Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

Soccer ball that is a generator

 Posted by (Visited 14257 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Feb 172010
 

Brilliant, simple idea. Kick a soccer ball around, have it capture some of the energy, then give a plug so you can get the energy back out. Then give it away in Africa.

The ball uses inductive coil technology–similar to flashlights that power up when shaken. Each 15 minutes of play with the ball generates enough power to light up an LED lamp for 3 hours, so a soccer game could easily provide light for a day.

In most African countries, 95 percent of the population is living off-grid with no access to electricity. With sOccket, people in developing nations will no longer need to walk 3 hours simply to charge their cell phones. The power will—quite literally—be in their hands. The sOccket ball can be used to light an LED lamp, or charge a cellphone or battery.

Jessica Lin is a Changemaker | Changemakers.

(Via Jane McGonigal @avantgame)

What social gamers look like

 Posted by (Visited 9913 times)  Game talk
Feb 172010
 

All these come from a study sponsored by PopCap (PDF), for game players in the UK and US. (GigaOM has an article here: Average Social Gamer Is a 43-Year-Old Woman – GigaOM).

  • There’s around 100m social game players
  • 24% of US and UK Internet users play social games at least once a week
  • Slightly more women than men
  • Average age of 43
  • Only 6% of them are 21 and younger
  • They’re not all housewives: 41% of them work full time, and only 11% are homemakers.
  • 2/3 of them also play other sorts of games — casual or hardcore.
  • And if they, do they spend more time on the social games than on the casual or hardcore games
  • And they’re stuck: more than half have been playing for a year.
  • A third play more than once a day
  • 2/3 of them play over an hour a week — 12% report over 10 hours.
  • And they report that their social game playtime is increasing
  • For half of them, it’s why they use Facebook at all.
  • And also, half of them say it’s very unlikely they will spend real money

Garriott goes to social games

 Posted by (Visited 15531 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Feb 172010
 

Portalarium.

The highlights:

  • A plugin to allow deploying games written as standalone titles. Torque2d is referenced as the tech for the first title, a poker game.
  • A virtual world hub called CenterPort, with a “semi-3d world”, minigames, ad-driven quests, housing, and microtransactions.
  • A social network. It looks like this will be tied into the OpenPlay network, which is a separate endeavor by other well-known ex-Originites that tries to develop an industry standard for social play data portability.

The requirement for a plugin will have all the same barriers all the other plugin efforts do, of course. (Unity is doing well, but it is having to fight hard for every user). One big example — it’s Windows only right now.

This is a play for anticipating the curve on the social gaming market lifecycle. The bet being made is that social gamers will ask for greater sophistication over time. It’s a good bet that this trend is valid — even “simple farming games” like the new sequel to Happy Farm feature farming, apartment decorating, and a central town; and Island Paradise has merged in a cooking game… showing that greater complexity is well on the way.

That said, the Facebook game explosion — social gaming in general — is more a phenomenon of distribution than it is one of game design or technology. The users tend to be older women, and not that technologically sophisticated.  Social gamers don’t care what technology you use. They only care how long the loading time was and whether it worked perfectly on the first try.

So the plugin choice may be banking on the wrong aspect of the trend. You don’t need a better rendering engine to make richer games.

Read more about Portalarium at this VentureBeat article.

What roleplayers look like

 Posted by (Visited 10991 times)  Game talk
Feb 152010
 

Oldish news now, but a pre-press copy (Word doc) of the latest study using EQ2 data is out.

The paper combines the big trove of server-side data and quant analysis of our other EQII papers, with a full-on second step of participant observation and ethnographic interviewing. The result, we hope, is a pretty deep look into who role players are, why they play, and what makes them tick. The chocolate and peanut butter of combined qual-quant methods we think gives the paper good generalizability, but with depth to boot. As always, there were some obvious findings and some unexpected stuff…

Terra Nova: Role Player Study released.

The focus of the study here is to specifically examine roleplayers — they give the genre its name, but as has long been noted, are a minority of users. The paper has a great overview of the history and theory behind RP for its intro that is worth the download in it own right.

Some of the big findings:

Continue reading »

A proofreading sim

 Posted by (Visited 6709 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Feb 122010
 

I’d like a proofreading sim, please, that all my students could play…

— Andy Havens, in this thread on Terra Nova

Proofreading sim: slurp a text file, pop words on screen scrolling by, put randomized typos in them, require the user to buzz in when the word is spelled wrong. Sounds like a game to me! Bad spellers need not apply!

When I was a practicing journeyman letterpress printer (both my wife and I did this in college) we learned the way to proofread under those “no takeback” sorts of circumstances: read each word in isolation, one at a time, in a group, with a pause between each word, sometimes spelling out the whole word as you went.

It.

Forced.

Attention, a-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n.

On.

Each.

Word.

…which is of course a big part of the challenge of proofing text, because that’s not how we read — we read words holistically, not by piecing them together out of letters.

In any case, it would be interesting to see if making a game like this would make someone into a more accurate proofreader.

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