Two weeks ago, we told you about a class being taught at the University of Florida that involved StarCraft 2 and how the game mechanics could be applied to the real world. Gamasutra caught up with Nate Poling, the class's instructor, for an interview about the curriculum, which goes into depth about how Poling plans to utilize the game as a teaching tool.

About build orders: Read More

It appears that the University of Florida is getting into games. I knew my alma mater was forward thinking, but I may go back and audit this course.

According to an article in Technology Review, UF is offering a 3-credit-hour honors class called "21st Century Skills in StarCraft." The class is taught by Ph.D. candidate Nate Poling and is designed to teach "critical thinking, problem solving, resource management, and adaptive decision making."

"In StarCraft you're managing a lot of different units and groups of different capacities," says Poling. "It's not a stretch to think of that in the business world or in the work of a healthcare administrator."

The course has the full compliment of 25 students and will be remotely taught, allowing the students to play from home while fulfilling the course requirements.

More and more colleges and universities are seeing the growing medium of videogames as a viable option for degree courses. Colorado in particular has several schools offering various diplomas that would make graduates good candidates for the industry.

An article in the Denver Post takes a look at the various schools in Colorado offering videogame programs, listing at least six colleges with different angles on the videogame theme. Among them:

• Regis University faculty are proposing a transformation of their single video-game development class into a multicourse minor within computer science. Students will also be encouraged to add "Intro to Electronic Imaging" to their repertoire.
• CU-Colorado Springs has watched its game development major jump from 12 freshmen in 2007 to 25 this year. The fast-growing school created a "bachelor of innovation" degree to cover subjects such as video-game development, intellectual property law and electrical engineering.
• Denver's Kolbe Film School, named after a martyred patron saint of mass communication, will offer an 18-month degree in game creation and animation "that inspire a culture of life."

Many of the schools seem to be starting programs to teach students basic concepts and not pushing high-technology applications: Read More

When trying to do relevant posts every day, I occasionally come across a plethora of information that is just too much to digest at one time. A brief perusal of the content shows that most stories are interesting, but the time to digest it all could devolve into days or even weeks.

Today, I found not one, but two such sites that deal with the expanding culture of video games. The first was a blog archive for a Game Culture class at Columbia College Chicago. Most of the articles printed within the blog seem to be papers done for the class, although a couple appear to be thoughts on a page at various dates. From the latest article on Sexuality in Games by thepieisfake (great name):

Video game characters, especially in many of the games that I played as a teenager (mostly Final Fantasy games), were full of characters with perfectly shaped, fit bodies. At that point, they had also molded personalities for these model characters and included the idea of relationships and sexual attraction between multiple characters. In Final Fantasy X, two of the main characters share a moonlit kiss in a two minute full motion video. When I first reached that particular scene, I recall inviting several of my friends over to watch it with me. We giggled as twelve year old girls would, but even now when I re-watch that scene I can understand what made it so enticing: the character interactions; how the two characters spoke and touched. It symbolized a level of intimacy I was only beginning to understand at that age.

And this from an article on the relationship of a player's avatar to the player in single-player and multiplayer games by vexation:

Once I start to play a single player video game, I no longer see the character but rather they become an extension of myself.  This has a lot to do with the fact that you spend most of your time in the game staring at the back of your character. It’s almost as if you’re pulling the strings of a giant puppet.  The avatar becomes my doppelganger and I in turn become unaware of its existence.  Thus the avatar is disposable in the single player world. When I play games I tend to not notice that I’m controlling the main character and it’s only when I enter a cut scene or see a bit of story that I realize I'm still that character.

Another resource for some great videogame information and commentary is Eludamos, the Journal for Computer Game Culture. The site, according to it's About page, is "an international, multi-disciplined, biannual e-journal that publishes peer-reviewed articles that theoretically and/or empirically deal with digital games in their manifold appearances and their sociocultural-historical contexts. ELUDAMOS positions itself as a publication that fundamentally transgresses disciplinary boundaries."

