The Game Jam is Still Going

6:30 aM - Sunday morning and the groups are doing good work. They have plans on the chalk boards and tasks are actually crossed out. Whew. One group has a (hand drawn and awesome looking) dinosaur skeleton in their background and it's called Jimmy's Crusade. The other group has a game name now - Pardoxical Irony.

The rooms look lived in - there are pillow and cups and RedBull cans and chip bags laying around. We even have one person asleep! (well - there were 2 but i got up a couple of minutes ago)

And here are people hard at work.

 

Sunday Noon - people are dragging. Turns out overnight both groups scrapped a lot of their code and came at their ideas in different ways. For one group it seems to be working out (Paradoxical Irony). The other group is having some issues. But nobody's throwing chairs or cussing more than normal. Jimmy's Crusade is pretty sure they lost the fun somewhere. We'll see here in 90 minutes. The art guys are cranking out some interesting assets - dinosaur and lunchboxes, water and animated fire. Here are some pictures from noonish.

What I read this summer

the 2nd Mass Effect book
the 1st Resident Evil book
the 1st Doom3 book
Monopoly by Philip Orbanes

Hard Core Diaries by Mick Foley
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
Anonymous Rex by Greg Garcia
Empire by Orson Scott Card

Child's Play Charity

This Child's Play charity effort organized by the folks at Penny Arcade would be a good thing for a videogame student group to work on once the major gets started. It's respected and well-known int he industry and it would just be fun.

Here's a story from Wired about the 2008 efforts

The FCC talks about videogame addiction

Check out this blog post from Alley Insider - a board member of the FCC has pronounced that people are becoming addicted to WOW and that's making them drop out of college in droves. There's a link ot the FCC doc as a pdf file.

First - why in the world is the FCC involved with WOW? They don't have enough to do with melamine contaminated baby food? Talk about mission creep. Well - some kind of creep, that's for sure.

Second - bad research - there's never just one variable that explains anything involving human behavior. The comments point out that tuition increases are through the roof and that having a college education no longer guarantees a good career. Also very good explanations for why folks drop out of college. And my favorite explanation - a lot of people in college shouldn't be there in the first place so they get weeded out.

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Interesting blog post

from an indie game developer on what it really means to be an indie game developer - he gets to do a little of everything (he's the only full time employee of his company) including talking to the media and promoting his games. There's a discussion of distribution channels and the current state of the casual games market.

Blog: NotesonGameDev.net, post written by Andy Schatz

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The Flow Guy

Here's a video of a talk from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at TED (tech, education, entertainment conference with lots of speakers over the years. He's talking about flow which is an idea we're going to discuss in game design class and in the fun and games senior seminar.

We now have an immense amount of videogame stuff

Image via WikipediaOk - it seems like an immense amount to me at this point. I'm going to make a list and then eventually i'll get a picture of our amazing educational tools (games!!!)

Hardware
- 2 XBOX360 Pros with 20 gig hard drives
- 2 PS2 (yes ps2's, not ps3's, they're coming) - more games for the ps2
- 5 PSPs
- 5 DS (variety of colors)
assorted memory cards and cases

Software
For the DS (nintendo has a bunch of online manuals
- Final Fantasty III
- Super Mario Brothers
- Professor Layton - hre is the pdf of the actual manual
- Nintendogs - here are directions and the PDF of the actual manual
- Harvest Moon
- Brain Age
- Big Brain Academy

For the PSP
- God of War
- Patapon
- Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

For the Wii
- Zelda Twilight Princess
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
- Boom Blox
- Super Mario Galaxy
- Okami

For the PS2
- Singstar 80s (with 2 microphones and music that doesn't make my ears bleed)
- Buzz The Mega Quiz with 4 controllers
- Resident Evil 4
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
- Indigo Prophecy
- Shadow of the Colossus

For the XBOX360
- Halo3
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
- Bioshock
- The Orange Box (half life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal
- Mass Effect

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