Himmel Attack!

Jesse Himmelstein

Developer, game designer, researcher, teacher & entrepreneur

Welcome to my personal website.
You’ll find occasional blog posts, links to my projects, and talks that I found valuable.

  • I guest-wrote a post for the EduGamesHub blog about the RedWire hackathon in London. http://edugameshub.com/running-hackday-remixing-redwire/

  • Reposted from Gamelier It’s a bit hard to find, but New Rules for Classic Games, by Wayne Schmittberger, is full of intriguing ideas and creative takes on well-known games. It was originally published back in 1992. As the subtitle says “Recycle those…

  • With the excitement and activity of A-MAZE calming down, I finally have a moment to write about a rich book that I will want to read again and again- Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg. Since it was…

  •   “What Video Games have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy” is a book about how video games motivate players to learn how to play them, despite or even due to their complexity and difficulty. James Paul Gee compares…

  •   Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals was written by Katie Salen (who co-created Quest to Learn) and Eric Zimmerman (from the NYU Game Center). Its is a BIG book, by which it means it covers a lot of ground, but…

  •   I finished reading “Reality Is Broken” by Jane McGonigal. It’s a pretty long book (370 pages), but very well written. I highly recommend reading at lest the first few chapters. The author explains how playing games is essentially doing…

  • The Nightscience Hackathon just finished, and I’m writing this on the long train ride home. It was a lot of fun, and though we didn’t get nearly as far as we had naively hoped, I’m happy that we have a decent…

  • I just finished reading Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design. Overall, its focus is squarely on modeling game economies, rather than other types of mechanics, which do not apply as easily to the kinds of games that interest me. However there…

  • Meet the PAF Peacock I just got back from a 3 day trip at the beautiful and mysterious PAF, in the countryside near Reims, about 2 hours east of Paris. The place is made for artists, dancers, and musicians to…

  • Black ball is up! Pretty exciting for me. This has been a lot of work for Quentin and I over the past year, if can believe it. Not that it’s really a year’s worth of work, but just that we had a lot…