via: chronicle.com

How Video Games Can Help in the Classroom, and in the World

By DAVID DEBOLT

Ms. Flanagan, a professor of film and media studies, was recently named the first holder of the digital-humanities chair at Dartmouth College. She is part of a research group, the Games for Learning Institute, that has joined Microsoft Research to study the most efficient ways to use video games in teaching math and science to middle-school students. She is also director and founder of Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth, which designs games to promote social change.

Q. You started out as a designer of mainstream computer games. What prompted you to begin working on your own?

A. When I was developing commercial software, one of the things that kept coming to mind was questions about the kinds of products we were making. I was thinking to myself, ‘How do we know this game is really educational? What are the ways you measure something like that? How do we know we are addressing diverse audiences?’ I developed this real sense of curiosity about the various ways that things I was making were being used. Sometimes you have a real push to get your product out the door, and you fail to have the time to ask important questions about what games are doing socially and culturally.

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via: Thaindian News

Washington, October 12 (ANI): San Francisco-based firm Posit Science has developed a set of five video games, together called InSight, to improve the mental acuity of older drivers.
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I am, I admit, a gloomy person, who spends a lot of time looking at the worst of the world. I am often saved, however, and made a little more hopeful, by the weirdness, creativity, and enthusiasm of kids. Today, in the midst of the financial storm clouds gathering around us, I was able to see some light at a meeting of the Connecticut Innovations Academy (CTIA).

Every year, the Center for 21st Century Skills organizes an Innovation Challenge to bring together Connecticut teens from urban and suburban neighborhoods to collaborate on high tech projects. Last year, the Challenge was to build a video game in MIT’s Scratch program, and build a whole mock company, website, white paper, and marketing campaign to support it. The winners put together a great educational game, but participants complained that they didn’t have enough game design education. This year, the Challenge is basically the same except all game designs will be about environmental issues, organizational kinks have been worked out, and they have dozens of Grow A Game to help spark young imaginations. I went to the program’s first meeting this year to talk to 130-odd students about designing games with values in mind.
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Tiltfactor ran another successful Grow A Games workshop last week at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Twenty people participated in the workshop, running through different one- and two-card exercises. As usual, some really unique game designs were developed, and there was thoughtful discussion about games as expressive media. Read more

This year’s Games 4 Change Conference was another great success, providing seasoned game designers and excited newcomers the opportunity to share experiences and knowledge. From June 2-6, participants met to discuss developments in serious gaming and critical play that will help gaming become an increasingly valuable vista of the cultural landscape. At the conference there was the sense that games in general and serious games in particular were at a tipping point; poised to become a ubiquitous part of modern living, widely valued, respected, and understood. Read more

This year’s Games 4 Change Conference will have a special bonus day to introduce non-profits to social impact games. You can read all the details below, but the most exciting part is that our Dr. Flanagan will facilitating a Grow A Game workshop to get the day started.

From Games 4 Change:
Based on feedback we’ve received over the past few years, we’ve created a one-of-a-kind workshop for non-profits new to the field of social issue games at the start of the 2008 G4C Festival. This workshop is a soup-to-nuts tutorial on the fundamentals of social issue games. The workshop will feature leading experts on topics including game design, fundraising, evaluation, youth participation, distribution, and press strategies, and will be extended for the rest of the year through an online community dedicated to learning about social issue games. Read more

The VAP team, led by Dr. Mary Flanagan, will be heading to Pittsburg tomorrow night to rock the Future of Interactive Technology for Peace conference. Our team will be facilitating a Grow A Game workshop and a discussion about how and activists and media makers can use games as an expressive medium, and why they’d want to. Workshop members will also get the chance to experience how empowering and fun the game design process can be by playing with Grow A Game cards. Participants will learn how they can use critical play to develop innovative solutions.

We have pictures from our workshop at the Grassroots Media Conference here.

The Future of Interactive Technology for Peace

April 2-3, 2008
Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
University Center

The Future of Interactive Technology for Peace Conference (April 2&3, 2008) is a day and one-half day national conference providing a forum for discussing the impact and the potential that interactive technology holds for peace and peacemaking. Using the highly successful game “PeaceMaker” [http://impactgames.com] as a jumping-off point, the key aim of the conference is to explore new directions in the application of interactive technology for conflict resolution, diplomacy, and international affairs. Read more

Professor Flanagan was at South By Southwest last week to speak on the Games For Change panel. The group of speakers was a solid collection of some of serious gaming’s most influencial thinkers and practicioners including: Suzanne Seggerman, Pres, Games for Change, Eric Zimmerman, Co-Founder, Gamelab, Heather Chaplin, author of Smartbomb, (Algonquin Books 2005), Benjamin Stokes, Program Officer, MacArthur Foundation, and Chris Swain, VP/Programming, Spiderdance. The panel was yet another chance to share our Values At Play work with a new audience. The talk went really well, and you can read some of the reactions on other people’s blogs.

SXSW

Serious Games Source

Bay Area Video Coalition

Buzz About the Redistricting Game 

This weekend’s Grassroots Media Conference was a big success, with over 900 registrants and a solid turnout for the VAP Grow A Game workshop. Dr. Mary Flanagan began the session with a brief presentation on why activists would want to express their messages through games, and what some of the challenges to doing so are. There is a common misconception among people outside the gaming field that technical hurdles are the biggest barriers to developing activist games. Mary stressed that creating a great design that is on message is far more difficult than finding a programmer. It’s because of this belief that Values At Play team’s work is focused on creating design tools, not technical tools. The Grow A Game cards are the most recent asset released by Values At Play, and we’ve found them to be a great help during brainstorming sessions. After Mary concluded her introduction, it was time to get down to business. Read more

Designing a great game requires a subtle grace. Even the loudest, most garish, monster slaughter of a first person shooter requires a deft hand and critical eye in the design phase. While I respect and enjoy big sandbox games, massive RPGs, and photorealistic car racing, there is no question that the greatest games of all time are the simplest. One of the oldest board games, Go, uses a grid and two sets of monochromatic stones. It is also a game of such sprawling complexity and boundless emergence that scientists have yet to build the computer to defeat the best human players. Checkers, poker, Tetris, these are games of few rules and endless entertainment. It is important that we as game designers think about these examples, and take a minute to contemplate the process of game design. Read more

via: Grassroots Media Coalition

The Mainstream Media is a propaganda mind control operation owned by an elite cartel for the benefit of the global oligarchy. I wish that were hyperbole, but it isn’t. Luckily, alternative media, independent media, is going strong and growing every year. The annual Grassroots Media Conference is a chance for media activists to come together, compare notes, and stratagize. It’s always worth attending. This year, Tiltfactor Lab will be facilitating a game design workshop to help participants better understand how to analyze existing games and consciously embed values in their own games. Read more

The Nintendo Wii has been out for some months now, so you may have heard about the phenomenon of the Wii and the elderly. Yes, the elderly and the Wii. If you need a refresher, take a look at this article. Read more

A possible problem lurking in every “educational” video game is the game’s inherent unfunness. An entry on Slashdot examines this idea.
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Now this is all levels of cool. There’s a project underway at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland that involves a giant game of Tetris. Read more

The Winter 2007 issue of the Association for Computing Machinery’s student publication Crossroads has an article on the educational capabilities of the online game of Second Life. Read more