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I’ve been playing Mini Metro, an abstract game where you have to connect cities by drawing, and redrawing, the metro plan to keep pace with an ever-increasing number of residents who want to move around. It’s abstract and …

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This week we had a chance to sit down with Mdm Norazlina from Wellington Primary School. She is a teacher who has embraced the use of 3DHive in the classroom and has developed a game for students to …

< < < There’s a large body of research on games and attention, supporting these general conclusions. Outside academia, both Dr Gazzaley and Dr Bavelier have given talks at TED events (here’s hers and his ), contributing to a representation of ‘games’ as beneficial brain trainers that will improve society and make us happier (for a sample, have a look at the rest of the TED site, or search for news about games and education ). This is less depressing than reading the headli

One of the concerns people still sometimes have about using games in schools is “aren’t games bad for you?” And of course the answer is, “it depends”. Like all media, there are times when the story or setting …

The BBC Future site recently featured US organisation Glasslab’s current educational gaming project, adapting SimCity from the code up and aligning the tasks players face with the US Common Core curriculum standards. It’s the latest in a twenty-year …

4 Questions with…KENNETH, 3D Artist and Game Designer A cupful of 3D art development, a cupful of level design and testing, a tablespoon of game design mixed in with a hint of 2D art are the ingredients of …

Playware Studios’ Game Artist, George, always found art to be his favourite subject in school. Doodling on his textbooks and classrooms tables, he had no idea his attempt at creating a trading card game with a classmate would …

In my previous two posts here, I described some of the research work that we’ve been carrying out with a local primary school using 3DHive, and discussed what we’ve learned about the importance of preparing well – thinking …

So in the last post I introduced myself and the research work we’ve been doing with schools. In this one, I want to talk about a couple of factors that were crucial in making sure 3DHive was used …

Using games to teach is hard. Over the past ten years, research has repeatedly shown that, despite the clear potential for games to play a powerful role in formal curricular teaching, the complexity of the classroom context and …

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< . MY FAVOURITE GAME OF ALL TIME … I like to play strategy games such as Warcraft III, fantasy adventure RPGs like Final Fantasy and 3D fantasy MMOs like League of Legends and DotA. MY MOST MEMORABLE EXPERIENCE IN PLAYWARE SO FAR… So far, every moment I have been with Playware has been memorable. Together with Mitch, I work mostly in the 3DHive Builder; adding additional features. I use AS3 as the base language and work on web development projects using C# and .net language.

Senior 3D artist Jon Chan has been with Playware Studios since the very beginning in 2005. Dabbling occasionally in the creation of game levels within 3D Hive, he prefers designing challenges rather than narratives. We find out from …

Senior Software Developer Hong Zhenyang has been interested in programming since he was 12 years old. At 15, he started dabbling in C++. Years later (and many programming languages after), Hong is now the lead for 3DHive.build, the …

< < < One of the first steps to creating your backstory is to figure out where your character comes from. Events in his/her past could be influencing their behaviour in each level. Does your character have a hidden past that needs to remain hidden?  How does he/she react to people he/she meets along the way? Excellent sources of inspiration for backstories could come from movies you’ve watched or books you’ve read. Detailed character lifepath guides from role-playing games c

This is the first of a series of staff interviews lifting the veil on Playware, so join us weekly and get a chance to peer into the inner sanctum of our studio and get to know the team! …

It’s an understatement to say that today’s kids are smarter than those of previous generations. There seems to be very little that they don’t know or have an opinion about. My kids, for example, can have prolonged discourses …

Most afternoons these days, you will find my kids and I at home playing games. Since the weather often makes it impossible for us to be outdoors, we stay in and bond over “Monopoly”, “Snakes and Ladders”, “Gin …

Just this week, I sat in class listening to my students give presentations on a topic of their choice. There were interesting ones about saving dolphins and wanting to be a K-pop star but also yawn-worthy ones about …