I still don’t know why I started getting a free subscription to Game Developer magazine, but I sure enjoy it. The technical articles are over my head and frequently completely over my head, but I enjoy reading articles written from a hard-core developer point of view. (The magazine comes to me under the name Johnny Locust at Wild West Ware — not a pseudonym or anynym of mine. I find traces of him on the Net, but none that lets me contact him directly. Johnny, if you find this, I’m enjoying your subscription!)

The magazine opener this month (Sept.) comes from Eric Caoili. It”s about The Difference Engine Initiative, an incubator to encourage and enable women as game developers. Two sessions are planned in Toronto.

One of the founders, Mare Sheppard, says in Game Developer:

“There’s this huge, homogenous, very insular, established set of developers right now in the game industry, and it happens to be mostly white and mostly male. From that, you can really only get a certain amount of innovation…If we had more voices and more opinions and more people coming in, then we would be able to take bigger steps in releasing games that represent different people, because they’re involved in the development process.”

As for the incubator, says Sheppard, “It’s like a crafter’s circle. It’s loose and low-key, and it’s about peer mentorship.” She sees it as just one step that might help some people get over the initial hurdle.

The project is named after Ada Lovelace’s contribution to Babbage’s Difference Engine, but I enjoy the implicit endorsement of difference as a source of innovation. In fact, difference is the source of all value, isn’t it?

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The GiveALink link-sharing site has posted two games thaty are actually research studies.

The first game is GiveALink Slider which the site says “is an interesting online tagging game in which you must annotate webpages with related tags and choose new webpages. You can accumulate points and win badges by accomplishing tasks and building links with other players.” They are giving iPods to the winners. It’s actually a study called “Social Annotations through Game Play” conducted by the Networks and Agents Network in the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research of the Indiana University School of Informatics
Here’s the description of the second game:

Great Minds Think Alike is a word association game that lets users build semantic concept networks and explore similarity relations.

Players form a chain of semantically related words, which comes from the GiveALink knowledge base. Users can browse through nine different social media, e.g. Flickr and Youtube, and earn points.

Words are geo-tagged, which helps to analyze the geographical distribution of terms. Players can also connect with other players via Facebook as suggested by the game.

Data from the game is collected by GiveALink.org to make the game more fun, support other social tagging applications, and for study purposes.

No, I don’t actually understand how either game works, and I haven’t signed up for them because the first one is a study that I don’t want to commit to and the second requires an iPhone. But, the GiveALink service is interesting. It’s an open bookmark-sharing service that also feeds a research program. [Hat tip to Julianne Chatelain.]

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Foursquare’s general manager, Evan Cohen, is giving a talk at the ILM conference I just spoke at.

He says there have been 381,000,000 check-ins so far. In every single country. The last country to check in was North Korea. The biggest single event was the Rally to Restore Sanity. “The most basic user experience is simply when friends check-in to their current location to find their friends.” “We help engineer serendipity” in which you discover a friend is nearby.

Their value proposition: Discovery, encouragement, and loyalty.

Discovery: They want to push people out into the real world. They’ve just launched an “explore” tag, a recommendation engine. It uses info about what your friends like to do, what people like you like to do, what people are saying in the “tips” review feature, etc. “We want to be like that best friend who knows every cool bar in Chicago, or every restaurant…”

Encouragement: Use gaming mechanics to get people to do what they wouldn’t have done otherwise. The mayor races have become really competitive. If someone loses it, they’ll go back to the place over and over. Their badges also encourage people to go out. E.g., go out to the gym a few times a week and you’ll get the gym rat badge. They have also improved their leader board. The Ambassador program enables users to bring merchants onto Foursquare.

Loyalty: They encourage merchants to offer rewards of various types. They’ve relaunched this part of the platform: easier for merchants, for users, and new “specials” types. They’re now offering “flash specials” to drive traffic when the place is under-utilized. Not all specials are discounts. “It’s an experience.” They also have a “friends special” that only works if you show up with some number of friends. Over 250,000 venues have verified on the merchant platform. Merchants have done creative things with Foursquare. Even when Starbucks offered a mere $1 off a frappucino to the local mayors, checkins jumped by 50%. “It’s about the experience and recognition as much as anything.”

They have a full and easy API, modeled on Twitter’s.

