Here’s a fun distraction for your Friday: Sign in, wait for the green light, and type as fast as you can.
I did pretty well with my average 65wpm speed.
Even better than the homemade touch screen hack, Johnny Lee has come up with a head tracking hack that could certainly be turned into many REALLY cool games.
Today I stumbled on a video that shares an inside look into 24 The Game’s “integrated marketing campaign”, a kind of viral/interactive mystery created to help generate buzz on the new Sony Playstation game.
I’m not a fan of the show, in fact I haven’t ever watched a full episode, but I found the intricacies of the marketing campaign fascinating. I have to admit, if I had received one of their emails, I would have been intrigued.
Julian Dibbell has an interesting article in the New York Times about China’s growth industry: gold farming.
Gold farming is the term used to describe playing Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMO’s) to collect gold and other valuables and then sell them for real world currency. Though it’s not a lot to any individual worker, the amount of cash involved may surprise you.
In 2001, Edward Castronova, an economist at the University of Indiana and at the time an EverQuest player, published a paper in which he documented the rate at which his fellow players accumulated virtual goods, then used the current R.M.T. prices of those goods to calculate the total annual wealth generated by all that in-game activity. The figure he arrived at, $135 million, was roughly 25 times the size of EverQuest’s R.M.T. market at the time. Updated and more broadly applied, Castronova’s results suggest an aggregate gross domestic product for today’s virtual economies of anywhere from $7 billion to $12 billion, a range that puts the economic output of the online gamer population in the company of Bolivia’s, Albania’s and Nepal’s.
Previously: Play Money is Now Out and Professional Game Playing Conclusion
Check out the top ten best 8-bit games as rated by the Game Trailer Countdown. A couple of my favorite 8-bit games, Tetris and Excitebike, didn’t make the cut, but the GT list does have some classics.
Think you know the world around you? Try naming all 53 countries of the African continent in 10 minutes, in my latest naming game:
53 African Countries in 10 Minutes. Good luck.
I think Desktop Tower Defense is the most fun and addicting flash game I’ve ever played. It’s awesome, but be warned, don’t even start if you have work to do, because the addictiveness is off the charts.
A Korean venture start-up claims to have developed an audio sequence that can communicate with addicted game players below the conscious level. The company wants game manufacturers to play the embedded subliminal messages when a young user has kept playing after a preset period of time.
From The Korea Times article:
“We incorporated messages into an acoustic sound wave telling gamers to stop playing. The messages are told 10,000 to 20,000 times per second,” Xtive President Yun Yun-hae said.
“Game users can’t recognize the sounds. But their subconscious is aware of them and the chances are high they will quit playing,” the 35-year-old Yun said. “Tests tell us the sounds work.”
Any scholarly evidence I’ve ever read up on has indicated that subliminal messages don’t work, but apparently marketing such messages is big business.
Xtive applied for a domestic patent for the phonogram and is looking to take advantage of the technology in other sectors.
“We can easily change the messages. In this sense, the potential for this technology is exponential,” Yun said.
More than just a simple puzzle game, Sprout features beautiful charcoal drawings as the basis for its graphics and style—a flash game that thinks it’s a children’s storybook.
I was first introduced to the game “You Don’t Know Jack” by my high school physics teacher almost ten years ago. On the last day of classes he let us chill out and play the addictive flash based game where high culture and pop culture collide; I’ve been a fan ever since.
Now you can play a single player version of You Don’t Know Jack online. You can also browse their older “Dis or Dat” games via their blog or after you finish the 7 question game.
I’ve come up with a few more versions of the “name the provinces/states/countries” game. I’ll list them all here (new additions marked):
- Australian States
- Argentine Provinces
- European Union Member States
- Canadian Provinces and Territories
Have fun, and don’t be shy, let us know what you think and how well you did.
It’s hard to believe that the Nintendo Entertainment System was released 21 years ago. Last year, GameSpot sponsored a documentary celebrating the early years of Nintendo.
I particularly enjoyed the demonstrations of how to make your Nintendo cartridges run. I recall that for the first few years of Nintendo playing at our house we never had to blow on the games, I guess it was only in the later years (early 90’s) when games weren’t babied so much that dust was allowed to collect on the exposed circuit boards, and the ritual of blowing on games before you loaded them began.
Here it is, Flashback NES:
Hit play or watch fullscreen at Google Video.
Can you name 50 US states in 10 Minutes? Here’s a hint, if you get stuck think about the property names in Monopoly. I got 32 out of 50 on my first try.
I hope no one minds, but I converted the 50 States in 10 minutes game into a Canadian version: 13 Provinces and Territories in 2 minutes.
Update: See my list of other versions of the game.
Check out The Missing Link flash creation by interactive media artist Masayuki Kido. This is really cool. I don’t really have the words to summarize other than to say, it’s a series of silhouettes that appear and with the click of the mouse you can interact with them to see a near narrative unfold itself dynamically. I found it extremely compelling.
You might also want to check out Pictaps, another flash based diversion, on the same site, that allows you to draw a character, and then watch him dance to a silly song.
The Interactive Institute in Sweden has created an in-car, virtual reality gaming system called Backseat Playground that uses GPS to integrate the actual location of your vehicle into a game. It’s currently a prototype designed for kids stuck in the car on long rides. Players can, for example, solve murder mysteries and search for clues in meatspace as they drive around. It has some great interactive features such as characters in the game will actually call the player’s cell phone (hand held receiver) to give him or her clues.
The Backseat Playground consists of a GPS receiver, a handheld computer and headphones, all connected to a laptop in the trunk of the car.
The laptop uses the GPS data to maintain a three-dimensional model that keeps the car correctly positioned within the virtual world. A database of geographical information is used to match events in the game to suitable locations. Players interact using the handheld computer.
The game begins with a radio newsflash, relayed by the handheld computer, which places a passenger at the start of a murder mystery or a werewolf thriller. As the car travels along its route, the player receives further phone calls and walkie-talkie messages from characters in the game.
For now, the game only works over an area of 35 square kilometres in Stockholm, but you can check out the video of a couple of kids giving it a test run.