Set The World On Fire: Fate Of The World By Kieron Gillen on May 7th, 2010 at 2:30 pm. It’s a good day for the interview to go live, I think. I’ve been following Red Redemption’s global-future strategy game for a while and now – with its release on the horizon and its name settled, I thought it was time to talk to its charismatic founder Gobion Rowlands, Creative Director/Lead Designer Ian Roberts and MD/Producer Klaude Thomas about Fate of The World. Gobion Rowlands: In 2007 with the help of Myles Allan from the Oxford University Physics Department, we convinced the BBC to sponsor us to make a strategy game called “Climate Challenge” in Flash. The game was far more successful than we had hoped and eventually around a million people played the game. RPS: So – what was the next step? Gobion Rowlands: Two questions kept popping up: Why cover just 100 years and why just Europe, when there was an entire world to play with? So we switched to PC, which immediately felt like coming home to us. The approach is a bit of a mix actually.
Education, education, education — Bruce On Games December 19th, 2007 | Crystal ball There is already an article on here about this. Quite simply I believe that education will be the biggest area of video gaming. Gaming has a lot of advantages as an educational method. Of course gaming is already educating people, almost by accident. As in many things in this industry, it is Nintendo who are leading where the rest of the industry will follow. One small anecdote here is that the Codemasters military simulation game, Operation Flashpoint, was adopted for use by the US Marines. Eventually games will replace teachers as we know them. Once the bandwagon starts there will be created an immense range and depth of materials.
Innovate: Past Issues Classrooms are obsolete (and so are teachers) — Bruce On Games “Oh no” I can hear you say, an article about education. Boring. Yet it should be one of the most exciting things you can read about. We are massive consumers of education. I have watched our industry try to get into education for thirty years. Teachers, at best, think that games are chocolate coated broccoli. With proper game based learning it is very simple to keep a track of every student’s progress. It isn’t just goodbye to classrooms and teachers. But the people who stand to gain most are those with “learning difficulties” who just cannot get all the attention they need with current learning methods. So what are we going to do with all the teachers? Some educationalists who have a grasp of this seem to think that you still need a physical school. The next thing that is going to shock is that much education will end up being free. I would like to thank Nolan Bushnell and all the other speakers at the Game Based Learning 2009 conference for stimulating my thoughts on this subject.