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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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