I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting. The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly [...]
March 4, 2010
The video is Carnegie Mellon University Professor, games developer and former Disney imagineer Jesse Schell on the surprise success of the likes of Farmville, Webkinz, Club Penguin, Wii Fit and X-Box Achievements. All of these are concepts that must have sounded insane on paper when they were proposed three-or-four years ago and then went on [...]
February 22, 2010
I wrote yesterday about the difficulties of selling media content when people can get something more-or-less identical without paying. It looked a bit bleak. In this – more positive – post, I’m going to look at some of the ways media owners might persuade people to pay for their content, focusing on the good, bad [...]
July 14, 2009
I just read this from Brian Mitsoda (ex-Troika) on fave gaming site rockpapershotgun in an article about ‘which games made you the gamer you are’ and I agreed so furiously that a little bit of wee came out: It’s impossible to separate my childhood from Pac-Man. If you were alive in the early 80s, you knew [...]
May 28, 2009
(Or, for those enjoying the puns, Nashional Guard.) Every social media destination has some sort of scoring mechanism: Twitter followers Linked-In contacts Facebook friends Blog subscribers/comments Those are the four I personally use most consistently, though I dip in and out of all the others to see what’s happening. They all have an equivalent. What’s the result of those scores? Bigger is [...]
December 6, 2008
When you have this sort of team on your side. Only about 20 months late on this. (And yes – I wish I could shut off that frickin’ tweeting from the Cooking Mama post below. I’ll replace the widget with a link v.soon.
December 3, 2008
What I imagine many readers are looking for from an English social media and technology blogger is an overdue Thanksgiving treat. So here you are: <(delme)embed src="http://www.peta.org/cooking-mama/swf/cooking-mama.swf" width="300" height="219" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /> Widget deleted for noise pollution! This is a cheeky bit of social media from US animal rights organisation PETA (full size and downloadable versions here). It’s [...]
July 11, 2008
If you start a job as an oil rigger, then there’s a 50% chance you’ll have a reportable accident within the next six months. After that period, the risk drops to 5% or less, as you get to know the ropes. That’s quite frightening for potential oil-riggers and for people in the oil and gas industry [...]
July 2, 2008
Blizzard, the company behind the most successful and profitable entertainment franchise in the world*, World of Warcraft, held a mini-conference in Paris last week to announce that a second sequel to its Diablo series – Diablo III – was in development. Unlike a lot of press conferences, they invited along lots of fans, active forum [...]
January 8, 2008
I’ve been tagged twice for this so here goes. I have also cheated and extended this out to two weeks… Telly: watched Extras and Dr Who over Christmas. Neither of them were as good as I’d hoped. Otherwise, I watched The Most Annoying People of the Year on BBC 3 through iPlayer, which was quite possibly [...]
March 9, 2010