e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: games

  • Web Analytics, Gaming Technology, and the LMOS

    A while back, a blog conversation between Mark Oehlert and Lee Kraus regarding how to knit together lots of embedded, widget/gadget like learning applications into a coherent picture of what and how learners are doing. To begin with, the idea they’re toying with is very similar to the LMOS but focused on a corporate market and workflow learning. What really got me thinking, though, was when they started talking about a dashboard somewhat like Google Analytics to track learner progress. (Those corporate folks sure do love their dashboards.) Something about this really clicked with me, but I couldn’t quite articulate how I would want to see this work in an academic environment.

    That is, until Raph Koster’s post put me onto VisitorVille–“Web Stats in Video Game Format!”

    (more…)

  • Book Recommendation: A Theory of Fun for Game Design

    Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design is one of the best work-related books I’ve read in quite some time. It is also one of the strangest. Written in a simple, plain-spoken style with relatively few words on a page and an illustration on every facing page, printed in a shape that is wider than it is tall, the book feels very much like a children’s book. But don’t be fooled. The level of sophistication, both in the narrative construction and in the content itself, is impressive. The result is that you can plow through this book very quickly and yet absorb some very rich and subtle concepts.

    Most interesting of all, though, is that the book is really about teaching and learning as much as it is about games. (more…)

  • The NYC Budget Game

    I love these sorts of simulation games. It’s too bad that they’re so time-consuming to design. At their heart, they are fairly simple branching simulations, not so diffierent from the original text-based branching adventure games. (Anybody remember “xyzzy”?) Some, like this one, are a bit more sophisticated because they include numerical computations. But they are really only a bit more sophisticated from a programming perspective. For example, this particular game was written in Flash, but you could probably do most of it in a simple tool like HalfBaked Software’s Quandary.

    No, the hard part about these games is the branching. Unless you’re incredibly clever about designing loops, the game either explodes into an exponentially growing tangle of story lines, each of which needs to be explicitly authored, or remains boring and obvious with mostly Pavlovian clicking.

    There is a craft to writing these branching simulations efficiently and well. Somebody should write a book about it. In fact, maybe somebody already has. If anybody knows of such a resource, please let me know.

    (Found via e-clippings.)