The Great Flu.com

I haven't had a chance to play it because I think the site's servers are dealing with an epidemic of their own, but here's a game that teaches through simulation and play. Pretty great design, too.

via Kotaku

"While it might not actually be Swine Flu: The Video Game, a flash game created by Dutch researches aims to raise the awareness of similar outbreaks by having the player control the deadly Gamers Flu.

The Great Flu casts the player as the head of the fictional World Pandemic Control. Pick a strain of flu based on difficulty level, and use your budget to help stop the spread of a potentially deadly disease. Should you distribute masks to the public, or broadcast public service announcements warning of the potential update? Should you start manufacturing vaccines, improve research facilities, or bring in a group of specialists? Even at the lowest difficulty the game delivers a sense of just how difficult it is to handle and contain the spread of a dangerous virus."

Play here --> The Great Flu.com

also, a write-up on Fast Company.

Immersion (Video Game Faces)

via Videogum:

New York Times photographer Robbie Cooper used a camera behind a screen to capture kids' faces while they play video games

I hear someone calling us to make games that matter...

Meet Emily

"Emily - the woman in the above animation - was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated. She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness."

Here's a link to the Times Online article.

I found her mouth to look a little strange (wide?) in parts. I think it could have interesting applications for video games, but I still have a hard time seeing this widely used in film or television. Actors, for the most part, already look fabulous! And it seems like a lot of work when you can just point a camera at someone to get genuine human expression.

UPDATE: more discussion over at Cartoon Brew

via Slashdot

And for something still looming in the "uncanny valley," try this video on for size:



via BoingBoing

Creating Video Games Is Not Just Fun, It's Educational

We've recently been talking a lot about the educational benefits of video games around the studio. We create lots of great games and activities that helps kids learn as they play them. Below are a few examples that take another 'meta' step outward to promote the idea that students can learn through the act of actually making the video games.


Alice - An Educational Software that teaches students computer programming in a 3D environment

Alice is a visual programming environment that is used to teach students Computer Science concepts. It is often used in introductory Computer Science courses.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

Scratch - A visual programming language from the MIT Media Lab

Scratch has a very simple interface for creating video games. It can be used to help students learn concepts in math, programming, design, and digital media.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.


Computer Games As Liberal Arts

Here's a cool article that talks about how creating video games can even help students learn concepts in writing, logic, math, science, marketing, sociology, and Internet culture.

[...] some educators are going a step further, teaching kids to make the games themselves. It turns out to be perhaps the ultimate form of liberal arts. In order to create a computer game you have to think about the content. You have to write a script. The programming involves logic, math and science. And to understand how you distribute a game you have to get into issues of marketing, sociology, and Internet culture.


Given the above, think about how much smarter we're getting every day at work!