January 2011 Blog Entries

Today at Gamasutra, they're featuring an article about an experimental game from Carnegie Mellon called Fusion that blends the genres of Puzzle, First Person Shooter, and Racing into a single, team-based game. The article, while thorough, could go into even more detail about the trade-offs and decisions made for my taste. It's an exciting experiment that seems to have met with reasonable success though, and the creators should be lauded for the work!

It's particularly inspiring for learning games because a challenge that often goes unaddressed in the educational game space is addressing students interested in different modalities. Putting aside the problematic notion of learning styles, which has recently been questioned, this represents an excellent first step in being able to address students who might simply be interested in one playstyle over another. In some ways, it echoes our work in participatory simulations, but instead of changing the players' lens on content through collaborative roleplay, you could change their lens on content through collaborative genreplay instead.