[I find Foursquare fascinating. To the users it’s a game. To the merchants, it’s a form of marketing. And as a blending of the virtual, the real, gaming, and marketing, it’s amazing.]

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As a diploma project, David Arenou has prototyped an augment reality game that turns your living room into a scene in a first person shooter. Here’s his description:

Before beginning, the user has to set action markers and hiding places with personal furniture. It can be a chair, an armchair, an overturned coffee table: whatever wanted. After calibration, the player sits behind one of his hideouts and the game can start. The position of the body will have a direct impact on the avatar that it embodies.

When the player hides, he becomes invisible for his virtual enemies. When he uncovers himself, he can attack but becomes vulnerable to enemy bullets. Following a shooting phase, the game forces the player to change hiding place or to touch one of the markers, in order to get to a new sequence…

On his site you can see a video of the actual prototype in which he places the computer-readable markers, and crouches behind his furniture in between firing off shots at his television. Here’s his concept video:

The future of gaming, the innocent-sounding origins of the apocalypse, or both?

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You don’t have to fully understand these two brief videos from 15 years ago (I don’t) explaining solutions to tech problems building a 3D game (3D as in Quake, not as in putting on the funny glasses) to be reminded how hard it can be to do things that seem simple, and how damned clever our tech is.

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As Gianluca Baccanico (who pointed me to this) says: What do you get when you mashup Google Maps, GPS, and PacMan?

From the SourceForge page on the project:

PacMap as a location based game for Android devices. To play the game you need a GPS signal and a working internet connection. There also have to be some streets nearby. Your goal is to eat all the dots. For each dot you will get a point. But beware!

What next: Google Theft Auto?

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Let the games begin.

(Wonderwheels are a new browsing option available when doing a Google search. When you do a search, click on “Show Options” and then on “Wonderwheel.”)

[Tags: google wonderwheels kevin_bacon games ]

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I really like the fact that when Left 4 Dead (the great cooperative zombie killing game) introduced a new type of gameplay, one of the developers explained the math behind the balancing of the waves of incoming undead.

[Tags: games left_4_dead zombies transparency blogging expertise ]

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Last night I watched two things on TV.

First, I caught up with some of The Onion’s news clips. One was a report about a video game — “Close Range — that consists of nothing but shooting people in the face. Although the “news” item wasn’t The Onion at its hilarious best, it was at least brief.

Then we watched Oliver Stone’s “W.”

When will I learn? Stone continues to be the worst major director of his generation. Perhaps we can quantify this by saying that he’s the worst Academy Award-winning director in my lifetime. That’s not to say that everything about every movie he makes is awful. But it doesn’t matter, for all of those good moments put together are washed away by the mighty river of awfulness that goes by the name of “Alexander” [My review and followup]. So, yes, “W” has some ok moments. Well, actually it doesn’t. It has a good vocal impersonation of Bush, and the humorous revelation that Richard Dreyfuss actually sort of looks like Cheney. But otherwise it’s made out of 100% cliche and cardboard. It also has two more of Stone’s signature qualities: It goes on too long (it should have stopped when Bush wins the presidency) and it uses embarrassingly failed tropes that Stone thinks are arty. (In “W,” he cuts to Bush alone in a baseball field, as if in a dream. Or something.)

My conclusion: The four minutes parody news report from The Onion, of average quality, is far superior to all of Oliver Stone’s work put together. Especially if you were to put all that Stonage together and actually watch it.

PS: The Onion lets you play “Close Range” for free.

[Tags: movies tv the_onion oliver_stone reviews fps games ]

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Did I ever mention Tic Tac Two? It’s a version of Tic Tac Toe I invented about ten years ago (which probably means 15 years ago), that has only two twists on the original. First, you have to have two counters in a square to own it. Second, once per game each player can deploy two counters in a single turn. I suppose there’s a variant in which you can deploy the two in separate boxes.

Anyway, Tic Tac Two is more fun than Tic Tac Toe, although so is counting.

(Way back when, I wrote a program to let a computer play against a human. The only interesting thing about it — and I was very proud of this — was that the computer automatically played 10,000 random games with itself to determine what the winning moves are in every situation. Purely for flash, when it was going through this data-building exercise, I had it display its moves, so that it looked like that scene from WarGames, except in this version, Global Thermonuclear War looked a lot like Tic Tac Toe.)

[Tags: games tictactoe tic_tac_toe ]

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