What Can Serious Games Learn from Soap Operas?
Gabriel Recchia on Oct 24, 2012The serious games industry—if “industry” is the right word for a ragtag handful of academics and idealistic startups—is in a deceptively precarious position. Funding for games and gamified applications is at record levels in the public and...
GDC Online - Playdom presents: The Year in Social ...
Jared Lorince on Oct 12, 2011This talk by Steve Meretzky and Dave Rohrl of Playdom was a doozy (and I mean that in the best way possible), reviewing the major changes in social gaming market over the past year. I'm going to use this post to highlight some of the most important...
To Bartle or Not to Bartle?: Capturing Player Beha...
Jim Cummings on Jun 14, 2011From horoscopes to the Hogwarts Sorting Hat to Facebook quizzes, we humans seem to have a certain fascination with categorizing ourselves in terms of group identities and fitting ourselves to archetypal models. Maybe this is because of the various...
Can games fix our broken reality?
Jared Lorince on Jan 4, 2011Jane McGonigal is not your typical game designer. She has a PhD from UC Berkeley (my alma mater!) in performance studies and predicts that a game designer will win a Nobel Peace Prize by the year 2023. She has been the subject of articles in The New...
Another look at Zynga
Jared Lorince on Dec 14, 2010Travis's recent post on games taking advantage of evolutionary psychology reminded me of a conversation he and I had a few weeks ago. I had recently read this short article in Wired Magazine, and it brought up some interesting questions I'd like to...