Alice Taylor, Commissioning Editor for Channel 4 (and Wonderland blog) talked recently at Game Based Learning, looking at how gaming enables Channel 4 to engage with their target audience of 14 to 19 year old. But also looks at how gaming mechanisms can be used to engage large numbers with an educational agenda.

Video of Alice Taylor

To see the full selection of videos go the the Games Based Learning forum. I'd also recommend Matt Mason's talk on pirating and how it adds value to the original, touching on how game modding evolved.

This year I was really sad to see that the Women in Gaming conference has been cancelled due to low delegate numbers. I am an avid gamer and I think the games industry is sometimes behind other areas of technology, where it could really benefit from getting more women involved in games development. Often women go for the human focused areas of development, such as user experience or copyright, which are often sadly overlooked in games development. Instead there are a steady stream of churned out games like Imagine Babies and its ilk, lacking original gameplay and creativity. While I am glad that the games industry is finally realising gamers are girls and women too and I value a diverse set of games to choose from, I don't think it all needs to be Barbie dolls and toy soldiers in electronic form. Obviously this isn't just due to a lack of women, but by cultural stereotypes and an industry that has increasingly large budgets and monolithic development houses. Independant games development however still have a wealth of opportunity.

There are however some amazing women involved in games development, one of whom is Robin Hunicke who is a games designer and producer. While at EA she worked on My Sims and Boom Blocks and their sequels before recently moving to ThatGameCompany, who developed the truly awesome Flower. She combines this with academic study on Artificial Intelligence and Video Games, building bridges between the theory and the application. Her research on dynamic difficulty examines different techniques for representing and reasoning about uncertainty, to see how these approaches can be extended and combined to create flexible interactive experiences that adjust on the fly.

Robin Huckine and her cat Mika

I was lucky enough to see Robin talk at Gamecity last year and she spoke about how in order to be a better game designer you need to do much more than play games that you need to look outwards and experience as much of life a possible, reading and travelling. I think this is great advice no matter what your role, especially where you want to explore creativity. She also spoke passionately about using sketchbooks to capture ideas, to allow you to externalise ideas, and as creative people to capture ideas and work through some concepts, something which has definitely been true in my experience.

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This video is an amazing argument for the power of playing games. Her latest game takes this to the next step, check out Evoke.

I’ve been attending GameCity since its creation, and before that the Broadway’s Screenplay games festival that which ran from 2000. Each year it gets bigger and raises the bar. This year was no exception, with some amazing and large scale events.

This year saw the event take place mostly in the Council House and a large tent pitched outside in Market Square, so the event had its highest public presence to date, which can only be good for the festivals future.

Highlights

The best part of a games festival for me is in exploring new games and new ways of playing, which is evident in my selection of festival highlights.

Sandpit

This was my first experience of pervasive gaming, and I’m totally hooked. I only managed to register for two games due to demand, but this wasn’t really an issue because there were lots of other people waiting too so we were able to start an impromptu game of Werewolf (http://www.eblong.com/zarf/werewolf.html) which needs 7+ players. One of the things I loved was that the people had an open attitude towards play.

I played two games, Hipsync and Moveyhouse, which were great fun and interesting experiences. There is something elevating about reclaiming a space with play and people not taking themselves too seriously. http://sandpit.hideandseekfest.co.uk/events/

Gambling Lambs

Gambling Lambs is a monthly gaming event in Nottingham, which held a special event as part of the festival. There was a great atmosphere and in the same way as Sandpit having a group of friendly strangers willing to play games together is a great experience. It takes place the first Thu of the month and I highly recommend it. http://www.gamblinglambs.com/

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Ok I have had some real fun with getting my XBox to see my XP desktop. It was easy enough to get it to see my Vista laptop after I set up Windows Media Centre (WMC), and although WMC sees everything on my network it has no supports for DivX, so doesn’t really meet my needs.

Diagram of XBox on wireless network, but media sharing can be on wired or wireless network. 

However playing video through the XBox dashboard does have DivX support, but this way it only finds files that are local to my laptop and I wanted it to see my whole network. It wasn’t as straight forward as it should have been so here is my quick guide on how I managed to get it working. It’s not the only way, there are 3rd party tools out there.

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This is a personal retrospective on technologies that had a significant impact on my life over the last 12 months, that is to say they are not necessarily new technologies, or even new to me, but the way that I use them has dramatically changed or had a significant impact that wasn't there before.

Podcasts

In 2008 I've got into downloading and listening to podcasts. The main barrier to entry for me had been finding the quality content, but I found the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast interesting enough that I made the effort to download it regularly. After getting an iPod it became a great deal easier to find interesting and useful content thanks to the iTunes store and for all its flaws it offers a nice hands off way of maintaining my subscriptions. While Juice can offer the subscription management for other players, it lacks a resource to plug into as a way of finding interesting content. The whole thing is disappointingly hardware centric.

Impact:

It makes better use of my commute time, and offers an additional way to take in useful information that can be easier to multi task than keeping on top of my RSS reader. However it is still very much about finding the right content and for me that is mostly covered off by the Guardian Tech Weekly, TED talks and Channel Flip Games (sadly this website fails to acknowledge their female audience).

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If you missed some of the classic PC games of yesteryear, or if you have even tried to reinstall them on your new Vista box only to be thwarted by incompatability, well then I have the site for you... Good Old Games

Good Old Games has a growing catalogue of classic PC games guarenteed to work on XP and Vista.

 There are some great classics on there including the Fallout series and the early Unreal titles, and they are all DRM free and come with support. At less than $10 or about £5 you can get the full game and install it as many times as needed where ever you like... are you listening makers of Spore?!

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I have been gaming for all of my life; Space Invaders was released in the same year I was born. I’ve been thinking back about not only how the technology has changed but how my gaming habits have also changed.  What started with playing arcade tables in pubs and evolved through to Rock Band on an Xbox360.

My early and only console gaming for a long time was Wizard of Wor and Space Invaders on an old Atari 2600. When we got an Amstrad CPC with only one game; a dodgy flight simulator that took three times longer to load on cassette than I could ever make the game last, I taught myself BASIC instead and sealed my geek fate.

This was the start of my PC gaming habits; we got a 386 and discovered Duke Nukem and Prince of Persia back when they were still 2D platform games, shortly followed by Wolfenstein3D and then Duke Nukem 3D.

From then on I was predominantly a PC gamer, only managing to grab the odd game on console when babysitting or at a friend’s house. Mostly I enjoyed the odd point and click adventure game, especially if it was an Eric Idol voiced Rincewind set in the Discworld.

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Although it was over a fortnight ago I still want to write about the Game City 3 event that occurred in Nottingham. It was a three day event, but I was only able to attend on the last day. It is great to events like this organised outside of London.

While I enjoyed the event and I’m glad I attended, overall I’m not sure the event was as well organised as last years. The website made it hard to find some of the important information regarding the event and emails of inquiry were not replied to. The pricing structure changed from last year, previously tickets were bought for individual events, so you picked and chose which of the events that cost you were interested in and filled the gaps with the free stuff, of which there was plenty. This year is was like a more conventional conference in that you bought a ticket for the whole day, and this gave you access to all the events. The advantage of this is that there was a more consistent audience for all the events, but it wasn’t clear which events needed to be paid for and when events were cancelled there was no compensation or even notification. Thankfully the students that were there helping to run the event were helpful and friendly to make up for the lack of organisation.

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