Category Thoughts

The pen is girlier than the sword

These recent Amazon reviews for BIC For Her Ballpoint Pens made me laugh and laugh, but there’s a serious point here too (leaving aside the whole ‘Really, BIC?’ question). If the feedback had simply been a series of rants/earnest comments/serious…

PlayThinkLearn Redux

Updates to this blog have been notably inconspicuous over the past eight months. This is primarily due to the arrival of Offspring #2 back in January, compete with sleepless nights, more poo than I care to remember, and general child-related…

Less is more in game design

Recently I’ve been working with a few different people designing games and game-based activities, and it struck me that one of the big mistakes that people make when trying to design a game for the first time is to over-complicate…

Can everything be a game?

The newly-formed Association for Learning Technology Special Interest Group on Games and Learning (more on this in a post coming soon) has just started a reading group. I thought I would use this group as an opportunity to write about…

Computer gamers and university

Interesting article in the guardian yesterday (via @mikedicks) discussing research that computer gamers are less likely to go to university. This research tracked 17,000 born in 1970 and looked at their likelihood of going on to get a degree, finding…