Last Friday, we went to see Zynga, the company that made Mafia Wars and Vampire Wars for Facebook. This reminded me the “bites” from some friends that I “ignored” some time ago. By making extremely simple games on facebook, they managed to obtain millions of customers and hire a hundred people in 1.5 years. The [...]
Archive for March, 2009
And the award goes to…
Posted in Note, tagged award ceremony, demographics, fiancee, gdc, gdca, gender, igf, mother on March 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Tonight was the Game Developer Choice Awards and the Independent Games Festival. The ceremony is like oscars of video games. There are several awards like audio, writing, innovation, etc. We were in this huge conference room, with fancy lights and screens on the stage like a TV studio. They selected several games and gave their [...]
The game of networking
Posted in Note, tagged business card, game business, game industry, gdc, linkedin, networking on March 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
One of the purposes of GDC is the so-called “networking” which is apparently a huge game of card and keyword swapping. It is like a ritual, actually there are written rules to it. Basically, you approach a circle of people, listen to them a bit, make intelligent comments, describe your purpose and method of achieving, [...]
Game Developers Conference
Posted in Note, tagged game developers conference, gdc, mmo, chinese gold farmers, farming, mmorpg on March 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Next week, game developers of the world are uniting once again in GDC 09 at San Fransisco to develop new ways to create worlds by developing games. Also, International Game Developers Association is bringing 25 students from around the world to this conference, including me.
The conference includes several lectures and roundtables about many issues regarding game [...]
Violence in games
Posted in Note, tagged competition, cooperation, death, game theory, violence on March 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Before and besides stating that the “videogames encourage violence”, one can ask: “why do people prefer violence in videogames?”. A gamer could say: “Because the violence in games is not real violence, it is just the reflection of the competition in the essence of the game.”
As a matter of fact, game theory tells us that [...]
Long rant on a small game
Posted in Note, tagged itchy, voronoi, theme, game design on March 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
In Itchy, the player controls a bug that walks on the skin of a giant monster and makes it itchy. The bug tries to eat the food while fleeing from the scratching hand of the monster.
Game map is automatically generated as a Voronoi diagram. In some games, Voronoi diagrams are used to generate natural looking [...]
EmotionML 1.0
Posted in Note, tagged emotion, emotionml, empathy, machine readable, robots on March 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
No kidding. The new standards shape how human emotions are encoded in machine language.
Make a guess on possible applications. We can embed these “smilies” into the text as a logical structure that can be analyzed. It can also be embedded as metadata in videos and audio clips. Huge databases can be collected that show what [...]
Facebook Town Hall founded
Posted in Note, tagged energy conversion, facebook, town hall on March 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A few weeks ago, facebook changed its Terms of Use silently to claim rights on user content even after users left the group. Then, some users realized this change and formed an opposition group that quickly growed in tens of thousands. After this reaction, Facebook reverted to the original ToS.
And finally, they formed an official [...]
