Bill Graner

Here's an amazing article about a high school for autistic students. It includes several powerful examples of play as a tool for learning and building relationships... and a cow-colored magic box.

Reaching an Autistic Teenager - NYTimes.com

Most discussions of narrative in games focus on the thematic level: the characters, objects, pre-authored backstory, and so on. While these representational elements are an important part of the overall experience of the game, they ultimately comprise only a skin, a layer (thin or thick) of media assets that color the workings of the dynamic game system. The game system itself is an engine defined by rules. While it is abstract rather than representational, it generates its own type of narratives, which resonate with metaphorical meaning to its players.

More... (PDF)

Google has just completed phase 1 of their Project 10 to the 100th, "a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible." Idea submission has just ended (sorry!), but you can still vote for your favorite ideas starting January 27. Here's the gist: the general public submits their ideas, Google evaluates them for maximum public benefit, and then Google funds them ($10 million dedicated in total).

All of this is great, if you implicitly trust very large companies. Criticism after the jump...

In this presentation, Google CIO Douglas Merrill talks about various types of innovation, with Google-specific examples, as well was how innovation factors into an overall business plan.

He defines three categories of innovation: incremental innovations (small changes), incremental innovations with side-effects (small changes with huge impacts, such as the evolution of the opposable thumb), and transformational innovations (those which change the playing field completely). A bit long, but well worth watching.

Bill