IndieCade call for submissions!

 Posted by (Visited 5690 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Mar 082009
 

Celia writes,

IndieCade Call for Submissions:

IndieCade invites independent game artists and designers from around the world to submit interactive media of all types – from art to commercial, ARG to abstract, mind-bending to mobile, serious to shooter, as well as academic and student projects – for consideration. Work-in-progress is encouraged.

A diverse jury of creative and academic leaders will select entries for top prizes at the IndieCade 2009 Festival. All entries for the Festival will also receive consideration for presentation at all 2009 IndieCade international exhibitions including:

IndieCade 2009 Events:
IndieCade @ E3, Los Angeles (June 2-5)
IndieCade Asia TBA
IndieCade @ SIGGRAPH, New Orleans (Aug 5-7)
IndieCade 2009 (Oct 1-10)
IndieCade Europe, GameCity, UK (Oct 26-29)

Submissions Deadline: April 30, 2009 at Midnight PST.

For more information and to enter: www.IndieCade.com.

IndieCade’s successful flagship 2008 festival held last October at Open Satellite contemporary gallery in Bellevue, Washington, was the first major intertaional exhibition of independent videogames and videogame art in the area. Event organizers include IndieCade Founder Stephanie Barish, Chair Celia Pearce, and Festival Director Sam Roberts.

YoVille bigger than WoW in NA?

 Posted by (Visited 21003 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Mar 032009
 

Back in July of 2008, I pointed out YoVille, a Facebook MMO that runs as an app. Back then, it had 150,000 daily uniques.

Today, I’m here to tell you that YoVille is almost certainly more popular than WoW in North America.

The Top 25 Facebook Games for March 2009 and The Top 25 MySpace Games for March 2009 are a pair of posts over at the Inside Social Games blog. And what do they say? That YoVille has 2.26m users on MySpace and 4.46m on Facebook. And yes, these are monthly uniques.

Now, there is probably some overlap between the stats on the two services. And there is little doubt that WoW makes a lot more money, and is a lot more game.

But we should not be quick to discount this. More game and better art can be added. YoVille is a virtual world: it has avatars, money, inventory and housing. It has embedded games. It has a map. It has chat and persistence. And it’s in Flash. Oh, and they picked up 1m users in the last month.

Amid all the hoopla over whether there is room to go around WoW, here’s an answer.

Recent neuroscience summed up

 Posted by (Visited 7979 times)  Game talk, Reading
Mar 032009
 

Every once in a while, I get asked about doing an updated version of Theory of Fun. I generally reply that not only do I not have time, but that there’s fairly little that seems to merit updating. Plenty has moved on the political front, but science moves more slowly, and so most of the stuff that the book references as its underpinnings hasn’t seen any radical changes.

Then again, the book doesn’t dive all that deeply into some of it. I think the only reference to dopamine happens in the end notes, even though it’s central to the statement that fun doesn’t equal flow. (Arguably, the better update would be to surface that stuff more in the book…)

Well, the science does move some, and iHobo has a pair of great summary articles on Why You Play Games and The Biology of Compulsion which sum up quite a lot of the recent research on all this. Not only is it a handy reference, but there’s also a pointer towards the forthcoming book Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames, with articles by Bateman, Lazzaro, Bartle, Isbister, and others. My pre-order is in!

The Great Metaplace Meep-In

 Posted by (Visited 10814 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with:
Feb 272009
 
Some sorts of meeps

Some kinds of meeps

A meep is a fuzzy critter I made in Metaplace that is sort of a cross between the things Marvin Suggs beats on in his Amazing Muppaphone and a Miyazaki soot sprite. They come in a variety of colors and with a variety of behaviors — some like people, some are shy, some have big teeth… I put them on the marketplace, and they quickly became popular on the service.

If you have been on Metaplace, you may have noticed that people get “meeped” instead of “poked.” This was put in by our web guys as a joke, originally, when meeps became popular. Sure enough, everyone started asking, “What is meeping?”

Well, last week we decided to rename the feature to “nudge” or something else mundane. Too many people in our user testing were getting confused, didn’t know what it meant, or were commenting on it. So with regret, we decided we needed to change the term. Meeps would remain running around the worlds, but the feature needed to be easy for new folks to understand. We figured some of the veterans would not like this, but that everyone would understand and be supportive.

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