Awesome! It goes into the cartridge slot for GBA games; too bad the new DSi doesn’t have that slot anymore.

Features

• Converts test results into reward points that children can use to unlock new levels and buy in-game items.
• Includes Knock ‘Em Downs™: World’s Fair video game and Mini Game Arcade for use with the Nintendo™ DS and Nintendo™ DS Lite gaming systems.

Bayer Didget – Product Information – Bayer’s DIDGET™ Blood Glucose Meter.

This is a UK website… dunno when or if it is coming to the States.

Someday I should finish and post up the game I did to teach my daughter about blood sugar levels and the glycemic index of various foods…

I’m on the MediaSnackers Rezed Podcast#33 today, for maybe five minutes worth of talk about Metaplace, particularly uses for education. The bulk of the podcast though, is about the fascinating project Quest Atlantis out of the Indiana University School of Education.

For example, after students have begun to learn about potential causes of the fish demise in Taiga Park, they are asked to make a recommendation about how to resolve the issue. In making this decision, students have to consider their conceptual tools (i.e. understanding eutrophication, erosion, and overfishing) in order to make a recommendation about what to do (i.e. stop the indigenous people from farming, tell the loggers they can no longer cut trees in the park, or shut down the game fishing company). In making these decisions, students engage in projective consequentiality: they have to consider what their use of particular tools tells them about the context that they are working with. After making a recommendation, students travel 20 years forward in game time, and see the results of their recommendations (experiential consequentiality). At that point students are asked to reflect on the implications of their disciplinary recommendations on the context, thus serving to re-couple content with context.

Dan Terdiman has an article on the rapid proliferation of “news games,” which were an unusual and even controversial genre a few years ago when Ian Bogost and others started pushing them. Today, they are all over the place, thanks to the huge Flash community: tiny games that serve as a replacement for editorial cartoons (editorial cartooning, btw, is a business that is apparently in trouble).

When we talked five to ten years ago about how games were going to be the dominant medium of this century, I don’t think most people were thinking in terms of this sort of tiny minigame, mostly made by amateurs. And yet, I think that is kind of where we’re going.

It makes me ponder, what other areas of media will have little games slip in and replace the old way of doing things? We could maybe walk through the newspaper and see: how about classifieds? Obituaries? The social column? The letters column? Anyone got a Flash game to replace the Arts page?

Some choice quotes:

Doherty’s Fubra bought Sock and Awe from its original creator on eBay for more than $8,000, but said ads on the game earned the money back in just 48 hours. And Tocci said his creations earn money from royalties paid by the casual games sites that host the titles.

That leads to staggering numbers like the 14.5 million viruses tackled in Swinefighter and the 93.5 million shoes tossed at Bush in Sock and Awe alone. Tocci’s Double Bird Strike has been played more than 400,000 times.

“It’s a shame the innovation (of providing CDC advice about swine flu in Swinefighters) was left to two entrepreneurs,” said Doherty. “It would have been great if the World Health Organization had realized they could use a game to raise awareness about preventing swine flu.”

– ‘News games’ put public in charge of hot topics | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.

This was cool — State Representative Nancy Landry of Louisiana just held a town hall meeting in Metaplace. A big part of the event was Q&A sessions with a middle school class run by teacher Margret Atkinson of Northwestern Middle School, and in attendance were the state’s Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, and the school’s principal, Debby Brian. I believe a few blog posts elsewhere and a video of the event are forthcoming. Eidt: and here’s one.

I was asked to give brief remarks on digital citizenship, and here they are:

So I was asked to make a few comments about digital citizenship, and I think the thing that most strikes me about an event like this is the fact that citizenship is the same whether it exists in the real world or a digital framework. Here we all are at this wonderful event, and the things that we are talking about in this cartoony, digital world are big important, real world issues, like funding for science education, and the legislative process.

Online communities are a VENUE, not an end in themselves. They are just a new way for us to engage in very old practices. And I think that if we managed to transplant some folks from ancient Athens and given them an intensive course in language and computer literacy, they would be perfectly at home with the substance of the discussions today!

At the same time, I think that it also highlights how important that digital literacy IS; after all, without those lessons, they would be less able to participate. And as our society’s tech capabilities grow, I think it’s wonderful to see that our society — and legislators — and principals and school superintendents, and teachers — are willing to invest in that literacy so that future voters, citizens, will be able to participate to the best of their ability using this new technology.

