Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Monthly Archives: October 2010

Looking back on a serious symposium

Last week the KNAW (Roy­al Dutch Acad­e­my of Sci­ence) orga­nized a sym­po­sium on seri­ous games. Some­thing we’re deal­ing with a lot right now, so we checked it out. Here’s some thoughts on what was talked about: David Shaf­fer was the first speak­er. He made an inter­est­ing point: In order to learn by play­ing, the player […]

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Assumption is the mother of all…

So game num­ber two. What was this game sup­posed to be about? What kind of game could we design to take our stu­dents to the next lev­el? What was our next role? Look­ing at game #1, the big pin­up board game, one of the main things the stu­dents were doing was mak­ing assump­tions about basi­cal­ly everything. […]

Posted in Projects | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Cheating by the rules in Pirateball and Illuminati

One of the design­ers of the game Pirate­ball describes it as “extreme­ly stu­pid”. I recent­ly ran it at a games fes­ti­val and dis­cov­ered that it’s also craft­ed quite clev­er­ly. Pirate base­ball To poten­tial play­ers I always say that it’s base­ball as pirates play it. Then you get an idea. That’s the first trick: the name […]

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

One thousand blank white cards

The Learn­ing Lab is a course. And so like any oth­er course, there’s a set time dur­ing the week where every­one comes togeth­er to learn. Usu­al­ly there’s a cer­tain focus dur­ing these ‘lessons’. This week’s focus was rules and play. Some­thing one could say we, as aspir­ing game design­ers, are famil­iar with. And so for […]

Posted in Projects | Tagged , , | Comments closed