Somehow I completely forgot to mention that I am giving a keynote at ETech next week, called “The Core of Fun.” It will be about fun, obviously, but most specifically, about the ways in which the basics of game grammar can be applied to any sort of interaction design.
More info on the session here and below the fold:
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Linden has released a cool survey of developers providing 3rd party services in the Second Life platform. At SXSW, Reuben Steiger of Millions of Us was very upfront about calling himself “an ad agency,” and that’s what some of these folks do — certainly many of the ones making big bucks. The value isn’t so much in the eyeballs they get in SL, it’s in the publicity that ensues when the build for some company gets picked up by a wire service and plastered all over the news.
Anyway, a few of the stats:
It’s not just media companies getting into the MMO biz, now it’s government agencies too. You can read NASA’s full CFP here (16MB PDF).
Of course, NASA is a Johnny-come-lately to this party; the military has been exploring MMOs via partners for a very long time, as well as maintaining its own robust multiuser simulation community.
(via 3pointd)
Edit: Got this email from NASA: “Thanks for mentioning the NASA Learning Technologies ICPI on your site. At this time the solicitation is being postponed. I regret any inconvenience.” Oh well. 🙂
Yes, meetings (and pitches!) like this actually happen.
Looks like Understanding Games: Episode 3 is up at Kongregate now. This one is about how players build mental models: hypothesizing, experimenting, and getting feedback from the game as to whether they are playing correctly.
