Video games

Yesterday I posted a topic about online role-plays for higher education on Brainstorms. I knew there’d be an interest in the idea there, but what’s amazing is the quality of discussion there. Already I’ve had responses from people like Howard Rheingold, Andee Baker, Julian Long and Charles Cameron, all of whom are noted experts in related fields. Andee has even taken up my offer to check out what I’m doing here (hi Andee). Charles’ area is games for education in general. He pointed out something called the Serious Games Initiave. Through that site, I found a videotaped presentation by Kurt Squire from MIT’s Games-To-Teach Project. His presentation talks about (among other things) a role-play game called Biohazard from CMU that sounds really intriguing. It’s a “robust simulated” role-playing game, meaning it includes a simulated environment that you can interact with, much like (I imagine) a FPS game. This could be a really interesting case study because it is so obviously packed with all kinds of assumptions and interests — for example the project is funded by Microsoft, and the example of a biohazard that Squire gave was anthrax.