I’ll be giving a lecture at the IGDA Leadership Forum in November. Quick summary: “This session will attempt to summarize, and make relevant for the game industry, the most important lessons that I learned when getting my MBA from MIT Sloan. This session will not be a thinly-veiled attempt to glorify business school or to suggest that attendees enroll at MIT Sloan. :-)”
Henry writes about Eric Klopfer’s work on Augmented Learning and mobile educational games. Eric’s team has created an “Outdoor Augmented Reality Toolkit” — a drag and drop authoring tool for location-based games on Windows Mobile devices that has been used by researchers and educators around the world, and will soon be available for download here.
Microsoft has announced that XNA Creators Club members will be able to actually sell their games via LIVE.
Via Raph, news of the open alpha of PlayCrafter, another “easy way for anyone to make games” platform. (See Raph’s blog for a video.)
Google’s developer challenge for its Android mobile platform is resulting in some really interesting applications, including a barcode scanner that finds pricing and metadata on the fly, and an iris (eye) scan for biometric authentication. How long will it be before Android-based games are piggybacking this functionality?
Blizzard is creating a new cross-title Achievement system, much like Xbox LIVE’s Achievement system, which will give players a unified score across all Blizzard games. I wonder if this indicates that Blizzard intends to expand Battle.net into more of a comprehensive platform like Steam?
Recap of what seems to have been a very, very interesting talk by Jon Blow, who asserts that gameplay elements and narrative elements often conflict in commercial games.
Crowdsourcing games (like Google’s “Image Labeler”) are one of my favorite topics, and here’s word of a new one — The Stock Moose, which presents you with performance charts for two stocks and lets you choose which one you would buy.
