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Emergence is above all a product of coupled, context-dependent interactions. Technically these interactions, and the resulting system, are nonlinear: The behavior of the overall system cannot be obtained by summing the behaviors of its constituent parts. We can no more truly understand strategies in a board game by…
In The Well-Played Game, Bernard DeKoven advocates a fundamental adjustment in players' attitudes towards the rules of a game: You're not changing the game for the sake of changing it. You're changing it for the sake of finding a game that works. Once this freedom is established, once we have established why we want…
What Prensky and Gee had realized early on was that game designers had lowered the cost of failure so players would take risks. They'd figured out that well-designed problem solving that gives players a second chance and a way to share their successes is almost irresistibly attractive. In just a few years, game…
Most teachers work very hard, of course, and all of them want kids to succeed. But when kids don't learn what's been laid out for them, schools typically look for answers in the things that are going wrong in children's lives: poverty, trauma, bad parenting, poor nutrition, disability, sleep deprivation, lousy study…
As you successfully lock in Tetris puzzle pieces, you get three kinds of feedback: visual—you can see row after row of pieces disappearing with a satisfying poof; quantitative—a prominently displayed score constantly ticks upward; and qualitative—you experience a steady increase in how challenging the game feels. This…
Let's start off with my likes for this title: First, the graphics are really good. I really felt immersed in the environment and quaint little neighborhood in the first level. I know other games have pretty good graphics, but Going Outside: You Know, Real Life? takes it to another level, because when you look closely…
As you all know, games are about choices. Sid Meier famously defined games as "a series of interesting choices." And choice is the most fundamental expression of Will. How can an activity motivated by decisions, striving, goals and competition, a deliberate concentration of the force of Will, be used to transcend Will…