This is my dumping ground for quotes and other stuff relating to the wonderful world of digital & communications.
DeAngelo struck upon the idea when his favorite 1980s video game – in which users had to safely guide a frog across a busy road – was omitted from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s The Art of Video Games exhibition. The developer decided to create an updated version of the game, hacked to receive input from a webcam located above 5th Avenue, which translates real traffic into digital obstacles for the game’s character.
Wow, seems I’m in the dwindling minority not to have downloaded this. I just don’t trust myself not to get hooked …
There was a time, not that long ago, when games lived in the game cabinet. The canon included Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, a deck of cards and a backgammon set. Over the last 25 years, the game cabinet has been slowly replaced with the game console, the computer, the smartphone and now the tablet. Games became ubiquitous, but they were still mostly for fun. Now games are trying to make another big leap, from the world of recreation to the world of deadly serious. A rash of new games seeks to help you lose weight, save energy, cope with your chemo or cut back your drinking.
Draw Something was downloaded 50 million times in 50 days. Users created billions of drawings, adding 3,000 new pictures every second. On March 21st, OMPOP, the company behind the game, was bought up by Zynga for more than $200 million
Zimmer reports that Ginsberg “conservatively guesses” that Dr. Fill can place in or near the tournament’s top 30. In simulations of 15 recent tournaments, Dr. Fill beat all its human competitors three times. Though the computer may not match humans in accuracy, it can whip them in speed, solving puzzles in 30 seconds and then editing its answers for another 90. Not even the top humans can complete the tournament-level puzzles in two minutes. The computer’s dictionary database currently contains 10 million entries.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million units in the US and UK on its first day, good for $400 million. To put it in perspective, that’s the biggest day-one for any entertainment product ever in history.
As experts on human motivation, they have identified basic psychological needs — similar to physical needs like food, water and sleep — that video games satisfy.
First, Ryan says, is the need to feel competent. In real life, you get the chance to “level up” only once every couple years: like when you earn a promotion at work or get married. In games, you always know what you have to do to get to the next level.
Redniss shared with Mashable some of the early numbers from the game. In the first 12 hours of being online, more than 13,000 unique visitors visited HashTagKiller.com. Of those visitors, 10,000 signed up for the game. At its peak Wednesday afternoon, the website was fielding over 6,000 requests a minute.
Even more impressive than the early sign-up figures — which took place entirely from social network-based promotion — is the average time users spent on the site. Redniss tells us that the average user spent more than 12 and a half minutes on the site. Additionally, 22% of visitors returned at least once within the first 12 hours.
Adult entertainment studio Pink Visual announced the release of an API yesterday so Web and mobile developers can take advantage of the company’s content to create dynamic games, websites and native applications. There was once a time when this would have been significant news. It is not. The porn industry was once the leading pusher of technological adoption. If porn adopted a new innovation, it indicated that tech would likely flourish.
The classic example of this is VHS. Betamax was a better technology but it was more expensive than VHS. So, porn went with VHS and that became the dominant standard for nearly 20 years. The early rise of the Internet was also filled with porn and, like it or not, has been part of the definition of the Web for nearly 20 years as well. The time has come for porn to move over. If you really want to see what the next great Web technology is, the best place to look is at cutting edge game developers working with HTML5.
» via ReadWriteWeb
Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world’s leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft. So why not apply that expertise to all those areas of life where we could use more engagement, commitment and fun: in education, say, or in civic life, or in hospitals? Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn’t some of that energy be productively harnessed?
This sounds plausible until you start to demand details, whereupon it becomes extraordinarily hard to grasp what this might actually mean. The current public face of gamification is Jane McGonigal, author of the new book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World, but many of her prescriptions are cringe-inducing: they seem to involve redefining aid projects in Africa as “superhero missions”, or telling hospital patients to think of their recovery from illness as a “multiplayer game”.
Robh was the Art Director on the massive PS3 hit Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. In this interview, he discusses how he used SketchUp to help conceptualize and design the video game’s look and feel.
I don’t quite know what to say about this one…
Sega Corporation makes a grand comeback into the world of video game hardware manufacturing with their Toylets, a new gaming platform with a whole new paradigm of user/game interaction. A pressure sensor is applied to a strategically-positioned location inside the porcelain hull of a public urinal, and the pressure exerted by a stream of urine aimed at the sensor serves as controls for minigames on a display embedded in the wall above the urinal.
McDonalds has become the first marketer to create a branded farm in Farmville… (Visitors) to the McDonalds “neighbourhood farm” help grow tomatoes etc in return for virtual “Farmville McCafe Consumables” that will give more energy and let them farm twice as fast.
