If you don't see it, you won't do it ...

All along, I encourage kids to check out quality animation and games as I teach programming, keeping in mind that the best writers are those who read a lot of books! So, I do the same to keep the creative juices going to make me a better teacher, too. And, keeping in that spirit, check out this summary of "Best Game" 2014 nominees here. I've taken a look at all of them, because I aim to keep this blog and what I teach "family friendly"; unfortunately, the gaming world isn't always "clean" that way, so please be warned that several of the snippets (even!) hosted on this link use crude language or depict women in ways I'm not happy about. It shows we have a ways to go to create and promote game development that grabs the masses that breaks the stereotypic, easy common denominators to sell lots of product. That said ... 2 of my favorites are Mountain and Threes. I like them for entirely different reasons. As for Mountain, I like the concept of it better than actually playing it, which seems to be a popular reaction. It's a narrative game, and I like that it forces you to "play" it, by watching things happen to an object (in this case, a mountain), then figuring out how you can move/add reactions as time goes on. Newly released, it's got an avid following; check out this Atlantic Monthly article. As for downloading it to play, it's a very large file (3D graphics), and an acquired taste to play, so I'd recommend watching it being played to decide if you want to make the commitment to your device. I'm looking forward to teaching narrative game building (and there's a fair amount of controversy in the gaming community as to whether this is even a game) using Kodu this coming winter for SEP. Kodu is very narrative friendly and allows you to program outcomes based on decisions characters make in your story, following these decision from a first person camera view.

Threes is a nice 2D mobile device friendly math game, where you slide tiles to match those that randomly appears divisible by 3. Watching it, reminded me how you could use App Inventor to build this kind of game, using "table" screen arrangement once you set up your canvas, adding buttons and programming the text (string) for each button to change to a random integer, and programming "fling" and "collision" blocks to move and evaluate whether or not you touched a number divisible by 3.

Just over a month to go before I start teaching Kodu again, so I'll devote the next upcoming posts to more talk about narrative game development...