Category Archives: Marketing

Part of VW’s TheFunTheory Project. 66% of people chose the stairs over the escalator. Via Fiona Long’s eclectic PostApocalypticWomble

A frequent issue with serious games (games not designed with the sole intent of entertaining) is their failing at being fun. Angry Birds, that one wouldn’t think of as a serious game, successfully meets both challenges of being engaging and educational. The empirical method Do you remember your high-school mechanics: forces, acceleration, parabolas, center of [...]

I’m planning to put my content behind a paywall soon and was interested in getting some feedback. I’ve been posting since 2003 and over the years the motivation to participate has wained. I’ve found that posting original content online has risks associated with it both professionally and personally which no advertising model could support. Also [...]

Attending the Playful conference in London last in september 2010 I had the chance to meet with Alexis Kennedy, founder of Failbetter Games, the editor of Echo Bazaar, a text game that has received much critical acclaim. He had very enlighting thoughts about how to articulate games and narratives. To start with here is a [...]

I was surprised to see the news that Zynga bought the social web browser Flock but it makes a lot of sense. I had previously thought that Zynga was so big that it might want to buy facebook, I obviously lacked their imagination as they have moved up the foodchain into the lofty realm of [...]

This 10 best games of the year video from Tested is probably is one of the best “best of 2010″ item that i’ve seen yet. In this they show several games that are amazing in how games are pushing the interactive envelope. Particularly interesting were Shoboya which reinvents stacking, to the potentially infinitely recursive Game [...]

With the recent success of so many multiplayer/social games and the emergence of the gamification of services it’s worth thinking about what makes multiplayer gaming so powerful. Games can be applied to anything and in many ways humans often make games where none existed just due to our amazing pattern recognizing abilities. Games and play [...]

I posted a tweet yesterday inspired by the recent Details article on early adopters that generated a fair amount of conversation which was: I then recently went through @padday’s presentation on social network design that provides some great examples of how relationships are scaled. In real life groups of friends are categorized in several different [...]

I wrote recently that about the next important step for organizations to learn on the social web is leadership. I had characterized it as cultural leadership inspired in many ways by Reed Hastings (the Netflix CEO) presentation on “Freedom and Responsibility in Culture” (my post on that Culture as Competitive Advantage). This idea of social [...]

OpenFeint has just launched a Group Buying model for mobile games built on the back of their multiplayer infrastructure. It’s interesting how they have flown under the radar but have established a very valuable asset, a single sign on and points/leaderboard for a lot of iPhone games. It was started by a couple of incredibly [...]