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.

What the Web and games have to teach each other
April 14, 2006April 14, 2006 Game talk
59 Comments

One of the things that I have been thinking about a lot lately is the way that the current Web world (particularly the Web 2.0 stuff) and games seems to be ships passing in the night. It’s led me to say a lot lately that the two groups have a lot to learn from one another. Right now, with big dot-com folks like Joi Ito calling WoW “the new golf,” there’s a bit more awareness crossing the gap, but sometimes I wonder if the right lessons are bring learned.

So I thought I’d post my quick off-the-top-of-my-head list of stuff that each side should learn from the other.

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Supernova, last year
April 12, 2006April 12, 2006 Game talk
4 Comments

One of the best conferences I attended last year was Supernova, put together by my friend Kevin Werbach of Wharton. I don’t know whether I will get to go to Supernova this year… At any rate, in bringing my CV up to date, I stumbled across these notes from a panel I was on there, written by J. D. Lasica, author of the excellent book Darknet : Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation. Looks like I was saying single-player gaming is an aberration as long as a year ago…

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Second Life wrestles with “age play”
April 12, 2006 Game talk
21 Comments

170,000 players, 20% growth a month, and adult players with child avatars soliciting sex.

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Interesting sales figures
April 12, 2006 Game talk
13 Comments

A while back, Time Magazine wrote that “Most attempts to re-energize board games are now garage-sale fodder.” In their latest issue, they instead announced that “For old-fashioned fun, many Americans are going back to family board games–sales were up 18% in 2005.”

It’s interesting to contrast this with the recent doom and gloom analyses of the pen and paper gaming industry:
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Mental models
April 10, 2006April 10, 2006 Game talk, Reading
31 Comments

To change your world, you first have to change your own thinking. Neuroscience research shows that your mind discards the majority of the sensory stimuli you receive. What you see is what you think. The ability to see the world differently can create significant opportunities, as companies such as Southwest Airlines, FedEx, Charles Schwab and others have demonstrated. But even successful models can ultimately become a prison if they limit your ability to make sense of a changing world, in the way that major airlines failed to fully recognize the threat of upstarts such as Ryanair or that music companies, locked into a mindset of selling CDs, failed to see the opportunities and threats of music file sharing.

— from The Power of Impossible Thinking: Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business, by Jerry Wind, Colin Crook, and Robert Gunther

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Game talk

What the Web and games have to teach each other

Supernova, last year

Second Life wrestles with “age play”

Interesting sales figures

Mental models

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