Gaming is a leisure activity for most people, for some an obsession, but what many don’t realize is that gaming is the way we process and learn within our environment. From the time we are babies we are playing games. Children play “house”, and “doctor”, and “war”, and they do this all over the world, without any rules but the ones they see in their day to day lives.

Gaming is a learning tool, and the games we play in our adult lives should also be teaching us something. What do we learn from a huge game like WoW or Guild Wars? We learn cooperation, social interaction, tolerance of other races… we learn that we can all be heroes. We also learn economics when we buy and sell things, trying to optimize our backpack space. We learn physics when we deal with our character’s movement, and mathematics when we count up mana costs, degeneration, regeneration, spell effects, etc. We learn logic when we string skills together to get that awesome effect… and the list goes on.

We are practicing social interactions with people around the world. The world is getting smaller and smaller, and it’s due to online gaming as much as it is due to online business. When you make friends at home, do you make friends with business partners, or with people you have fun with? The world has always been about “who” you know rather than “what” you know. Bill Gates plays WoW. Maybe you’ve seen him outside a town and never realized it.

In the future we must focus on what our games bring to the world. The best games leave us with a sense of having come away from them better than when we started them. That is our goal as designers.

Watch Trailer. WANT. WANT.WANT.WANT.WANT.WANT.WANT.WANT.

Can’t stop. trailer to watch again.

I want to be Batman, not the real Batman with all the heartache and pain, the death of parents type Batman, all the years of dedication, training self torture and sacrifce.  I mean Batman, the Batman that goes around beating up bad guys, with his fists, the Batman that can swing about in the rafters, hanging from a beam to grab a bad guy, real him up to the beam, hang him there, and move onto the next one.  The Batman that scares the bad guys. The Batman that is just so cool. That is the Batman I want to be.

You might have worked it out, I downloaded the demo for Batman: Arkham Asylum.

It’s now on my must buy list.

Well, EA & Dice have done a grand job.  I have very few problems connecting to servers, so I can now play BF1943, and just incase you have not bought it yet, it’s brilliant fun.  Get into a squad, and go and capture some flags, drive some jeeps, fly some planes and then make sure the enemy sees the bullet from your guns.  ENJOY.

Gamertag udoh on the xbox360 if you want to add me.

Currently Learning: Scout and Infantry (BF1943) and anything that shoots bullets in CoD4  ( lvl51)

Well, yesterday morning I was very excited because of the release of the Brand New Battlefield 1943 for our Xbox 360.  What is there not to like about this idea, a cheap 1200 MS Points Battlefield game for the Xbox 360.  But my excitement turned to disapointment.  because EA/DICE and Microsoft managed to completly mess up the release of this game.  First the game wouldn’t appear in the Xbox Marketplace, then when it did, it would not download, I kept getting ‘server unavailable’ messages, I read everything I could on http://majornelson.com/ and there are lots of people who had either got it, and got stupid amounts of lag or couldn’t get it.

I finally got it this morning, and I couldn’t even connect to a game.  Considering that the Microsoft Marketplace is a paid for subscription service, why it is so crap sometimes, I have used free services that are better than this, what exactly are we paying our xbox live gold subscription for?

This morning I tried log onto the xbox site to change my profile, and once again, ‘service unavailable’.

Bad work Microsoft. You should hold companies like EA to a higher standard than this, they make you look bad.

That’s one of the PC’s down for the count for a while it seems ( 0x0000007f error ) .  It looks like it’s the graphics card, but why the No Keyboard error when the PC switches on.  None of these things are easy.

Just got some MS Points, and bought the Big Surf Island for Burnout Paradise, it’s really good, the jumps are just awesome.

Still can’t put down Call Of Duty 4 on the xbox 360, don’t know what it’s doing right, but the Multi-player is just so very addictive and just very good fun.

But basically, that is about it for the last weekend, which was just a good fun time.