exactly what I have no interest in doing

I took one of them and tossed it under the table, telling her not to worry about it. Problem solved.

In these instances, and in the case of playing 7 Wonders, I eventually got really bored and stopped listening.

I have found that I am more successful being taught one-on-one.

Accumulating resources quickly enough to buy materials and to be able to build was the only strategy that I could discern.

civilization

but I understand the basic premise as well as the components of play, even if I'm not yet able to grasp any strategies that would help me to win.

After all, not being able to make a living or pay your rent isn't necessarily romantic, glamorous or emancipating.

Some scholars emphasize that mainstream notions of design and play value ideals that are actually quite gendered: difficulty, complexity, time-consuming play that is "hardcore" and inherently masculine:

Popularity, however, can be defined by a variety of measures.

and pretty mundane

the tutorial itself playfully congratulates users on being "radical".

queering takes place when the definition of success is expanded and altered to encompass different ideas and possibilities, including what some might consider failure.

to the "queering of game design" to mean measures of success that are alternative to money, scalability, popularity, name recognition, awards, and other trappings of what traditionally constitutes success.

the risk of economic hardship and delegitimization increases the more an activity operates outside of conventional norms.

a free, open, accessible game design platform such as Twine encourages users to expand - or democratize - the definition of what games are, who they are for, and how they can be created.

using the application Twine

dedicating a volume of GAME to subcultures

when one must learn a game in order to learn the topic being studied

I even sent a couple of questions through twitter that were quickly answered.

by how enjoyable the experience of playing Exploding Kittens with my professor and classmates was

and it’s a bit too early to come to any conclusions

one must admit that their emotional state affects their ability to learn

it seems we teach in ways that have the opposite effect.

and we read quite a bit about language acquisition and learner anxiety, including Krashen’s Affective Filter hypothesis (Lightbown & Spada, 2013, p. 106).

decreasing learning anxiety

as I don’t have a desire to play games

And that is “In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.”

to relax and be themselves.

Effective team members were skilled at intuiting how others felt by tone of voice, as well

Healthy group norms include good communication and empathy

including work and social activities

to yet another collective is a bit confusing.

permitting me the latitude to have a go at it.

and just refused to turn me loose

the same idea may be true for humans: if we expose our brains to a broader range of spaces and richer experiences, we can improve our cognition and even slow its eventual decline.

how people who play video games might actually be much better at some tasks than those who don’t.

Right now, Clemenson and his colleagues are testing how gaming could help aging populations slow cognitive decline. Using games like Minecraft and Super Mario 3D World, they’re hoping to find out whether video games that give players a virtual version of “environment enrichment” can do just as much as the real thing.

Angry Birds (a 2D game) or Super Mario 3D World (a 3D game), while a third group played nothing

I am now examining my son more closely as he “learns through play” and trying to somehow relate this to learning as an adult.

I already have my article picked out for my critique and it examines the use of a board game on the administrative side academia

maybe I need to rethink my gamification, and turn it into an actual game

however I still want to learn if we can apply these principles to other disciplines such as STEAM.

How do we use games in higher education?

I’ve experienced joy in pride in teaching others to play my favorite game, frustrations in learning a new game and getting most of the rules wrong, and observing others learn from each other in a casual setting.

I’ll try again next year.

and I hope I contributed to them

I was very uncomfortable in the first Twitter chat that I joined.

Frequent interactions with my classmates allowed me to tap into their expertise, and learn from them as well as learning from the text.

because the game is just not that engaging for me.

they were simply learning tools

but it was obvious that the game designers felt like the girl character needed to be showing more skin / sexuality than the boy

and why is this so obvious in a game directed at such a young audience?

I noticed that the female non-playable characters were all wearing short skirts, while the male non-playable characters wore long pants

While playing the game I remained cognizant of how female characters were being portrayed.

a Pokémon type chart

This game had something new that others didn’t, it lets you know when you’ve acquired all the Pokémon on a certain route. I could not continue until I caught them all.

mostly because of this week’s reading topic

In spirit of Pokémon’s 20th anniversary (February 27, 2016) I am playing Pokémon Alpha Sapphire on a Nintendo 3DS for this cycle’s play journal.

are proven educational effectiveness and overall impact on student learning outcomes.

of the transfer of knowledge

This would align with the assumed character/ narrative that exists.

Just the observation of a child using another skilled player as a resource as opposed to utilizing the programs "tutorial", gives the player more control over how she learns to play the game, rather be directed by the software.

