Recent theorizing around games and notions of play has drawn from a pool of mid-20th century scholars including such notables as Johann Huizinga, Gregory Bateson, Roger Caillois and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Through his articulation of the concept of language as a type of game, Wittgenstein has been both adopted and critiqued for purposes of circumscribing what are now commonly held as the necessary constituents of games including their systemic nature and the acquiescence of their participants to an agreed-upon rule structure: a set of rules which Wittgenstein likens to the ‘grammar’ of language (Salen and Zimmerman, 2001;Suits, 1978; Juul, 2005; Wittgenstein, 1953; Finch, 2001; Brenner, 1999). Although thus far Wittgenstein has served as a pillar of 20th and 21st century game theory canon, this paper adopts Wittgenstein’s notion of language-games not for purposes of examining games, but for purposes of examining the design of games. The pursuit of this paper is to utilize Wittgenstein’s lens of the language-game to investigate what it is that informs and consequently shapes and reinforces game design epistemologies in an attempt to encourage a reflexivity about the design practices behind the games we create. Read more...

In recent years, a sharp increase in the number of academic studies around the use of video games and new media for educational purposes has greatly expanded our understanding of their potential for enhancing learning. At the same time, the field of foreign language pedagogy has been racing to keep pace with the numerous opportunities afforded by the internet and interactive media forms. Surprisingly, however, there has been little cross-over between the two bodies of academic literature. This site seeks to present many of the latest theories in game studies and new media literacies alongside theories of language learning. Numerous examples are presented of how video games and web applications such as The Sims 2, Grim Fandango, Google Earth, Social Networking, DVD functionality and others could shift the way we approach language learning. Read more...

Could androids use movements to build relationships'? For people, relationships are created with the help of behaviour-shaping norms, which infants begin to discover and manipulate by the third month. To build relationships, machines can also learn to exploit human reactions in real-time decision-making. In the video game Tetris, for example, affect co-opts computer-generated patterns to simplify cognitive tasks: norms mediate what Kirsh and Maglio (Cognitive Sci., 18, pp. 513-549, 1994) term epistemic actions, which allow implicit knowledge to shape key pressing in ways that, given past games, are likely to be informative and valuable. Expert players act to change their cognitive states by allowing the game's higher-level states to constrain their lower-level actions. Since this process enables the development of expertise, we might expect it to be widespread; but it seems marginal in hamadryas baboons, although they use affect and complex norms. In humans, by contrast, infants use adults as cognitive resources in developing their epistemic abilities. This has engineering implications for android designers. Since androids can elicit epistemic actions, engineers need to develop an affect sensitive inter-face. If successful at this, even rudimentary co-action may prompt people to report experiencing androids as both making choices and violating expectations. Read more...

A group of 97 participants who were monolingual or bilingual and who had extensive practice playing computer video games or not completed two Simon tasks. The tasks were presented in two conditions that manipulated the number of response switches required in each block of trials. Bilingualism and video-game experience each influenced a different aspect of performance: Video-game players were faster in most conditions, including control conditions that did not include conflict from irrelevant position; bilinguals were faster only in a condition that required the most controlled attention to resolve conflict from the position and the stimulus. The results show the potential of experience to modify performance and point to Subtle processing differences in various versions of the Simon task. Read more...