gamedesign Archives - Page 13 of 19

Video Games and The Scientific Method

The Mario Method Form a question, create a hypothesis, predict the outcome, test your theory. Sound familiar? You probably recognize these steps as the foundational structure of the scientific method. Human beings have used this simple yet profound process to structure scientific inquiry for hundreds of years, and based on the fact that I’m typing…

October 4, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

Project Highlight: Aquation from the Smithsonian Institute

Learning games are powerful tools for delivering information – whether you’re teaching basic spelling or object-oriented code, learning games are potent experience engines that immerse and engage the learner. There are even some cases where that immersion can be quite literal. Take, for instance, Aquation, the new Freshwater Access Game from the Smithsonian Institute that’s designed to…

October 2, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Making Games that Learn

There’s a lot we can learn playing games – from Newtonian physics to object-oriented coding, games can make us more capable and more informed. But here’s a thought that might sound a little ridiculous: what can games learn from us? According to today’s article from Fast Company, Unity Technologies is looking to answer that very question. Yesterday…

September 20, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Filament Games | Educational Game Developers

Walden and ELA Games for Learning

With Games for Change awarding Most Significant Impact and Game of the Year to Walden, a Game, there’s a lot of attention right now on the type of game that Walden represents – that is, narrative games, which fall more broadly into the category of English Language Arts (ELA) games. As a game named after a…

August 3, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Highlights from a Decade of Learning Games

What does a decade of learning games look like? Filament Games has been around making learning games and taking names since 2005, which was so long ago that smartphones weren’t even a thing at the time. A lot has changed about the world since then, and correspondingly, a lot has changed about how we design…

July 31, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Sid Meier’s Narrative Design: Part Two

Looking for part one of our “Sid Meier’s Narrative Design” series? Check it out here! Situational choices encourage the player to look at their choice as a piece of a larger context – in other words, a good choice is more than the literal options in front of the player, but one that asks the…

July 26, 2017 // Matt Haselton

Embodied Cognition and the Vital Importance of Play

Greetings gentle reader, I would like to kick off this blog article with a quote from one of our fearless leaders here at Filament Games, Dan Norton: “Games-based learning requires that we look at the content and figure out if there are ways to embody that content in the act of play itself.” What I…

July 13, 2017 // Ethan Cayko

Games as Owned Experiences

I’ve just finished reading Tom Bissel’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, in which Bissel simultaneously lauds games for their benefits and foils them in a following sentence. Even through to its conclusion, there’s never a single moment where the titular statement is followed by a colon and plain answer. Which to me, a gamer…

July 12, 2017 // Nell Farrell

Filament Games Podcast Finale – Episodes 9 & 10

That’s a wrap! Season 3 of the Filament Games podcast is officially concluded with this exciting double-header. Check out our last two episodes of Season 3 below and stay tuned to our Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s next from the Filament Games Podcast team! FGP3-9: Retro Review: The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis…

July 10, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Bloom’s Taxonomy and 21st Century Skills

We draw on quite a few paradigms of thought when we develop games, and fortunately for us there is no shortage of taxonomies and frameworks to be found in the realm of education. Recently, during a casual discussion of educational frameworks (yes, we’re nerds) we decided it might be worth highlighting a few with regards to…

June 21, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

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