How this question is answered could, in a sense, direct the overall development of the educational gaming market.

to applied practice in the classroom

"Bring Your own Device" policies at school.

If gaming literacies, levels the playing friend, providing equitable learning opportunities, how can we more effectively recruit students to be apart of that team?

What are the ongoing implications of STEM/ STEAM development using gaming principles in the classroom?

tudents in the "clubhouse" likely were able to work with one another to support them.

STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and math) studies in the K-12 arena

that apply to technically creative career paths in design and media.

I want to see what people have to say about why they might stop playing, as well as what brings them back to the game (and, apparently, the affinity space).

Mods appear to be a big part of the gaming experience with KSP

 I’m actually really into the development notes, which they try and release weekly – the notes are a good insight into the overall communication lines between the “game” (i.e., the people who are responsible for the base game) and the community at large.

People are generally ready to cheer each other on, which gives forums a positive vibe

 I look forward to exploring them more when I have a better understanding of terminology and game mechanics.

reliably ended in me nose-diving a space ship into the ground.

using the KSP Wiki, starting with the parts page

Well, I can’t say that I’m now a rocket scientist

that works with people’s interests rather than trying to force them a certain direction with a lot of flash and sleight of hand.

(I did, by the way, think that Bogost’s longer chapter from The Gameful World was really helpful for a deeper reading).

 I plan on utilizing some broader search methods and also tapping my peer network to see if anyone has good leads on where to find well-constructed research in this area.

and I think this lends itself to stronger, more open conversation.

need to figure out some new strategies for staying on top of it, but I’m feeling please with the experience and challenged in a constructive way.

Surprisingly… most of the time, it feels pretty good.

 I traveled downtown to join members of my cohort in playing a game

All of these things are rarely typical for people to experience while attending a lecture, or doing homework, or sitting in a classroom quietly writing.

are used for adult learning

Both types of reflective play session practices resulted in better understanding of the games we studied.

“In Game, In Room, In World,” captured the “multiplicity” of settings and how games and learning is situated by social context.

would not have been achieved by use of LMS discussion or solitary engagement with texts.

This drives the discussion forward in a way I’ve never experienced before and in a way that was motivating to engage with a text.

to annotate a live document.

without really being totally cognizant.

Perhaps it’s more important to teach students how to critique cultural artifacts, such as a video game, rather than to passively engage with it?

That’s why “gender neutral” games often times offer the best possible learning scenario without biases.

can be sexist (among many other negative things)

however these portrayals may be the result of systemic sexism in society as a whole and gender roles and identities crafted and perpetuated by consumer culture, religions, governments, educational institutions, sports, etc.

As games are considered by many a form of art, like film, can portray extremely sexist depictions.

For starters, game developers may employ more females as part of their development team. Or provide equal play testing scenarios for both men and women in order to assess a game’s appeal to both sexes.

Assuming it’s the intent of the developers to make the highest possible monetary return on the product.

genders

if I can connect the dots between gender and videogames

works by Ian Bogost

1:20 / 16:23

0:39 / 16:23

GamerGate

who use it as an educational tool for their kids

Police responded by stating that they would not do any type of screening whatsoever for firearms because of Utah's concealed-carry laws

the UC Santa Barbara shootings committed by Elliot Rodger this past May

It's a common language that we can use to talk about these larger societal and social concerns.

will hopefully help to inspire more creative writing

We can be critical of the things that we love. That is possible. 

It's straightforward textual analysis. I'm looking at patterns and presenting evidence and arguments to back up those claims.

but I didn't know how to explain it.

It was my way of pulling feminist theory out of academia into a more public space for a wider audience.

she canceled a speaking engagement at Utah State University after an anti-feminist detractor threatened a mass shooting when police refused to search attendees for weapons, citing the state's concealed-carry law.

We have big blockbuster films every year that are the same stories recycled over and over again.

the Montreal Massacre at Ecole Polytechnique

I’ve had this argument about whether it was “technically” rape

we are not fucking Mario racing to the castle to beat Bowser because we know there’s a princess in there waiting for us.

I’ve heard it come out of my own mouth, in moments of anger and weakness.

their inner John Galt

Like life is a video game and women, like money and status, are just part of the reward we get for doing well.

How much longer are we going to be in denial that there’s a thing called “rape culture” and we ought to do something about it?

So what happens to nerdy guys who keep finding out that the princess they were promised is always in another castle?

