Running - Home. DICE 2010: "Design Outside the Box" Presentation Videos. SCVNGR Launches LevelUp to Compete With Groupon: Tech News and Analysis « SCVNGR, the real world location-gaming service, is applying game mechanics and a new business model to daily deals in an attempt to strengthen the relationship between merchants and their customers. With LevelUp, a pilot program that begins today in Philadelphia and Boston, SCVNGR is hoping to compete with local deal programs like Groupon and Living Social by offering a series of three deals to consumers, who unlock each one as they try out a business. The company is waiving any fees on the first deal to help encourage businesses to try out the service. By leveling up — a term that comes from video games, and means that users unlock rewards as they complete certain levels — SCVNGR believes it can prevent consumers from abandoning a business after one daily deal and give merchants a shot at turning them into regular customers.
LevelUp requires businesses to offer up three discounts or offers rather than just one. “Our job is get customers to come back,” said SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch. SXSW Crowd Earns $10K for Charity by Playing a Game. In an unusual keynote speech at South by Southwest Interactive, SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch captivated the crowd with examples on how game mechanics can solve the world's problems. Better yet, he leaned on the communal-play game dynamic and motivated the crowd to successfully complete a complex game in 180 seconds, the prize being $10,000 for the National Wildlife Foundation. The opening keynote address included two games — one a test — mixed with thought-provoking points on the game dynamics inherent in education, customer acquisition, loyalty, and location based services. His goal: to convince the crowd that game mechanics can solve big problems.
He succeeded in his mission with a little help from the crowd. Midway through the talk, Priebatsch tested the crowd with a simple task. The real game came at the end. Priebatsch also sweetened the deal with a $10,000 reward. The life-sized card game served as a microcosm of how game dynamics can solve real world problems. Design Fiction: Micronations Revolution | Beyond The Beyond. *I’m hard put to describe what is going on here, but it sounds rather like “experiential futurism.” Dear Friends! It is that time of the year again! We are about to turn our backs on the cold and the rain, and say goodbye to the long winter! Therefore this new pop-up show at the edge of science fiction should warm up your imagination and haunt you with images of yetis, giant submarines, wild octopus and much more!
Directed & curated by Nelly Ben Hayoun for shunt, Micronations Revolution is two nights of music, performances, workshops & animations developed around four fictional micro-nations. It will take place on 11th and 12th of March only. Set in the post industrial landscape of Shunt’s yard and machine filled interior, you will enter the threshold and be able to push your physical limits in Sea-salt park; learning to scuba dive with Aqualon Scuba Diving Tutors. Micronations Revolution’s programme is built as a series of interactive experiences & experiments. Where? When? Jane McGonigal short video. Jane McGonigal on gaming. Video: Game Designer Wants to Save the World - Health. Full Interview: Jane McGonigal on Fixing Reality | Spark | CBC Radio. EVOKE trailer (a new online game) Haikyo Ruins | Beyond The Beyond. Gamepocalypse | Beyond The Beyond.
*You gotta hand it to this Schell guy — when it comes to apocalypse, he likes to sweat the details. From: Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation Subject: [SALT] Gaming the world (Jesse Schell talk) Date: 28 luglio 2010 21:20:18 GMT+02:00 In a glee-filled evening, Schell declared that games and real life are reaching out to each other with such force that we might come to a condition of “gamepocalypse”—where every second of your life you’re playing a game in some way. He expects smart toothbrushes and buses that give us good-behavior points, and eye-tracking sensors that reward us for noticing ads, and subtle tests that confirm whether product placement in our dreams has worked. The reason games are so inviting is that they offer: clear feedback, a sense of progress, the possibility of success, mental and physical exercise, a chance to satisfy curiousity, a chance to solve problems, and a great feeling of freedom. * New screens—live displays on everything. * Beauty—everything is getting goreous.
GAMEFUL, a Secret HQ for Worldchanging Game Developers by Jane McGonigal. Jeux sociaux : Yahoo ! s'associe à Zynga. Big Thinkers: Katie Salen on Learning with Games. Katie Salen: My name is Katie Salen, and I have a couple of hats: one, is I'm an associate professor at Parsons School of Design; and I used to run the graduate program there in something called Design and Technology. And so, the students there build software and do digital cinema and animation; something called physical computing, where they're working with all kinds of crazy sensors and robotics; and that kind of thing. And now, I’m a senior research faculty there, doing work in games and learning. And I also am the executive director of a non-profit called the Institute of Play, and we're doing research in that space.
