A loosely organized and evolving list of websites related to our mission. Some are more game-oriented, some more pedagogy-oriented. We have tried to supply some guidance to what to expect, so you can zero in on sites that will be most useful to you.
Blogs
Ian Bogost: Blog of theorist and game designer Ian Bogost.
The Ludologist: Blog of theorist and game designer Jesper Juul.
Ludology: Blog of game designer Gonzalo Frasca.
Greg Costikyan: Blog of game designer Greg Costikyan
Confessions of an Aca-Fan: Blog of game theorist and media critic Henry Jenkins
Terra Nova (Simulation + Society + Play): Wide-ranging and active blog discussing a variety of topics related to games and culture. Examples include gold farming, social networking games, and gamification.
Tiltfactor: Website and blog of the Dartmouth-affliated Tiltfactor Labratory, a group which designs and studies games for social change. Links to many games designed by Tiltfactor, including Grow-A-Game, a game for designing games!
Play the Past: A group-authored blog focusing on the intersection between cultural heritage and games/meaningful play.
Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog: An often-updated blog centered on the Digital Humanities run by the Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Occasional forays into pedagogy. Besides the blog,dozens of “digital campus” podcasts are also available here.
Links to and Reviews of Games
Play This Thing: Links and short reviews of games in a variety of formats, including tabletop games, and free and shareware online or computer-based games. Generally avoids major commercial video games in favor of games not likely to be covered elsewhere.
Jay Is Games: The most popular website for links and reviews of casual games, including both online and downloadable games.
Serious Games
Games for Change: Leading global advocate for social-impact games. Hosts an annual conference and has links to many serious games.
Gameful: Social networking site for people interested in creating and playing games for social change. Users get a “pet monster” who levels up based on user activity. Play games designed by other users, or hook up with other users to design something new! Active site.
The Play Ethic: Exploring the power and potential of play for influencing popular culture.
Persuasive Games: A digital game company that specializes in serious games.
MolleIndustria: Another digital game company specializing in serious games.
Academic Centers and Sites
Gameology: Academic writing about video games. Content analysis, often from a cultural studies perspective.
DiGRA: An association for academics and professionals who research digital games and associated phenomena. It encourages high-quality research on games, and promotes collaboration and dissemination of work by its members. Organizes a conference and includes articles from proceedings on its website. News page dominated by conference announcements, calls for papers, job postings, and book / journal announcements.
Institute of Play: Nonprofit devoted to GBL through all media,including digital and table games. Game developer. Partner in Quest to Learn, a New York City public school organized around collaborative and explorative education using games and digital media.
Games For Educators: Packed website about GBL. Includes articles for educators and parents, and links to games. Searchable database of educational games is heavily biased towards commercially produced games, and additions by users mean some of the “games” are of questionable value.
IGDA (International Game Development Association): International organization for video game developers. An academic relationships interest group maintains a framework for game development curricula and links to student game developer clubs and organizations. Not a GBL-focused organization.
Advanced Distributed Learning Research Archive: An annotated bibliography of research articles on games and learning prepared by Sigmund Tobias and J.D. Fletcher.
The Pericles Group: A research group at U Conn who specialize in transforming education using games–or what they call “practomimes.”
Columbia University Games Research Lab: From the website: “Through an understanding of play, the Games Research Lab seeks to gain knowledge of human cognition, collaboration, media effects, modern culture, creativity, improvisation and other factors within games that have implications for education. Faculty and students involved with the Games Research Lab have broad-ranging interests, and the lab has resources allowing the study of video games, traditional board and card games, role-playing games, games for teaching and learning, “serious” games, media literacy, the psychology of games, and related topics.”
NYU Game Center: From the website: “The NYU Game Center is dedicated to the exploration of games as a cultural form and game design as creative practice. Our approach to the study of games is based on a simple idea: games matter. Just like other cultural forms – music, film, literature, painting, dance, theater – games are valuable for their own sake. Games are worth studying, not merely as artifacts of advanced digital technology, or for their potential to educate, or as products within a thriving global industry, but in and of themselves, as experiences that entertain us, move us, explore complex topics, communicate profound ideas, and illuminate elusive truths about ourselves, the world around us, and each other.”
Greater Than Games Lab @ Duke University: From the website: “GreaterThanGames aims to build a game platform that brings together virtual and real world components, is adaptable over a range of networked and programmable devices including desktop computers, iPhones, iPads, etc., and develops rich narrative content that emerges interactively with player collaborations and choices. The goal is to use the combined allure of game play, virtual architecture and design, and digital storytelling to intervene constructively in real world problems.”
MIT STEP: The MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program designs free, open-source learning games for K-12. They specialize in augemented reality games (ARGs).
Miscellany
The HUMlab Streaming Lectures: Swedish university Umeå University sponsors HUMlab, a digital humanities nexus. One of the best resources on this link comes from their stream-available lectures on all things virtual and how they related to learning, higher education, and culture.
