The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World eBook: William Sims Bainbridge Adora's Blog Everything Bad is Good for You eBook: Steven Johnson The Guild Counsel: Can guilds save the economy? Wait! Before you hit that comment button about the absurdity of the title above, hear me out! A few weeks ago, I stumbled on a video that touched on this very topic, and I felt it was a perfect discussion point for this column. The video is actually titled How World of Warcraft could save your Business and the Economy, and it's a commentary by John Seely Brown that's part of a series called Big Think. What Seely Brown argues is that he'd prefer to hire an expert World of Warcraft player over someone who graduated from Harvard with an MBA, and he goes on to explain why businesses can learn from the way top players and guilds function in game. It's worth noting that in the video, John Seely Brown is talking about player practices and behaviors compared to common business practices. But he adds that guilds are not just self-organizing groups. Learning and fun Furthermore, there is a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. Get the job done
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition: James Paul Gee: 9781403984531: Amazon.com “History Is Our Playground”—Using Assassin’s Creed III and other videogames for education | Albion Pleiad By Travis Trombley Imagine one of those high school days when your history teacher (and probably basketball coach, because history teachers are, for some reason, often involved with school sports) lacks any will to teach and resorts to forcing upon you some history-related film like The Patriot. You may know these days better as nap-days. But what if, one day, instead of movies, your lazy teacher told you to play a video game? This beautiful future may not be too far off. October 30th marks the release of Assassin’s Creed III, the fifth* console installment of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed videogame series. The third-person, action-adventure Assassin’s Creed games boast a record of recreating historical eras, cities, characters, and events as settings for their fictional war between the Assassins and the Templars. “You will visit these places in the moment that they were important, and hopefully, experience why we know where they are today.” What do you think? Photo courtesy of IGN.com
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter eBook: Tom Bissell BronSt : Goats helping goats the... Imaginary Games eBook: Chris Bateman An Hour of Video Games a Day Can Be Good for Kids, According to Study A new study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics finds that playing video games for up to an hour a day can be beneficial for 10- to 15-year-olds. “Electronic gaming and psychosocial adjustment,” believed to be the largest study of its kind, was carried out by Oxford University and examined the positive and negative effects of video gaming on a representative sample of 5,000 UK children and teenagers. It found that a little gaming goes a long way to helping children feel well adjusted, when compared with 10- to 15-year-olds who don’t partake of console games at all. Children who play console or computer games for up to an hour a day were the most likely to express satisfaction with their lives, had the highest levels of sociability, and appeared to have fewer friendship, emotional, or hyperactivity issues than other subjects in the study. However, there appears to be a tipping point. The study’s author, Dr.
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World eBook: Jane McGonigal For the Win, by Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com Last updated Nov 20, 2012 This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means: You are free: to Share -- to copy, distribute and transmit the work to Remix -- to adapt the work Under the following conditions: Attribution. See the end of this file for the complete legalese. For the Win is my second young adult novel, and, like my 2008 book Little Brother, it is meant to do more than tell a story. I hope that readers of this book will be inspired to dig deeper into the subjects of "behavioral economics" (and related subjects like "neuroeconomics") and to start asking hard questions about how we end up with the stuff we own, and what it costs our human brothers and sisters to make those goods, and why we think we need them. But it's a poor politics that can only express itself by choosing to buy or not buy something. This is the golden age of organizing. I'm pretty bummed about this. Dedication:
An Introduction to Game Studies: Frans Mayra: 9781412934466: Amazon.com Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames eBook: Mia Consalvo