This week was the Seattle Casual Connect conference (the conference formerly known as Casuality). Talking to organizers there was around 1300 attendees this year, up from around 900 last year. What that really meant for me was that there were a lot of new faces, and many of those were people that are new to […]

I’m running for the IGDA Board of Directors this year. I’ve always been really involved with the organization having helped coordinate both the Colorado and Ottawa chapters while I lived there, as well as being a chair of the Online and Casual Games SIGs.
My goal if elected is to help ensure the IGDA retains its […]

I’ll be speaking next month at OGDC 2007. My session is titled Appealing to the MMOB and should give a good overview of what it takes to build large-scale branded games. I plan to discuss some of the challenges in working in this space, as well as how rewarding it can be when done right. […]

Apologies for the relative quiet over the past week or so - we’ve been hard at work building our brand new site (which is looking pretty awesome, incidentally… more on that later.)
In the meantime, Canadian readers might be interested in a CBC documentary on tonight at 8:00 called GAMER REVOLUTION. 
GAMER REVOLUTION explores how computer […]

This past holiday break has me thinking a lot about what makes a great casual game. While there is no strict definition most people generally agree that casual games need to be easily accessible, and accommodate very short play sessions. The key thing here is that the game needs to be playable by people that […]

It’s easy to dismiss the significance of online gaming if you’re outside of the culture. In this 50-minute video podcast, Joi Ito and Loic Le Meur talk online gaming (WOW and Second Life), video, online music and copyright. Great stuff.
The most important part is in the first few minutes:
“There are four basic elements […]

Product & brand integration into games is intuitively a great idea - but where’s the proof? Show me numbers on recall! AdWeek has a great article on the recent Nielsen/Activision joint research into this subject, which has concluded that it might have “the best results in terms of consumer recall, awareness and ‘calls to action’, […]

There’s a new report out from mediaedge:cia that discusses in game advertisements. The research looked at what consumers think of in-game ads, and how brands might be able to use a video game to reach an audience.
The results reinforce what I’ve been saying for quite a while now: in-game advertisements can work and can be […]

The IGDA has just posted Eric Zimmerman’s Game Developer’s Bill of Rights. Eric presented this at the Montreal International Game Summit. Eric created this based on the inspiration of Scott McCloud who did a similar thing for Comics Creators.
While the entire article and Bill of Rights is a good read, it isn’t all directly applicable […]

AtomShockwave just announced the launch of their new In-Games Ad Network. The first game to take incorporate the in-game ads is our own SWITCH Wakeboarding.
Fortunately with a game like SWITCH we can incorporate ads in non-intrusive and intuitive locations. The end user now sees branding in the same locations they would expect if this was […]