School is a game. It's just not a terribly well-designed game

Love is Respect - Grace's Diary is Life. Love. Game Design Challenge's winner

I just payed the flash game Grace's Diary that won the prize of the Life.Love.game contest. The third annual Life. Love. Game Design Challenge, is a flash design contest for the creation of games that deals with dating violence without using any violence in the game. Grace's Diary is more of a simple interactive story about helping Grace and her friend Natalie while learning the danger signs of Teen Dating Violence. In my opinion it could be less textual and more interactive but it can work as a good example of a creative way to speak about inconvenient truths to children and teens in a straightforward yet soothing way. It's a great contest for a great cause. Don't forget to check the other games as well http://www.jenniferann.org/2010-games.htm

The Psychology of Games

"Why do gamers do what they do? Why do those designing games do what they do?Why do those marketing and selling games do what they do?"
These are some of the questions that http://www.psychologyofgames.com blog is trying to address in a very successful imho way... No serious gaming and game based learning here kids, but you will definitely enjoy the opinion/results of a serious researcher who is a actually a gamer. Even the comments were really insightful and provided links with books/papers I was not aware of.

I was actually looking for some new papers on emotion and gaming and the Decision Making Under Arousal  post was trying to tackle the unanswered question "why am I staying up late playing games when I know you have to work tomorrow?"... oh why?

Gaming to save the world

According to the amazing Jane McGonigal and her TED.com speech: Gaming can make a better world gamers are able to solve REAL WORLD problems one quest at a time.
It was fascinating to see how game designer and doc McGonigal believes that gamers because of their ingame abilities/qualities of urgent optimism, ability for social fabrication, blissful productivity and epic meaning (such as SAVING THE WORLD duuuh) are willing and able to solve real life problems such as famine,global conflict, poverty, financial crisis, educational inequality etc. as long as we present them as a game quest. Sounds crazy? then it might work...