Reflections of raid leadership

I had the opportunity the other day to give a talk in game in World of Warcraft for the r u game series by the Games and public libraries group which was a real blast. Although the attendance was light, my friend and colleague Mark Chen did jump on, and along with the series host Ellen Forsyth we had a rather excellent conversation about everything from my work on guild leadership, to games as texts, and more. One thing that came up, as it invariably does, was the question of leadership skill transfer between WoW and other settings.

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SimCity always-on and other crimes against humanity

I'm not going to be the only one saying this. In fact many people have been ranting about it already, and there has been much muttering of oaths and rending of...bits in the comment threads. But I'm going to say it anyway, because it needs to be said. It needs to be said multiple times, by many people with different voices, and it needs to be stated from a number of angles including education.

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IMSH 2012 micro-SBL presentation

I just got back last night from IMSH 2012 where my colleague Terry Tao and I presented work by our team here at University of Wisconsin-Extension on a system for micro-Scenario Based Learning for nurse education. We're designing the system to be usable for other content areas as well.

San Diego was fantastic as usual and the conference was great. The image above is from the current prototype of the micro-SBL system which we demoed at the conference. If you click on the image you can download a copy of the presentation as a .pdf. Needless to say, the demo is not included in the .pdf.

Nested Communities of Practice #AERA2011

This post is a little delayed (as usual), but here are my slides from AERA. Notes and slides after the jump.

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More Slides About Game Design

Last week I had the pleasure of giving another guest lecture for Roxana Hadad's awesome online Game Design & Development course for  Year 10 students in the UK (they'd be freshmen in the American HS system). Last year I gave a talk to her students about genre, but this year I decided to change it up a bit seeing as genre isn't necessarily the most useful construct in actually designing games. Instead I presented the idea of approaching game design as an inquiry process (using the term inquiry loosely). If you click the image below, you can download my slides for the talk as a .pdf.

Sometime later this week I'll try to post some content explaining what each slide was about, although hopefully many of them are self explanatory. I should also note that I've got a ton of screen shots in here, and I continue to borrow Valve's TF2 fonts for these presentations. If anyone has a better attribution for something than the ones I've provided, do let me know.