Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Players Handbook
Indeed.
As far as faculty/professors are concerned, I’ve always considered myself pretty cool, but I’m beginning to suspect that my students think of me much in the way that I thought of my more… challenging professors. Apparently my grade distributions are second only to the “law” faculty in the department and my ability and indeed desire to stick to syllabilical requirements has become well known in only one short year. Damn right. All of that said, as someone who teaches game design and classes about the history and political-economy of the videogame industry, I still think I’m pretty hip. I may make you work, but at least the source material is cool, right? I tend to not “do” finals, as they are already overdetermined. As if you (my student) hadn’t managed to already make your bed throughout the semester, why on earth would I offer a single moment in which to redeem yourself? I’m a consistency person.
So, this spring I actually held finals, though they had no impact on grades, officially. To the one student who asked, “Can I leave? I have real final I need to get ready for.” You are on notice. Two classes, two very distinct finals. Continue reading »
Osy Osmosis
Well, it looks like I’ll be headed to the Game Education Summit this year, thanks to the NIH SEPA grant that I’m doing game design work for this summer. I’ll be bringing the latest build of Osy Osmosis [an early prototype build to the left] along with me. We should have our vertical slice completed by then and with any luck a build working on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is my hope to submit an NSF grant this summer to support my ongoing work on the project.
Work on the project is progressing well thus far thanks in large part to the artist and part time engineer working on the project. I’ve had to put my money where my mouth is as far as design goes, so we’ll see how that goes over the next couple of weeks and months. I think our vertical slice represents a pretty good sample of everything we’re attempting to put together for this game that happens to contain educational elements. I think it is a good example of what games with educational content could be. I shy away from calling it an educational game, because so often those games aren’t all that much fun. What I’ve attempted to do with this project is make the underlying game mechanics match up with real-world scientific processes. Instead of quizzing students though, we design the game such that “winning” requires that the player find and recognize that underlying model. We should be rolling this out to some teachers and students very soon as things move forward.
I suspect that in the end this particular component of the SEPA grant will hit a kind of 1St Playable state and remain there, as going into production and producing several levels for the game may not make sense. Perhaps it is an economic opportunity to take these kinds of 1st Playable pieces and flush them out, though I’m not sure who has time for that. 
