A couple of press hits today.

First up, there’s this interview at NextGen which is mostly about the theory of fun and how it can be applied towards opening up new audiences for games.

The current games can be daunting to new players. “Look at what’s happened to the RTS market,” Koster says. “You have 300 buildables and 500 vehicles and your tech tree is enormous. To a novice, that’s just overwhelming. It’s like teaching a kindergartener to read with the Encyclopedia Britannica.

“New genres are exciting because that implies that they open new markets. It’s based on how games and brains work. Focusing only on the kinds of games that already exist really only caters to your existing base.”

Secondly, and less related to the book, is the streaming videocast of the IBM MMOG conference I took part in about a month ago. You’ll need to register for free here, and then go here to watch it. This talk is mostly about what I call “Moore’s Wall,” which is the notion that the advance of technology has in some ways been a barrier for us in game design, rather than an enabler, because of increasing costs. This has also been
Slashdotted and blogged about. It may seem less related, but taken in tandem with the above interview, might form a more coherent picture of some of the issues facing the industry today.

I can’t end this post without offering condolences to any Londoners who might be reading. 🙁

I’ll never understand the vagaries of Amazon sales. esterday and for the last few weeks, ATOF had been slowly slipping down the charts–the doldrums of summer, I thought, with no orders from universities for their classes, no press attention, and so on.

Today, it’s in the 3500’s on the charts, and the #12 bestseller in the computer and video games section.

I am told that Tim O’Reilly has a mystical formula that he can use to determine sales figures with exactitude based on Amazon sales rank data. From where I sit, it’s gotta be a heck of a formula, and probably involves eye of newt.

Time gets away from you, and you forget to blog.

I spoke at Supernova 2005. I will be speaking at Training Fall, and at Microsoft Meltdown.

I added a few more reviews to the site.

Hurray, E3 is over!

Latest press spottings of the book:

• George “The Fat Man” Sanger calls it one of his “very favorite books of all time,” but he rags on the cartoons.
• The Daily Pundit, of all places,
  discusses the LA Times article with the comment, “One practical payoff here is that Koster may have set the table for the first PC-acceptable justification for Booth Babes: luring males into teach/learn situations. If that angle ever gets traction it’s likely to find lots of creative applications.” Yikes.

And more May 24th…

Anyone read Dutch? ‘Cause there’s this review… Freetranslation.com renders the conclusion as “…as an introduction for the practical side of the ludologie an absolute must-property.” I think that’s good. 🙂

(Also, is tic-tac-toe really called “Butter, Cheese, and Eggs” in Dutch?)

I have gotten my second Wikipedia link, and this time it’s as the only cited book reference in the “Game Programming” article on the French Wikipedia. Very cool.

Over on Machinima.com a bit from the book is serving as the starting point for a discussion of whether machinima can be art. The answer had better be “yes,” duh, especially coming from that crowd! I don’t see why anyone would think that machinima couldn’t be art given that it’s essentially an animation technique, and we know that animation can be art…

Lastly today (I hope), the Detroit News seems to have reprinted the editorial from the LA Times. At least, they reprinted around half of it. It almost reads like they ran it through MS Word’s auto-summarizer–which is not a knock, that tool is surprisingly good.