Gameology 2.0

Does anyone know of any good articles on videogame design principles? I'm teaching a multimedia authoring course this semester, and the final project asks students to design a prototype of a videogame. Since the whole course isn't about game design, I don't want to bombard my students with a ton of reading on the subject; instead, I'd like to give them one or two articles that'll provide a basic working vocabulary. If anyone has such an article in mind, I'd love to hear about it.

In the spirit of Laurie's post on the Serious Games SIG at the upcoming Cs, I thought I'd let you all know about another games-related event.

Reading and Writing Virtual Realities: Computer Games and Writing Instruction

Session: A.25 on Apr 3, 2008 from 10:30 AM to 11:45 AM

This roundtable brings together instructors who have used computer gaming as either texts that are engaged and read by student writers or as texts that are (at least in part) produced by student writers; the participants will present brief overviews of their experiences (both positive and negative) and offer suggestions for instructors interested in exploring the potential of computer gaming in writing instruction. The goal of this roundtable is to advance the argument that games are not only important cultural texts that should be available to rhetorical analysis in our writing classes--much as we currently use film and websites--but that games can provide opportunities for both critique and production that bridge the gap between students' self-motivated out-of-school literacy practices and the literate practices of writing that we hope to teach them in our composition courses. While much work has recently been done to connect computer games and learning in general and computer games and literacy (Gee, 2003; Selfe & Hawisher, 2007), the presenters in this roundtable are interested in using computers games specifically for writing instruction, thus moving theoretical perspectives on gaming and literacy into the composition classroom itself. The presenters will discuss pedagogical and curricular tasks that primarily require students to use games as objects of critique (writing about games) or that ask students to use games as locations of rhetorical production (writing in games). Each speaker will present a different facet of the argument, from theoretical approaches to gaming in composition to examples of specific applications of gaming in writing instruction; these scenarios and vignettes will be brief, thus allowing time for interaction with the audience. A brief description of the roundtable participants' statements follows.

I'm writing my dissertation on WoW, and my recent work has been on race in this game: both the ways the game's design depicts race, and the ways that players respond to that design. Right now I'm working on the latter, and I've noticed a funny trend in the way that WoW players talk about race: when they're talking about their own racial identities and bigotries, they tend to substitute in-game races for real-life races. Here are a couple of examples.

About a year ago, I witnessed the following conversation between two members of my guild: