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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 13, 2007

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

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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June 26, 2007

Eliane, in her own words

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you undoubtedly noticed our newest contributor, Eliane Alhadeff. She writes about serious games, she does it well and nothing gets by her. She's also one of the nicest people I ever met in this blog business, always eager to help, never without a kind word and very, very patient.

But who is Eliane Alhadeff?

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June 23, 2007

Virtual Goods Summit 2007 Roundup
Virtual World News has done an excellent job posting a record of the Virtual Goods Summit I mentioned earlier (reLink), and there’s plenty of documentation elsewhere. I’ve not read everything yet but wanted to at least make those people who stop in here - especially Industrial Designers - aware of the interesting and relevant topics being discussed.

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May 23, 2007

Harvard's School Of Government On "Serious Games"

Via: Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government /Government Innovators Network- Companies put "Serious Games" to work

Sam LaGrone, Staff Writer - The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)

If 20-something pilots can use simulators to train for catastrophes, so should a 20-something restaurant or retail manager.

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April 24, 2007

MMO Miscellanea

Some MMO-related articles caught my eye because they stray out of the old, beaten path (Where is <game> headed? or What is the next WoW killer? or A new era dawns as patch 5.43.21b is announced).

First off, a Clickable Culture article reinforcing the point that, no matter what you design your game for, there'll be people who'll find new, weird and sometimes interesting uses for it. 

Staying in Azeroth, a piece about 'coming of age'. And as horrible as that may sound, the author makes a pretty good point. Yes, it's a game but it's still played by real people, even if they're behind really cartoonish characters.

Finally, a very detailed article by Nick Yee on MMO superstitions. I found it to be a delicious read, although, if you never played a MMO in your life, the post might read more like a psychiatry ward visit.

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April 5, 2007

Book: In-Game Advertising & Advergaming



This book came out in January, and I just spotted it on Amazon. Advergaming and In-Game Advertising: An Approach to the next Generation of Advertising. Not cheap, at $76. Couldn't find anything either on the book or the author. Am very curious.

Original post: http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/04/book-in-game-advertising-advergaming.html 

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April 3, 2007

Ian Bogost on Value of In-Game Ads
Ian Bogost (game designer and researcher, bio, blog) wrote a Gamasutra feature where he talks about the cultural meanings of the branded tokens in the latest Monopoly: Here & Now edition and what lessons can be extracted by video game designers:

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January 29, 2007

Second Life Shorts, Set 2

image: moomoney via Giff Constable

A number of interesting Second Life developments happening all at once:

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Reverse Product Placement in Games
BrandWeek has a follow-up on David Edery's HRB piece on reverse product placement in games (see David's earlier post on the topic, my old post on the fictional brand Sprunk in Grand Theft Auto, and a summary of the HBR article in Gamasutra). What's reverse product placement (I call it "proxy branding") ? BrandWeek writes: "While traditional product placement refers to integrating a real brand into a fictional environment, an idea that's gaining traction is to create a fictional brand in a fictional environment and then release it into the real world."

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January 18, 2007

No Ads On My Battery!
Found an article on in-game advertising over on 411mania.com.

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January 11, 2007

To: Advertisers, Subject: Hi
This article was indirectly triggered by this press release, which mentions in-game advertising company Double Fusion hiring a gentleman called Richard Willoughby, management expert, as their vice president of Human Resources.

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Generation Next?
A couple of days ago, the Pew Research Center released a forty-some pages report on "Generation Next", basically the young adults that grew up with the PCs and cell phones and the internet and whatnot. This subject has already been covered on the main Futurelab blog so this article will have a different approach, as far as the extracted data is concerned.

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January 5, 2007

SL predictions...
...and other assorted articles you could read and pretend not to notice I haven't updated this in a while now. Yes, I'm talking to you. Anyway...

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December 30, 2006

Warren Ellis writing about Second Life
I have to admit, I've always been a little uneasy when posting material or links to material about Second Life. For one, it's not my domain. Ilya Vedrashko is at home there, I am not. Not yet. Still, given the possibilities this growing virtual world lays before us, I have and do write about it.

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December 27, 2006

In The News..
Well, we're back, after a somewhat tumultuous Christmas. Starting tomorrow, we'll be going back to regular articles as I trim my feeds, something I wasn't able to do in the last few days' uproar. Until then though, here are a few things for you to read over a cup of mulled wine (if you're so inclined).

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December 22, 2006

Virtual Pain Management Here
While this subject may appear to stray from or merely lurk at the border of this blog's area of coverage, it is in fact rather well connected with everything, as per the Great Plan. Or perhaps, in the bothersome throes of this treacherous flu, I find this story to be soothing. It seems NVidia is putting a shoulder into developing a virtual reality system to help reduce pain for burn victims.

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December 19, 2006

Snapshot Experiment: Where Would You Place Ads?
For today, I bring you a small play experiment. A short block of questions have been handed out to five people as an imagination exercise. That is to say, the results have only minimal statistical relevance. It's just a glimpse on where various gamers would place ads and crafting conclusions such as "40% of the interviewees have said that [..]" would be rather silly. Also, serious answers where not a demand. Short of  combinations of four-letter words and terms such as advertising, they could and did answer any way they wanted to.

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December 18, 2006

Counter-Strike, Now With Ads


While going through my extended reading list, I (completely accidentally, I admit) ran into an interview with Valve's Doug Lombardi, on a big CS site, called..well..CS-Nation. Apparently, Valve and IGA Worldwide have started working together in order to bring ads to Counter-Strike. The ads will not be optional and they'll be tested in CS 1.6 only at first.

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December 17, 2006

Market research in Second Life
More from 3pointD - on a December 12th article, there's news of a "first life" market research institute moving into SL. Reperes Second Life is a French agency. The front page of their SL branch makes the following claims:

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3pointD: IBM in Second Life
This month, Mark Wallace has two new articles on IBM moving into Second Life, on the 13th, respectively the 14th. Following an October article, 3pointD announces that IBM is setting up a business group to focus on virtual worlds and will make some of its SL private islands available to the grand public.

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December 8, 2006

GameDaily BIZ: Using In-Game Ads to Draw in Your Target Audience
On GameDaily BIZ, Ran Cohen, Director of Emerging Media at Eyeblaster, does a piece on in-game advertising. The article starts with a brief plug for the company then proceeds to present the options and oportunities advertisers looking into the video games world have. The second part of the article gives a partly-statistic answer to the "Why advertise in Games?" question. Information on "What Advertisers Should Look for in Partners" follows. Finally, the "Finishing touch" :


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December 4, 2006

SL: Official Guide Now Shipping
Business Communicators of Second Life announces  Second Life: The Official Guide. The announcement specifies that the guide "promises to provide some of the practical aspects of operating in Second Life" and   "includes the written and unwritten rules, the geography of Second Life, and information about the economy".

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December 1, 2006

WSJ Online: EA expects holiday boost from in-game ads
Wall Street Journal, November 30

Quotes:

  • Jeff Brown, an EA spokesman, said the Redwood City, Calif., company, the world's largest games publisher by sales, estimates it will bring in between $4 million and $5 million in advertising revenue during the holiday quarter from Need for Speed: Carbon, a version of the game that EA began selling earlier this month.
  • Just under half of Need for Speed: Carbon's advertising revenue will come from "dynamic" advertisements, which are regularly transmitted over the Internet and inserted into the action of the game, a source of revenue that hasn't existed in previous EA games.

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November 29, 2006

NBC-2.com On In-Game Ads
        In a material titled "Video Game Ads Target Your Kids?", Paul LaGrone outlines an obstacle for advertisers plunging into this quickly-growing virtual market.
   Parents are not upset about video game violence. Instead, many are upset with the ‘real time advertising’ for video games their kids are seeing.

