Werewolf invades Silicon Valley

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Apr 242009
 

There’s an interesting article on CNet this morning about how the party game Werewolf (also known as Mafia) is quite popular among Silicon Valley tech folk lately (the article traces it to 2007 or so). It’s been popular among game designers for much longer than that, of course — I think the industry interest in it may have crested a few years ago, actually.

The thing that piques my interest in the article, though, is the suggestion that the game’s themes may be why it resonates so strongly in the go-go-go Silicon Valley culture. You see, Werewolf is a game in which you have a group of people lying to the other players.

Fundamentally, Werewolf is about deception by a minority, and about the ways in which manipulation happens. Villagers lose when they fail to act rationally, fail to cooperate to a sufficient degree, and fail at institutional memory.

“If you think about what the fundamental skills in play in something like Werewolf are, they have to do with persuasion and communication. For entrepreneurs in particular, this is kind of a lot of the currency of their everyday lives,” Slavin said. “Bringing the types of interactions that are most typical in those scenarios…and turning them into something useless, something that only has social currency instead of live-or-die consequences for the company, is (fun) in the same way that it’s fun to bankrupt your friends in Monopoly, not in real life.”

“Those are incredibly important lessons for an entrepreneur,” Ventilla said. “You’re constantly reminded of just how much you need to do until you’re really top-notch at those things.”

— Why do young techies want to be werewolves? | The Social – CNET News.

I suppose this is healthy or not for the entrepreneur (and Silicon Valley as whole!) depending on whether they prefer to play as a villager or as a werewolf…

Games for Health conference

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Apr 232009
 

It’s coming up!

http://www.gamesforhealth.org

5th Annual Games for Health Conference in Boston on June 11-12 with Pre-Conference on June 10.

Over 60 sessions on many many topics.

People who enter beb09 @ registration get a 15% discount

Also direct registration at: http://www.regonline.com/gfh2009

Content summaries so far at:
http://www.gamesforhealth.org/archives/000253.html

Apr 232009
 

Club Cooee went open beta today… and it looks like a better-done Lively, but running on your desktop as a widget. Basically, it turns the VW experience into a desktop IM client. Or vice versa, perhaps — they describe themselves first and foremost as a messenger client.

Looks like it’s free, depending entirely on the sale of virtual currency for monetization (they run a two-currency system, like most virtual worlds do today). You can buy items and animations, and build your own rooms to some degree. My favorite feature, though, is drag and drop sharing of music and pictures from your desktop.

There’s gaming pedigree here — the company was founded by the guys who did The Settlers and AquaNox.

The Enigmatrix: another diagram of games & stuff

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Apr 232009
 

The Complex Universe of Games and Puzzles, Simplified, claims Wired. I think I disagree mightily with many many of the links and clusters (code and math are way more tightly related than that! And I can’t tell why they see Board Games and Games as separate nodes. And…

But it’s a cool visualization, and there are lots of cool gems hidden away. Ah, look, there’s Sprouts, a game I always forget the rules to.

Google 3D Web plugin

 Posted by (Visited 13786 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Apr 212009
 

Add one more competitor to the race to create the standard for web-delivered 3d. This time, it’s Google, with a new API called O3D.

The O3D plugin leverages hardware accelerated rendering, which means that it is powered by the GPU and can deliver strong rendering performance. The API supports loading 3D models, much like Mozilla’s high-level C3DL library. Google has published several open source demos which show how the API can be used to build interactive 3D Web applications with JavaScript. One of the demos even features a JavaScript physics engine.

— Google joins effort for 3D Web standard with new plugin, API – Ars Technica.

It’s not compatible with Mozilla’s Khronos effort, but Google says they intend it to converge over the course of a few years. And yes, it is fully cross-platform. There’s a shader language (again, non-standard, doesn’t match HLSL or Cg), and of course it supports loading SketchUp as well as from Max and Maya. It also can run inside an OpenSocial gadget, or run offline in Gears.

It’s a developer release only, found here. But it’s very worth keeping an eye on. Google has to get it adopted, of course, and that will take using powerful distribution leverage, the way that Flash uses YouTube and Microsoft uses NetFlix and Windows Update to push Silverlight.

Here’s a video.