Greenflame

Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand

Category: Digital Technology

  • Meaningful games (Part 2)

    Following on from Meaningful games (Part 1) from a few days ago, here is an additional selection of games that might fall into the category of games that move us in some way, and demonstrate one or more of these dimensions: Meaningful choices; Flow; Social play of some form. (See previous post for more details on…

  • Meaningful games (Part 1)

    In her book, How Games Move Us (The MIT Press, 2016), Katherine Isbister suggests that, Compelling games don’t happen by accident, any more than do gripping novels, movies, or music. In all these media, creators draw from a well-defined set of strategies and techniques to create a specific emotional experience. (Isbister, 1) Isbister distills these strategies…

  • Digital writing – Part 1

    Writing is not natural for me. School tasks such as writing about your holidays or knocking out different kinds of essays were like pulling teeth; each word dragged kicking and screaming onto the page. Partly, that was because I never felt happy with the quality of my handwriting, but mostly because I like thinking about…

  • Social Mediators at #AARSBL19

    If you’re at AAB/SBL and are part of blogging or social media communities around religion and other things etc. then James McGrath has proposed catching up at a couple of the receptions. I’m planning to get to at least one of these. Should be fun. Details at the link below. Social Mediators at #AARSBL19 https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2019/11/social-mediators-at-aarsbl19.html…

  • Gaming documentaries

    I’ve been watching a number of gaming documentaries recently as part of an ongoing research project. These documentaries range across a range of topics including gender, discrimination, indie developers, education, identity, and history. Most of these I’ve rented or purchased through the Steam store, with a few from Vimeo and YouTube. It’s interesting to watch…

  • The article is about questions from the audience at literary festivals but could also apply to academic conferences. Over the course of the weekend, I attended seven hour-long events, which means I sat through 105 minutes of audience questions. That’s 110 too many. There isn’t even a spontaneity about it because there are really only…

  • One of the reasons I blog here is to record interesting web links and articles that I’ve come across with a particular emphasis on the intersection of faith, technology and popular culture. Here’s a bunch of things that have come across my desk, email and screen recently. religiousgames.org is basically an impressive index of religious…

  • For the past three days I’ve been attending the annual Theology and Communication conference THEOCOM17 at Santa Clara University in California. The conference describes itself as “A gathering of Theologians on Digital Communication” and this year’s theme is “Digital Shepherding: Pastoral Theology and Ministry in a Digital Age”. The schedule of presentations is below, which…

  • Latest issue of Gamevironments is out. Source: Gamevironments – Current Papers and Archive (2017)

  • Hunting around on the Internet over the past few weeks looking for some statistics on computer and video gaming in New Zealand. A few links so far: Digital NZ Report 2016: Games are popular mainstream media – NZ Game Developers Association (2016) Kiwi gamer facts revealed by NZ Research (2010) 2 in 3 New Zealanders…