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“The reward, in other words, doesn’t have to be a useful or fun thing in itself, it need only be an obvious outward sign that the wearer of it has done some difficult work to get it.” – Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds : The business and culture of online games (2005) This is a screengrab [...]

In my ongoing quest to locate the pedagogical value of games (via game play, research and dialogue), I have come across an interesting example of situated learning in WoW: The random dungeon, or “PUG.” For those of you unfamiliar with the term, here is an excellent and educator friendly overview. “A PUG is a “pick-up-group,” [...]

After close to ten years of watching my other half blast his way through massively multiplayer worlds (MMOs), I decided this was just too big a phenomena for me to avoid. Not only that, but I felt I couldn’t really continue to call myself a “gamer” if I hadn’t played an MMO – let alone [...]

My first machinima – Virtual World Learning v. H1N1 The above “news report” on H1N1 and virtual worlds is part of an assignment I just completed for an additional qualification course in Media at York University. The idea was to create two news reports in two different media. I chose to do a print story [...]

This is PMOG, an online game that allows you to earn data points, level up and create thematic “missions” from your web surfing. You can also create portals from one page to another or drop some loot or a mine on a page for another PMOG player to discover. All you need is a free [...]

Back in 2003, when Second Life arrived on the internets, I was not in a position to take part. My computer wasn’t fast enough and I didn’t have the time available. Since then, I resisted joining on the grounds that it seemed really materialistic and commercial. While there were indeed interesting things happening there, what [...]

Check out the trailer for Second Skin, a new documentary about massively multiplayer online gamers. As a gaming-positive educator, I was also excited to see my friend and colleague Tony Walsh, make an appearance in the film. From Tony’s blog: “Since 2006, I’ve been following the adventures of the team at Pure West–filmmakers researching and [...]

If you’re like me and you love exploring richly textured environments, you must check out Shadow of the Colossus – wikipedia. My partner and I started attacking the Colossi at Christmas and I’ve got a few to go. You can get a sense of the look and feel from the video above.