Gamasutra - The risk of games that seek to create empathy
“Game mechanics communicate a message,” said Colleen Macklin, a designer who runs the PETLab at Parsons School of Design in New York City, at GDC in San Francisco this week. While this power imbues the video game medium with tremendous story-telling power, it can result in a clash between a creator's intended message, and the one that is being communicated by the design. Macklin, who was speaking on the subject of so-called "games for change," cited the example of Spent, an online game about surviving poverty and homelessness created by ad agency McKinney for Urban Ministries of Durham. The game intended to create empathy and understanding within its players about people living in poverty. A study carried about by Psychology Today found, however, that the game had no effect on positive feelings toward the poor.
2018 is the year of HyperCard. The last version of HyperCard, 2.4.1, was released 20 years ago in 1998. In that time, it's maintained small communities of hobbyists maintaining their stacks and creating new art on old computers. HyperCard has been used by LGBT and other marginalized people to make interactive art representing their experiences. On the 20th anniversary of HyperCard's discontinuation, I want to pay tribute to the programming tool that started it all.
From fake news to chaos! How bad are you? Get as many followers as you can! In this game you take on the role of fake news-monger. Drop all pretense of ethics and choose the path that builds your persona as an unscrupulous media magnate. But keep an eye on your ‘followers’ and ‘credibility’ meters. Your task is to get as many followers as you can while slowly building up fake credibility as a news site. But watch out: you lose if you tell obvious lies or disappoint your supporters!
The Problem With the FCC's New National Broadband Map - CityLab
Before last week, the official U.S. map of broadband access had accumulated a fair amount of dust. On February 23, though, the Federal Communications Commission’s cartography of connectivity got a long-awaited upgrade. But while the new broadband map is easier to click around, it still isn’t a reliable tool to gauge what internet options are available to homes or communities around the country.
Nicholas Casey, a New York Times correspondent based in Colombia, and Josh Haner, a Times photographer, traveled 2,200 miles off the coast of Chile to see how the ocean is erasing the island’s monuments.
Amazon Doesn’t Consider the Race of Its Customers. Should It?
For residents of minority urban neighborhoods, access to Amazon.com’s vast array of products—from Dawn dish soap and Huggies diapers to Samsung flatscreen TVs—can be a godsend. Unlike whiter ZIP codes, these parts of town often lack well-stocked stores and quality supermarkets. White areas get organic grocers and designer boutiques. Black ones get minimarts and dollar stores. People in neighborhoods that retailers avoid must travel farther and sometimes pay more to obtain household necessities. “I don’t have a car, so I love to have stuff delivered,” says Tamara Rasberry, a human resources professional in Washington, D.C., who spends about $2,000 a year on Amazon Prime, the online retailer’s premium service that guarantees two-day delivery of tens of millions of items (along with digital music, e-books, streaming movies, and TV shows) for a yearly $99 membership fee. Rasberry, whose neighborhood of Congress Heights is more than 90 percent black, says shopping on Amazon lets her bypass the poor selection and high prices of nearby shops. As Amazon has expanded rapidly to become “the everything store,” it’s offered the promise of an egalitarian shopping experience. On Amazon and other online retailers, a black customer isn’t viewed with suspicion, much less followed around by store security. Most of Amazon’s services are available to almost every address in the U.S. “We don’t know what you look like when you come into our store, which is vastly different than physical retail,” says Craig Berman, Amazon’s vice president for global communications. “We are ridiculously prideful about that. We offer every customer the same price. It doesn’t matter where you live.”
More than 42 million Americans owe a total of $1.3 trillion in student debt, making it the second-largest liability on the national balance sheet. A generation ago, student debt was a relative rarity, but for today’s students and recent graduates, it’s a central fact of economic life that we don’t know much about. Mapping Student Debt is changing that. The maps below show how borrowing for college affects the nation, your city, and even your neighborhood, giving a new perspective on the way in which student debt relates to economic inequality.
Live Interactive Narrative Experiences for Education - GameTrain Learning
Can a Live Interactive Narrative Experience be an effective educational medium? Real Life to Video Games to Real Life In the early days of video games, many games were attempts to create digital versions of real-life activities. Pong, the first commercially successful video game, was based on real-life table tennis.¹ Later on, from the early text-based adventure games to simulations to sports games, video games aspired to try to emulate real life as best as possible. As technology has progressed over time, we now have games that are often indistinguishable from real-life video. However, today we’re seeing a shift from digital games back to real-life, in-person gaming experiences. Real-life gaming experiences like puzzle hunts, paintball/lasertag games, and LARPs (live action role playing) have been around for many years, but generally they have been more for niche audiences. Recently however, we’ve seen real-life games becoming more a part of mainstream society.
In 61 metro areas across the U.S., people of color were more likely to be denied conventional mortgage loans than whites, even when controlling for applicants' income, loan amount and neighborhood. This map of a statistical analysis by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting tracks those disparities. To get started, click on a metro area or search for an address.
MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research
In this paper we present the MDA framework (standing for Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics), developed and taught as part of the Game Design and Tuning Workshop at the Game Developers Conference, San Jose 2001-2004. MDA is a formal approach to understanding games ñ one which attempts to bridge the gap between game design and development, game criticism, and technical game research. We believe this methodology will clarify and strengthen the iterative processes of developers, scholars and researchers alike, making it easier for all parties to decompose, study and design a broad class of game designs and game artifacts.
We play games because they’re FUN! Duh! Okay, okay. That’s not much of a blog post, so we can’t stop there. Let’s take a close look into what makes games fun to play.
Gamasutra - The 13 Basic Principles of Gameplay Design
In an intriguing design feature, EA and Page 44 veteran Allmer re-imagines the famous '12 Principles Of Animation' for video games - adding a principle along the way!
