… to create an “educational game” for the Nobel Prize’s website. Apparently. I’m just sayin’, is all. If anyone’s recently seen educational game design that’s less relevant to the subject matter being taught, and gameplay which is less compelling, I want to see it. And then I want to pit it against these games in a steel cage match. Hopefully none will survive.
I can’t believe I spent a childhood in Pasadena and never read anything by Octavia Butler:
She told him of the messages she had read within the flesh of the fish. “Messages as clear and fine as those in your books,” she told him. Privately she thought her flesh-messages even more specific than the books she (sic) had introduced her to, read to her from. But the books were the only example she could think of that he might understand. “It seems that you could misunderstand your books,” she said. “Other men made them. Other men can lie or make mistakes. But the flesh can only tell me what it is. It has no other story…. My body reads it — reads everything.”
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On old buddy Roger’s advice, I went out today to see the movie Accepted before it left the theaters for good. ZOMG, check it out, he said. It’s completely about Hampshire. I had gotten that vibe from the trailers, in which a dude, who looks suspiciously like the Saturday Night Live actor in the sketches about Hampshire, starts his own college. The movie got lukewarm reviews, but I gave it a shot.
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… grand theft yadda yadda… dance dance doodlydoo… pac manhammina… and other pointless game-title-memes we should abandon… the biff! pow! sock! phenomenon… one of these days it’ll be an art form that nobody bats an eye at anymore. like film. you’ve heard of “film,” right? full disclosure, I saw one of those once. sheesh ;)
The Harper’s Magazine back-to-schoolmarmishness issue this year consists of a panel discussion on video games, literacy, and education… and guess who doesn’t appear in the discussion at all. Despite this oversight, the article has sparked some very lively blog interlinkage among various people whose opinions I respect, among them Raph Koster and my classmate Ulises Mejias. The following is my response to the article, and to comments that appear on Ulises’s site.
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For those of you who often find yourselves wondering how the hell it is that people make their way around the Internet without ever reading their search results, I suggest you go to AOL’s database of search results from specific users which it recently put up online, and search for number 711391. It’s a magnificent case study in how some people use search engines. What I want to know is how and why they come to use them this way; I know my own use of search strings is significantly different. (For one thing, I don’t feed search engines my cries for help, or even questions worded as such.)
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