Monday, May 21, 2007

Am I a gamer now?

Reading Disabilities-Fast Forward Slide

I think that eventually I'll go into elementary education so I was curious as to what online games would look like for children with learning disabilites. This particular game aims to improve a child's phoneme recognition, which can lend to reading improvements. I found myself kind of annoyed by the game, even though I can understand that it could be useful. Repetition is often necessary to fully develop sound comprehension, but I couldn't bare to listen for too long. The game requires you to move squares around and match sounds with one sound presented by a sheep. This sound isn't just a "ba" sound but it varies with each game you play. I can see this games use, but if I'm annoyed I can't even imagine how annoying this could be to a child with a learning disability.

Anti-Bush Video Game
I was curious to see what this game looked like after reading some of your reviews of it. I was a bit confused by some of the opening page imagery at first (see: Hulk Hogan pixel-man) but I decided to go on ahead. Once I got into the game I couldn't help but laugh at first. Its absolutely ridiculous at times. But in the end I really appreciated a lot of the information. Definitely not the venue that I would want my political or social commentary from, but appreciated none the less. I soon found myself processing through pages and pages of text between some highly visible American figures. Then I entered the interaction section where I was assumed the roles of several of the high profile Americans presented and I tried to defeat the Bush administration. I played for awhile and killed off some mutated machines, learned some facts and figures about the deficit/surplus, and was generally entertained and educated.

Growing Your Chi
This game was terribly chi-sy. I mean do I really think that clicking on clouds of people smiling as opposed to frowning will make my day better? No. In fact it kind of made me frusturated. I lost points for clicking on the names "Marcus" and "Stewart" because they were not my name. So am I to assume that Marcus and Stewart are bad for my Chi. And then I started thinking about people who weren't physically capable of smiling, and then I felt bad. Okay, so I am taking this a little far. Basically I just didn't like this game. haha.

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