Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.
Today, I was supposed to teach English to young monks.
But we quickly found a much more interesting subject matter…
Our Doodle Jump champion for the day!
A couple of observations:
- I was struck by how easily the young monks shared the game. Doodle Jump is addictive and it is very tempting to try “just one more time”. [...]
- Iwata-san gave a depressingly sad Keynote. Sad in the sense that I admire many things about Nintendo but can’t help feeling they are in complete denial. My friend Dustin Clingman may disagree but I’m afraid Nicholas Lovell nailed it exactly right.
- Hazard didn’t win the IGF Nuovo award. But *it should have*.
- Frank Lantz [...]
The Global Game Jam 2011 in Paris. 70 jammers, 14 games and
48 hours of crazy fun!
The Art of Game Design, an excellent book by Jesse Schell, is coming out in French.
Essen this year was huge!
Of course it is supposed to be the world’s biggest board game fair, but in all my years going there I’ve simply never seen that many people. Games seem to clearly increase in popularity. This was also noticeable from the publishing side as there seems to be more games available every [...]
A tree-planet, covered with lush vegetation. A tribe of tall blue aliens that live in close relation to nature. Strange humans with guns and futuristic technology. You know what we’re talking about, right?
We’re talking about Ryzom of course, the science-fantasy world I helped create 10 years ago with my previous game company, Nevrax. Our original [...]
Here’s a story: a big corporation wanted to write software that could replicate a singing human voice. To do so, it needed samples from real singers. Fearing they would be rendered obsolete if the software could clone their voice too well, the singers refused. Thus, the corporation had to develop the software using samples from [...]
Extremely well dressed Nick Fortugno (of Diner Dash fame) gave a talk entitled “How to Innovate in the Land of Clones”, based on the starting point that there’s a crisis of cloning in the social games industry.
Why do we innovate ?
- Because First comers own their space. At least recognized first comers.
- Markets evolve as [...]
The Art History of Games symposium’s days 2 and 3 were extremely interesting. Full of insightful and thought-provoking commentary on games. It was really impossible to transcribe the talks with fidelity. So I didn’t try, just soaked it up and took the time to digest it all. Now that the dust has settled a bit [...]
I am at the Art History of Games (#AHoG on Twitter) symposium in Atlanta.
It all starts with Jason Rohrer handing me his “New Gamist Manifesto” February 3, 2010. It goes like this:
1- Games do not have spoilers.
2- Games cannot be finished.
3- Games do not have characters, except for the characters who play them.
4- Games do [...]
