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Category Archives: Design
A New Beginning (Blog Migration)
After years of virtuallearningworlds.com being hosted by hostmysite.com, I’m migrating over to our University’s WordPress install. I often neglected the upgrades to WordPress when managing my own install, so I’m hoping by offloading the work I can get back to … Continue reading
Diablo 3 Hero Design: Evolution of Skill Trees
Like most gamers out there, I’m in the midst of slaying hordes of demons in Blizzard’s highly anticipated Diablo 3. I was around for the original Diablo, and also spent a great deal of time in Diablo 2, so you can … Continue reading
Posted in Design
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Orcs and Scaffolding
It’s really no secret that games are great at scaffolding. Video games, at the most basic level, are nothing more than very complex pieces of software. You, the gamer, need to learn how to operate (in this case, play) the … Continue reading
Posted in Design, Games
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IST 446 Prototypes
Some of my students sent me descriptoins and screenshots of their games from the Spring 2011 section of IST 446 that I taught. Overall, I was very pleased with the course and received a lot of great feedback. When I … Continue reading
Posted in Design, Games, Teaching
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Games that Change Behaviors
One of the primary reasons educators get excited about video games is the ability of games to change player behaviors. From an educator’s perspective, changing behaviors is one of the most difficult challenges we face when, say, we teach a … Continue reading
Posted in Design, Games
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Little Big Planet 2 and IST 446
This semester, I’ll be teaching a course on game design and development, IST 446. The primary assignment (or rather, string of team based assignments) takes teams of students through the inception, design, iteration and prototyping of an actual game. Or … Continue reading
Posted in Design, Games, Learning
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Privates!
I wrote about the game Privates in May, hoping that Microsoft would pass it for XBLA. No news from Microsoft about the game passing internal tests, but the game is available for free via Channel 4’s website. After spending 30 … Continue reading
Posted in Design, Educational Technology, Games
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Lego Universe
I remember hearing years ago that a Lego MMO was in the works, dubbed Lego Universe. Being a huge Lego fan as a kid, and still playing with Legos with my nieces, I felt this was a fantastic idea. But … Continue reading
Posted in Design, Virtual Worlds
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Innovations in MMOs
Some interesting times to be in the MMO space these days. Like usual, many companies are embarking on MMO projects (and if history is any indication, many will likely fail). BUT…some of the projects have the potential to really push … Continue reading
Posted in Design, Games, Virtual Worlds
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Jane McGonigal kick
For the last week or so, while sitting at my desk over lunch, I fired up some talks by Jane McGonigal from the Institute for the Future. I attended one of Jane’s talks several years ago at the Game Developer’s … Continue reading
Posted in Design, Games
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