Warchiefs Patch Coming: We are working diligently on a new patch and perhaps by the time you read this there will be details about it published on our community site. I don’t want to speculate on a release date or content, other than the new Ozarks map I mentioned recently. The patch is being tested daily and moving along well.

Warchiefs Contributers Win IGF Award: Several graduates from the game development program at Southern Methodist University’s Guildhall recently shared an award from the GDC’s Independent Games Festival. The students created the Weekday Warrior mod using the Half-Life 2 engine and it was chosen as the best single-player first person shooter modification in this year’s competition. Two members of the group, Phillip Escobedo and Bobby Simpson, helped us out last year finishing up the Warchiefs.
The Guildhall is one of several new graduate and undergraduate programs teaching aspects of game development at universities. Several ES’ers have been involved with the SMU program here in Dallas, particularly artist Paul Jaquays. Paul’s son Zack is a graduate of the program and also worked temporarily at ES on the Warchiefs.

The Weekly Standard on Civilization: I was recently sent a copy of the magazine The Weekly Standard (February 26, 2006 issue) that featured a cover story on the classic computer game Civilization. The author had interviewed me, along with many others, for the article, which is an interesting look at the game, its effects on players, and the mind of designer Sid Meier. I also received recently from Firaxis Software a copy of their boxed edition of the entire Civilization series, The Civilization Chronicles. Again, I had provided some anecdotes from the development of the first edition for their history of the series.
I think it is great that this particular game has touched so many lives. It is a fine example of the promise of good games, which can do much more than just entertain. At ES we are proud of the Age series for the same reasons.

Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century: This is the title of a new book by James Paul Gee to be published next week. The blurbs say the author explores the relationship between gaming environments and literacy development through case studies of computer gamers today. One of his goals is to examine the claim that computer games can provide better literacy and learning environments than U. S. schools. If you have read recently, like me, that standardized test scores of U. S. students have declined over the past decade while grades have gone up you may have a bias already on Gee’s question.
Mr. Gee is an academic and published several years ago the book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” Whether you find his work interesting or not, it is a sign of the growing importance and maturity of games that they are being subjected to serious academic study.

Serious Games: The idea of using games for a variety of non-entertainment purposes is a relatively new area of game development called Serious Games. I was a speaker at one of the first Serious Game Summits (SSG) several years ago in Washington DC. That whole event took place in one day in one relatively small conference room with a single track of speakers. Almost all the attendees that I met were from departments of the U. S. government interested in how games might help them plan or answer policy questions.
At the recent DICE conference, I ran into Ben Sawyer, one of the people behind the SGS. He told me that the SGS now draws hundreds of people from all parts of the world. There were six tracks and 55 speakers over two days.
Consider that today’s strategy gaming traces back to board wargaming in the 60’s, and those games trace back to the Prussian General Staff’s 19th century Kriegspiel (wargame), which was a serious game. Now entertainment gaming is fostering serious games to complete the circle.

Halo Wars Forums: I checked out our forums recently and writers seem quite keen on the game. I count almost 20,000 posts in the General Discussion forum, over 10,000 discussing the Halo universe and its inhabitants, and nearly 10,000 more offering suggestions for the game. The team is jazzed to see this interest and takes the input seriously. Thanks and keep it coming.

GDC Last Week: The Game Developer’s Conference was last week in San Francisco and there a contingent from ES attended. This is the granddaddy of developer conferences tracing back to small gatherings in the 1970s, I believe. There are tons of speakers and there is stuff to learn. Over 10,000 attendees were expected, many looking for jobs, so it has a quite different feel from the smaller conferences. It is also a big social event with lots of sponsored parties, loud hotel lounges, and lots of press representatives looking for stories. I won’t be there but will be interested in what friends who do go have to say.

Bruce Shelley