue from these ads would go to Nintendo, not the video’s creators.

Full Story: Gamespot

who is adding value to whom? who is the remora? who is the orchid? who is loyal to whom?

May 19

Where did the idea for Dots come from?

Moberg: A lot of the early thinking was just looking at what was already out there, what was highly illustrated or cartoonish, and deciding we wanted to do something new, something that wasn’t out there.

But why dots? Why not coins, or squares, or birds flying through the air?

Moberg: Well, some of my inspiration for the design of the game actually came from the fine art world. I copied and pasted a bunch of fine art images from Google into my design documents and thought, if an app could be like fine art, maybe this would be it. But Dots was also inspired by board games. Old-school board games are fun and playful but have such — I guess the word would be neutral — such neutral personalities that anyone can approach them and play them. (via Creators of the Addictive Mobile Game Dots on Game Tips, Making Money - Lauren Goode - Product News - AllThingsD)

The good news is that my Dots addiction may come with some added cognitive perks. Casual games like Dots—video games that are quick to access, easy to learn, and require no special game skills (a category that includes many other smartphone games, like Bejeweled and Peggle)—were subject to a study on gaming and cognitive ability conducted by East Carolina University’s (ECU) Psychophysiology Lab in 2010. The study, conducted with dozens of U.S. consumers, was designed to explore the effects of casual games on subjects’ short-term cognitive acuity, including cognitive response time (how quickly a subject completes a task) and executive function (how often a subject completes a task correctly). Subjects who played Bejeweled and similar games for 30-minute periods showed an 87 percent improvement in cognitive response time and a 215 percent increase in executive functioning when compared to a control group. These cognitive gains should not be interpreted as making gamers “smarter,” per se. Shortly after ECU published their study, the BBC and Nature found that brain training software like Nintendo’s Brain Age doesn’t really improve your reasoning, memory, or problem solving in the long run, and any gains wrought from incessant gameplay are confined to the specific types of tasks required by a game. The six-week online study, which involved 11,430 participants trained several times each week on cognitive tasks designed to improve reasoning, memory, planning, and attention, found that whatever skills players picked up were not immediately transferable to unfamiliar tasks. More recent research confirms that cognitive perks picked up from gaming are skill-specific and not general gains in intelligence. According to research published in open access journal PLOS ONE by Adam Chie-Ming Oei and Michael Patterson of Nanyang Technological University-Singapore, playing video games for an hour each day can improve subsequent performance on cognitive tasks that use similar mental processes to those required in a specific game. (via Can playing Dots on your iPhone make you smarter? - Salon.com)

“Mom, can I play on the iPad?” my daughter calls from the kitchen, where I’m sure her hand is hovering over the device, waiting for my assent. It’s Saturday morning. My husband left early for a round of golf, and I’m an “okay” away from a blissful hour sequestered with my writing book and favorite pen. Heck, I might even have a chance to finish this story instead of letting it tumble around in my head, spitting out phrases while I’m cutting into the right lane to avoid the car in front of me. My other option for her is TV, but I’d rather have her on the iPad because she’ll be either playing Minecraft or watching YouTube videos of other people playing Minecraft. She’ll build a world in “creative mode” with a swimming pool full of wool and probably a library. Her world will be blissfully threat-free until she switches over to “survival mode,” when the creepers, zombies, and pigs appear. “There are also spiders, Mommy,” she tells me, reading over my shoulder, “and pig men.” To get ideas and inspiration she’ll watch YouTube videos of others playing Minecraft, like SkyDoesMinecraft, who recaps his quests as he saves villagers and cows. (I think the cows get saved; I’ll have to ask.) Sometimes Ava will watch Minecraft videos authored by people I assume are the spawn of drunken sailors who drop f-bombs and m-f bombs, amongst their “kill that ass-wipe” quips, which I’ll hear from the other room and say, “Ava, choose another video please.” So I prefer Sky, because he might have a clue that there’s a bunch of third graders watching and he does not swear like aforementioned cliched sailor spawn on leave from morality. But even the cursing Minecrafters are better than pre-tween-targeted sitcoms on Disney or Nickelodeon. Let my sweet impressionable kid spend a day with China on AntFarm or Alex on Wizards of Waverly Place and my parental battles erupt. Bad language is easy to curb, but stupid adult stereotypes, sarcasm, backstabbing behavior, and contempt are not. I have yet to see an episode of any tween sitcom (as I’ll call them) in which the adults are not morons and the dialogue between the young characters is not caustic. I can tell Ava a dozen times a day to be kind with her words. I can tell her that how she says something makes a difference, that she has a choice of being hurtful or helpful. But in the end, I give in to her request to watch Minecraft so she’ll still believe adults are intelligent, trustworthy counselors who can provide a broader perspective. I know a fight is coming and my ability to advise may dwindle as Ava’s teen years approach, but I’m not willing to have my nine-year-old disregard everything I say. I can hear Sky from the other room, where Ava is watching as he quests for, well, whatever he quests for on Minecraft. Gold? Butter? I don’t know. But Sky, if you’re reading, I hope you find it. Thanks for keeping the language PG.” Choosing Minecraft Over Disney — Editor’s Picks — Medium

