Player agency in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Over on my other blog, Cosy Catastrophes, you’ll find a review of Ubisoft’s 2010 videogame, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I won’t post the full article here as it’s not directly related to serious games – but there’s a paragraph at the end of the review which refers to a particular scene in which the player’s ability [...]

Designing games for children

There’s a thought-provoking article on Eurogamer today about the principles behind designing games for kids. Jonathan Smith, head of production at Traveller’s Tales and director of LEGO Star Wars, says: Play is closely related to learning. When we have fun, we’re experimenting, discovering and developing our own abilities. This is especially true for children, who [...]

Heavy Rain and unpredictable actions

Heavy Rain is the PS3′s much-anticipated new title from director David Cage. It’s a dark serial-killer thriller with adult themes and content – and Cage claims that with this title he’s produced a new genre apart from videogames – ‘Interactive Drama’.

Scribblenauts as classroom literacy aid

There’s an interview on Kotaku today with Scribblenauts creator Jeremiah Slaczka. The Nintendo DS title was released in September 2009 and, although controls and interface were often criticized, critics applauded the open-ended gameplay. Puzzles within the game can be solved by typing nouns on the onscreen keyboard – if the object is stored in the [...]

Videogames improve working memory

Following on from last week’s claim that Tetris increases brain efficiency, BBC News reports that war-simulation videogames can improve players’ ‘working memory’ – i.e. the ability to remember information and to use it. Dr Tracy Alloway, from the University of Stirling, suggests that studies have shown that videogames such as the Total War series enhance [...]

Tetris increases brain efficiency

More fuel for the games-are-good-for-you argument: Albuquerque, N.M.-based Mind Research Network said over the course of three months, it tracked adolescent girls who practiced playing Tetris. Compared to control subjects, these girls exhibited greater brain efficiency and a thicker cortex, as evidenced by brain scans. Areas of the brain that showed thicker cortex were sections [...]

Information design in Casablanca and videogames

In his column in the new edition of Edge magazine, Randy Smith discusses similarities between movies and videogames. He comments that he tends to dislike old movies because of poor information design and offers the opening sequence of Casablanca as an example, where he argues that the importance of the transit papers is not made [...]

Do serious games developers ignore mainstream videogames?

Those interested in serious games have long been preoccupied with defining serious games themselves, and the outcomes are rarely illuminating. On his member blog at Gamasutra, Raymond Ortgiesen criticizes the term ‘serious games’ but also goes on to bemoan serious games developers’ tendencies to ignore the progress made in traditional videogames in terms of immersion [...]

Kodu game creator on Xbox Live

Microsoft Research’s Kodu on Xbox 360 allows users to create their own games using a visual programming interface. Through a series of ‘if…then’ commands it’s possible to create complex interactions such as ‘if player presses R trigger then unicycle jumps and changes to random colour’. While the resultant games are likely to be small in [...]

Building relationships with Microsoft’s Milo

During Microsoft’s E3 keynote presentation last night Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux demonstrated Milo, a virtual 10-year-old boy. Users interact with Milo via full-body motion tracking (courtesy of Project Natal, Microsoft’s new camera tracking accessory) and voice commands. In the demo Milo demonstrates impressive AI, tracking the demonstrators’ movement, and answering her questions, also making observations about [...]

Co-op games to promote speaking and learning skills

With Jim Rose’s review of the UK primary curriculum placing particular emphasis on speaking and listening skills, I’ve been thinking about games that promote communication. Of course, most games can be played with contributions from other people and there are plenty of multiplayer competitive games. However, my girlfriend and I have developed an obsession with [...]

Demon’s Souls: a model for online educational games?

You may not have heard of the PS3-exclusive game Demon’s Souls yet, as it’s currently available only in Asia. The game is a hardcore dungeon crawler RPG, and while generally well-received (rapturously so on some gaming forums), the online component has attracted particular attention. It appears to be a peculiar mix of single- and multi-player [...]

Teaching history in games

Over at Kotaku, Luke Plunkett investigates whether videogames that involve rewriting history can actually convey anything about what actually happened. As is usual in such discussions, Sid Meier and Total War games feature heavily.

Microsoft’s views on educational games

Microsoft’s Neil Thomson offered an outlook on educational games at the recent Games 3.0 event in London: “We’re in the business of producing fun, not education. It so happens that certain products we produce have educational value. We’re in the business of creating fun entertainment and the moment we try to pretend we’re in the [...]

LittleBigComputer

This video was something of an internet phenomenon a while back, but if you haven’t yet seen this amazing working calculator built in LittleBigPlanet, take a look.

Game based learning 09

London’s GBL09 conference seems an appropriate first post for this blog, as it featured three particular proposals that cover a wide range of methods of using videogames for learning. 1. Retrofitting commercial games for learning Derek Robertson (Learning and Teaching Scotland) and others talked at length about using commercially-available hardware and software in the classroom. [...]