May 2012
68 posts
“And your ability to keep this all in perspective will determine how you perform...”
– Future Football Stars: The NFL Is About To Destroy Your Life Hat Tip to Kottke.org
April 2012
64 posts
Creating Innovators: Why America's Education...
femmebot:
Individual achievement is the focus: Students spend a bulk of their time focusing on improving their GPAs — school is a competition among peers. “But innovation is a team sport,” says Wagner. “Yes, it requires some solitude and reflection, but fundamentally problems are too complex to innovate or solve by oneself.” Student Loans: A Long Journey Of Confusion That Ends In Owe, Owe, Owe...
Play RGB →
Play Movable Forest the Game →
“There’s always this sense that art is just play,” says Peter Plagens, a New York...”
– No sympathy for the creative class - Art in Crisis - Salon.com
“Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game,”...”
– Paintball with human “fox” as target - Boing Boing
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Soviet Gamification →
dropouthangoutspaceout:
Phrased that way, it sounds like a problem a certain Vladimir Lenin was facing in 1917: How do we motivate workers, without resorting to paying them based on their work?
Part of his answer was a theory of “socialist competition”, in which factories and individuals were to compete against each other within systems that bear greater or lesser resemblance to game...
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Funsultants, gamification, and work as play: A... →
“To put these aid agencies’ $200 million financial shortfall in depressing...”
– Steve Hynd at The Agonist. Six Million Face Famine In Sahel For Want of 3.5 Hours US Military Spending (via protoslacker)
kottke.org: The glamorous life of a former... →
jkottke:
Trevor Pryce played in the NFL for 14 years and upon retiring learned that fame and money is not much if you’re not doing what you love.
“Early retirement” sounds wonderful. It certainly did that cold night in Pittsburgh. I was going to use my time to conquer the world. Boy, was I wrong. Now…
“A no-win situation caused by a set of rules that can only be won by changing the...”
– Urban Dictionary: Kobayashi Maru (via thisway)
“retro ’80s graphics are sentimental fluff for modern adults who grew up in front...”
– An Essay on the New Aesthetic | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com
Which is also what I find so tiresome about much of indie game aesthetics today. (via karsalfrink)
“If you try and play Dear Esther like you play a standard FPS -you run as fast as...”
– Dan Pinchbeck (via notgames)
“In conventional schools, students learn so that they can get good grades. My...”
– Harvard’s Tony Wagner, author of Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, ponders how we can educate the next Steve Jobs.
Wagner’s insights echo John Seely Brown’s in the excellent A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant...
“We extracted and posted the 6502 code because it was a piece of computer history...”
– jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II · GitHub
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“To be clear, Valve hasn’t magically repealed the realities of developing and...”
– Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing | Valve
“My observation is that it takes new hires about six months before they fully...”
– Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing | Valve
DROP OUT. HANG OUT. SPACE OUT.: On the Videogame... →
dropouthangoutspaceout:
I enjoyed this piece by Leigh Alexander. It weaves an interesting path through the murky waters surrounding indie culture, avoiding the tired debates around the topic, and goes to the core of what pieces like The Atlantic’s take on indie games mean for how videogames are perceived in the wider…
“I hate gamification. Gamification is to play what crowdsourcing is to open...”
– Douglas Rushkoff, interviewed by Samatha Hinds in The New Inquiry, 3 (via stoweboyd)
Some thoughts on war in games →
dropouthangoutspaceout:
It’s worth considering that the first large computers were developed specifically to calculate the trajectories of bombs. With about 20 lines of code, I can write a simple game where you fire missiles at a target. In order to build a simple gardening game, I have to write hundreds of lines of code. This is because answering the question “did the bomb hit its target”...
Call of Apathy: Violent Young Men and Our Place in... →
War is the most horrific, sickening thing mankind can inflict upon itself, fought by and large by uneducated maniacs that have no other place in the world. Videogames have the attention of the youth and can educate as well as entertain. The real horrors need to be made very public to keep the next generation from turning out like us.
My friends and I are not represented anywhere in mass media....
Response: Call of Apathy: Advanced Warfighter →
The list of questions raised by our military’s digital paradigm shift doesn’t stop with its effects on our youth. What few answers are provided are shrouded in the smoke and mirrors of “classified information” and “the interest of national security.” Is the risk of fratricide or civilian casualties through apathy worth the ease of war-fighting in a digital age? Are we saving lives while...
How To Train Your Robot →
xtianw:
The game works as follows: every kid is turned into a “robot master” and their mom or dad becomes their “robot”. I give each kid a “Robot Language Dictionary” and explain to them that this is the language their robot understands. The dictionary has symbols for “move left leg forward”, “turn left”, “grab”, “drop” etc.
However, I was pleasantly surprised on how much more the kids...
“It’s tough to demand respect for a creative medium when you have to struggle to...”
– Taylor Clark (via notgames)
Watchtheatlantic:
The Most Dangerous Gamer:In a multibillion-dollar industry addicted to laser guns and carnivorous aliens, can true art finally flourish?
Like many wealthy people, Jonathan Blow vividly remembers the moment he became rich. At the time, in late 2008, he was $40,000 in debt and living in a modest San Francisco apartment, having just spent more than three years meticulously refining...
Watchart280gamethesystem:
(via Stuart Brown says play is more than fun | Video on TED.com)
Watchart280gamethesystem:
(via Tim Brown on creativity and play | Video on TED.com)
Watchart280gamethesystem:
(via Stuart Brown says play is more than fun | Video on TED.com)
“I’d love to see more projects like this for games. After attending the...”
– Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference merges art and technology, provides model for collaboration in games. - Kill Screen
“Pre-Tetris games were different in a primal way. They required human opponents...”
– Sam Anderson (via notgames)
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“We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing...”
– Tim Brown, Strategy by Design (via stoweboyd)
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