Hikaru Dorodango (image borrowed from cristiancontini.blogspot.com)
If there’s one thing in life that clearly trumps playing video games, it’s making shiny balls of mud. What? No, really? While, not exactly but apparently the activity of creating Hikaru Dorodango is tremendously popular among school age children in Japan. My good friend and fellow musician coppercat tipped me off to this activity, pointing to the mud balls as a curious corporeal counterpoint to those oh so famous red and white pokeballs. Little did either of us realize that these shiny little balls had explicit educational intent behind their introduction into the Japanese primary school scene. Read the rest of this entry »
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Joystiq has written about the fact that a blogger over at Black Looks has taken offense to the trailer for Capcom’s upcoming Resident Evil 5 (and the setting of the game itself). RE5 appears to take place in an African country this time Chris Redfield is back and killing African zombies.
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After a week of particularly bad weather on the Second Life grid (including major outages, L$ transactions breaking, asset server issues leading to lost no-copy items) , Linden Lab rolled out their biggest feature in quite some time – Second Life voice communication is activated.
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According to Kotaku once more Nintendo shows the revolutionary attitude that has turned it into the leader of the console wars. Nintendo has followed up early efforts in educational game development (Brain Age & Brain Academy) by sponsoring the Handheld Learning Conference that will take place in London on October 10-12.
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(image curtesy of google pics)
A new study by psychology researchers in the UK has proved what we already know. MMO players are social! They play with friends! They play with family! Who knew?
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The problem with going to a convention about a virtual world is that you can meet the man behind the whole thing and not recognize him. No lie! Philip Rosedale had a great t-shirt on and was about as engaging a conversationalist as you can expect from a harried entrepreneur and founder of Second Life. That quick encounter was representative of most of the conference, in a good way. The conference was a packed as that elevator and moved even quicker. Read the rest of this entry »
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Just a quick note to let everyone know that Constance Steinkuehler and her research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (including myself) have started a blog. It’s located at popcosmo.org and features work on virtual worlds, learning, and literacy.
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(image from redoctanegames.com)
I found this interesting article in the New York Times on the educational aspects of Guitar Hero. Now, this game was not made to teach people how to play guitar, however according to this article it can be helpful and is inspiring some people to take up this instrument which has waned in popularity since the 1960s. “The game teaches rhythm, and, Mr. Lange [the guitar expert at Red Octane] said it teaches “independent hand usage” both being necessary skills to play an actual guitar.
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I usually shy away from debates about if games can be art. Games are misunderstood as a medium, and the journalists and critics can’t agree on what makes an artistic game, or if that’s even possible. It doesn’t help that even the best selling and reviewed games are usually unoriginal rehashes. After three hours of living in the world of Bioshock, I can’t resist jumping in the fray. Bioshock is the most “artistic” game I’ve come across in recent years, not just superficially pretty like Alice or controversial like SCMRPG. It takes all the qualities of a good game and pushes the medium farther than it has gone before.
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Before parents jump all over me about how kids SHOULD just do their chores because it is the right thing to do (and would make mom or dad happier), please read Steven Levitt’s Freakomonics. Levitt makes a convincing argument that we all work for incentives – children no less than adults. What I’m about to review may be controversial because it involves providing incentives for work which is quite necessary, often boring, and usually done by the lowest ranking members of our society.
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