Category Thoughts

Time for a rant

Games get a hard enough time being taken seriously without rubbish like this being produced. It’s a ‘virtual fashion game’ aimed at 9-14 year old girls in which the aim is to “become the hottest, coolest most famous bimbo ever”.…

Gaming in schools

It’s good to see some really innovative gaming research, such as this small-scale study to look at the potential impact of using Nintendo DS consoles in primary schools to teach maths. When I was at a talk about this project…

Good in parts

For the past four days I’ve been on an NLP diploma course. As I blogged a while back, this is a recent area of interest for me, and one that I approach with a healthy scepticism. The low point of…

Your project sounds fascinating…

I’m back in York for another two-day project meeting (different project this time). Yesterday we had to sit through a presentation from each project at the meeting. All 28 of them. Fair enough, each had only 5 minutes and one…

I’m a SEAK, apparently

I’ve just been introduced to the work of Richard Bartle, inventor of the original multi-user dungeon, and the Bartle Test, which is used to analyse the personality types of MMORPG players. While the test itself would be unlikely to stand…

Stories from the front line

I spent a happy couple of hours this afternoon at two lectures, organised by the Computing & Mathematics department at MMU, on computer game design from the perspective of an industry professional, given by two speakers from Rare Games. First,…