Category Thoughts

Games of the Year 2018

So my New Year’s resolution is (once again) to blog more regularly. Rather than start with a rant about the state of the world in general, and Higher Education in the UK in particular, I’m going to keep this one…

Writing in the open

On Monday I had a paper deadline for a journal special issue. It wasn’t the final deadline but the only free day I had between then and the actual deadline in which I could write a first draft. Typically, I…

Some thoughts on failure and learning

I’ve been talking a lot over the last year about the importance of failure in learning, and how play can provide a context for that failure (summarized in this Conversation piece and this article in the Guardian by Andy Walsh). I have…

The resilient researcher

Is it just me, but in the last few years everything seems to have got really hard. It’s become particularly hard to get research funding, as the economic climate worsens and funds get squeezed, pots of money become more elusive…

Ian Bogost on Fun

I recently saw this video of Ian Bogost (of Persuasive Games fame) talk at UX Week 2013 about fun. He argues that ‘fun’ isn’t something that can be added to a task (a.k.a. the chocolate-covered broccoli model) but that it…

It’s about time

Yes, I’ve been painfully rubbish at maintaining this blog in recent months. Well that’s all going to change now. We’ve recently launched a new Masters Programme in Research with blogging as a core element. As we’ve been talking about the…