So I want to just say thank you to all of you for taking the plunge!

It’s coming up!

http://www.gamesforhealth.org

5th Annual Games for Health Conference in Boston on June 11-12 with Pre-Conference on June 10.

Over 60 sessions on many many topics.

People who enter beb09 @ registration get a 15% discount

Also direct registration at: http://www.regonline.com/gfh2009

Content summaries so far at:
http://www.gamesforhealth.org/archives/000253.html

Latest from the games-are-good-for-you department:

The findings, reported in the March 29 issue of Nature, indicate that action games offer players the chance to improve their contrast perception by as much as 58%.

via Video Game Play Improves Eyesight — Video Games — InformationWeek.

The findings show that you have to play FPSes like UT2k4 and CoD2, and not games like The Sims 2. So you may improve your “contrast perception” but presumably the industry’s critics will then assert that you traded your eyesight for temporary boosts in aggressivity.

Akoha is an interesting idea — one bound to run right up against the qualms of those folks who dislike using games for social engineering.

You buy a deck of cards for about $5. It has missions in it, like “buy a couple in love drinks,” “donate an hour of your time,” or “give someone a book.”

Once you do the good deed, you give the card to the reicipient of the good deed, and they “play it forward” — the mission is now theirs. They also go to the website and register the deed so that you get credited with points. You can track the movement of the cards across the world, kind of like how you can track dollar bills with Where’s George.

You gain points, you level up, and eventually you unlock perks like the ability to create your own missions — the plan is they will print your own custom deck of cards for you. Cory, here’s your whuffie.

If you look at their “learn more” link (engagingly done as a photocomic) you can see that they do envision this being mostly played among friends, although mention is made of strangers. In that sense, it is less a serious game than it is a social game, but the pay it forward element, should it offer enough incentives, has interesting potential. I could easily see something like this catching on among the sort of widely dispersed tech-savvy folks who make up the web and gaming communities…

Spotted this on the f13 forums:

I met with a recruiter recently (online media industry) and in conversation I happened to mention I’d spent way too much time in the early 2000s playing online games, which I described as “the ones before World of Warcraft” (I went nuts for EQ1, SWG and the start of WoW, but since 2006 I have only put a handful of days into MMOG playing – as opposed to discussing them – I’ve obsessed over bicycles and cycling instead).

He replied that employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft players. He said there is a belief that WoW players cannot give 100% because their focus is elsewhere, their sleeping patterns are often not great, etc. I mentioned that some people have written about MMOG leadership experience as a career positive or a way to learn project management skills, and he shook his head. He has been specifically asked to avoid WoW players.

— f13.net forums – Recruiter told not to hire WoW players.

I think the funniest bit is all the MMOG players in the thread agreeing with the recruiter…

If you weren’t sick of this debate already, here’s more.

So this, really, is the problem withWorld of Warcraft‘s torture sequence. It does not model any consequences. You torture the sorcerer, but nothing particularly comes of it. You just move on to the next quest.

This would be lame in a TV show, but is arguably even lamer in a videogame, because it’s not too hard to imagine all sorts of repercussions that would have been dramatically fascinating while actually enhancing the gameplay.

For example,Lich King maker Blizzard Entertainment could have made the Art of Persuasion quest optional — but endowed it with some unusually lucrative loot or experience. That would have made it a genuine moral quandary: Should you do a superbad thing for a really desirable result?

– “Why We Need More Torture in Videogames“, Clive Thompson in Wired

…please explain to me again why killing NPCs in games is fine but sticking them with a cattle prod is evil.

Here’s your explanation, from my theory-of-fun/game-grammar point of view.

In killing NPCs (or popping any other sort of experience balloon), we are definitely seeing a “kill” dressing put on top of a statistical exercise. We are being entrained around measuring odds, optimizing behavior towards success, and then receiving a reward. The reward is generally utilitarian in some other aspect of the game. In other words, you do it, and there’s a reason for it — you kill the mob and you get back the loot, the XP, etc.

Although the killing is itself morally dubious as a ‘dressing’ for these underlying mechanics (see my previous writings on the subject), players do learn to see past the fiction fairly quickly, and cease seeing this as a moral issue, because they are smart: they know it’s just a game, and they move onto the underlying systemic reality very quickly.

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