Balanced Gaming

According to statista: In the second quarter of 2020, consumers in the United States spent an estimated 1.02 billion U.S. dollars on video gaming content and a record 11.6 billion U.S. dollars on video gaming as a whole ( reference ). Video games and video gaming is a significant and important part ...

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It's spring as I write this, and I've been outside, enjoying walks in the woods and preparing for some camping trips. The birds singing and the uptick in people walking outside has lifted my spirits from the dark winter. I've also been greatly enjoying the Witcher 3 . The game is one of the best I'v...

I recently had the privilege of presenting at Central and Eastern European School Association (CEESA). My topic was "everyone should be making computer games". The presentation slides I used for this 45 minute presentation are here

From wikipedia: 1 Action 1.1 Platform games 1.2 Shooter games 1.3 Fighting games 1.4 Beat 'em up games 1.5 Stealth game 1.6 Survival games 1.7 Rhythm games 2 Action-adventure 2.1 Survival horror 2.2 Metroidvania 3 Adventure 3.1 Text adventures 3.2 Graphic adventures 3.3 Visual novels 3.4 Interactive...

Wikipedia has a decent introduction to learning through play. Learning through play is a term used in education and psychology to describe how a child can learn to make sense of the world around them. Through play children can develop social and cognitive skills, mature emotionally, and gain the se...

The report below, titled Media and Young Minds is the official policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics. From the abstract: Infants, toddlers, and preschoolers are now growing up in environments abstract saturated with a variety of traditional and new technologies, which they are ado...

One of the big ideas in balanced gaming is understanding why we play games. I was initially exposed to gamer motivations from Richard Bartle and then later to Nick Yee's Quantic Foundry I think this chart below, used from quantic foundry, really summarizes the different motivations very well: Screen...

I hate link rot. I had all these great games in education research links, and now 90% are defunct. Whenever I can, I upload the PDF’s directly to my server so the information can be easily found. I’m now re-writing my research in games in education list. Everything will be stored locally - with link...