A book you should read: Masters of Doom by David Kushner

Posted by | September 27, 2010

Masters_of_doom-Book_cover John D. Carmack and John Romero—the two Johns who changed the landscape of videogames forever. Between id Software and Ion Storm we’ve seen much of the best early innovation of the FPS genre from the minds of great workers. And here’s the book to read about the evolution of our beloved gameplay.

We haven’t had much time to digest the pages, so we’ll defer to the Wikipedia entry to entertain and delight,

Much of the book concentrates on this dynamic. While the two men initially very much complement each other, eventually they come into conflict, leading Romero to be fired from the company. Carmack, the skilled creator of the complicated and fast game engines the company’s

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Cute ideas: RPG styling for text book learning

Posted by | May 27, 2010

Us voces can translate a little Nipponese but not quite enough to read the article behind this blog’s post—but the story still intrigues us.

It looks like Namco Bandai—a company that we love simply from all the enjoyment they’ve brought us—is looking into educating children using a translation from the digital world of video games into the analog world of textbooks.

It sounds like Namco Bandai is layering a choose-your-own adventure into the basic work/textbooks most students use in elementary school. Students follow an RPG storyline by, say, solving math problems and each right answer nets them a key. Scoring enough keys wins the student some kind of prize — but it’s not clear if the prize is contained within the book or something physical the teacher distributes. It could be pretty entertaining edutainment if it’s not too easy to cheat the game like you

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