Category Archives: Articles of Interest

Every online consumer forum should implement something like this!

Danc attacks the topic of workplace productivity. My favorite quote: We simply have a culture that tends to look inward (or at the movie industry) for solutions. A broader education on management and work practices, despite its ability to dramatically improve our games, typically takes a back seat to meeting the latest arbitrary, urgent deadline.

Want to participate in an ARG that will try to forecast events in 2019? Try Superstruct, which starts in five days and runs for six weeks.

A simple, but remarkable tale of customer service. Note the amount of traffic this post has attracted — quite a winning event for the company. And speaking of, MSMR just published a long article on how to respond effectively to customer complaints.

I can’t help but be fascinated by the stories that occasionally pop up about the US and Russia very nearly annihilating one another. Maybe because I still want to believe in a God of some kind, and these stories help me to believe. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for a thrill.

A nice interview in which Dan Ariely shares some great examples of price anchoring.

Great article on how to make reward programs more effective; very useful to any game company that has (or is building out) a consumer platform. Which, nowadays, seems like almost every game company!

My book, Changing the Game, was reviewed in the October print issue of Inc. Magazine. An online version of the article is available here.  🙂

Raph liveblogged Lane Merrifield’s lecture at AGDC. It’s an educational and even inspiring talk on the subject of customer service, from the founder of Club Penguin.

I really like Scott Adams’ (aka creator of Dilbert) blog. He’s often quite funny, and every once in a while he says something relatively insightful. In a post called timing is everything, he speculates that 9/11 basically killed the sales of his book God’s Debris. I believe it. Timing is everything in the game industry, too. It’s interesting how many publishers are willing to ignore that truism (to the detriment of their games’ sales) because they feel compelled by internal politics and/or Wall Street analysts to release a game by an arbitrary deadline. (And speaking of, do you think I should ask my publisher to delay the release of my book? Between the election and the economy, November really doesn’t seem like a great time for a debut!)

A friend emailed me this interesting article about how boring physical environments can actually stifle brain development. No surprise, but interesting to see it proved out. If you work in a cubicle farm (especially a drab one), watch out.

I’m so excited to see interesting games coming out of GAMBIT! One of the latest is called Akrasia. From the GAMBIT blog: “The team decided to make a game about INNER DEMONS and coming to terms of who you are. It would take place in the mind and the mind would be symbolized by a maze – a common metaphor but through its spatiality particularly well-suited for a game.” It’s a free download — check it out!

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.

Kzero compares the traffic rankings of various virtual worlds.

Activision is launching an online music platform, based on the Guitar Hero franchise, that will compete with iTunes. Great idea. I’d love to know how they intend to handle portability between devices and between games.

For those of you looking for an extremely quick recap of the console makers’ E3 highlights:

• Nintendo announced Wii Motion Plus (a hardware add-on that makes Wiimotes more precise), Ubisoft’s Shaun White Snowboarding, which uses the Wii Fit board, the long-expected Wii Music, and the even longer-expected Star Wars lightsaber game. Nintendo also unveiled the WiiSpeak microphone, which allows a room full of players to converse with one another.
• Sony showed Resistance 2, unveiled a movie download service for the PS3 and PSP, and announced an original Ratchet & Clank game for PSN. There was also mention of a “massive action game” that would accommodate 256 players simultaneously. And of course, additional glimpses of Little Big Planet were a big hit.
• Microsoft unveiled an avatar system for LIVE, an updated dashboard, a party system (that enables friends to jump from game to game together), and integration with Netflix. On the retail games front: the next Viva Pinata, and a movie-making game that uses the Vision Camera called You’re in the Movies, and a karaoke game, Lips, which uses music on your Zune or iPod and ships with motion-sensitive microphones. Finally, the news that Final Fantasy is, well, finally coming to Xbox. On the LIVE games front: Primetime interactive game shows like 1 vs 100, the true sequel to Geo Wars, an all-new Galaga, and an original game in partnership with South Park.

Speaking of E3: You may agree or disagree with them, but the guys at Penny Arcade really know how to poke fun at the platforms. 🙂

Too wonderful for words. (Kim and Raph already beat me to it.)

Jeremy Liew posts an estimate that most successful free to play MMOGs will generate $1 to $2 monthly ARPU. Some commenters dispute that, claiming up to $5. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in between (though I’d lean towards the higher end for free MMOGs that do a good job of serving niche audiences and/or that have more creative revenue-generating mechanisms.)

Majesco becomes the first publisher to capitalize on the opportunity created by Nintendo when they stunted Wii Fit by not including streamlined, customizable fitness (and especially cardio) modes in the game. Hopefully Majesco doesn’t go too far in the opposite direction and forget the fun.

And speaking of Wii Fit, Nintendo claims that they didn’t create this video, but if they did, it’s one of the most brilliant marketing gimmicks ever. (And it looks like copycat videos will bring Wii Fit even more attention; Playboy just posted one. No nudity, but still maybe not safe for work.)

Ummm… and speaking of Wii Fit (again…) Danc writes an eloquent post accurately labeling it a great example of game design as a “transformational new product development technique that can turn historically commoditized activities into economic blockbusters.”