Virtual Goods: the next big business model is an article by Susan Wu, who we work with (she’s at Charles River Ventures, one of our investors). It’s chock-full of juicy stats on some of the revenues that virtual item sales companies are generating. Definitely worth a read — and interesting that the article is so controversial (check out the comment thread!).
Liveblogs of the panel I was on today have shown up a few places already:
This was an editorial that appeared in Game Informer in 2005. I am supposed to be on a plane. It’s already posted on the site, but I figured I’d make a blog post out of it anyway.
Whither online?
Anyone remember what cyberspace looked like a decade ago? There we were, all fresh arrivals in the Metaverse, dreaming of Snow Crash’s virtual bars and William Gibson’s skies like televisions on dead channels. We wondered if the Holodeck would require one of those newfangled 3d hardware video cards or not. If we were really old-school sci-fi fans, maybe we thought about Bradbury’s Veldt or Vernor Vinge’s “True Names.”
Here is the full outline of what I have developed over the years as my preferred Vision Doc format. Usually I do a one-sheet before this, which could literally be the first two pages of this. It’s mostly tailored towards largish projects, but could apply to smaller ones as well.
The purpose of this sort of doc is to make sure you have a core reference for “what you’re making” that you can hand to both internal and external folks. Losing sight of what you’re trying to make is a common pitfall on larger projects, and can be disastrous.
game, game, game and again game.
So, honestly, it made me think. Certainly there was an overabundance of artsiness, but there was also raw application of game elements to discussing serious subjects. There were moments where I said “this is expressing something serious.” There were also moments where I said “gimme a break.”