May 17

via killscreen:

(via @gaijingames)

zerofeedback:

Three hundred games.

I started this site with a simple criteria: collect freeware games that were posted by the developer and received no comments from that community for at least six months. (I later changed it to three.)

Three hundred games fit this heuristic. It’s hard to tell how many more are currently out there. Are yet to be made.

It’s never been easier to make games. It’s never been easier to make a game that goes overlooked.

Two hundred games ago, I highlighted the diversity of these games. Games of every genre. Featuring pixel art, 3d models, hand-drawn sprites, ASCII. Traditional and experimental mechanics and experiences. By new and established developers.

We need more.

More developers. More games. More voices. A system to support them.

More communities which foster a culture where developers of all backgrounds and skill levels can receive constructive feedback on their games.

More journalists and curators who are willing to dig deep in forums, tool-specific sites, massive game jams. Who realize that most games don’t have expiration dates. Who can appreciate the interesting ideas in otherwise unpolished games.

(via notational)

Bill Russell on Playing In The Zone

stoweboyd:

Playing ‘in the zone’ is what many athletes call their experience of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s flow state, the complete absorption in what you are doing.

Bill Russell, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man

Every so often a Celtics game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is difﬁcult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from ﬁve minutes to a whole quarter, or more. Three or four plays were not enough to get it going. It would surround not only me and the other team, and even the referees. At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened: The game would be in the white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn’t feel competitive, which is a miracle in itself. I’d be putting out the maximum effort, straining, coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet I never felt the pain. The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut, and pass would be surprising, and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball inbounds, I could feel it so keenly that I’d want to shout to my teammates, ‘it’s coming there!’—except that I knew everything would change if I did. My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.

[…]

On the ﬁve or ten occasions when the game ended at that special level, I literally did not care who had won. If we lost, I’d still be as free and high as a sky hawk.

Moving so fast that everything is a surprise and yet nothing surprises.

Emergent business has to play at the edge, in the flow, dancing just before the point where it trips.

Emergent Digital Practices: Bored of Farmville? Try Tahrir Square, the game

emergentdigitalpractices:

In May, Facebook users who are looking to waste a little time online will have a new option; a game called Tahrir Square Defense will allow them to relive the glory days of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

Alkottab, the Egyptian games development company responsible for the game, describe…

May 16

8bitfuture:

Wow, check out those ‘3D’ graphics.

In my mind the graphics in Myst were still amazing, so it’s kind of disappointing to actually see it again and realize how dated it looks now.

This was the 1993 entry for Wired’s ‘Most jaw-dropping game graphics’ list of the last 20 years - check out the full list here.

Low-polygon counts, to be sure, but the compositions and the proportions have an enduring beauty. The control of the lighting and atmoshperic haze was, and remains, masterful both visually and ludicly. Clues and gameplay were hidden in the shadows.

“It’s time to stop thinking of computer programming as a specialty subject. Schools should respect it as a fundamental skill.” Why High Schools Should Treat Computer Programming Like Algebra - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic (via infoneer-pulse)

(via stoweboyd)

Humane Games

Humane Games are: games for education, games for health, and games for change. They can work either through the play or through the making. This tumblr celebrates Humane Games, and reflective and critical play.

Puppy Chow Recipe

Brain can be trained in compassion, study shows

Nintendo claiming ad revenue for user-created YouTube videos

Bill Russell on Playing In The Zone

Emergent Digital Practices: Bored of Farmville? Try Tahrir Square, the game