September 30th, 2008 by adam
Jussi posted an excellent writeup of how there’s been over $350 million invested in social games etc worldwide, and commented that he the European side wasn’t really included in his sources.
But I’ve been tracking the European side for a while, and since I’m preparing a new MMO / Education startup at the moment, I’ve recently [...]
September 28th, 2008 by adam
This is a quick review of free tools for web analytics / stats-analysis / weblog analysis. I’ll follow up with some more detailed posts about non-web tracking. Follow-up posts will extend this into game development, but this post is purely about web stuff.
September 26th, 2008 by adam
Well, obviously, it ain’t possible, but sometimes you can do it using Google…
September 26th, 2008 by adam
My wonderful review of Spore (which Dave McGraw described as “accurate”, IIRC) I thought was lost and gone forever. This is CLEARLY a conspiracy from EA/Will Wright (the review was quite scathing :)).
But … thanks to Gavin “Just pulled from my google reader archive. Hope it helps.” Bowman, here it is:
September 26th, 2008 by adam
Hard disk failure. The nice people at Bytemark got a new hard disk installed within a couple of hours, and I had practically everything backed-up, but the restore process turned out to be harder than I expected.
In particular I’ll mention (because it was the only one I couldn’t solve on my own – wordpress authors [...]
September 16th, 2008 by adam
Is it just me, or is calling this about “piracy” missing the point here? (and, in case this isn’t obvious enough: yes, this is a deliberately very flippant post, but the points are serious :) )
EDIT: just for the record, I actually bought and played the game, quite a lot. Although don’t expect a professional [...]
September 14th, 2008 by adam
(this is part 2 of Publishers are from Mars, Developers are from Venus)
Last time I said that “good Developers are very similar to Valley Technology Startups”, which suggests one obvious way things could develop:
Publishers to become Venture Capitalists; Developers to become commodities
In this model, the Publishers spend their time “speculating” in Dev studios: instead of [...]
September 9th, 2008 by adam
Over the last few years, there has been a big shift in power and success away from independent studios, and towards in-house, publisher-owned studios. This has been driven by several things, sound economic reasons, competitive reasons, and because the strong independent studios had done a good job at creating a slew of new IPs (which [...]
September 8th, 2008 by adam
Don’t get excited :). The title refers to experimentation with stuff you’re allowed to use, rather than cracking (deliberately breaking in to stuff). Unless you submitted proposals this year, you won’t be able to do anything.
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September 1st, 2008 by adam
Pointed out by Sulka, this essay: http://virtual-economy.org/files/Lehdonvirta-VWDE.pdf
I suggest that researchers ask themselves the following questions to ensure their work is relevant to their aims:
1) Out of all social world sites and technologies, why am I focusing on MMOs?
2) Out of all possible interaction modalities, am I justified in limiting my
observations to the MMO server?
3) [...]
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September 1st, 2008 by adam
A 20-page essay explaining why thinking of “Virtual Worlds” as opposed to “the real World” causes problems from a design and analysis perspective. Instead, it suggests, we should think of them as Anselm Strauss’s social worlds (Strauss, 1978). IMHO, this fits closely with the good parts of mainstream thinking on non-online games, e.g. James Gee’s [...]
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September 1st, 2008 by adam
I’m running out of RSS readers, in my quest to find something that Just Works, and Doesn’t Do Anything Stupid. I got close to giving up that such a thing exists, although I’ve finally found one that’s been working fine for a couple of weeks, so I think I may be OK. I was surprised [...]
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