Games for Change: Teaching With Portal, Fixing Brains With iPhone

Portal publisher Valve is encouraging educators to use the physics puzzle game in lesson plans.
Image: Valve

NEW YORK — It is an exciting time to be part of the games-for-change community.

For a few years now, there has been great deal of interest in using videogame technology to improve health and education. So far, there haven’t been any blockbusters in this space outside of “exergaming” titles like Wii Fit. I attended the Games for Change Festival in New York last month, and what I saw there gave me reason to believe that there will be some big hits for education and health videogames in the near future.

Two pieces of software that were just released stood out in particular: Teach With Portals and SuperBetter. One is a system based on an extremely popular commercial game that was modified to advance educational goals. The other was designed from the ground up from a behavioral science model with the express goal of improving health outcomes. I think these two development streams will allow purposeful play to finally enter the mainstream.

At a presentation at Games for Change, Leslie Redd and Yasser Malaika of Valve presented the story of the development of Teach With Portals.

Valve released the game Portal 2 in April 2011. By May of that year, it had already begun developing Puzzle Maker, a tool for making Portal 2 puzzles. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell gave the keynote speech at the Games for Change conference that year, in which he discussed the potential of commercial games as learning tools. He then showed early versions of the Puzzle Maker, which Valve soon began play-testing with teachers and students.

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The iPad Game That Took 9 Years (And an Epic Disney Fail) to Finish

The iOS game The Act is the product of nine years of work and a small army of former Disney animators.
Image courtesy Electronic Arts

Edgar, a mild-mannered window washer, is daydreaming of the girl he loves. In his dream, they meet in a nightclub straight out of Casablanca, flirting from across the room.

The scene, lovingly rendered in hand-drawn animation on an iPad, is controllable: By swiping your finger right or left, you can control the boldness of Edgar’s flirting. Swipe too hard and Edgar will gyrate wildly, causing her to recoil in terror. But swipe slowly, and Edgar will ease on the charm, pantomiming some smooth dance moves that win him the girl of his dreams.

The Act, released last month for iOS, is a game with a remarkable history. Development on the game began over nine years ago and involved dozens of former Disney animators that had worked on films like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Its animation was created the old-school way: pens and paper. And after The Act was completed, it came very, very close to never coming out at all.

The seed of The Act was planted in Omar Khudari’s mind in 1986. A computer programmer for an educational gaming company, Khudari was looking for the next big thing. He was fascinated by Dragon’s Lair, the arcade game that used animation by Don Bluth stored on a LaserDisc. But the game didn’t live up to his expectations.

“It looked like a movie, but it didn’t seem like [one] when you were playing it,” said Khudari. The player wasn’t involved in the story, he just pressed buttons to make Dragon’s Lair‘s hero jump and dodge.

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Osaka Cops Bust First Store Employee in Game Piracy Crackdown

“Sales of majikon have ended,” reads a sign outside a shop in the Den Den Town electronics district of Osaka. Police arrested a worker at another shop accused of selling one of the illicit game-copying devices.
Photo: Daniel Feit/Wired

Osaka police have arrested a man in the city’s electronics district for selling videogame-copying devices at a brick-and-mortar store, the first such arrest in the country, according to Japan’s Kyodo News wire service.

The suspect, 35-year-old Masayuki Nishimura, worked at a small electronics store called Majipara on the electronics store shopping street known as Den Den Town.

The store mainly deals in computer parts. In an attempt to get around Japan’s ban on game copiers, Majipara broke the devices down and sold them as separate components, according to a Yomiuri Television report.

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Game|Life Podcast: Ouya’s and Penny Arcade’s Kickstarter Gambles

Backing a Kickstarter project is a roll of the dice.
Image: Fady Habib/Flickr/CC BY 2.0

With Ouya off to the races and likely to become the most-funded Kickstarter campaign ever, and Penny Arcade taking a gamble on using Kickstarter to eliminate advertising, it seemed like a good time to bring up the topic again on this week’s Game|Life podcast.

Wired senior editor Peter Rubin is away this week, but we’ve replaced him with Bryan Lufkin, who has been recording our podcast for the past few months and will now move on to other endeavors inside Wired. His reward for having to sit and listen to our voices every week is that he gets to sit in on this episode now that we have brought on a new sucker to do this thankless job.

Besides Ouya, I attempt to explain to everyone why they need to get all the way through Episode Two of The Walking Dead (no spoilers) and we take some listener questions about Miiverse and iOS games.

I also deliver what turns out to be probably my most incendiary Game|Life podcast rant ever about gamers’ reactions to the Penny Arcade Kickstarter, ultimately landing on why I think some people’s temper tantrums over the fundraiser may be having some larger ill effects that they don’t realize. Listen as I struggle to contain my rage! A rollicking good time awaits.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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Ouya CEO: ‘We All Have Reputations On the Line’

Julie Uhrman, founder and CEO of Ouya.
Image: Ouya

Ouya, the fledgling Android-based videogame console, has drawn a great deal of attention with its astonishing Kickstarter success. In just three days it has raised over $4 million, making it the second-largest Kickstarter ever with a great chance of setting the all-time record.

With this dramatically increased attention came a level of extra scrutiny. While some industry watchers are quite impressed with Ouya, others are highly skeptical.

On Wednesday, I spoke with Ouya founder and CEO Julie Uhrman and asked for her response to the common caveats: Ouya consoles don’t exist yet beyond a bare-board prototype, the controller isn’t finished, and Kickstarter’s rules mean that the project’s 32,000-plus backers have no guarantee that the console will ship at all.

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