Play’s Republic

A new company, Serious Games Interactive, is breaking onto the scene with Global Conflicts: Palestine, a game designed to educate players about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The gamer plays as a journalist reporting on the surrounding events. Various actions increase or decrease your “trust” (in WoW, this is known as “reputation”) with the two […]

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Updated!
Stephen E. Jones is a professor of English at Loyola in Chicago, where he’s just finishing up an undergrad seminar on “Video Games and Textual Studies.” It is an undergrad class, so the reading load is considerably lighter, but the syllabus still makes for interesting (comparative) reading. Be sure to check out the […]

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Here is a soup of symbols for those of you crazy for meaning making.   
Just Cause was released in 2006 about a specialist in “regime change.” (marketing magic = much nicer than mercenary and much less inflammatory than revolutionary.)  Here is the product description:
 
“In Just Cause, you take on the role of the flamboyant Rico Rodriguez - […]

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Digital Games versus Video Games…
Is there a difference in terms? A wrong or right one? What do people think?
For my final, I think I’m essentially arguing for an academic focus on “digital play” instead of “digital games”, but I want to make sure I’m using the terms properly. It seems like people are calling them […]

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After looking at sexuality and video games, I got a little curious about what conservative religious groups are doing with video games. I imagine there’s some controversy over material appropriateness etc, but I also imagine that there are several conservative religious organizations creating their own material.
In God in the Console (2003), Tom Loftus argues that […]

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…looking over the shoulder of the person in front of me, as she is logged into second life, in the NMC ampitheatre and watching the panel in second life. (in addition to being here herself) There’s about 10 people hanging out there, watching the panel.
I just thought that was cool.

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Salon has an interesting article up at the moment on the representation of multiple sexualities in video games. Apparently there’s been quite a bit of internal debate on whether to allow players of an upcoming Lord of the Rings game the option for same sex marriage. It seems like much of the debate was over […]

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Henry Jenkins made a post about the conference on his blog yesterday. It has details on the topics of the plenaries, and the addresses. Check it out here if you are interested:
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/04/media_in_transition_5_creativi.html

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So, I’m at the MIT conference at MIT ( http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/ ) and they just announced that the 6 plenary sessions will be simulcast within Second Life at the New Media Consortum site (find it through search or http://www.nmc.org/ I believe, they did not give SLURL’s unfortunately, I’ll post ‘em as I get ‘em)
Webcasts/podcasts for […]

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