It's a game-development studio, but it's focused on kind of games and learning, and new kinds of learning environments that we might design for kids today. I'm a big advocate of games, partially because I think that play is a just an amazing important part of people, even developmentally. And we see the same thing happening with teachers. Games for Change: An Interview with MiniMonos and a Look Back. (MiniMonos.com screenshot) Jeff Ramos of GameCulturalist.com recently interviewed Kaila Colbin from MiniMonos.com, which is a virtual world that encourages children and parents to practice sustainability, generosity and community. The game was developed by a group of New Zealanders who were trained by Al Gore to be Climate Ambassadors after The Inconvenient Truth came out (see "Al Gore's Slideshow Going Viral" and "Field Report: Al Gore's Climate Project" for more from Worldchanging on the Climate Project's Climate Ambassadors training program).
Here is an excerpt from the interview in which Colbin talks about the real world projects the players of MiniMonos develop as a result of the game's lessons: What have you learned about gaming and social interaction because of MiniMonos? We’ve learned that kids online will continually surprise and delight you. Click here to read the full interview and learn more about MiniMonos and the game developers.
Peace is hard! Google acquires Toronto-based social gaming firm. SocialDeck is the latest in a series of acquisitions by Google over the past month, all focused around the area of social networking features. Google shows no signs of stopping its social networking start-up shopping spree–it acquired social gaming service SocialDeck on Monday. The acquisition was announced Monday via the SocialDeck blog. It is Google’s fifth acquisition in the past month.
SocialDeck is a social gaming company that makes games for various mobile platforms (including BlackBerry and iPhone) that are playable across multiple devices and social networks. For example, you can play a game on your iPhone and then switch over to Facebook on your computer and play with the same profile. Related Story: Google Wave failure proves social networking is tough Some of SocialDeck’s games include “Shake & Spell,” “Pet Hero MD,” and “Color Connect.” SocialDeck, which has workers in Toronto and San Francisco, received financing from the BlackBerry Partners Fund in early 2009. Urgent Evoke - A crash course in changing the world. Gameful: A New Secret HQ for Worldchanging Games. My recent post on Games for Change seemed to be pretty popular, so I thought many of you would be interested to learn of Jane McGonigal's (and co-founders Nathan Verrill, Matthew Jensen, and Kiyash Monsef) new venture: Gameful.
Gameful is set to launch at the end of October and will be a "secret HQ" for people who are making games that are making people: - happier - smarter - stronger - healthier - more collaborative - more creative - better connected to our friends and family - and better at whatever we love to do when we’re not playing games The intention of Gameful is to connect people who are: ...and, to make it easy for those people to get what they need to develop new "reality-changing, life-changing, or world-changing" games, such as by helping them find: - collaborators - ideas - funding - partners - mentors - allies - playtesters - publicity - and gamers If you'd like to receive email updates about the launch, you can sign-up at Posted by: Denis on 25 Aug 10. From Design Thinking to Game Thinking | Gauravonomics Blog For Marketers, Entrepreneurs and Activists. What is More Social: Playing With Your Real Friends or Making Friends With Strangers You Are Playing With? | Gauravonomics Blog For Marketers, Entrepreneurs and Activists.
Will Zynga Become the Google of Games? Atmosphere Industries » » Street Games, Theatricality & Technology. I’m pretty notorious for not doing post-mortems of our games, while being fully aware that I really ought to. Gentrification: The Game! Will be no exception, mainly because it’s still around and kicking. So this is a pre-mortem, if you will. This seems timely, since G:TG! Just won a couple of awards at Come Out and Play. It seems we’ve blindly stumbled, in our wildly thrashing sort of way, into some kind of good design principles, so now’s the time to try and sound smart if there ever was one. Gentrification was borne of a desire to not do everything we’ve done before, kind of.
