October, 2008

Clay Shirky gives an excellent talk re-phrasing the conundrum of information overload. He explains that information overload has existed for centuries (at least since the printing press), so it is not a problem, it is a fact, or a condition that we have naturally immersed ourselves. The problem however is not an increase in information, but that our filters (social and institutional, not just technological) are no longer working.

Two recent findings that highlight different futures for gaming, and what it means for education and communication.

This first is a fun flash game (light bot). The objective is give your bot a sequence of instructions that lead it from the start position to a designated end point, and it gets more interesting when you start to build in a couple of functions (so you don't rewrite repetitive instructions), although it would be interesting if it also incorporated other programming building blocks (arrays, classes, etc.) -- version 2?

The second is a TED talk by game designer David Perry, who starts by asking the question Will video games become better than life? And he comes up with some interesting examples pointing to what he imagines will happen with games, not just in terms of visuals, but in terms of richness of emotional experiences.