Chris Covell posted images and translations of Stars of Famicom Games, a children’s book showing how Nintendo games were made, from start to finish. The book focused on the making of Super Mario Bros. 3, and includes shots of Miyamoto, developers and artists. He also posted scans from a book about Dragon Quest VI.
A list of Super Nintendo games that pushed the limits in terms of what the system was capable of. I remember Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario RPG being two later generation games that wowed me.
Gaming the Classroom is a program at Indiana University, created by Lee Sheldon and Jenna Hoffstein, that is structured like a MMORPG.
This class is designed as a multiplayer game. Class time will be divided between fighting monsters (Quizzes, Exams etc.), completing quests (Presentations of Games, Research etc.) and crafting (Personal Game Premises, Game Analysis Papers, Video Game Concept Document etc.).
The class is now finished and you can read a post mortem.
The developer behind Canabalt has written an article about tuning the game to achieve the feel that players expect. The post includes details about the selection of aspect ratio, the hitbox and the player’s motion. If you don’t own it already, the game is a fun one to have around on your iOS device when you need to kill a few minutes.
Video games in the classroom explores the use of games as a teaching tool.
Salen’s theory goes like this: building a game — even the kind of simple game a sixth grader might build — is equivalent to building a miniworld, a dynamic system governed by a set of rules, complete with challenges, obstacles and goals. At its best, game design can be an interdisciplinary exercise involving math, writing, art, computer programming, deductive reasoning and critical thinking skills. If children can build, play and understand games that work, it’s possible that someday they will understand and design systems that work. And the world is full of complicated systems.
For a generation growing up immersed in technology, it offers a great opportunity for cross-curricular learning. Implementing a broad program like that could be problematic with the compartmentalized subject structure found in most schools. There would also be issues in an educational system with standardized testing, where you pretty much have to teach to the test. Regardless, it’s an interesting approach that has a lot of potential.
Can videogames be journalism? A brief look at Newsgames: Journalism at Play, the new book from Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer.
“Games allow us to address systems instead of stories,” Dr. Bogost said in an interview. And, in some ways, they can offer more depth. People often search for simple answers to broad topics like the Gulf oil spill or the 2008 financial crisis, but in reality both were the result of a confluence of failures and events. Games can help to convey that complexity. “In particular, they can offer this experience of how something works rather than a description of key events and players,” Dr. Bogost says.
Gaming the System is an article from Rands describing the relationship between geeks and their games.
It’s also why we love games — they’re just dolled up systems — and the more you understand this fascination with games, the better you’ll be at managing us.
In a nutshell, geeks love to figure out how things work, improve anything they can and be the best at what they’re doing.
Satoru Iwata discusses the Mario brothers with Shigeru Miyamoto. The interview is quite revealing — many of Mario’s trademark characteristics were due to design and programming restraints at the time, including the moustache, the hat and the overalls.
The girls who practiced showed greater brain efficiency, consistent with earlier studies. Compared to controls, the girls that practiced also had a thicker cortex, but not in the same brain areas where efficiency occurred.
I think it’s time to dust-off my old Game Boy and increase the girth of my cortex.
An awesome stop-motion Lego homage to 8-bit video games. It took more than fifteen hundred hours of moving bricks around and photographing them.
Eightface is a weblog by Dave Kellam. It's largely just a collection of links to things I find interesting, with some attempts at pithy commentary interspersed.