Author Archive
Dear Duke Nukem: Compromise Is Part of the Process
There are plenty of lessons to be learned from the decade long debacle of Duke NukemForever, but the key one here, I think, is that any creative process is going to have elements of disappointment when you launch. Things you imagined would be better but aren’t, or ideas that you hoped would flourish but didn’t. [...]
A Vision for a Magazine on Digital Dveice
This technology doesn’t exist yet, but it’s good to see people are already thinking about the impact of the next generation of digital devices. The good stuff starts at about 3 minutes in. The first generation of digitized media tends to closely relate to our analog experiences, but quickly takes advantage of the flexibility of [...]
Why Zynga is worth $2.5 Billion
With their latest huge investor Zynga is now valued at somewhere around 2.5 billion dollars, give or take a billion (and who’s counting, right)? As usual when these huge valuations come around, people tend to question whether or not the company is really worth it, especially when you consider they pulled off this kind of [...]
Video Games as Astroturfing
Rachel Maddow covers the controversy over using virtual offers as a political tactic: She does an excellent job of breaking down the economics.
An Eightfold Path for Social Game Development
Someone asked about what it takes to create a social game. This is incredibly stripped down, but here is my basic formula I use with my clients: 1) Figure out what your fundamental gameplay dynamic is going to be as early as possible. IE, what is it the fundamental unit of play that the user [...]
Zynga gets shut down- Updated
After writing a few days ago that I felt that Michael Arrington had unfairly targeted developers as being culpable for scam advertising offers, Zynga goes ahead and proves me wrong by allegedly blocking the IP addresses of Facebook employees from seeing certain ads, and getting Fishville banned in the process. That’s led to Facebook taking [...]
Bioware tries a new tactic with Dragon Age DLC. Penny Arcade Notices.
So, it seems that Dragon Age has integrated virtual DLC directly into the game, allowing players to purchase extra quest lines as an integrated part of their adventure. It’s an interesting tactic, and one that Penny Arcade has seen fit to comment on in the form of a comic: There’s an interesting point being made [...]
Kit Kat makes a real Virtual Goods
If you want to understand the fundamentals of how a functions gift-giving economy works, taking a closer look at this article on the Japanese candy market may give you some insight into how people relate to objects differently when they’re given a different context. Fiorella says companies want to keep spending habits up by introducing [...]
Social Games are dangerous!
And so, once again, a few bad apples are used to blame an entire industry for being too addictive and too dangerous. This time the man trotting out the moral panic is Michael Arrington, in this post condemning the offers system that games are using for monetization. Any system with that many users is going [...]
“The Future of Games” is featured on SlideShare
The slides from my presentation at PAX are being featured on the front page of Slideshare today. If you haven’t checked them out, go take a look.