Filament Games Blog

The Return of the Learning Games

At the recent Games for Change Festival, Constance Steinkuehler displayed Gartner’s time-honored “hype cycle” and posited that learning games are somewhere on the Slope of Enlightenment (likely closer to the Trough than the Plateau). The Game Based Learning (GBL) space is idiosyncratic and will likely have a unique adoption curve (including multiple hype cycles), but…

August 16, 2017 // Dan White

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

Five Years of Game Art

When I was hired here at Filament five years ago, I had a lot to learn. Back then, the first tool I learned was Flash. You remember Adobe Flash, right? In recent times it has put on a new logo and has been masquerading around as “Animate CC” but lo, it is the exact same…

August 9, 2017 // Natasha Soglin

Walden and ELA Games for Learning

With Games for Change awarding Most Significant Impact and Game of the Year to Walden, a Game, there’s a lot of attention right now on the type of game that Walden represents – that is, narrative games, which fall more broadly into the category of English Language Arts (ELA) games. As a game named after a…

August 3, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Highlights from a Decade of Learning Games

What does a decade of learning games look like? Filament Games has been around making learning games and taking names since 2005, which was so long ago that smartphones weren’t even a thing at the time. A lot has changed about the world since then, and correspondingly, a lot has changed about how we design…

July 31, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Sid Meier’s Narrative Design: Part Two

Looking for part one of our “Sid Meier’s Narrative Design” series? Check it out here! Situational choices encourage the player to look at their choice as a piece of a larger context – in other words, a good choice is more than the literal options in front of the player, but one that asks the…

July 26, 2017 // Matt Haselton

Speed Sketch! Styles for All Ages

Filament Games’ library of educational tools and learning experiences is constantly expanding. With the exception of the Filament-made iCivics line, no two games look the same. If I told you Filament only has four game artists (one of which is actually a 3D generalist), you may be so inclined as to squint dubiously. So how do…

July 24, 2017 // Natasha Soglin

Medical Applications for Virtual Reality

Last time I checked in on the Virtual Reality space I was looking at VR projects that were creating a positive impact on the world, and I found no shortage of material. One thing I was intrigued by was the sheer number of medical projects already underway, so I did some investigation. As it turns…

July 17, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Embodied Cognition and the Vital Importance of Play

Greetings gentle reader, I would like to kick off this blog article with a quote from one of our fearless leaders here at Filament Games, Dan Norton: “Games-based learning requires that we look at the content and figure out if there are ways to embody that content in the act of play itself.” What I…

July 13, 2017 // Ethan Cayko

Games as Owned Experiences

I’ve just finished reading Tom Bissel’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, in which Bissel simultaneously lauds games for their benefits and foils them in a following sentence. Even through to its conclusion, there’s never a single moment where the titular statement is followed by a colon and plain answer. Which to me, a gamer…

July 12, 2017 // Nell Farrell

Filament Games Podcast Finale – Episodes 9 & 10

That’s a wrap! Season 3 of the Filament Games podcast is officially concluded with this exciting double-header. Check out our last two episodes of Season 3 below and stay tuned to our Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s next from the Filament Games Podcast team! FGP3-9: Retro Review: The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis…

July 10, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

What We Mean When We Say AI: Understanding Types of AI

How to Bring Games to Your Classroom in 2024

Great Games that Teach Programming