High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle 
The Last Moments Of GAME 
How Bad User Interfaces Are Ruining Video Games And Other Wonderful Things 
She Tried To Make Good Video Games For Girls, Whatever That Meant 
The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks 
Sunday Comics: Dead Island Composers working on video game soundtracks seem to either be veterans of game-making or TV/movie composers crashing the medium. Take note, then, of schools like Berklee Music College in Boston that just might train people to compose music for games.
“The Art History of Games”, a three-day public symposium devoted to investigating games as an art form, will be held in Atlanta in early February, followed by the month-long display of three commissioned art games.
The National Science Foundation has given two universities a million dollars to study whether video games can improve thinking skills in the elderly. They’re using Boom Blox in the research.
Some deep reading over on Gamasutra on game design and narrative (courtesy of Company of Heroes narrative designer Stephen Dinehart) could be my next graduate school adventure.
Jim Reilly forwarded news of the UConn interdisciplinary and interinstitutional initiative called < a href="http://vghvinet.ning.com/">The Video Games and Human Values Initiative, and I noted it on the Brainy Gamer blog as well. Spearheaded by the occasionally baffling Roger Travis, professor of classics at the University of Connecticut, it’s a pretty interesting idea — centering around discussion, courses, and bringing together a variety of us boring Ivory Tower types as well as any other interested parties to create a new forum for discussion:
Recently, some controversy has popped up regarding who owns the IP of student-created work; recent events with the award-winning creation of some graduates of DigiPen Institute of Technology have highlighted the problematic nature of what is somewhat par for the course in design programs. On the one hand, while I can see some of the arguments for schools retaining the IP (and certainly, the policies are clear to students from day one), I find some of the arguments downright laughable. With the recent kerfluffle, are policy changes on the horizon?:
Totally out of my academic purview, but it’s a really neat sounding conference: The research group Ludiciné (University of Montreal), the Research Group on the Creation and Formation of Cinematographic and Theatrical Institutions (GRAFICS) (also from the University of Montreal) and the NT2 Laboratory on Hypermedia Art and Literature (University of Quebec) are hosting a conference next year (in — surprise! — Montréal) on horror games. Proposals are due by January 15, 2009, and the conference will be held from April 23 to 25, 2009. So if you’re incubating a great paper topic on horror games, or are sitting on a paper that you haven’t had an academic outlet for, here’s your chance. Sounds pretty fun! More information can be found at the website, and the full call for papers can be found beneath the jump. [via GameSetWatch]
Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer has a nice reminder of why we play RPGs (well, those of us who play RPGs), based on some of his undergraduates’ writings on their experiences in Fallout 1 and 2. Michael notes that the exercise — writing autobiographies of their characters — is often used in theatre, but it never occurred to him that it would be useful for his students in his RPG seminar, until “we began discussing the characters they had created …. The sense of ownership they clearly felt, and their remarkably vivid descriptions of their experiences in the games, made the assignment a no-brainer.” Which goes to one of the reasons why people make the investment in RPGs:
I was recently discussing the mainstream media’s love affair with Second Life, and how the bloom appears to be off the rose. The Denver Westword News recently followed around a Denver University ‘media specialist’ who is working on SciLands, where NASA the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other scientific groups have a virtual outpost; while Jeff Corbin, the ‘media specialist,’ and other academics are practically beside themselves with the potentials for nuclear research in Second Life, the other side is presented:
Now others at [Denver University]seem to be paying attention. “Can you imagine if we really succeed, if we get twenty students into this laboratory to do physics experiments?” says Hill excitedly. “Putting them into a nuclear control room and letting them do things and destroy things and not letting them get hurt? Think of what this means. Imagine how powerful this can be for education.”
But not everyone was thrilled when the story hit the online newspaper Inside Higher Ed last year. “Second Life isn’t stable enough to test something that important,” one commenter wrote. “Why not make a program that will actually simulate that properly? Second Life doesn’t even stand up to normal ‘game’ quality. It can’t even properly simulate a car.”
Zing! The accessibility of Second Life is cited as a reason institutions are having ‘notable’ results with their virtual counterparts, but I’d be curious to know how ‘notable’ is being defined.
With help from the feds, a Denver scientist helps Second Life go nuclear [Denver Westword News via TerraNova]
Man, as a package, The Getaway sucked. But the driving parts, and the attention to detail in recreating London, those bits were pretty great, so it’s good to see they’re at last being put to good use by somebody. A modified version of the game’s driving aspect has been used by British scientists to study how London cabbies are able to find their way around the city’s winding streets. Their findings are all a bit scientific for our stimulus-soaked brains, but hey, we’re sure the surviving Team SOHO members are thrilled to bits regardless.
