September 25th, 2008
Do you remember when there was only one type of sudoku puzzle? It was a simple (or sometimes not so simple) 3×3 grid using only the numbers 1 to 9. Now, as the sudoku craze is sweeping the world, new sudoku varieties are coming out of the woodwork. There are now so many variations on […]
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September 20th, 2008
The internet touches every aspect of your children’s lives. Where you might look up an unknown word in a dictionary, your kids are more likely to use dictionary.com. Where you use the telephone, they use instant messenger. An even greater difference can be found in how they play games. Where the games […]
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September 20th, 2008
In part 1 we talked about online gaming and your children, including FPS games and exposure to violent content. We wrap up this week by talking about RTS games, MMORPGs and the additional threats of addiction and social predators.
RTS stands for Real Time Strategy. Strategy because these games generally take a much […]
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September 20th, 2008
Children are always up for a good game. Well, who isn’t? Pretend that you are back in school. For the rest of the class period you have two choices as to how you can spend your time. Option #1 is to struggle through endless arithmetic and English worksheets without any feedback except […]
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September 20th, 2008
There is no doubt about it, using computer games is a great way to encourage children to expand their realm of thinking. Your options for entertaining your child may seem numbered. Many people allow their children to spend quite a bit of time in front of the television. But, what good does […]
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September 20th, 2008
There exists some ephemeral quality that separates gamers from the rest of humanity, some thing that makes us, us and them, not us. I’ve never been able to quite put my finger on it, but it is inescapably there. Today, in hopes of moving closer to that essential quality of gamerosity, we […]
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September 20th, 2008
Last week we started to get into the motivation of the gamer. We discussed challenge and its ugly stepsister competition, two of the most common motivators. Today, we look at two more on the way to forming an overall model for what moves us.
Perhaps less common than the first two motivators, creativity […]
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September 20th, 2008
In part 2 of this series we took a look at Creative Expression and Escapism, two significant motivators of the common gamer. The week before that, we covered Challenge and Competition. This week we have a look at Socialization and try to tie it all together.
Social interaction is a subject on which […]
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September 20th, 2008
World of Warcraft is by far the best and largest MMORPG out yet. World of Warcraft follows a long history of the original strategy game warcraft. There were 3 popular titles that were released previously that were also an extremely big hit. Warcraft, Warcraft II, Warcraft III and the 2 expansions “The […]
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September 20th, 2008
MMOG currencies was first introduced from the popular game EverQuest (EQ) with their currency “platinum”, also known as “plat”. Since the first pioneers of selling plats on Ebay, many have argued and frowned upon those that have ever purchased plats online. I recall many players harassing others with foul names such […]
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