Although seldomconsidered in conjunction with action gameplay, meditative activities such as mind-bodytraining and eastern relaxation technique alsoact in part by enhancing selective attention(Lutz et al. 2008, Tang & Posner 2009).Whether these two rather different treatmentsachieve their effects through comparableneural modulation may be a fruitful avenue ofinvestigation in the future.

When the practice of annotation moves into the open – and becomes social and networked – should a formative and self-directed practice become a means for summative assessment? I think not.

they actually teach gamers to learn

But the positive effects are almost completely neglected

Lumosity preyed on consumers’ fears about age-related cognitive decline, suggesting their games could stave off memory loss, dementia, and even Alzheimer’s disease," Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “But Lumosity simply did not have the science to back up its ads

I anticipate continued ambiguity, confusion, and even frustration as we (re)shape this mashup of more formal academic discussion facilitation with informal and emergent social annotation.

Certainly I referenced my notes when writing a paper.

graduate students

the enhanced attentional controldocumented earlier is not, in this view, theproximal cause of the superior performanceof VGPs, i.e., an end in and of itself. Instead,it is a means to an end, with that end beingthe development of more generalizable knowl-edge as one is faced with new tasks or newenvironment

It is not always the casethat VGPs show greater suppression of dis-tractors. Rather, distractor processing appearsto be greater in VGPs than in NVGPs underconditions of relatively low load. Under suchconditions, task difficulty is sufficiently low forVGPs to remain efficient on the primary taskand at the same time still be able to processdistractors

Although some of thesebenefits could be driven initially by changesin resources, the fact that they can last forfive months or longer suggests more profoundand long-lasting changes in representationthan what is typically afforded by attentionalresource

much evidence demonstrates thataction video game play leads to not only en-hanced resources, but also a more intelligentallocation of these resources given the goals athand.

VGPs may better employ exec-utive strategies to reduce the effects of distrac-tion.

It is unlikely that action game play to-tally obliterates the attentional blink, but thesedata suggest a much faster rate of attentionalrecovery in VGPs.

VGPs’ blink is much lesspronounced, with some VGPs failing to showany blink

VGPs continued to show effects of flanker iden-tity even for relatively high-load target tasks,thus suggesting the presence of greater atten-tional resources.

simple flanker compatibility tasks

increasingly higher levels of behav-ioral abstraction being coded as one moves fromcaudal to rostral locations along the prefrontalcortex

the abil-ity to enhance neural processing selectively byallocating more resources is central to behav-ior optimization, but it depends fundamen-tally on an internal understanding of whichneural pool is important to augment at eachpoint in time

In contrast, appropriate abstractionallows hierarchical architectures to captureregularity across variations in task and stimuli.

Learning theory hasshown that discriminative models require lessdata to learn the observed relationships butare task specific

hierarchicalarchitectures

machine learning

hierarchical architecture in human action

Finally, having greater resourcesdoesnotsystematicallyguaranteemoreefficientlearning; resource allocation needs to be guidedby the presence of structured knowledge thathelps select where useful information lies

working-memory training results in en-hanced recruitment of the frontoparietal net-work associated with top-down attentional con-trol

Raven’s Ad-vanced Progressive Matrices

much evidence in-dicates that action video game play improvestop-down resource allocation, thus leading tobetter selective attention and enhanced pre-cision in representations

resource allocation acts as a key gate-way to learning by refining the distinction be-tween signal and noise and enhancing the qual-ity and precision of the to-be-learned infor-mation

An increase in resources may therefore enablelearners to achieve greater asymptotic perfor-mance (more learning capacity), or even fasterlearning, because critical distinctions will bemore accessible to those learners with greaterresources.

devel-oping representations that are invariant to irrel-evant internal limb motions

The pattern of synapticweights that optimizes performance on thistask is a simple instantiation of a discriminantfunction and thus is completely specific tothe trained reference angle

synaptic weights

moreaccurate posterior distribution.

an increase in the connectivity between themodel’s sensory layer, where neurons code fordirection of motion, and its integration layer,where neurons accumulate the informationthey receive over time from the sensory layeruntil a criterion is reached for decision andrespons

p(c|e)

All require subjects to make a deci-sion based on a limited amount of noisy data

Rather than hy-pothesizing distinct mechanisms for each taskimproved, it seems more parsimonious to con-sider one common cause: learning to learn

A key question concerns whether the effectsof action video game play are causal or areinstead reflective of population bias, whereinaction gaming tends to attract individualswith inherently superior skills

when attentionis driven in a bottom-up fashion (i.e., by exoge-nous cueing) no differences have been foundbetween VGPs and NVGPs

the fact that there was no difference in accuracyin any of these tasks suggests that the differencesalso cannot be attributed to differences in crite-ria, or VGPs being “trigger-happy” or willingto trade reductions in accuracy for increases inspeed

many aspects of top-down attentionalcontrol such as selective attention, dividedattention, and sustained attention are enhancedin VGPs

Despite faster reaction times, accu-racies were left unchanged, establishing that ac-tion game play does not result in trading speedfor accuracy.

Action video game play sped up reactiontimes, and this was true whether the task was inthe visual or the auditory modality.

Wefound that action game play enhances the rateat which information accumulates over timeby∼20% as compared with control partici-pants

Another cognitive domain enhanced by ac-tion games is spatial cognition

Several studies have alsodocumented enhanced task-switching abilitiesin VGPs, meaning they pay less of a price forswitching from one task to another

VGPs have also been documented to bettertheir nongamer peers on several aspects ofcognition such as visual short-term memory(Anderson et al. 2011, Boot et al. 2008), spa-tial cognition (Greenfield 2009), multitasking(Green & Bavelier 2006a), and some aspects ofexecutive function

contrary to the folk belief that screentime is bad for eyesight, action video game playappears to enhance how well one sees

action video game play retrains corticalnetworks such that each layer of the process-ing hierarchy makes better use of the informa-tion it receives from earlier layers

This difference suggests achange in the dynamics of the visual system:VGPs can resolve events at a higher temporalfrequency

Action video game play enhances the spatial andtemporal resolution of vision as well as its sen-sitivity

the fact that VGPs best their nonaction game–playing peers (NVGPs) on standard laboratorytests that are quite dissimilar to video gamesbegs further investigation

Although no new academic concepts orfacts were taught by these games, they allowedthe children to develop skills, such as attentionand control, that underlie the ability to learn inschool.

ideo games teachis the capability to quickly learn to performnew tasks

A handful of behavioral in-terventions have recently been noted to in-duce more general learning than that typicallydocumented in the learning literature. Theselearning paradigms are usually more complexthan standard laboratory manipulations, remi-niscent of the “enriched environment effects”seen in animal rearing (Renner & Rosenzweig1987), and they typically correspond to real-lifeexperiences, such as aerobic activity (Hillmanet al. 2008), athletic training (Erickson &Kramer 2009), musical training (Schellenberg2004), mind-body training (Lutz et al. 2008,Tang & Posner 2009), working memory train-ing ( Jaeggi et al. 2008, Klingberg 2010), and,the focus of this article, action video game train-ing (Green & Bavelier 2003, Spence & Feng2010).

Thus, for all practical purposes, thespecificity that typically accompanies learningis a curse.

putative

-ification is always easy and repeatable, and it's usually bullshit.

Learning academic varieties of language and thinking in school is now “old.” It is (for most people) important, but not sufficient for success in modern society. People must be ready to learn new specialist varieties of language and thinking outside of school, not necessarily connected to academic disciplines, throughout their lives.

The human mind works best when it can build and run simulations of experiences its owner has had (much like playing a video game in the mind) in order to understand new things and get ready for action in the world.

However, with violation of copyright as close as one mouse click away, ethical concerns are prominent in digital culture.

Such understanding is crucial for today’s citizenship, when more aspects of life have moved into the digital domain.

For example, video game production became a mark-er of high status, and two types of experts emerged: some youth developed expertise in highly focused (local) aspects of game design, and others focused more on general (global) principles of game design.

This dominance has been problematic for many reasons, including the lack of representation of women and minority avatars in games,

multimodal texts that integrate sound, music, graphics, writing, and more.

he user's needs and goals are the primary consideration at every sta

that if the task was already uninteresting, reward systems did not reduce internal motivation, as there was little internal motivation to start with. The authors concluded that "the issue is how to facilitate people's understanding the importance of the activity to themselves and thus internalizing its regulation so they will be self-motivated to perform it" (

y Deci, Koestner, andRyan

. One significant problem with this model of gamification is that it can reduce the internal motivation that the user has for the activity, as it replaces internal motivation with external motivation. If, however, the game design elements can be made meaningful to the user through information,then internal motivation can be improved as there is less need to emphasize external rewar

ncern. Every time 10 or more students logged into the game simultaneously, the server at Gamelab would crash and log everyone out until it was restarted

in order to participate in a Discourse is its set of language prac