background preloader

LBS

Facebook Twitter

Gamersband LBS network for video games players (still a lot of work to do ;-) Gamersband (gamersband)

Find Gamers In Your Neighborhood With Gamersband: A Location-Based Social Network. If you’ve ever been tired of playing FIFA Soccer against the computer or wanted a comrade to help you rip through Gears of War, you know that it’s not always easy to find a friend to play with. With that problem in mind, two Parisians invented Gamersband, a location-based social network that allows players to cooperate, compete and play with people in their area. The question is whether they can will gain enough adoption and develop enough filters so that the network isn’t filled with creepy old dudes who like Japanese dating simulators and fake female profiles asking you to “visit my website as9dfj.oi.ru”.

The service is well thought out and in addition to the more obvious functionality of being able to find players close to you, gamers can create challenges related to a ‘zone’, and then ask people to compete within that zone. Since they’re all in the same area, the idea is that if someone makes the winning score, all the players can visit one another to verify the claim. Realtime Worlds. Project MyWorld Homepage. Realtime Worlds: an inside story. How did this happen to Realtime Worlds?

Realtime Worlds: an inside story

That's the question most industry pundits have been asking all week. APB was going to be the Grand Theft Auto of the 21st century – a freeform cops'n'robbers shootfest, taking place in a massively multiplayer universe where player characters were infinitely customisable. Realtime Worlds, founded by Grand Theft Auto creator Dave Jones, was the giant of the Dundee games community, the lynchpin amid a thriving enclave of studios, many spawned from Jones's original company, DMA Design. Last week, however, Realtime Worlds went into administration with the loss of 150 jobs. The developer had apparently burned through $105m in funding. Here's what's left.

Those are the facts, but they tell a fraction of the story. First of all, some employees saw this coming months ago. It wasn't. "We were getting the data every week and we could see what the sales were like," says one member of the APB team. And you've just got to ask again, how did this happen? “Casual location” Nokia gaming coming to life soon. Interview: Nokia's Mark Ollila. Mark Ollila, director of technology and strategy at Nokia Games Publishing, is responsible for setting the development of gaming on Nokia’s mobile phones.

Interview: Nokia's Mark Ollila

His position is a powerful one: Nokia is still the world’s leading producer of mobile phones, its products comprising 38.1 per cent sold in the first quarter of 2009. With access to such an enormous market, Nokia has the potential to define mobile gaming – and that’s just what he hopes to do. Though iPhone gets all the headlines, with Nokia’s new Ovi Store, a single marketplace for apps and games launched last month, the N-Gage gaming platform, which was launched in April last year, and access to a host of services, from music to maps, at his disposal, Nokia is a sleeping giant in the world of mobile gaming.

Ollila’s current focus is on location-based gaming: games that use the player’s position in the world to produce their gaming experience. Director of Games writes essay on social location gaming. GLOBAL – The concept of ‘social location gaming’ is reasonably simple, but this innovative twist to more traditional mobile gaming engagement promises to change the way we play games on the move and how we behave socially through mobile play.

Director of Games writes essay on social location gaming

It’s an exciting area of development, and one that Nokia is keenly immersed in evolving. Nokia’s Director of Games, Jaako Kaidesoja, has written an interesting essay all about it, simply entitled ‘Location, location, location’. Earlier today I began picking out the highlights to run in this piece, but quickly realized that the it’s much better enjoyed in its entirety – there’s so much interesting stuff in there, it’d be a crime to put it under the editor’s knife. His article addresses the ‘social location’ buzzword and asks the questions of what it actually means for mobile games and the industry? Nokia launches user created "Yamake" games on N-Gage.

Yamake Shortfilm. Yamake Art Project Home. Print Your Own Version of SCVNGR's Game Mechanics Flash Cards.