There are currently five issues online, each full of interesting positions, perspectives and articles. In the latest edition (Vol. 3, No. 2), topics range from "Video Game Genre, Evolution and Innovation" to "Just Gaming: On Being differently Literate."

From the abstract of an article my Mark Mullen called "Letter from the Wilderness:"

In a November 2006 Gamasutra article titled “We’re not listening: An Open Letter to Academic Game Researchers” John Hopson argues that much of the research into games by academics is not presented in a way likely to appeal to game developers and is largely irrelevant to their concerns.  Hopson’s argument implicates humanities and many social science researchers producing speculative and descriptive research rather than more hard-edged technical and statistical research that can have an immediate impact on a game’s bottom line.  While conceding Hopson’s point about the ineffectiveness of many academic communication norms, I argue that Hopson’s article is indicative not of problems with academic research into games as much as the position of game development toward the utility of academic research in general.  After analyzing the assumptions underlying Hopson’s argument, I offer a schema that articulates several key types of research into games carried out by scholars with a primary background in the humanities and the contribution of each research approach to the game development process.

If you find yourself with extra time and want to do some reading that provokes critical thinking, I highly recommend both sites.

(image from the latest cover of Eludamos)

A middle-school teacher in North Carolina has embraced the technology of video games and is using them to help students with their language arts and writing skills.

Craig Lawson, a teacher at Cape Fear Middle School in Rocky Point, NC, is a professed "geek" that feels that merging technology and literature will help studentw become better writers, according to a story in the Star News Online. For a current project, Lawson had his students create characters in The Sims 3 on an iPod Touch that were different from themselves and then write create a fictional comic strip from start to climax. The idea was to give students the chance to write from a different perspective.

According to Lawson:

“A lot of times you see negative publicity for video games, that they promote violence and that kind of thing, but that misses their connection to literature. This is a way for students to gain insight into the experience of another person without having to live it themselves, just like we do when we read a book.”

The school picked up on the interactive nature of the games as a way to keep the attention of students, who said that they found the game a great way to learn responsibility and surviving on their own. The program has been so successful that the school is looking to expand the iPod Touch to other classes.

Lawson plans to use Civilization: Revolution in his social studies class next semester:

“My job is to teach literacy, and technical literacy is an important part of that today,” Lawson said. “It’s not just about reading and writing anymore.”

(Photo courtesy of the Star News Online)

A Cornell University professor is using a specially developed video game to give reserachers better insight into autism in children ages 10 to 15.

The game, called Astropolis and developed in collaboration with the Rochester Institute of Technology's computer sciences division, is actually a series of small games that gives autisic users (and their siblings) a series of tasks to complete in a sci-fi outer-space environment. Each task is measured and designed to support or debunk certain pet theories that autism researchers have.

Matthew Belmonte, assistant professor of human development at Cornell, is spearheading the project. From a Cornell article:

"Autism has been characterized as a fundamental perceptual abnormality; it's been characterized as a fundamental attentional abnormality; it's been characterized as a failure of theory-of-mind," he said. "We each have our individual pet theories, and we each -- me included -- have designed experiments within these narrow theoretical apertures to confirm or refute hypotheses that are stated along our single tracks."

Subjects are allowed to take the game home on a laptop and play at their leisure. However, while they are playing, the game "logs how rapidly they shift attention and engage or inhibit motor responses; how well they perceive coherent motion; and whether they can intuit the motivations of other characters." Belmonte explained the reasoning for letting the subjects take the game home, as opposed to being in the controlled space of a lab:

"When we look at people with autism in a lab, it's not clear that we're testing them under naturalistic conditions, because one of the hallmarks of autism is very high levels of anxiety -- anxiety with new people, and anxiety with new places," he said.

For more information on the game and what it is trying to accomplish, visit the game's official web site.