Neurology of Gaming, Infographic « All Kinds of Minds As with most things, “gaming” (or being engaged in video games) has both positives and negatives when it comes to developing minds. Too much gaming, and the positive effects are overshadowed by the negative. Yet, the right balance can add another avenue for pursuing educational goals and achievement. As a result, more and more programs are using gaming to reach and teach students in ways they never could before. Therapy programs, schools, and even research scientists have all benefitted from the strategic use of games to increase successes. Below is an infographic from Online Universities looking at the brain on games. Image: Online University Like this: Like Loading...
Programming Methodology - Download free content from Stanford Making Computer Games Is Easy « Meditations on First Gaming Phil Well, not really. Obviously the process of actually making a real game is laboriously difficult and beset with more problems than you could ever presuppose (which is sort of the point), so difficult that any project of any size will find it hard to ever estimate how long their game will take to make. If we are talking man hours to actual end content making games is ludicrously difficult. So maybe we can say finishing a game is hard, but actually making one? As in, getting out a tech demo/general proof of concept and letting it evolve? Now that, well that isn’t that hard. Mario is a paradigm we all understand, controls and rules we are familiar with, so where ever the game wants to pull off its quirk (Time Travel! But that’s the thing. My premier theory for Why All Games Are Shit ™ (Alternatively: Why Gaming Isn’t An Art-form ™ or Why All Mainstream Games Are The Same ™) is that to ever get to the position in any studio that gets its works published you’d already have to A. Like this:
AVR GCC Tutorial (1) – Basic I/O Operations « Suhas's Blog My no frills programmer Atmel has come up with a whole range of superb AVR microcontrollers which are the dream of every hobbyist. However, the real icing on the cake is that these µControllers can be programmed with just a parallel port connector and nothing else!!!. However, Atmel µC’s have their downsides too. They have to be programmed in either Assembly or in C. There is one program – Bascom AVR – which reportedly allows programming in BASIC. I’ll attempt to give a brief introduction to basic I/O operations in C for AVR microcontrollers. First of all, you need a programmer to program. So, first make a simple programmer, test out the blinking LED program and then come back. PS: Your programmer doesn’t have to include all the header pins, a board etc, that Real Elliot has shown in his tutorial. Before starting, there are a few things i would wish to tell. What you should know before reading this tutorial: 2) I expect that you are reasonably comfortable with the C syntax. Running_LEDs.c
Welcome to Flow in Games Abstract | Introduction | Foundation | Design Flow in Games | Implement Flow in Games | Conclusion | Bibliography “TWENTY-THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness...” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) Motivation In the last 30 years, as a form of entertainment, video games have evolved from confined arcade activities into a mature media. Video games have deeply infiltrated our daily life and our society. As if toys expanded every child’s imagination, modern videogames take advantage of a player's active involvement to open more possibilities than any other existing mediums. However, video games are still recognized by the majority, who do not play video games, as shallow and aggression-provoking materials. Due to the nature of marketing and business, making video games purely for non-gamers is too risky and impractical. The quality and the budget of typical commercial video games today can easily reach over 20 million dollars.
Python Programming Language – Official Website Taekwan Kim's Blog - Validation Theory The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. Today, I’d like to propose a very basic idea: a consequence is a reward whenever it validates the player. Conversely, and more importantly, a consequence is a punishment whenever it invalidates the player. Simple, yes? If we take the premise as granted, however, a careful examination should produce some practical insights into how validation shapes player activity. Validation: The Source of All Rewards The pursuit of validation—objectively, the psychological result when reality matches schema; subjectively, the feeling that an investment (intellectual, emotional, material, etc.) has been justified—is one of those things that, because it so thoroughly and expansively permeates human behavior, largely escape our conscious awareness. Let’s consider a particularly negative possibility. Footnotes
RIAB Electronics - RIAB Electronics The Origins of Flow | Motivate. Play. - Aurora As a reader of MP, there's a decent chance that you're already familiar with the concept of "flow" championed by positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced like this, not this). If you aren't up to speed on it, fear not; I'll go into the details in just a moment. The notion is immensely popular among game designers and theorists, whether they want to leverage games' power to put us into a flow state to pursue social good, are using psychophysiological tools to quantify flow and keep players in it, or simply using it as the blueprint for good game design. But as much as the games community wants to take flow as its own, there's more to the story. I finally sat down and read Csikszentmihalyi's principal book on the topic, and the truth of the matter is that "flow" is much more than a gaming concept. The key realization, and the one Csikszentmihalyi is famous for, is that there's a sweet spot where challenge and skill are well-matched that he dubbed the "flow channel".
Ruby Programming Language The Philosophy of Game Design (part 1) The Escapist Magazine. If you've ever said that a videogame was "bad" for any reason - is evil, is nothing new, is too hard, is pretentious, is inaccessible, is sexist - in the performance of your royal duties as Grand Arbiter of Good Taste, then you also have to define and articulate what is a "good" game for us simple-minded folk. So, what makes a "good" game? Well, it all depends on whether you believe in absolute truth. For purposes of simplification, I will ignore all traditions of ancient philosophy that took place outside of Greece. Aristotle argued for a type of pluralism, where the purpose of a society was to ensure its individual citizens flourished (and by citizens, he meant only the small portion of Greek society that was the educated male land-owning military and gentry - sorry, women and slaves, no flourishing for you!) So, an Aristotelian philosophy of game design would presume the existence of a "citizen" - the hardcore gamer.
Games Some Struggles Teachers Face Using Games in the Classroom Lack of time and administrative support are just some of the obstacles to using games in the classroom. Continue Reading The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning explains key ideas in game-based learning, pedagogy, implementation, and assessment. Continue Reading How Digital Games Help Teachers Make Connections to Lessons and Students Teachers finding the most success are good at creatively connecting the game back to the curriculum, while allowing it to maintain the qualities of a good game. Continue Reading Video Games and the Future of the Textbook Curriculum designers are rethinking not only the textbook, but educational content delivery in general. Continue Reading Could Video Games Measure Skills That Tests Can’t Capture? Researchers are experimenting with playable tests capable of capturing learning in action. Continue Reading Screen Time That’s Valuable For Young Kids