I'm still on a semi-enforced vacation from academia, but I couldn't resist reading some of the essays found on electronic book review. The essays are a selection from two MIT Press books, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. There are a bunch of interesting essays (and some not-so-interesting ones, I'm sure), on topics ranging from IF to WoW to more general ruminations on narrative, stories, gaming in general:

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Henry Jenkins runs the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program at MIT. He also blogs more words per day than Kotaku. Over at his eponymous website, Jenkins has been posting articles about the various serious games projects MIT CMS students have undertaken over the years.

Titles covered include Revolution, a game about life in colonial Williamsburg; a series of handheld augmented reality games; Backflow, about the environmental issues of sewage; and Labyrinth, a game about math literacy.

Each post about the games includes a comprehensive article detailing its design and learning goals.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming [Henry Jenkins]

In the great tradition of decades of "hacks" (us, non-collegiate types call them pranks), the folks at MIT snuck into Harvard Yard on the day of the Halo 3 launch and dressed book-donor John Harvard up as the Master Chief, complete with a fancy Spartan Helmet and Battle rifle. What amazes me is how they manages to make the additions look like they were made of the same material as the statue.

Halo 3 John Harvard [Thanks Jeremy and everyone else who sent in tips]