Play’s Republic

I would like to share the findings of a study that I read about in New York Mag this weekend. A disclaimer: the study is directly related to education but it is only loosely related to games.
Anyway, a Columbia University psychologist studied the effects that praise has on a child’s achievement. […]

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I found a story this morning that has nothing to do with either teaching or learning in video games. But I’m going to do everything I can to try and make it connect.
A group of Second Life players who have labelled themselves as the Second Life Liberation Army (SLLA) […]

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here are random thoughts which ideally should have been posted separately and written more coherently - but I am playing catch-up.
Thought #1  I will take another crack at convincing you that you don’t create magic circles, you just enter someone else’s - or in other words, we live in a world of concentric magic […]

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As he lays out his argument for video games as semiotic domains of active learning and fluid subjectivities, James Paul Gee, in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, makes frequent reference to Pikmin, a 2001 release for the Gamecube from Nintendo, designed by the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto.
The following Youtube clips […]

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This, from the washingtonpost.com:
Tenleytown’s Fantom Comics, best known as a place to stop in for graphic novels, is now hosting midnight video game parties on Saturday night with snacks and drinks. There will be different games and systems every week on the shop’s 42-inch plasma TV, and tonight’s vintage selection is Street Fighter, and the […]

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A few recent articles:
The Nerd Auteurs: A video slide show
By Michael Agger
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007, at 12:10 PM ET

Over the past 24 hours, I have seen a night elf and a dwarf compete in a “dance-off.” I have seen an Arab guerilla force overwhelm American soldiers in an Iraq-like setting. I have seen Princess […]

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Just FYI:  Our site (and thousands of others) will be offline and entirely unavailable this Saturday February 24th from roughly 4AM to 9AM.  If you’re like me, and spend Saturday mornings doing work on your laptop at the Mocha Hut, you’ll want to plan ahead.

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One of the many things we didn’t discuss Tuesday is the play epitomized by pre-Lenten carnival, a week-long festival that figures heavily in the lives of folk in many countries, especially in Latin America, the Caribbean, and even some regions in West Africa.  Carnivals typically culminate, as on Tuesday, in a day devoted to the annihilation […]

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During one of our previous classes, I recall that we touched a little bit upon what happens to games when they’re brought over from one country to the other. More specifically, there was some talk about how translations of text are handled, whether it’s something as simple as the literal meaning, nods or in-jokes that […]

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