B-school profs taking a hard look at games

Isaac Knowles on Mar 19, 2014
The video game industry has begun to attract significant attention from researchers in business schools and economics departments across the globe. New faculty in these fields grew up with video games, and they view the industry with a great deal of...

[GDC] SpaceChem's Zach Barth on educational game d...

Gabriel Recchia on May 5, 2013
In 2011, Wired UK and New Scientist described how “SpaceChem, a science-themed puzzler hailed as one of the year's best indie games, is aiming to make the leap from bedrooms to classrooms.” Today, SpaceChem is used by schools in the...

GDC: A brighter future for collaboration between i...

Gabriel Recchia on Mar 27, 2013
Motivate. Play. "seeks to form a bridge between the gaming and scientific communities, offering analysis and commentary on games from a social sciences perspective"--it's right there in our mission statement. As such, it's exciting (and somewhat...

The trouble with trolls

Lauren Collister on Jan 31, 2013
I have been digesting the fascinating blog post by Whitney Phillips over at Ethnography Matters about her ethnography of trolling. Phillips studied trolling communities like 4chan's /b/ board, the Internet Hate Machine (Anonymous), and Facebook...

Presence and Games – An interview with Paul Skal...

Jim Cummings on Dec 5, 2012
Back in October I gave a talk at the 2012 conference for the International Society for Presence Researchers.  While there I sat in on a number of fascinating presentations, including several by Dr. Paul Skalski, professor and researcher in the...

Neal Stephenson's REAMDE

Jared Lorince on Nov 29, 2012
REAMDE is speculative fiction author Neal Stephenson's latest novel. His previous work has dealt with virtual reality, cryptography, Baroque-era Europe, and more, but REAMDE represents his first explicit foray into video games as a literary topic....