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.

  • Mass market perspective

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 30 Comments

    I don’t know if you have seen the McDonald’s Line Rider commercial, but it caught me by surprise while watching some show with my kids (it was old hat to them, of course).

    Very cool that a little indie game has made it to a commercial, and it follows on the heels of other game-based commercials like the Coke parody of GTA and the WoW truck commercial. But does Line Rider seem like an odd choice for the ad, given that it hardly has the mass market penetration that something like Grand Theft Auto has? Perhaps we might think that it isn’t something that the average non-gamer is going to have heard about.

    I think this perception is upside-down. I think the non-gamer (meaning, core game industry gamer) is more likely to bump into Line Rider than into many of the industry’s mainstream products (GTA and WoW are not fair comparisons, given that they’re at the hyper-top end of popularity and mass market penetration).

    Read More “Mass market perspective”

  • If your architect were a game designer…

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 24 Comments

    Let’s say you were wealthy and lived in New York City, and hired an arhcitect to redo your new apartment. And you dropped a single, small hint that you liked playfulness — that you wanted a poem you had written for your kids to be embedded in the wall somewhere.

    A whole year later, you realized that what the architect gave you was an apartment that was an adventure game, rich and deep with fiction and characters and mysteries…

    In any case, the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining panels, revealing, in large type, the poem written by Mr. Klinsky.

    If there is any justice in the world, this apartment should be preserved as a museum and as a testament to human creativity. 🙂

  • MMORPG Tycoon

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 10 Comments

    Ever wanted to run an MMORPG? Well, now you can without having to do the pesky step of actually creating one. 🙂

    MMORPG Tycoon is an indie game written for a game contest. You have a procedurally generated MMO, and your job is to keep the forum posters happy.

    I’m downloading it now… watch me suck at it.

  • Auto-puppeteering avatars patent

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 17 Comments

    Massively has an article about a university in Australia patenting a way to extract emotional info from player actions and automatically puppeteer the avatar.

    There’s a long history of this sort of thing out there, of course. This particular patent, for example, references pulling out emoticons from chat, as many worlds have done, but also pairing them up with voice analysis in order to better match up emotional markers provided by voice and the tone intended by a given emoticon.

  • Areae makes the 2008 OnHollywood 100

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    The 2008 OnHollywood 100 | AlwaysOn

    We proudly present this year’s OnHollywood 100. With this list of top private companies, AlwaysOn’s editors and our panel of industry experts introduce a new generation of game-changing players in the digital entertainment industries.

    These 100 companies have emerged in an exciting year in the world of entertainment–a year in which the old business models came crumbling down as writers took to the picket lines, musicians ditched their record labels, and breakout creative artists turned to venture capital for funding.

    The OnHollywood 100 companies are fueling this disruption and creating new business models to fit evolving trends in consumer habits and content creation.