“There’s a time for work and a time for play.” “Work hard, play hard.” “Once you finish your homework, you can go out and play games.” Most of us were brought up to believe that there is a stark divide between play and productivity.
I've just spent my first week on the social network/game called Empire Avenue, a new kind of site. If Twitter encourages us to tell the world what we are doing, and Foursquare tempts us to tell the world where we are doing it, then Empire Avenue asks us to determine what we think our friends and brands we like are worth.
The video game industry might have a market that spans the globe, but that’s not to say that the same game will sell in the same form in, say, Germany and Malaysia. There’s a lot that goes into localizing a game for foreign audiences – from translation and rewiring hotkeys, to cultural preferences and visual understanding.
Attending the Playful conference in London last in September 2010 I had the chance to meet with Alexis Kennedy, founder of Failbetter Games, the editor of Echo Bazaar, a text game that has received lots of appraisal. He had very enlighting thoughts about how to articulate games and narratives.
With the recent success of so many multiplayer/social games and the emergence of the gamification of services it’s worth thinking about what makes multiplayer gaming so powerful. Games can be applied to anything and in many ways humans often make games where none existed just due to our amazing pattern recognizing abilities. Games and play are an old form of communication almost certainly pre-writing, possibly even pre-language, one could hypothesize that games themselves might be one of the oldest forms of cultural communication (especially when you see animals learning through play).
According to video game research company GameVision, 20.1 million people in the UK regularly play games across a variety of platforms and over half these people (10.4 million) visit online social gaming websites every month.
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