College game design courses are great for learning how to program games on a PC, but for the most part, getting access to console development tools has meant going to work for a licensed console developer. Sony is looking to change that with it's new PlayStation-edu program, which provides PS2 and PSP development kits for
"computer science and engineering students who want to understand how the hardware works in the PlayStation consoles."

The program isn't a charity -- schools will have to purchase the dev kits from Sony -- but the package comes with demo code, samples, documentation, and access to a support web site and forums. Seems like a good way for Sony to divert student developers' attentions towards their products and away from Nintendo-affiliated Digipen or Microsoft's XNA development tools.

A new Harvard class entitled CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion will be jointly held in the real Harvard Law School and in the virtual world of Second Life. The course, which starts this week, deals with making persuasive arguments in virtual spaces such as web sites, wikis, and, of course, virtual online universes. While registration for the course is currently full, the virtual classroom and lecture materials will be available to Second Life users at-large during non-class hours.

While this isn't the first time a college course has been held in-game, this offering from a school as prestigious as Harvard shows that this trend may be growing. Would you attend a class in a virtual world?

[Thanks nsomneia]

Erudite academic and advocate for all things gaming, MIT Professor Henry Jenkins has started a blog titled "Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins." Now you can finally trash all those unofficial Henry Jenkins fansites from your RSS feed, cause this one's official. With only a couple gaming posts -- like this one on games as branded entertainment -- there's still plenty for the interested nerd to uncover and look forward to.

But the blog isn't supposed to be all about games, it's about his new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. We could try to condense what Prof. Jenkins is gonna be writing on his blog, but we'd only be doing a disservice to you, reader. So we'll just tease you into it: "Reduced to its most core elements, this book is about the relationship between three concepts - media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence ...."

During the Sony press conference earlier today, there was a sneak preview of a technological concept that takes the PS2's current motion detection (EyeToy) one step further. Using a camera and barcoded physical cards, a card game can become digitally visualised.

Augmented reality and tangible user interfaces are two research areas that various academics have been pursuing for some time, but are only just making it into the mainstream. While these ideas seem cool in theory, in reality we have to ask ourselves what value is added to a game by providing this interface. Perhaps we'll see this technology being used to strike out in innovative, unusual directions -- or perhaps, like many research ideas that are nice in theory but fall flat in practice, it will become a selling point that isn't taken any further.

Gaming, and the myriad disciplines which overlap with the concept of video games, are gaining ground in academic circles as a valid field of research and study. With MMOs used for social and anthropological experiments, film-making papers focusing on machinima, and computer scientists investigating hardware and algorithms, computer games research can cover a wide range of subjects, and it's often hard to find exactly what's going on in the field.

A new journal called "Games and Culture" will help with this, as it plans to cover everything from gaming culture to development and even the political ramifications of games. Often fantastic ideas occur in academia before they hit the mainstream, so it should be worth a read for anyone interested in games--there's a free trial of the first volume to get you started, and many of the first issue's papers are on the topic "Why Game Studies Now?"

[update: fixed typo]