Lessons from Arden

I wrote some time ago about the possibility of failure in attempting to develop serious games to teach academic subjects (Failures in GBL). The FutureLab Flux blog has a comment from Ted Castranova on another key issue - that developing good fun games, whether educational or not, may be several orders of magnitude more expensive than Universities can afford. The context here is his Arden: World of Shakespeare project which had to be scaled back from its original goals. Still a project well worth a look, however.

Broadband for All

The UK Schools minister announces vague plans to get broadband to every home with a child - and The Register notes the irony against the background of another minister recently blaming technology for drops in literacy and numeracy.

Oddly one of the key benefits being touted has nothing to do with student learning at all…

Online gaming and addiction

Some recent posts from Lisa Galarneau and discussion in Terranova, here and in this one which considers childrens’ MMOs. I’ve been thinking about this a little since my daughter got her Tamagotchi - and started visiting the (non-multiplayer) online ‘Tamagotchi Town’. She’s had the thing for a month and already seems to have forgotten what life was like before then.

I also finally got round to logging in to WoW - which I’ve avoided before as I know I don’t have the time to play it and because I know that I sometimes have difficulty controlling my own use of games once I get started - RPGs in particular, let alone MMO ones. One weekend later, and I’ve successfully proven to myself that I daren’t subscribe. I don’t want to turn into Cartman in that episode of Southpark.

Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games

A little off-topic, but I’m pleased to announce that a book I co-authored is soon to be published by IGI Global:

Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games

ISBN: 978-1-59140-646-4; 278 pp; November 2007

Published under the imprint Medical Information Science Reference (formerly Idea Group Publishing)

Authors: Darryl Charles, University of Ulster, Ireland and Colin Fyfe, Daniel Livingstone, and Stephen McGlinchey, University of Paisley, UK