| Posts in category 'Play' |
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28 April 2008
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26 April 2008
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17 December 2007
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7 December 2007
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17 November 2007
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At the first keynote of Toronto’s Future Play 2007 conference for game educators and developers, Dr. Constance Steinkuehler, assistant professor in the Educational Communication & Technology program for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argued that MMOs and online worlds are good “push technologies” for education, rather than threats to it.
Her presentation (audio file) was titled “Massively Multiplayer Online Games as an Educational Ethnology: An Outline for Research,” a deceptively straightforward talk about Steinkuehler’s [ethnographic] research findings on what constitutes gameplay in MMOs and virtual worlds, and how that research might be applied to education programs. |
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21 October 2007
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The Serious Games Institute in Coventry, England, says that it is one of the first places dedicated to helping businesses enhance their own operations by harnessing virtual worlds for things like training, communication and emergency planning.
Read full story (International Herald Tribune) |
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17 October 2007
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Bruno Giussani reports on the press conference announcing the LIFT08 conference programme (backgrounder):
I am very pleased to notice that Genevieve Bell, Paul Dourish and Francesco Cara are amongst the speakers. |
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8 August 2007
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Lately a lot of people seem to have had second thoughts on Second Life.
A wave of articles was published recently on how marketers are not getting the returns they were expecting, how deserted it is, how it is all about sex and pranks, how it has become a virtual nanny state, and even how terrorists are using it to plan attacks. Leaving aside for now the discussion to what extent this is just negative hype, it does make sense to see Second Life as an experimental environment where we can prototype new interaction and communication paradigms. Experimenting in these virtual worlds can also help us understand and imagine a future where a mix of real and virtual worlds will become increasingly prevalent. I can see four good reasons for businesses, institutions and experience designers to be present in Second Life. 1. Prototyping of new participatory communication paradigms often involving very targeted and selected communities 2. Prototyping of new interaction paradigms 3. Experimentation in an unconventional digital environment 4. Virtual laboratories to understand human behaviour |
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6 August 2007
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Soon New York City will be home to a new 6-12th grade public school that will use game design and game-inspired methods to teach critical 21st century skills and literacies.
Opening in fall 2009, the school is being created by the Gamelab Institute of Play (blog), a New York City-based not-for-profit organization that leverages games and play as transformative contexts for learning and creativity, in collaboration with New Visions for Public Schools, a not-for-profit organization that works in partnership with the New York City Department of Education to improve academic achievement in the City’s public schools. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently awarded a grant of $1.1 million to help with planning and development. According to a Wired news story, the planners “are looking at how games naturally engage players and teach them new skills, and hope to apply those principles to create kids who not only ace their SATs, but are also well suited for the 21st century.”
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2 August 2007
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Bryan Hynecek of Ignition reports on Core77 how his company teamed up with the Texas Instruments DLP Products Group and students from The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University, putting together a program that would enable video gaming experts the chance to design their “ideal product”–a video projector design specifically for gamers.
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27 July 2007
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The BBC reports on how social scientists are starting to use game worlds as laboratories to study human interaction.
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25 July 2007
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Jess McMullin and others (Luke Hohmann, Serious Games, LEGO, Pat Kane) are using games and play within product, software, service and even policy development.
In this article on boxesandarrows McMullin describes why we use games, core game principles, how to apply games, and how to sell design games to your organisation or client. There’s also some good links and great commentary.
(via Ireland’s Centre for Design Innovation) |
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28 June 2007
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Say a term or a word, and the ring will search it in wikipedia, getting the information directly to your second life ear.
Yaniv Steiner, Experientia’s director of R&D, has been working (together with some of our other collaborators) on Feedamass, a new application that can take information from Wikipedia, Google Definitions, and what not, and send it in a clear text format to almost anything. In other words, you ask a question and Feedamass answers it immediately, e.g. as a text message on your mobile phone. Now it has been implemented in Second Life.
- Read more |
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27 April 2007
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The UCD game allows human-computer interaction practitioners to demonstrate the key user-centered design (UCD) process and methods to those who are unfamiliar with UCD. The game teaches how to incorporate user-centered design into every step in the software development process. Overall, the purpose of this game is to promote a better understanding of a good design process by demonstrating the importance of understanding and focusing on the end user.
The target audience for this game is those unfamiliar with UCD, yet whose work relates to the definition, creation, and update of a product or service. In other words, everyone involved in the software development process. The UCD game is structured in 4 sections mimicking a standard user-centered design project: defining the users, analyzing the users’ characteristics, designing and evaluating the designed artifact. The last station – evaluating the process – requires the participants to look back on the three previous stations and reflect their design process. The game was developed by three people associated with the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, Spain). |
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3 April 2007
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One of the sections of Vodafone’s new website is called The Vodafone Journey.
The first item in the menu of this flash-based mini-site are Vodafone’s customers. Ten stories explain how Vodafone has changed the way people work and play. The stories are quite promotional, but they nevertheless clearly emphasise the people-centred approach of the company. Nice too is that the people featured are from New Zealand, Germany, Australia, Greece, Tanzania, Ireland, Spain, Egypt, UK and Italy, and that everyone speaks their own language. |
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12 March 2007
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10 March 2007
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22 February 2007
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“Club Penguin is a leader among a tidal wave of new community Web sites designed specifically for tweens and even younger kids: think of it as MySpace in braces,” writes Brian Braiker in Newsweek.
Sites featured: Club Penguin, Whyville, Habbo, Imbee, Tweenland, Webkinz, Nicktropolis, and Disney Xtreme Digital. |
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17 February 2007
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The newly launched Monocle magazine features a video interview with Lego CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp on its home page.
In the interview, Knudstorp starts of by explaining how they became a user-centred toy company by involving their users to an extreme degree. He also states the core brand value as “the joy of building and the pride of creating things”, which is a description of an experience. The interview, which was conducted by Monocle editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé and took place at the company’s innovation centre in Billund, Denmark, then goes in to an interesting discussion on the changing nature of play. Knudstorp describes some insights from an anthropological survey the company did recently, in particular about interactivity, community and what children expect from a brand. Watch interview |
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10 February 2007
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“Europeans make up the largest block of Second Life residents with more than 54 percent of active users in January ahead of North America’s 34.5 percent, according to new Linden Lab data,” as reported on Reuters/Second Life.
(via Loic Le Meur) |
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