The blog posted below is an archive. Values at Play blogging continues at the Tiltfactor Blog, http://www.tiltfactor.org/?page_id=413.

Come one, come all to the variable_d lecture series on Digital Arts and Humanities this Winter and Spring at Dartmouth College, Hanover NH. Jesper Juul, Celia Pearce, Nick Montfort, Tracy Fullerton, Eric Zimmerman, Katherine Isbister, Luis von Ahn, and Doris Rusch will be visiting from January 2009 – June 2009. We are very pleased to bring these fine scholars, artists, and designers to campus.
Wednesday January 14, 4:30 pm ((Dartmouth Campus, Silsby 028))
Jesper Juul, from the MIT Gambit Lab, gives a public lecture at Dartmouth, “The Meaning of Video Games: On Today’s Debates in Video Game Studies”

Tuesday February 3, Tuesday 4:30 pm ((Dartmouth Campus, Silsby 028))
Celia Pearce, Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech, game designer, and game researcher gives a public lecture on games research.

Wednesday February 11, 2008 4:30 pm ((Dartmouth Campus, Silsby 028)
Poet, Computer Scientist, and Blogger Nick Montfort, Assistant Professor at MIT, “A New Dimension for All-Text Interactive Fiction.”

Course Discussions: (in Tiltfactor, 304 North Fairbanks; interested students welcome with RSVP to tiltfactor@gmail.com)
Thursday January 15, 2-4 pm
Jesper Juul leads a discussion on Half-Real and his recent work

Tuesday February 3, 2008 2-4 pm
Celia Pearce, on game art doll play, and dress up.

Thursday February 12, 2008 2-4 pm
Nick Montfort on platforms, interactive fiction, classic games, and narrative

Tiltfactor is delighted to be able to share some design methods with the public. Developed as part of Values at Play, the Grow-A-Game cards are widely in use in both K-12 and University classrooms.

Using Grow-A-Game, groups of people brainstorm novel game ideas which prioritize human values. While no prior game design experience is necessary, both experienced designers and those new to the field will have fun making games.

Announced today, the The Games for Learning Institute (G4LI) is a joint research endeavor of Microsoft Research, New York University and a consortium of universities, including Dartmouth College. Tiltfactor will be home to the 3 year research initiative at Dartmouth, where researchers will be evaluating computer games as potential learning tools. Dr. Mary Flanagan, Director of Tiltfactor, notes that “players are always learning in games. The time has come for serious integration of those magical aspects of the games we love and the way we conduct K-12 education.” The laboratory anticipates a limited number of student positions in relationship to this research, so please contact us for more information.

I am by no means the first to report this, but there are some eerie similarities between Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon game from 2001 and the current conflict in South Ossetia. Ghost Recon is set in April 2008 when an ultra-nationalist Russian president seeking to rebuild the Soviet Union invades Georgia. US Green Berets are deployed to South Ossetia to battle armed rebels and Russian troops. In reality, the conflict broke out in August, not April, and Russia was defending itself after Georgia staged a sneak attack in South Ossetia against Russian peace keepers and civilians, but the way the US media has portrayed Russia as the aggressor, you’d think Tom Clancy was dead on.

Commentators pointing out the similarity between Ghost Recon and reality have noted that the key difference is that no US troops were involved in the fighting, but in fact that’s a detail Clancy got right. We don’t know of any Green Berets in the conflict, but Russian media has reported US instructors guiding Georgian forces. Civilians in South Ossetia claimed to see soldiers in black uniforms with American flags on their sleeves. Even if the accounts of black uniformed soldiers were innacurate, there were definitely NATO training excercises and US military instructors in Georgia this past July. I wonder if any of those soldiers ever played Ghost Recon. I wonder how the experience playing the game affected their experience guiding real soldiers in such a similar conflict.

At the Games Learning and Society conference this past July many people claimed that we’re witnessing the gestation of ludic century. This will be an era of games everywhere, from the classroom to the living room to the factory floor. Perhaps this is so. We are already seeing the rise of ludic warfare.
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To get everyone in the mood, here’s perhaps the best Christmas-themed thing ever. And remember to be safe!

The Values at Play research project launched version 1.0 of its website, http://www.valuesatplay.org, which offers a wealth of game design ideas and scholarship about games and human values. Read more

The Aberrant Gamer, a column on GameSetWatch, asks, “Are we [gamers] crueler than we were years ago? And have we, as a society, become unhealthy?”
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Because I think that everyoone sometimes needs something light to get themselves started at the beginning of the work week, here are a few amusing things from around the Internet. Read more

In a late celebration of Halloween, Mac owners can now shiver in fear at the prospect of computer viruses, with the brand new Mac virus. And Steven Jobs didn’t even have to hold a press conference for it. Read more

Lisa Laughy has a problem with game design education. But it’s not so much the education, so much as the game industry’s influence on the way game design is taught.
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by Andy Lemke
Private security contractors are in the news, and now you can play the videogame. But game designer Chris Ferriera wants to do something different—creating a cooperative, two-person shooter game in Army of Two. Read more