betajames

We miss out on some of the great potential of this medium if we focus too heavily on the real. We have the power to create entire worlds—isn’t using this power to create a shadow of reality a bit of a cop-out? And really, it’s only a conceptual cop-out. In practice, reality is quite hard to recreate. This is why the lushly-detailed world of Avatar’s Pandora is so compelling to people. It’s new, but recognizable. It’s compellingly different, but not alienating. This is the potential that exists within games.

During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn't be made good on. Today, "social" media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.

Call it relationship inflation. Nominally, you have a lot more relationships — but in reality, few, if any, are actually valuable. Just as currency inflation debases money, so social inflation debases relationships. The very word "relationship" is being cheapened. It used to mean someone you could count on. Today, it means someone you can swap bits with.

Go right from the inspiration -- the vision -- to actually making it. Don't think it through. Don't talk about it. Don't plan it. Dive in and start making it happen. If you do that -- if you can start rocking -- you'll get some momentum, and when you have some momentum then the project has a chance, because now you're into it. It's going somewhere, it's tangible. Sure, you'll still run up against problems to solve and decisions to make, but you'll approach these in the moment and solve them in the moment. You'll solve them so you can keep moving.

2) The syllabus is broken into quests. Solo quests are completed by individual students. Pick-up Group quests are completed by pairs of students, each from a different guild. Guild quests are completed by all guild members and the guilds are responsible for dividing up the work among themselves (so it sounds like he won't directly penalize a guild for forcing one member to do a whole assignment themselves).

Instead of dealing only with historical data, in virtual worlds "you have the power to experiment in real time," Segerstrale says. What happens to demand if you add a 5 percent tax to a product? What if you apply a 5 percent tax to one half of a group and a 7 percent tax to the other half? "You can conduct any experiment you want," he says. "You might discover that women over 35 have a higher tolerance to a tax than males aged 15 to 20—stuff that's just not possible to discover in the real world."

Many children who want to believe their tastes are adult will bravely try coffee, find it to be undeniably awful, but recognise something that could one day, conceivably, be enjoyed. Once our tastes as adults are fully developed, it is easy to forget the effort that went into them. Adult taste can be demanding work – so hard, in fact, that some of us, when we become adults, selectively take up a few childish things, as though in defeated acknowledgment that adult taste, with its many bewilderments, is frequently more trouble than it is worth. Few games have more to tell us about this adult retreat into childishness than the Grand Theft Auto series.

Boiling down the first book of the Divine Comedy to its surface elements is a bit trickier than it sounds because you either think the poems are about three stages of the afterlife or that they’re about Dante’s spiritual transformation as he grapples with accepting God’s authority. Dante himself wrote in a letter to Can Grande della Scala, “The subject…of the whole work, taken literally, is the condition of souls after death, simply considered…But if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, how by actions of merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he justly deserves reward or punishment.” (172) Given that the game re-imagines Dante as a Crusader who wields Death’s scythe, who can absolve damned souls to Heaven, and who can shoot super spirit crosses using a crucifix, it seems safe to say that the game is not taking the literal approach to the poem.

Collaboration allows the two teachers to combine strengths, share responsibilities, and learn from each other, bringing the best of both their experiences together to create an improved student learning environment. When co-planning, both content and technology standards can easily be combined thanks to each partner's specific focus. Other advantages of co-planning include the sparks of innovation that begin to fly when more than one teacher contributes their perspective to a unit or lesson, and the opportunity this allows to customize the pedagogical and technology experiences for that particular class or grade level.

Given this low barrier to entry – with the wealth of freely available authoring tools, the only required inputs are time and ideas – IF may be the most creator-accessible interactive medium, and certainly one that places the fewest technical hurdles between conception and realization. Interactive fiction, as a result, is very much an auteur form in which individual creators can explore the medium free of marketing concerns and genre strictures. It thrives in our online cultural context where authors can reach audiences, and audiences can become authors.

In an interview last week with Inside Higher Ed, John J. Neuhauser, the president of the Roman Catholic, 2,000-student Vermont college, said he is considering encouraging certain faculty to use open courseware in their classes. Doing so, Neuhauser said, could spare them time spent designing courses and compiling course materials — time that could be reinvested in teaching. Neuhauser also said incorporating open courseware into certain parts of the Saint Michael’s curriculum might give the college the option of reducing the total number of faculty over time.