Community in Games an Interview with Ron Meiners
Travis L. Ross on May 1, 2012During a recent trip to San Francisco, Jim Cummings and I had the privilege of sitting down with veteran community manager Ron Meiners. Ron has worked in online community for fifteen plus years, from Myst to Burning Man, from Splinter Cell 3 to The...
Gee, what a future: A response to James Gee’s talk...
Kenneth Rosenberg on Apr 16, 2012A more detailed summary of James Gee’s lecture can be found in the companion piece titled: Problems in education, as solved by James Paul Gee As a student, it’s incredibly distressing to hear James Gee speak about the future of the...
Problems in education, as solved by James Paul Gee
Kenneth Rosenberg on Apr 16, 2012A few weeks ago, James Gee visited Indiana University and gave a talk on the foundering education system—with its failing standards and increasing disjointedness with most society—and proposed deferring to the natural state of knowledge in this...
Scholarships for Students working with Games
Travis L. Ross on Mar 27, 2012The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ AIAS Foundation, has announced that submissions for the Randy Pausch Scholarship and Mark Beaumont Scholarship are now open. The Randy Pausch scholarship, which awards two $2,500 scholarships, was...
GDC: Game Optimization through Experimentation
Jim Cummings on Mar 12, 2012How do we know if a game design is any good? How do we know if a particular feature makes a game better, worse, or has no effect? Until fairly recently A/B testing was a practice most of us associated with market research teams as they adjusted...
GDC: Chris Bell – Designing for Friendship &...
Travis L. Ross on Mar 11, 2012Meaningful relationships and anonymity. These are things that we don’t often consider together. In fact, much of the evolutionary literature on relationships and trust suggest that anonymity can deteriorate relationships. Yet, this strange...
GDC: Winning the behavior change game – suggestion...
Jim Cummings on Mar 8, 2012The role of games for promoting, facilitating, an supporting behavior change has been a hot topic at this year’s conference. Below are summaries from two presentations from two separate sessions, both of which stress how games – through their...
GDC: Time to get SuperBetter
Jim Cummings on Mar 8, 2012As part of the Game IT summit of this year’s conference, there was a special Health IT session Monday afternoon, featuring presentations for integrating games with health-focused IT. Headlining this session was the unveiling of SuperBetter, Jane...
GDC: Getting Integration Right – Productivit...
Jim Cummings on Mar 6, 2012Busy first day, so some delay in reporting. I’d like to first mention an interesting session from Monday afternoon on the nature of integrating games into existing information tech. This “Entertaining the Enterprise” session was...
Academic Day @ GDC 2012
Travis L. Ross on Mar 6, 2012GDC continues to roll on today, but before it does I wanted to post a few quick updates about day one of the conference. For many the first “real” day of GDC is Wednesday, however, for those interested in games as solutions to institutional...
GDC 2012
Travis L. Ross on Mar 5, 2012Here we are again, March has finally come and GDC 2012 has started. As always we hope to provide coverage for those of you who are interested in both game development and social science. As is typical in GDC the conference kicks off with a variety...
Game Analytics – An Interview with Dr. Dmitr...
Travis L. Ross on Jan 13, 2012While I was at GDC Austin back in October (I have been side tracked by a dissertation) I was fortunate enough to meet and interview Dr. Dmitri Williams who is a cofounder and CEO of the analytics company Ninja Metrics and a Professor at USC. Below I...