Tag: Gaming
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Is there a future for artisan MMORPGs?
I’ve been playing Star Wars:The Old Repuiblic lately, to see what the state of the art in MMORPG is, and its ok, but as a long time tabletop RPG gamer, it is not very satisfying. I can get lost in it, occasionally, but I’m a bit fed up picking up 7 credits and a pinch…
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Theory=Model=Game
Neil Ferguson‘s mis-adventures in gaming are highlighted on Richard Mehlinger’s blog on HASTAC in a a post which reinforces the dangers of non-gamers getting swept up by the gee-whiz of digital games. I’ve always been wary of digital games for teaching, which is why I’ve always used old fashion non-digital game play and design in my history…
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Gaming Reality History
Teaching contemporary International Relations with in-class simulations is sometimes challenging when the simulation scenario may be radically changed by what is happening in the real world, but that is the challenge my HI3112 International Organisations students are dealing with this week in this terms conference game on the Horn Of Africa/Arab Spring. “Upstairs” literally as well as figuratively, the MA class are dealing with the problems of designing a…
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Reworking Courses 2011
The best time to plan next years courses is right after this year’s end and I am already sketching out some revisions to my options for the coming year. Some old assessments are going, some new stuff is in and one course is going in reverse.
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Games in Three Parts
Good computer games should come in three parts. I don’t mean in terms of gameplay, I mean in terms of architecture. Well designed business client-server applications have three main parts, database, business rules and front end client, but many games are driven mainly by the graphical front end, and munge up the other two parts…
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Facebookedu?
Are elements of those silly Facebook quizzes and games potentially useful for teaching, at some level? I tend to ignore them, but a comment just now started me thinking about the possibilties. Sam, one of my students, took “What mode of production are are you?” and came out as Feudalism (which some people would think…
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Scrabulous and intellectual “Property Rights”
There is no doubt that Hasbro owns the IP on Scrabble, and are within their rights to force Scrabulous off Facebook, but legal rights don’t always make things right. If I ever create something worth loadsamoney, I would like my childern and probably grandchildren to enjoy some of the windfall, but I’m not impressed with…
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Medieval Mobile Boring?
For game that does so much well at the tactical level, Medieval Total War on mobile phones is very disappointing as a strategic game. Clearly, the team who ported the PC game to the J2ME platform have a very good hexmap based, IGUO engine for fighting pre-modern battles, but the strategy and diplomacy end is…
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A cohort is a battalion…
“That bad, huh?” the brother said when I slapped down Phil Sabin’s Lost Battles on the table in the campus Starbucks as he joined me for coffee yesterday. Actually, it is not bad at all – far from it. It is a good book, the product of many years of careful scholarship, and a useful…
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Wargame Design Class
I just finished marking the wargame design exercise which I set my War, State & Society class to do as a group exercise for their coursework which was doubly mean because it was (a) not a regular boring old essay so they had to think about it and (b) required them to work in groups…
