MATRIX is pleased to announce that it has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Startup Grant for the Red Land/Black Land: Teaching Ancient Egyptian History Through Game Based Learning project. Led by MATRIX Assistant Professor Ethan Watrall, the project will produce a Civilization IV mod designed to provide players with an opportunity to explore the process of social and historical change in ancient Egypt from the early Predynastic period (ca. 4000 B.C.) until the end of the Third Intermediate Period (ca. 525 B.C.). Further, the game will include supplementary content that explores the construction of historical knowledge – addressing questions of how historians and archaeologists know what they do about ancient Egypt. In addition to specific learning outcomes, the games is intended to provide an ethical and accurate counterpoint to the wealth of existing main stream commercial video games that draw upon pseudo-historical and pseudo-archaeological notions of ancient Egypt in order to craft an experience that is presented in a historically accurate manner.

KORA 1.0.0 has been released. This full version release includes bug fixes from the KORA 1.0.0-beta release and additional features, including fixity checking and enhanced documentation.

You can obtain KORA 1.0.0 from sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=212072

Ethan Watrall has been selected to participate as a member on the National Research Council committee on Modeling, Simulation, and Gaming.

One of the committee’s objectives is to explore how gaming affects attitudes and values of the people who play them, including examining how cultural difference causes approaches to gaming to differ. The committee will also examine political games, including how players participate in them; god games and the ramification on policy and culture; persistent worlds; and networked games.

Ethan will bring his considerable experience with games for cultural heritage engagement and complex socio-cultural systems in strategy games to bear on these and other questions while serving on the committee.

Meaningful Play 2008 (http://meaningfulplay.msu.edu) is an interdisciplinary academic conference taking part at MSU from October 9-11 that explores the potential of games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways. The conference includes thought-provoking keynotes from leaders in academia and industry, peer-reviewed paper presentations, panel sessions (including academic and industry discussions), innovative workshops, roundtable discussions, and exhibitions of games.