Deep, lasting flavour. Flavour is an interesting term. Situated games, big games, pervasive games — whatever you want to call them, working with them complicates matters. But the other thing about these games is that they inhabit a domain with a rich history of loosely structured, highly theatrical experiments and strategies. These guys know what I'm talking about. Mobile phones: so 2007. How Foursquare turned life into a game. Foursquare isn't really a location service at all; it's a way to turn your life into a game and keep track of your score. It started as a way to make running more fun. He was already tracking his progress with Nike's iPod add-on but as he jogged past a Super Mario graffiti on his regular route around New York future Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley mused that if the real world was a game, he'd have just got extra points.
When the Dodgeball location service (for telling your friends where you were) he built and sold to Google languished (because telling your friends where you are isn't that much fun after the novelty wears off), he decided to see if he could turn life into more of a game. The points and trophies and maps in Nike's system "take the regular old run of exercising and make it more interesting," says Crowley. "How can you do that for nightlife and socializing? They also change their behaviour because of it. Scraping the surface Liked this? The Gamification of Life - II. eCommerce General Manager Internet | London, United Kingdom, GB Managing Director / General Manager of internet / eCommerce business with experience across B2C and B2B.
Expertise in internet marketing, product management and team leadership. Specialties: * General Management * eCommerce * Marketing, Internet Marketing, Relationship Marketing, SEM, SEO, CRM, Direct Marketing * Strategy, Strategic Marketing, Segmentation * Product Management, User Experience * Supplier Management * Leadership, Change Management. The Gamification of Life. An entire post, just on URLs? RLy? Well, yes.
I’m amazed how often I see leading eCommerce sites making basic mistakes with their URL structures that will hurt their SEO performance, even for sites that have just launched. So much so that I thought it worth a post. Here’s my list of the top eight oversights, with examples I’ve noticed recently: 1. If people post a link to your website (e.g. on a blog), they’ll most likely link to it in the form Common mistakes are to have additional URLs for the home page at some or all of: (i.e. with the slash) Debenhams launched their Irish online store last week and have at least three versions of the homepage indexed in Google, all caused by not making the home page simply and only 2.
The new Debenhams Irish website also makes this mistake. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. The Gamification of Life. On last week’s edition of Spark, my new favorite podcast, the topic was games and the first segment was a very interesting discussion with Jesse Schell, a game designer who also teaches at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. His thesis is that, while games of one kind or another have always been with us, the ability to store and access huge quantities of data in the 21st century is bringing about the “gamification” of life. The whole discussion is worth listening to (an extended version is also on the show site) but there were two pieces that stood out for me.
First, is Schell’s view of school as gaming. People are already talking about how to reorganize [using gaming techniques] school because school is already a kind of a game. You go they have tasks, you do the tasks, you get a score. People are talking about how can we design that better. I suspect we’ll have to suffer through a whole lot of the wrong approach before we get to the right ones. The Future of Teenagers: My Interview in O Globo. Game developers warn FCC of "balkanized" Internet. A team of online game developers and boosters told the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday about worries that the big ISPs could fragment the Internet with "pay-for-priority" arrangements, causing economic troubles for the gaming industry similar to those created by mobile access providers.
"Software platform developers like Microsoft and Facebook pose less of a threat to innovation than infrastructure owners," one developer told the agency, according to notes of the meeting. He added that "if the Internet were balkanized, and developers had to negotiate separately with each ISP, that would be a substantial drag on innovation because it would divert resources from development. " The game makers included Asheron's Call producer Dan Scherlis, Jon Radoff of GamerDNA, Christopher Dyl of online world-maker Tubine, Matthew Bellows of voice chat developer Vivox, and Darius Kazemi of the International Game Developers Association. Latency, not bandwidth Slotting fees. CONFIRMED: Netflix is Coming to Nintendo Wii. Last week we reported on a possible partnership between Netflix and the Nintendo Wii, and today it's official: The rental streaming service will go live on Nintendo Wii consoles in the U.S. this spring.
That's right, when the flowers start blooming and the birds start singing, Netflix will also start streaming free for Wii console owners who already have a Netflix plan starting at $8.99 per month. This partnership will no doubt be a boon to Netflix (which has suffered a little heat as of late). Of course, consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PS3 already stream Netflix, but Wii is the fastest-selling home console in history. In December alone, Nintendo sold more than 3 million consoles in the U.S. Come spring, Wii owners only need to procure a Netflix instant-streaming disc — which they can snag here — which works basically like your average game. The End in Mind » Gaming, Social Learning & Authenticity.