Press play: Designing an epistemic game engine for journalism

Designing for the epistemological entailments of physics through game-centered dialogical activity cycles

This study examines a secondary-level science curriculum centered on a multi-user, “serious game” called Escape from Centauri 7. The game engine depicts qualitative physics phenomena via dynamics tied to player actions. Players progressively engage the epistemological entailments of charged particles through new phenomena they encounter as the game unfolds. We engineered discretely bounded gami...

The Right Kind Of Telling: An Analysis of Feedback and Learning in a Journalism Epistemic Game

Comments of Journalism Mentors on News Stories: Classification and Epistemic Status of Mentor Contributions

We identified the speech act categories and clusters of discourse comments of journalism mentors who interact with students editing news stories. Two important speech act categories are evaluations and suggestions. Latent semantic analysis and principal components analyses helped us discover clusters of comments involving evaluations and suggestions. The comments of mentors were also significan...

You Played That? Game Studies Meets Game Criticism

While game criticism has been largely tied to the world of enthusiast press game reviews the emergence of the academic field of game studies and the maturing world of game journalism opens new opportunities to consider the future of the game critique. Today, the critical dialog around games can approach its subject from several vectors—social, psychological, historical, aesthetic, philosophical...

Epistemic games & applied drama: Converging conventions for serious play

This paper describes a way to bridge the remaining conceptual gap between the conventions of digital games and those of non-theatrical drama forms, particularly when both fields are applied to non-entertainment settings. The approaches and literature surrounding both David Williamson Shaffer’s work in epistemic games and Dorothy Heathcote’s work in applied drama are compared. The teaching strat...