What Can Serious Games Learn from Soap Operas?
Gabriel Recchia on Oct 24, 2012The serious games industry—if “industry” is the right word for a ragtag handful of academics and idealistic startups—is in a deceptively precarious position. Funding for games and gamified applications is at record levels in the public and...
Behavior-Change Gaming – An interview with Michael...
Jim Cummings on Aug 28, 2012As part of MP’s coverage of last March’s GDC conference, I discussed a few interesting sessions on the growing application of games, game mechanics, and player psychology to behavior change projects and interventions. One such session included...
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...
Better, Stronger, Faster: How Games Will Change Wh...
Jim Cummings on Jul 27, 2011For a few years now I’ve been interested in the idea of cybernetic systems – that is, systems of information communication and control that typically include a human controller, a machine enhancement, and regulatory feedback between the two....
Reflections on hoarding, evolution, and Fallout: N...
Jared Lorince on Jun 1, 2011So my latest gaming obsession is Fallout: New Vegas, the latest action RPG release from Obsidian and Bethesda. And I don’t use the word “obsession” lightly (okay, maybe a little, but still). When I heard last year that there was a...