Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 11:27PM I'll keep this short. As noted, this post includes spoilers. They are not plot spoilers. Mostly, they focus on the absolute failure and tragedy of game design which is the tower defense minigame in Assassin's Creed: Revelations.
Monday, October 3, 2011 at 11:30PM What are we in conflict with?
What are we actually striving for?
What do we fear?
What do we hope for?
How will it end?
Games design, video games, video games as art in Games Sunday, October 2, 2011 at 9:38PM I've tried to keep this installment on games and narrative shorter than the previous one, but I'm afraid I haven't been entirly successful. After all, this post dips into some pretty deep theoretical territory and you know how that goes. At any rate, this post starts with a conversation that happened on Google+ in a thread John Woodring started about gamification in education . At some point in the thread, Roger Travis and I drifted into a fairly theoretical conversation about games and narrative.
Agency, Games, JRR Tolkein, Roger Travis, Tadhg Kelly, narrative in Games Saturday, September 24, 2011 at 5:28PM The perennial "narrative in games" conversation has been in pretty high gear on the internets of late. I'm less interested in why the topic is popping up again with such regularity, and more concerned with trying to find some clarity on the topic so that we can move past rehashing ye olde ludology vs. narratology debate when we talk about what games are. I intend to resurrect some of the threads of that conversation in order to reconcile them with my own stance on games and narrative, but before I do that there's a little backfilling to do. For that reason, I'm going to proceed through a number of smaller posts on this topic (starting with this one) rather than dumping all of my thoughts on narrative and games in one massive wall of text.
David Antin, Story, narrative, video games in Games Friday, September 2, 2011 at 7:22PM If you're thinking about gamification in relation to your clients, workers, or students, you might want to start by asking yourself the following questions.
If you can't answer questions 1 and 3, then you are not prepared to consider gamification as an approach.
If the answer to question 5, 6, or 7 is no, then gamification is definitely not for you.
If you've answered question 2 without thinking it over seriously for at least a week, gamification is probably not for you.
Question 4 should require research and/or consulting. It can potentially take a very long time to answer this question.
gamification in Games 
