Multi-User Virtual Environments
A collection of links and articles about gaming - email me
MUVEs - multi-user virtual environments
The recent recognition of gaming as a powerful tool in education has become a hot topic. I am totally convinced this is the way to have personalised, engaged, performative learning. What we need to do now is look at how to optimise these opportunities for learners.
New one (to me anyway) is Neverwinter Nights - Arden World of Shakespeare - I want more hours in my days!!!
Neverwinter nights in the classroom
From: Social realism in gaming (Galloway)
From this one may deduce that realism in gaming is about a relationship between the game and the gamer. In cinema, realism was merely a concern of the filmmaker during the making of the film De Sica's Bicycle Thief is still a neorealist picture no matter what social class is in the audience. But for games to be realist, they cannot be excised from the material realities in which they are played. To put it bluntly, a typical American youth playing Special Force is most likely not experiencing realism, where as realism is indeed possible for a young Palestinian gamer playing Special Force in the occupied territories. This fidelity of context is key for realism in gaming.
Games signal a third phase for realism. The first two phases were realism in narrative (literature) and realism in images (painting, photography, film). Now there is also realism in action. Whereas the visual arts compel viewers to engage in the act of looking, games compel players to perform acts. Any game that depicts the real world must grapple with this question of action. In this way, realism in gaming is a process of revisiting the material substrate of the medium and establishing correspondences with specific activities existent in the social reality of the gamer.