Kid games

So I have been teaching an after school art program for kids ages 5-7. For their most recent project I am trying to teach them how to bring concepts from the drawing board to life so I am having them all construct their own board games. Today we started with our concept sketches. Here are a few of them:

A game called "quick" in which players
try to get through a forest as fast as they can
without getting eaten by a bear.

A game like chess but with less pieces
only one piece can capture the "king"
and only one piece can kill this "king killer"
also the board spaces will be hexagons to allow
for 6 degrees of movement
A soccer board game in which the ball moves
via dice rolls but players move one square at a time.
An action adventure board game with many divergent paths.

In addition I am simultaneously enrolled in a Game Design class as part of my masters degree at UF's Digital World's. I find it interesting (and a bit sad) that 5 to 7 year olds were able to generate more original and cohesive game concepts than a lot of the people in the class!

Future of digital Studies Conference

I attended the Futures of Digital Studies Conference with Francesca over this past weekend. As you have probably already read the conference was maligned by some technical problems, though from what I could tell not the fault of Digital Worlds, and in true new media theorist fashion the conference goers quickly re-appropriated these technical issues as grounds for further theorization.

As much as I enjoy the lofty discussions and theorization on what all this "digital stuff" means to us as a culture, in tongue and cheek, I came to the realization that anyone could write a critical discourse on new media by following this simple formula. 1)combine antithetical statements with 2) made up words and 3) sprinkle with digi- or techno- prefixes and suffixes.

To cope with the reverberating feedback coming over the speakers Francesca and I took turns adding words to a page to write our first discourse on New Media. Here it is:

We incorporate the incorporeal personal meta-verse through electro-plate tectonics with bipartisan unilateral machinic politics in order to augment dematerialized techno-cultural
holons. Technopaganism cross-polinates Norse-Luddism to create hypertextualility in
context of finitely disembodied passively proactive emotional cyber conversion. Ipso facto
digital genitalia converges stationary nomadism's radically pro-viral paleo-conservative
agenda with pseudo-Foucaultian phallic decentering.

Hope you all enjoy it and keep adding to it in the comments!