Category: Games
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The Games We Make Up About Ourselves: Interactive Narratives of Personal Transformation
I'm not a gamer, but a segment in last week's On The Media, Personal Video Games, inspired me on several levels, offering insights into the ways that game designers are utilizing their craft to enable others to more effectively relate to their personal trials and tribulations. I've long been fascinated with the stories we make…
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Virtual Reality, Somatic Cognition, Homuncular Flexibility and Object-Centered Sociality and Learning
Jaron Lanier recently wrote about virtual reality and its potential application to learning, utilizing some evocative terms and offering an educational scenario that reminds me of a seminal 1997 paper that described how a Nobel prize-winning biologist fused with her objects of study. The Saturday Wall Street Journal article gave me a keener appreciation for…
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Interactive Displays at Disney World
As I noted in my notes from UbiComp 2009, I missed a few sessions during the last day of the conference so I could explore more of Disney World, taking advantage of my free birthday pass to look for examples of how interactive displays were used to enhance guest experiences at Epcot Center. It felt…
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Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivations: Doing the Right Things for the Right Reasons
I was recently talking with a friend about the contrast between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and offered to send him an email with some of the inspiring things I've been reading about this topic lately. Having just blogged about mutual inspiration, and how blogging provides a channel for telling the stories we make up about…
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Influence in Digg Nation: Democracy, Meritocracy or Aristocracy?
There appears to be rising indignation in Digg nation over the perception that some users have undue influence in the ranking of articles posted in this popular "user driven social content website" (cf. articles at InformationWeek, Wired Blog, and Wikipedia, the last of which also notes that "diggnation" was one of the names originally considered…
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The Pervasiveness and Permeability of Games Worlds
The Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium this week highlighted the pervasiveness of games and raised a number of questions (for me) about the thin membrane between games worlds and so-called real life. I was also reminded of a number of themes I first encountered years ago in a delightful and insightful book, Finite and Infinite…