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July 31, 2007

Serious Games: The Work Model Of The Future

Via: Entrepreneur Magazine - August 2007

Some government agencies and companies are kicking around the idea of turning the desktop into a game where employees interact in a game format all day.

Video-gaming on the job makes sense to John Beck, co-author of The Kids Are Alright: How the Gamer Generation™ is Changing the Workplace. In the book , he shows how growing up playing video games actually helps kids be more sociable, have a greater understanding of strategic thinking and will help them become better leaders later in life.

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Casual Serious Games As A Corporate Gameplay Model?
Via: International Game Developers Association (IGDA) - Casual Games Quarterly

The article Casual Games Get Serious examines why organizations are starting to deploy casual serious games, rather than triple-A inspired projects. It also makes the case that now the time is coming for Casual Games developers to take advantage of the Serious Games space.

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July 26, 2007

Mobile Phones as Game Controllers

Sci-Fi Tech writes about Megaphone, a company that turns mobile phones into controllers for games that run in public spaces on large screens. Call in a number to join the game, then control your piece of action by punching buttons on the dialpad or by simply barking out orders.

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July 25, 2007

Valador: Serious Games Creating Immersive Visualization Environment
Via: Valador - Information Architects

Valador Immersive Visualization Environment (VIVE™) is a development environment that integrates modern gaming technology, Valador models and simulations, and real-world data to create learning applications that present information in a stimulating, collaborative, simulated real-world environment, facilitating comprehension better than static text, charts, and graphs.

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Wired, Too, Bearish on Second Life
Last fall, Wired published a huge "travel guide" on Second Life. "[...] This exotic realm can seem bewildering and strange to first-time visitors," the magazine wrote then.

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Links For The Day

I temporarily lost access to my rss reader (read: I'm an idiot) so I had to find news the old way, like our ancestors did a few hundred years ago: I read a bunch of blogs and whatnot.

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Games Are Vehicles For Self Expression

by: Lynette Webb

858350329_bd822ee40d_400Here's one last slide on games for the day. Actually this is an old quote that I’d already included in part on an earlier chart, but I decided to expand - helped by stumbling across yet another brilliant photo by Thomas Hawk that perfectly suited it. :-)

Of course, not all games are “vehicles for self expression”. There is a very important distinction between so-called ‘casual’ games and their role-playing brethren - they’re like chalk and cheese in terms of the way it feels to play. Even for RPGs it varies by where you are in the experience curve…

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July 24, 2007

The Serious Job Of Game Designer
Via: VideoJug - Game Designer

VideoJug, the how-to video aggregator site, has recently made a terrific batch of videos on video game design with top-class interviews with industry expert Harry Ravenswood - Lead Designer, Kuju Entertainment (London). VideoJug strongly believes that these videos provide excellent content for video games enthusiasts.

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H&M Brings Fashion to The Sims




Fashion retailer H&M teamed up with Electronic Arts to bring modern fashion into the game world of the Sims with the H&M Fashion "stuff" extension pack. The game will allow players to

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Play2Train: Serious Games For Emergency Preparedness
Via: PLAY2TRAIN Project

Play2Train is a virtual training space in Second Life designed to support Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), Simple Triage Rapid Transportation (START), Risk Communication and Incident Command System (ICS) Training.

This virtual environment spreads over two islands, Asterix and Obelix, with one island dedicated to a virtual town and the other to a virtual hospital.

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In WoW I Can Cross Tasks Off A List

by: Lynette Webb

858255397_6e04540fce_400Continuing with the topic of games, here’s another interesting anecdote about why someone likes to play world of warcraft. It’s pretty much self-explanatory. :-)

The quote comes from a Newsweek article www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14757769/site/newsweek/. I’ve had it saved up for ages but only recently stumbled across this perfect picture to illustrate it. Thanks to Mrs Reed for letting me use it. www.flickr.com/photos/thereeds/708220272/ 

Original post: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/858255397/

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July 23, 2007

It Is Hard To Think Of Anything More Surreal Than A Chinese Goldfarmer

by: Lynette Webb

858255125_51d5418d79_400There was a really interesting article in the New York Times recently that looked at the gold-farming phenomenon. For those who don’t know, ‘gold farming’ is the term given to people who play online games like world of warcraft in a manner so as to earn the maximum ‘gold’ which is then sold on to other players who don’t have the time/skills to earn it themselves.

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July 17, 2007

Media Pendulum Swings On Second Life
Yeah, the media's honeymoon with Second Life is clearly over. Time mag has listed it among five worst sites to avoid: "We're sure that somebody out there is enjoying Second Life, but why? You interact in the space through an avatar, but creating and personalizing this animated representation of yourself is tedious. Movements feel clunky and there can be a terrible lag."

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Serious Games: Second Chance Trees Reforestation Project

Via: Second Chance Trees and and The Click Heard Round the World

Second Chance Trees, conceived, designed and developed by Converseon in support of its project partner Plant-It 2020, utilizes the power of social media to support proper planting, maintaining and protecting as many indigenous trees as possible.  

