Search Results for games

There’s a nice persuasive game making the rounds, called Spent. It was made by ad agency McKinney for the Urban Ministries of Durham. The game attempts to illustrate how easily financial hardship and low income work can devolve into homelessness. It does a pretty good job, too, taking the same basic method as did Tenure, the 1975 PLATO game about… read more

The Game Developers Conference takes place next week in San Francisco. Here’s my speaking schedule for the event. I guess it’s filled with general ire this year all around. Serious Games SummitMonday – Tuesday (all day)Ben Sawyer, Jane McGonigal, and I organize the summit, which takes place on Monday and Tuesday. Monday is devoted to games for health; Tuesday is… read more

Whether via the lamentable trend of gamification or through the very public release of Jane McGonigal’s new book, the topic of videogames’ impact on the real world has been front-and-center of late. Enter iCapitalism, an iOS game that critiques both capitalism and iOS games through a simple design. As in Godville, there’s no gameplay. But unlike that game (which actually… read more

Fitness expert Jack LaLanne died yesterday at age 96. He’s most notable for starting the first health clubs, but anyone who lived with television in the late twentieth century couldn’t have missed LaLanne’s many programs and endorsements. Despite his fame, and despite the recent popularity of home fitness videogames like Wii Fit and EA Sports Active, few know that LaLanne… read more

Last year, the social gaming phenomenon Cow Clicker captured the world’s imoogination, offering players the opportunity to click on a cow every six hours—or even more often. Since July 2010, more than 50,000 people have clicked over 50 breeds of cows over 5 million times, engorging their accownts with over 5 million mooney, Cow Clicker’s in-game currency. Cow Clicker distilled… read more

Jane McGonigal’s new book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World is destined to be one of the most influential works about videogames ever published. The book is filled with bold new ideas and refinements of old ones. It’s targeted at a general readership, but game designers, critics, and scholars will learn… read more

I’ve been busy since the holidays catching up and preparing for the new term, which makes this the requisite occasional “I haven’t posted on the blog” blog post. Since I’ve been reduced to such self-referential shame, I figured I might as well take things even further and offer my readers a massive dump of recentish press about me. For starters,… read more

Switched.com ran a story offering their assement of The Best Tech Writing of 2010, and my piece Cow Clicker: The Making of Obsession. I’m in good company, too: others in the top 15 include Zadie Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, William Gibson, Gary Kasparov, and the inimitable Onion. I’d never heard of Switched.com, but apparently it’s a reasonably popular AOL technology lifestyle… read more

Here’s a quick link summary of my 2010, including both major events/work and smaller moments that took the form of blog posts. Happy new year, all. Disney cease-and-desist – the turtlenecked hairshirt – the Art History of Games – Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes – Heavy Rain – Pascal spoken here – I hate gamification – Knight News Challenge – philosopher… read more

Kyle Orland, co-author of the forthcoming book Farmville for Dummies, writes this introduction to a two-part feature over at Gamasutra, by Tadhg Kelly. The title: “How Zynga’s CityVille Has Compelled 70 Million Players.” Given today’s surprising new interest in Cow Clicker over on Reddit, I thought I’d share some delightful snippets Orland extracted from Kelly’s work. One of the keys… read more