Wednesday
Feb152012

Hominid motions (post in progress)

This is a blog post that really requires a diagram, but I want to get it out now while I'm thinking about it so I'll revise it later with some images and what not. I've been considering hominid motions in games and in particular controlling human shaped charcters from the third person perspective.

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Saturday
Feb112012

Video games are not a monolithic medium

Video games are not a monolithic medium. I've said this before and I'll probably have to keep on saying it for at least a few years. In the meantime I've been wanting to get a blog post up to point people to when any of the myriad issues that come back to this simple fact pop up. This is that post.

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Wednesday
Feb012012

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.

Monday
Jan092012

AC: Revelations and la vita assassino (spoilers)

Jumping from roof top to roof top, hiding in shadows or hanging patiently from ledges, uncovering the secrets of an ancient brotherhood, leading a cabal of highly skilled killers, and of course exeucting targets using a range of tools and techniques...This is the assassin lifestyle, and it is this experience that I believe Assassin's Creed: Revelations (as well as the other games in the series) aspires to grant the player...

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Thursday
Jan052012

Ideation and Game Designers

There's a common refrain from many successful game designers when it comes to the topic of ideas. You've probably heard it before. It takes several forms including "Ideas are cheap." "Ideas are worthless, it's all about execution." "No one's interested in your game idea." "Game design isn't about ideas." The list goes on. Game designers as pundits are often pretty down on ideas. As a researcher, I've been trying to puzzle out exactly why this is...

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