The Rosetta Stone: I18N’s early best friend Online games have become an international business. In order to compete in the global marketplace, your game needs to appeal to players in countries ranging from America to Japan to China to Poland. None of these cultures speak the same languages, have the same cultural values or even celebrate the same holidays. If you are starting an online game company it is wise to starting contemplating the monumental […]
Yesterday morning I woke up from one of those startlingly lucid dreams where I was playing a completed game design. I tell my wife that odd ideas are like exotic fruit and if you fail to jot them down, they will rot away, never to be tasted again. So here are my quickly captured notes of what is, literally, a dream game of mine. 🙂 Imagine, if you will, a space strategy game. You start […]
Where are the wacky mixtures of new technology that fundamentally change the way we interact with computers? A next generation cell phone is imagined as a phone with cooler buttons. A next generation computer is seen as just another computer you sit in front of except the buttons are shiny. It is time for a flight of fancy, something that is shockingly rare in the world outside of rarified blogs (and perhaps Nintendo’s hallucinogenic research […]
Here is a little social comic creation game that just occurred to me as I was day dreaming in the shower. I loved Tadhg’s recent post about interviewing game design candidates with a test and it got me thinking. Unfortunately, If I actually was in a real interview, it appears I would have to rush off to a shower in order to do my best work. Wet candidates…part of the trials and tribulations of interviewing […]
Remember when you were a young and you drew epic images on giant rolls of butcher paper? The little boys would draw cool spaceships and army men battling one another in landscape full of tunnels, fortresses and lots of explosions. The little girls, with their surprisingly superior sense of color, drew fish, rainbows, and people. You didn’t worry about your drawing skills. You just doodled for the fun of it. The best part was either […]
You know, I’m seriously starting to love China’s attitude to MMOGs. It is a precursor to how governments will attempt to influence many immersive online activities managed by a legal entity. The opportunities for abuse of civil rights is both delightfully immense and ill defined. Yet, because we are talking about virtual worlds any abuse that occurs is purely voluntary. Is this a victimless crime?Admittedly, the owners of the MMOG have complete control over all […]
An anthropological view on game design Game Anthropology There is a concept in product design called product anthropology that can be usefully applied to game design. “Plain anthropology is about watching how remote tribes go about their everyday lives and joining in with them eating nasty things. Product anthropology is about watching how ordinary Westerners go about their lives; what sort of things do they do, what do they want to do, how do they […]
One of the most difficult and damning areas of the American lifestyle is personal finance. As a nation we are deeply in debt and despite our cultural wealth fixation, basic accounting skills are rarely part of a standard education. Here is a thought experiment that attempts to define a massively multi-player game of financial responsibility. How can we improve the personal finances and savings of heavily in debt individual using the tools and techniques of […]
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