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November 27, 2006

Second Life business interviews
3pointd announces that Reuters' Second Life correspondent will conduct in-world interviews with Nintendo and Warner executives this week.
The article

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DoubleFusion's CEO on Behavioral Targetting
Behavioral Insider does an interview with Jon Epstein on behavioral targetting in the context of gaming environments. Epstein is the CEO over at DoubleFusion, an "independent provider of in-game advertising and marketing solutions", in their own words.

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October 2, 2006

Opinion: OMMA Advergame Panelists Biased

IGA’s Darren Herman blogs about the recent OMMA panel on advergaming, calling it a farce. Hard to disagree. While advergaming has clear advantages in certain situations for certain demographics, I don’t see how you can make a sweeping argument in favor of advergaming over in-game advertising (or the other way around).

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IBM’s Exec on Business Potential of Virtual Worlds

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM’s vice president of technical strategy and innovation, writes on his blog about virtual world’s potential for business and communications. Quotes:

“About two years ago, a study conducted by the IBM Academy of Technology concluded that technologies and capabilities from the gaming world would have a very strong impact on all aspects of IT, and made a number of recommendations for follow-on activities, which we have proceeded to implement.”

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August 15, 2006

Data: Activision CEO on In-Game Advertising

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick in an analyst call reported by Seeking Alpha:

“…We look at the amount of hours that are consumed by consumers and let’s take 18 to 35-year-old males in the U.S. in front of a video game screen. So last year that was roughly 30 billion hours. Then you compare that to television watching which was to the same demographic roughly 30 billion hours. There was $8.5 billion spent on television advertising to 18 to 34-year-old males and there was less than $50 million spent in-game advertising last year. So it’s somewhere between $50 million and $8.5 billion.”

“…What we’ve said all along is the biggest limiter right now in establishing a rate card and generating any kind of reasonable revenues is that you don’t have a big enough installed base of next-generation hardware that you can use for measurement purposes. That will not change until you have 20 or 30 million units of always-on Internet capable next-generation consoles in the installed base. So you won’t start to see it have an impact on our business until, let’s say, two or three years from now.”

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August 8, 2006

Duran Duran To Give Concerts in Second Life

“British band Duran Duran are to create a virtual island within online game Second Life, on which they will perform actual live concerts. The band is the first major group to announce a virtual world presence in the game.”

Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes said: “When I first discovered Second Life a few months ago, I was astounded by the possibilities that were there. “When I started looking at the figures running around, chatting and interacting, I thought this is somewhere between a bizarre virtual reality TV show, a surreal real-life experience and a video game.”

– BBC News, “Duran Duran to Give Virtual Gigs“, August 8, 2006

Earlier:
EA To Translate Depeche Mode Song Into Sims Language
Second Life: U2 Concert Report
MTV Overdrive on U2 in SL

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April 18, 2006

News, Data: In-Game Ad Market To Reach $732M by 2010

Yankee Group Sizes the In-Game Advertising Market Opportunity; Exponential Market Growth to Reach More than $700 Million by 2010

(press release)

BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 17, 2006–Yankee Group today revealed that the in-game advertising market is poised for explosive growth, garnering more than five times the current market value to reach $732 million by 2010. In a highly fragmented media environment, Yankee Group finds that video games present a promising window of opportunity as a growing advertising medium.

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Data Point: In-Game Ad Market To Reach $432M by 2010

“Digital Ads Expected to Hit $23B by 2010″
Enid Burns, February 21, 2006, Clickz.com

“A new report from analyst firm Parks Associates forecasts across-the-board growth in digital media segments. New categories like in-game advertising and mobile will show the highest gains, according to the study, likely because they’re starting from a lower base.

Emerging categories like rich media, in-game, and mobile advertising will show the most growth, according to the report. Internet rich-media ads are expected to experience a 31 percent compounded annual growth rate by 2010. The format will bring in an estimated $5.7 billion. In-game advertising will grow by at least 50 percent annually to $432 million. Advertising on a mobile platform is due to reach $2 billion.”