State of Play reports

 Posted by (Visited 10733 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jun 212009
 

I didn’t liveblog, but others did!

Tim Burke at Easily Distracted has a series of liveblog posts.

TerraNova has a thread.

Virtual Learning Worlds has a bunch of posts too:

Hakawi Tech also has several posts:

I think that I will try to write up some of the specific things I was trying to get across in the keynote as a blog post at some point, because the vaious blogs and notes all seem somewhat partial in one way or another… are backchannels damaging liveblogging? In any case, here’s the backchannels, which may not make too much sense without the original actual content being commented on!

  • gsssop « Today’s Meet is the web-based backchannel for the conference, including the rather fascinating (and to my mind, somewhat jarring) responses to the panel I was on.

Zon: Chinese language learning MMO

 Posted by (Visited 11366 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Jun 042008
 

This is cool: an MMO devoted to language learning via full immersion.

Welcome to Zon! | Enter Zon

Zon is an unique interactive massively multiplayer online role playing game for learning Mandarin Chinese.

By interacting in the Zon environment you will be exposed to Chinese language and cultural knowledge in a new and exciting way. Everything that you do in the game is another chance to learn new words, phrases and cultural info about China. Never before has learning Chinese been more fun.

Not at all the first time this has been tried, of course; at SOE we supported a few college campuses that were doing full-immersion language learning via EQ2, for example.

Nov 262000
 

I hope you like the new artwork. That’s what happens when I take my first vacation in a year. I had meant to also do some recording this week, but I didn’t get around to it, unfortunately.

So what’s changed? Let’s see… first off, this (News) is now the front page of the site. This should make it a little easier to find out if I’ve bothered to update lately. The Guestbook is still around, but you have to go to the Main section to reach it. I also got rid of the old Bio section and old front page and moved that content into Main under About. I tried to save all the guestbook entries, but if you entered a message right when I was putting up the new site, yours may be gone.

Under Gaming, there’s plenty of new content. For a while now, I’ve been working desultorily on a book on online world design. Some excerpts were published at The Rantings of Lum the Mad a while ago, but now I’ve decided to go ahead and toss up more here on my own site. Look under the “Book” section for that. Also, I’ve been working on a breakdown of typical design patterns for online world design (mostly extracted from the book, actually) for a GDC presentation next year. So that’s up there under Essays as a set of Powerpoint slides.

Under Writing, I finally went ahead and put some actual content in under Poetry, Fiction, and Genre. Hope ya like it. If you’re an editor starving for an author, lemme know. In fact, out of all the stuff in the site updates, this is the area that I’d most like to see comments on. I don’t write much anymore, and the stories are mostly a decade old, but I started out as a writer and I am sure that someday I will go back to it.

I reorganized the Music section. I recently wrote a guitar instrumental that I titled “Alice” after the character in the comic strip, and I’ve put up the sheet music and guitar tablature to it. There’s also another small guitar instrumental piece there called “Memorial,” with sheet music and tab.

I got rid of the Teaching Materials section under Books. I can’t locate any of ’em (somewhere in the garage no doubt). But I did add a new page on what I’m reading lately. Only four books there right now, as that is all I got to over the holiday.

There’s a couple of new images under Art; a new doodle and two ink pieces from over ten years ago.

In other news, I recently did an interview for Joystick101.org. This site is devoted to academic critique of games, developing a critical vocabulary, etc, and the folks who run it are all involved in academia. Check it out, leave a comment, support the site, whatever. 🙂

Redesign

 Posted by (Visited 6938 times)  Game talk, Misc, Writing  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Feb 131999
 

Redesigned the whole website to this spiffy new look! Also added:

  • a bit of historical trivia to Gaming/Misc Writings/Scripting languages in Diku muds.
  • Limericks under Writing/Poetry
  • Roleplaying bardic verses under Writing/Poetry
  • The entire Music section, although there’s plenty yet to add
  • Teaching Materials under Literature
  • The Bio page
  • The Guestbook
  • The What’s New page
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