What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Discourse in the Novel

(1963). Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Technometrics: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 128-130.

Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Politeness: some universals in language usage

Serious Games represent an acknowledged potential for instruction, because they are able to strongly motivate learners. They can also provide immersive environments where advanced users can practice knowledge and skills, also exploiting multimodal interaction. They can combine the effectiveness of computer processing and data storage, with high levels of attractiveness. Our work has investigated the state of the art research on SGs, starting from the cognitive aspects, that are necessary in order to root technological development and applications in sound theoretical foundations. The paper discusses some key aspects about SG design and exploitation: choice of components-off-the-shelf or from-scratch design, tools and methodologies for development or adaptation, intelligent tutoring, virtual coaches and affective learning, living worlds, game mechanics, Human-Computer Interaction.
While several SGs have been developed, still the literature stresses a lack of significant, extensive user tests. Further research is necessary to investigate in greater detail the real effectiveness of the various types of SGs. The paper proposes several research questions - that range from requirements elicitation to design and from deployment to use and evaluation - to be answered in order to avoid technology pushing and drive technological research according to the requirements of the end-users and stakeholders. 
We believe that deepening the analysis about these issues is key to strengthen the foundations of SG research, for which we identify four major directions: definition of metrics and learning progress evaluation tools; methodologies and tools for designing games from various topics and for various users; computing and communication architectures; technologies that can enhance the overall system performance.

/pdf/designing-effective-serious-games-opportunities-and-127prxlvju.pdf

Designing Effective Serious Games: Opportunities and Challenges for Research

Transnational identifications: Biliterate writers in a first-year humanities course

This paper discusses two projects developed at the University of Southern California with funding from the U.S. military: Tactical Iraqi, a videogame that is designed to accelerate a learner's acquisition of spoken Arabic to assist in the rapid deployment of soldiers into volatile tactical situations, and Virtual Iraq, a virtual reality simulation intended to lessen the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among combat veterans. Both programs specifically address issues of memory related to inhabiting these VR worlds and connect spatial experiences to acts of practices of recognition, recollection, and remembering: Tactical Iraqi is designed to prompt soldiers to remember specific Arabic words and phrases; Virtual Iraq is intended to trigger memories and appropriate coping mechanisms in combat veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This paper analyzes how the traditional "method of loci" or "art of memory" from classical rhetoric, which has been updated by Wong and Storkerson as a tool for hypertext theory, can also be applied to 3D graphical worlds with immersive multi-sensory environments. As Certeau argues, however, in his work on the "rhetoric of walking," the architectures of these virtual worlds should properly offer possibilities for tactical resistance in order to be fully inhabited by their users.

The palace of memory: virtual tourism and tours of duty in Tactical Iraqi and Virtual Iraq

Applications developed for the popular social network site Facebook frequently take the form of online games, but designers need to consider the conventions governing politeness, aggression, reciprocity, and obligation carefully in both online and face-to-face communities when structuring the rules of game play in the context of highly formalized and conceptualized social networks. In particular, the combination of egalitarian mechanisms for "friending" across generational and class lines and extremely hierarchical systems of ranking on leaderboards among particular cohorts can make it a challenging environment for creating sustained and synergistic game play.

In polite company: rules of play in five Facebook games

This paper discusses two computer graphics-intensive projects at the University of Southern California that are being developed with funding from the U.S. military: Tactical Iraqi, a computer game designed to accelerate a soldier's acquisition of spoken Arabic to assist in volatile tactical situations, and Virtual Iraq, a virtual reality simulation intended to lessen the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among combat veterans. Both initiatives have received extensive national media coverage and may serve rhetorical as well as pedagogical or therapeutic ends by making individual, private digital experiences aimed to effect the personal education or rehabilitation of military personnel accessible to a wider public. This paper examines the debate in the serious game development community about working on behalf of government-funded projects that support current military efforts. It also considers the potential for what Bruno Latour has called "object-oriented democracy" that these games and simulations could represent.

Making things public: democracy and government-funded videogames and virtual reality simulations

This paper treats web generators as a form of online hypertext and provides a taxonomy of some of the most popular generator types. It also characterizes the ideology of participatory culture associated with the generator phenomenon – along with its subversion through parody – and how specific processes that produce user-generated digital ephemera often mimic the constraints of familiar software applications and online forms. It includes a consideration of some of the knowledge-sharing practices of PHP coders and of members of the general public who exchange information about and from these digital phenomena.

Elizabeth Losh

Papers

Transnational identifications: Biliterate writers in a first-year humanities course

The palace of memory: virtual tourism and tours of duty in Tactical Iraqi and Virtual Iraq

In polite company: rules of play in five Facebook games

Making things public: democracy and government-funded videogames and virtual reality simulations

Assembly lines: web generators as hypertexts