Blog reader Dragon sends in this note:

Raph, Haven’t seen anything about this on your blog yet – if you’ve already written about it then I missed it. Thought you might be interested in this article on the BBC tech news about a company adapting Neverwinter Nights to use it to encourage learning in schools. The company website is http://www.alteredlearning.com/ (and no, I’m not connected in any way shape or form) Cheers!

It is indeed interesting. The achievement scores have literally tripled. Most interesting, however, is that the mod replaced typical RPG challenges with, well, typical RPG challenges:

Read More “Using NWN for basic learning skills”

War breaks out in Second Life.

CNet sat down with Howard Rheingold within SL to discuss his take on the overall virtual world and online community sphere. He sides with those who assert that the size of SL matters less than the quality of the discourse within:

As far as I am concerned, tens of thousands of people who are actively creating new stuff are more interesting than millions of more passive participants.

There’s something about this quote that bugs me, despite the great respect I have for Rheingold. And it’s this: is creating really more privileged than consuming?

Read More “In defense of the content consumer”

The link is here — looks like a version of the AP article from a couple of days ago, complete with the oddity where the organizers offer two separate justifications:

“I spoke to people who are still suffering very much from Columbine,” Baxter said Friday. “Some things are more important than one game or a festival.”

Baxter said organizers were reluctant to expose Slamdance to possible legal issues over music in the game.

“We have to preserve the ability to support gamemakers and filmmakers in the future,” he said.

It’s still quite possible, of course, that it was both of these, plus other factors — basically, a number of factors overall contributing to the decision. It will be interesting to see the reactions in the mainstream media.

Bloginati gathers up the RSS feeds for all the MMO developer blogs, it looks like. Shorter than signing them up in a feedreader, I suppose.

Alas, it only grabs the gaming category from here. Which means you miss out on the awesome Sunday Poem I posted yesterday. Really. Go read it. 😉