May 2009
1 post
Applying Game Design to Email →
jingc:
Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can attach to e-mail they write. If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent’s Outlook inbox. Reeves figured this would encourage people to send less e-mail: Those who are parsimonious would wind up with lots of tokens, which means...
April 2009
3 posts
“Students increasingly find themselves teaching. Peer production is moving from...”
– Idit Harel
Newsletter March 2009
(via fred-wilson)
Is Wii Sports Tennis Pong 2.0?
Easy to learn, hard to master?
Ian Bogost argues that our familiarity with table tennis prepared us for Pong — not the ease of learning the game itself.
One step forward, two steps back...
The New York Times takes a passive aggressive swipe at professional gamers:
Virtual Leagues Fold, Forcing Gamers to Find Actual Jobs
March 2009
2 posts
Video Game Industry Learning from Movies
EA has floated the idea that too many video game releases are crowded around the holidays, creating a sub-optimal sales situation.
While this may be true, it’s worth evaluating whether video games are like movies (which are staggered throughout the year with considerable success) or tech hardware (which follows a pretty rigorous yearly release cycle). Unfortunately, they occupy the middle...
YouTube EDU
YouTube EDU launched last week - the consequences of this launch are tremendous.
Some schools already had YouTube channels for releasing lectures, but YouTube gets millions and millions of visitors - more than even a tech-savvy school like Berkeley or MIT could hope to attract to its own free courseware/video site.
What are some of the consequences of this new lecture video aggregator?
Free...
February 2009
1 post
War Games
nomouse:
AMY GOODMAN: You write that the best [U.S. Army drone] pilot is an eighteen-year-old kid who trained on an [Xbox] video game? P.W. SINGER: Yeah. He was actually a high school dropout who wanted to join the military to make his father proud. He wanted to be a helicopter mechanic. And they said, “Well, you failed your high school English course, so you’re not qualified to be a mechanic....