gamedesign Archives | Page 7 of 16

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

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

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

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

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

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

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

Learning About Learning: Dog Training

If you have been following Filament Games you have probably met my dog Euler (named after Leonhard Euler). As you might infer, Filament has an office policy where pets are welcome at work. Euler has appeared across Filament’s media. For example, she has been featured, and photo-bombed others on our instagram. I added a second dog,…

October 11, 2017 // Stephen Calender

Tangential Learning: What Can Commercial Video Games Teach Us?

There is no shortage of game-based learning research and implementation studies suggesting that educational games can serve as effective, beneficial teaching tools. But what about commercially released games like Assassin’s Creed: Origins or Call of Duty: WWII? Are these wildly popular titles, developed first and foremost to entertain, capable of offering any educational value to players?…

November 13, 2017 // James LaPierre

How to Get Hired at a Game Studio: Game Designer Edition

Let’s talk about design as a job! People like to think that designers are a job defined by having neat ideas. They sit on a cushion, think of game…stuff, maybe even write it down. The developers gather around, consume the documents, eager to fulfill the prophecies from their glorious leader, and eventually, the designer is…

January 17, 2018 // Dan Norton

Designing Games & Saving Lives! An Interview with Matt Haselton

To celebrate the recent launch of the AppClinic series, we sat down with Matt Haselton, Game Designer at Filament Games and lead designer on Saving Lives!, AppClinic’s marquee CPR/AED learning game. We spoke with Matt about the inspiration behind the project and the particular advantages of delivering this kind of training content in a digital,…

January 24, 2018 // Brandon Pittser

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