Suzanne de Castell is a professor of curriculum and instruction at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6; e-mail: [email protected]. Her interests centre on relations between media and epistemology, with particular reference to problems of knowledge formation, non-formal learning, and game-based curriculum design. Her recent publications include ‘Object lessons: Towards an education...

Biology and the particular gun culture of the United States come together to explain the persistent and powerful attraction of American boys to both real guns and toy guns. The 1990s saw adults begin to conflate “the gun problem” with “the boy problem,” sparking attempts (largely failed) to banish toy guns from homes and schools. Following the approach of play scholar Gregory Bateson, this arti...

The primary goal of Let’s play was to observe and conduct a literature review of preschool play behaviors. To aid in the observation of play, children were given autonomous robots to create open-ended games. The following literature review collates studies which seek to validate and describe play behaviors dominant in young children using various scales. The secondary goal of this study is util...

This Doctoral Consortium paper overviews the author’s PhD thesis which aims to explore the phenomenon, affect and appeal of ruthless play through examining three ruthless games; EVE Online (2003), DayZ (2012) and Warhammer 40,000 (1989).

This paper presents a progress report on a system to facilitate the manipulation of structure in music. Its purpose is to serve as an infra-structure for exploring music in terms of its inherent pattern structure, providing a platform for further research into the perceptibility of musical pattern. It is also intended as a framework for composition and, ultimately, as a performable instrument. ...

Bayes-Nash Equilibrium (BNE) is at the root of many significant applications of modern game theory to multiagent systems, ranging from airport security scheduling, to network analysis, to mechanism design in e-commerce. However, the computational complexity of calculating BNEs makes the process prohibitively costly, and the process does not scale well. On the other hand, finding BNEs by simulat...