How I Stopped Worrying About Gamers And Started Loving People Who Play Games

A response to Justin Peters' recent Slate article. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra

Every week at my company Persuasive Games we get repeated calls and emails from people interested in playing Stone City, the Cold Stone Creamery training game we created back in 2005. In the game, the player services customers at the popular mix-your-own flavor ice cream franchise by assembling the proper concoctions while allocating generally profitable portion sizes. The vast majority… read more

Persuasive Games

The Expressive Power of Videogames

This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon A book about how videogames make arguments: rhetoric, computing, politics, advertising, learning. Videogames are both an expressive medium and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis,… read more

The Missing Rituals of Exergames

Exergames need social contexts. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.

Interest in exergames has grown in recent years, largely on account of their potential to replace sedentary leisure activity with active leisure activity. Instead of sitting in front of the television idle, mouth agape as we ponder our love for Raymond or hatred for House, we might step-to with DDR or jump around with Eye Toy.

Elementary Greek

Koine for Beginners

Elementary Greek is an ancient a Greek text that’s both simple and substantial. Designed to be used as a full course for teaching children as young as 2nd or 3rd grade, Elementary Greek may also serve as a self-teaching program for teens and adults. No previous knowledge is necessary and each concept is covered thoroughly and reviewed regularly throughout the… read more

The Rhetoric of Exergaming

Paper presented at the Digital Arts and Cultures conference, Copenhagen Denmark, December 2005.

Recently videogames that use physical input devices have been dubbed â??exergamesâ? â?? games that combine play and exercise. This paper offers a historical perspective on exergames, from early arcades to the Atari 2600 through contemporary consoles, as well as a theoretical analysis of the different rhetorics such games deploy to influence players toward physically-active gameplay.