Video Game Podcast | Gaming Podcast | What's Good Games
Welcome to What’s Good Games, a new show for the nerd-inclined. This particular Voltron is comprised of Andrea Rene (host/producer extraordinaire, seen on Yahoo Esports, IGN, GameStop TV, and more), Alexa Ray Corriea (you’ve seen her writing on Polygon/Gamespot), Brittney Brombacher (the kick-ass creator of BlondeNerd.com) and Kristine Steimer (she’s worked at a lot of places like IGN and PlayStation).
Each episode of The Psychology of Video Games Podcast features a discussion with a different expert on a specific topic about psychology and video games. Guests include those working in academia, the gaming industry, or as consultants.
Exploring the Linguistics Behind Regular Expressions
I had to write an essay about a famous computer scientist or academic whose work impacted computer science. I chose Noam Chomsky. Little did I know that learning about Chomsky would drag me down a rabbit hole back to regular expressions, and then magically cast regular expressions into something that fascinated me. What enchanted me about regular expressions was the homonymous linguistic concept that powered them. I hope to spellbind you, too, with the linguistics behind regular expressions, a a backstory unknown to most programmers. Though I won’t teach you how to use regular expressions in any particular programming language, I hope that my linguistic introduction will inspire you to dive deeper into how regular expressions work in your programming language of choice. To begin, let’s return to Chomsky: what does he have to do with regular expressions? Hell, what does he even have to do with computer science?
Below is a growing list of OER resources, Useful links and digital desktop / mobile art making platforms. Desktop and mobile platforms will be regularly introduced and discussed here. Collaborations will take place and artistic interventions will expand. This page will grow over time as students, faculty and community members contribute!
Making Games in the Classroom: Twine and Harlowe 2 – ProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education
When it come to making games in the classroom, my go-to tool for newcomers is Twine: it’s relatively easy to get started and make something that works, but it can also represent complex mechanics and logic. I recently had the fun of joining the Indiana Humanities celebration of Frankenstein to run a Twine-driven workshop (pictured above) to build games inspired by the themes and journey of the classic novel. In our Frankenstein workshop, I asked the cohort to think about the process of making a text game through the lens of reshaping a familiar story: this can be a great first project in Twine, as the framework of a novel can provide settings, characters, and plot points that can be translated into Twine’s framework of passages (the stuff that displays on each "page") and links (the essential connections that make the nonlinear narrative come to life). The very act of putting some of those elements into pieces requires the game designer to rethink the very organization and outcomes. It’s also one of my favorite assignments to use with fairytales, as even if everyone works from the same story the games can end up very different.
bellingcat - How to Archive Open Source Materials - bellingcat
When conducting open source investigations, an ever-present issue is how to archive away the materials you are researching. For example, a social media post may be deleted by a user after you publish an investigation, or a video on YouTube showing sensitive information (such as a war crime in Syria) may be deleted due to censorship policies set by YouTube. There are two main reasons to archive all of the digital evidence that you use an investigation: to preserve it in case it is removed from its original source, and to prove to your audience that the material (if it has been removed) really existed as you present it. Screenshots can be easily forged, so it is vital that you find a way to retain the materials in a way that shows that you did not have the opportunity to modify the content.
Explore the Largest Known Early Map of the World, Assembled for the First Time
A 60 sheet manuscript world map made in 1587 by Urbano Monte has been acquired by the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford Libraries, which scanned the sheets, then digitally stitched them together.
You might have come across people that are "abandoning everything," deserting the urban consumer lifestyle to engage in small community activities, living off the land or following the path of the digital nomad. Are these experiments just nostalgic recreations of hippie fantasies from the 1960s or do they signal a powerful new leap into new ways of organizing social systems? In this talk, Alexa Clay looks at the challenges that have accompanied the rise of mass society and shares practices from communities that have sought out radical alternatives. Looking at eco-villages, hacker collectives, intentional communities, social movements, and diverse misfit subcultures from live-action-role playing to underground secret societies, Clay gives us a peephole into the emerging "tribes" that are springing up in the wake of post-capitalism.
What do pirates, terrorists, computer hackers and inner city gangs have in common with Silicon Valley? Innovation. Across the globe, diverse innovators operating in the black and gray economies are developing solutions to a myriad of challenges. Far from being "deviant entrepreneurs" that pose threats to our social and economic stability, these innovators display remarkable ingenuity, pioneering original methods and best practices that we can learn from and apply in our own worlds. The Misfit Economy seeks to unveil and leverage this new well-spring of ingenuity. Join us in exploring the dark side of innovation.
I am using this space to collect data to write a post to answer the question above and also to offer it as resource to anyone who may be asking this question:Why do you gif?
I must confess that about 6 months ago I would have had no further views on the animated gif beyond... This was before I joined and open online course on Digital Storytelling called DS106. The tweet above tells you how far I have come in challenging my own views on the animated gif. I now have an immense amount of data on it, I make them myself on Tumblr and defend them as art to fellow course participants who do not share my liking of them. In my conversations over the last few days I decided to ask on Twitter #whygif? This post is a personal reflection on why I gif and my first excursion into Medium as a medium.
As a special event for the students Michael Branson Smith and Ryan Seslow organised a hangout with the awesome people behind giphy.com, Jess Gilliam and Alex Chung. The event was to talk about a digital sticker contest giphy.com are organising and which York College students may be contributing to. I was interested in the high nerd ideas behind the contest, giphy.com and visual writing. It turns out that what was a new insight to me months ago when I asked ‘Do you speak gif?’ is something that has been studied by media scholars for a long time. The wonders of being a networked scholar, no longer tied to my own discipline and having infinite learning possiblities open to me. I digress. The rest of this article sums up the converation in the hangout from the perpective of these big ideas rather than the detail of the contest.
