In anticipation of its soon-to-be-released next-gen MMO, GuildWars 2, Seattle-based ArenaNet has published this short promo video that characterizes the company and its employees in all the right ways: They are portrayed as intensely collaborative, resolutely non-hierarchical, game-oriented, fun-loving geeks who believe in the power of digital community. I have no way of knowing whether [...] Read more – ‘ArenaNet’s First Ten Years’.
Posit the first: Virtual goods have real value. Posit the second: When a virtual good is destroyed, so is its value. Demonstration: This video, from the MMORPG EVE Online, depicts the destruction of approximately US$15,000 worth of virtual goods. Via Kotaku Read more – ‘The Real Cost of War’.
It’s Gun Week over at Kotaku (seriously, though, when are guns not an issue on a video gaming site?), and Mike Fahey has compiled a 102-second historical overview of 18 years’ worth of getting shot, First Person Shooter-style. The video is interesting, and somewhat depressing: The calculus of projectile weaponry meshes so well with the [...] Read more – ‘Getting Shot: A 103-Second Retrospective’.
This semester, especially as we’re looking at material by James Paul Gee, we’ll talk about incentives to mastery, reward, and cognition. This (fun! animated!) excerpt from a recent RSA presentation by Daniel Pink is an excellent introduction to an interesting behavioral problem that the best games address in surprising ways. The dilemma is this: Economists [...] Read more – ‘Pink on Incentive and Algorithmic Cognition’.
Close on the heels of the Italian government’s recent public statements on the civic and aesthetic merits of video games (and the taxable appeal of game studio revenues, no doubt), Associazione Italiana Opere Multimediali Interattive (AIOMI) has released the first of what will be several video shorts promoting interactive media in Italy. And like a [...] Read more – ‘Mona Lisa / Duck Hunt Mashup’.
When the Macintosh computer introduced desktop publishing (DTP) to the world in the eighties, one wag observed that “Now everyone can create bad design.” While we frequently applaud tools and technologies that promise to level the playing field, the fact of the matter is that a good toolset is never enough. Good storytelling is a [...] Read more – ‘Machinima, Done Well’.