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What If and What Then?
Seems as if the marketing/videogame/metaverse blogosphere is full of posts and comments discussing yet another round of embarrassingly amateurish mainstream media articles and commentary on Second Life. Personally, I’m more interested in discussing the future of this technology than in trading comments with people who obviously prefer shadenfreude to critical thinking. So instead of getting wrapped up in what seems to me to be a complete waste of time, I want to go beyond the current issues and play a game of “What if?”

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July 14, 2007

Top 10 Features of China's Second Life

by: Dominic Basulto

Hipihi If you've ever experimented with virtual worlds such as Second Life, you may have heard the rumors that the Chinese were working on a souped-up version of Second Life for Chinese-speaking avatars. Jason Stoddard, CEO of new media agency Centric, has done some heavy beta-testing of HiPiHi and put together a list of the Top 10 features of China's Second Life - everything from water effects, in-world weather, swimming capabilities for each avatar; and cool new flight engines that mimic the look and feel of helicopters. Plus, there are neat things that only hard-core tech developers will appreciate, like new distance algorithms and on-the-fly ground retexturing. But here's the #1 reason why HiPiHi rocks:

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July 13, 2007

Virtual worlds and the future of TV

by: Dominic Basulto

Second_life_sundance_channelIn the Sunday New York Times, Dave Itzkoff explains how and why TV networks and cable stations are experimenting with virtual worlds such as Second Life. It's all part of their attempt to remain relevant for young audiences, while at the same time, making TV-watching a more social experience. In some cases, they are creating virtual avatars to interact with consumers, and in other cases, they are hiring companies like Electric Sheep to build entirely new worlds for viewers of their shows. In a best case scenario, argue technologists, virtual worlds like Second Life could become a complementary technology for TV:

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Geoterra: Serious Games For GE's Ecomagination
Via: GE's Ecomagination Initiative

Ecoimagination is a commitment by GE to develop and drive the technologies of the future that can protect and clean our environment.

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The Niche of Mass
Joel Greenberg has a blog entry (Link) worth reading regarding Suzanne Vega’s upcoming concert inside Second Life. Some of what he’s getting at has come up here before (reLink). And of course scarcity is something I’m often thinking about, given my particular interests.

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July 12, 2007

OutdoorAR: Serious Games Without Frontiers

Serious Games redefining our relationship with the physical world


Via: CNN - Turning virtual visions into reality

Virtual games such as Second Life and The Sims Online have not only proved to be commercially successful, but have also encouraged public interest and generated a wider understanding of the possibilities that virtual reality (VR) represents.

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Virtual Meetings with some Meat
I caught an interesting article over on the Technology Review site yesterday to which I wanted to call attention. From “Unreal Meetings” (Link):

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Links

Hi and welcome to another installment of "articles you may have missed and you may or may not care about".

First off, The Angry Gamer, an introductory analysis of..well.. trash talking. While not necessarily revealing anything you didn't already know, the author did do his homework and took the subject quite seriously.

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Nintendo breaks out of the living room and into the classroom

by: John Caddell

It's generally known that Nintendo deftly sidestepped the video-game console testosterone wars by focusing on an innovative motion-sensitive controller rather than amping up processing and graphics power (and price). As a result, Nintendo's Wii is the fastest-selling third-generation console in the world, well ahead of both Microsoft's XBox 360 and Sony's Playstation 3.

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July 9, 2007

Gibson To Ghost Second Life
Via Media Bistro comes word (Link) that cyberpunk author William Gibson intends to rez inside Second Life as part of a marketing effort to promote his latest book, Spook Country. From the Media Bistro post:

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Art Institute Goes Virtual
Via The Online Universities website comes word (Link) that The Art Institute Online has established a presence inside Second Life. No surprise here. But also no surprise is that so many other art schools have failed to establish a presence. This is especially odd considering the recruiting possibilities in a virtual space where there is so much emphasis on content creation.

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July 8, 2007

YDreams: Developing Games For An Interactive Future
YDreams is a Portuguese technology solutions provider founded in June 2000 by internationally renowned specialists in information technology, telecommunications, image processing, geographic information systems and environmental engineering.

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July 6, 2007

MTV: One Avatar, Their World
I caught an entry over on Virtual World News (Link) calling attention to a clip on C|Net (Link) that smacked of public relations bull. From the short write-up on VWN:

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July 4, 2007

Metabrands: Serious Games Demanding Meaningful Brands
Via: K Zero - The Rise of the Metabrands

A Metabrand is a brand that is created to exist solely in a virtual space.

Metabrands are the next commercial opportunity for companies made possible by the growing popularity of virtual worlds.

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Action and Experience In Second Life
The Second Life blogosphere is buzzing about the lawsuit SL resident and well-known virtual sex business operator Stroker Serpentine (real life Kevin Alderman) is filing against someone alleged to be infringing on both his copyright and trademark. The originating story is over on Reuters (Link) where the legal filing is also available for review (Link - PDF).

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