March 2010
27 posts
Turning brand comms over to the customers - estate... →
Game design as marketing paper →
Gamasutra - Features - Game UI Discoveries: What... →
bravelittlememe:
A look into the design of in-game user interfaces.
The Last Ad Agency On Earth →
Zynga launches its own pre-paid virtual currency... →
The 3 levels of happiness
As mapped by psychologist Daniel Nettle, via John Kay’s ‘Obliquity’…
1) Short-term: Momentary physical responses - e.g laughter, sex, etc
2) Intermediate: ’State of mind’ happiness - a sense of satisfaction or well-being. This typically arises from an internal judgment on our feelings, rather than the feelings themselves… e.g ‘I feel content at...
First (?) PS3 title with in-game Facebook... →
Find out which countries are producing the...
If (like me) you think that many of our extant business models are a busted flush, and that we have really only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of how technology will change the way we do commerce, then you should probably be interested in where the top new tech companies actually come from.
This looks at the geographical homes of the top 50 new tech start-ups as ranked by Business Week...
More Taiwanese 'Apple Action News' reconstructions... →
Diminished attention... 34% of the time Americans... →
Nice and Lo-fi... Choose Your Own Adventure Comes... →
mashable:
As if Twitter weren’t enough of a time-sink, Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed and Huffington Post fame created a choose your own adventure game using only Twitter (and lots…
Gareth Kay on Millward Brown 'tips' for going... →
Cultural currency, and why advertisers are getting...
We often talk about cultural currency - x or y has gained cultural currency when it has penetrated people’s thoughts and thus their conversations. In particular, the fabled ‘watercooler’-type conversation when everyone’s buzzing with the same topic contemporaneously. For the purposes of this train of thought, I’m going to suggest a definition that cultural currency =...
Project Natal trailer vid →
Some presentations on social game development →
Why aren't more ad agencies creating their own...
So it looks like BBH’s offshoot, Zag, may be starting to bear fruit.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/mar/10/bartle-bogle-hegarty-attack-alarm
The bigger question is - why aren’t more agencies doing this? There’s obviously notable examples - agencies like Anomaly and Brooklyn Brothers… But by and large no one’s doing it.
If it was down to cash, I could...
Keep track of the top 20 social games on Facebook... →
Measured by new users per week. The scale of some of the gains is pretty amazing.
Lots of social gaming developers about to become... →
Great statistics on whether big companies are... →
Cultivated Play: Farmville →
everythinginthesky:
The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the...
Learning from user testing in video game design
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009/08/13/ux-for-videogame-design-gamplay-research/
We all know advertising is increasingly about creating engagement.
And that’s always been gaming’s focus - ‘engagement’ is pretty much the definition of a game experience.
So it beats me why there isn’t more cross-fertilisation between the video game and ad industries (in...
Book review of Guilt Trip, written for Admap March...
Guilt Trip: From Fear to Guilt on the Green Bandwagon
Without wishing to open on the biggest book review cliché there is, it’s hard to do anything else in this instance. Because Alex Hesz and Bambos Neophytou’s Guilt Trip: From Fear to Guilt on the Green Bandwagon is about as fine an example of the old adage ‘never judge a book by its cover’ as one might find.
Ostensibly marketing’s latest...
Inexplicable Perle de Lait yoghurt ad
Could someone perchance explain this advert for ‘Perle de Lait’ yoghurts to me…
http://www.visit4info.com/advert/Get-rid-of-a-sour-face-with-Perle-de-Lait-yogurts-Yoplait-Yoghurt-Fromage-Frais-range/82221
So far as I can ascertain, its message is essentially: ‘I used to eat really revolting yoghurts, and this Perle de Lait does - at the very least - have the virtue of not...
Heavy Rain
PSM3 Magazine’s review of new game, Heavy Rain, dishes out plenty of plaudits to Quantic Dream’s new opus - but, notably, it also includes the following judgement.
“The future of video games? No.”
I think they’re probably right.
Playing Heavy Rain, the one thing you’ll find lacking is the sense of real challenge and - to some extent - control, which the best...
February 2010
13 posts
Maximisers and Satisficers
There’s are many things in Barry Schwart’z Paradox of Choice that are useful from both a professional and personal point of view (particularly as a recovering chronic indecisive person).
But for me the most interesting is the split between Maximisers, and Satisficers.
Maximisers are perfectionists - they have to be convinced that every decision they make is not just okay but the...
Stephen Hester, RBS Chief Exec, motivational king
This quote from Stephen Hester shows why they pay him the big bucks - his comments on the effects of paying ‘smaller’ bonuses must have done wonders for staff morale:
“We’ve had a small experiment in this respect… some of our best-performing people have been leaving in their thousands,” he said.
“The people who left us last year, I believe, would have...
Awesome Gordon Brown bullying reconstruction,... →
OnLive and its MicroConsole - the first remote,... →
Riepl's Law of new media adoption
A new media channel never fully replaces existing modes of media; instead, a kind of convergence takes place in, leading to different ways of using the media conjointly.
One to drop in when you want to look like a bit of pretentious twizzer.
Cloud computing and brands - don't clutter up the...
How long till the ad world gets a grip on the potential ramifications of the charmingly-named cloud computing revolution?
It’s a subject which seems to be provoking intense debate in the technology sector, but nary a twitter in adland.
Essentially, cloud computing is a catch-all term for the general migration of programs and data from the user’s device (e.g their PC) to a...
Control your computer with your mind... Cool if... →
Work ceases to be work in a virtual environment
This company creates jeans via a ‘virtual sweatshop’ in Second Life… the jeans then get produced in real life via telematics.
The oddest/most important thing being that people are much more willing to work for pittance in a virtual environment - and enjoy it far more, since they don’t see it as ‘work’, but ‘play’…
...
5 key hooks for creating engagement
Derived from video game research by Amy Jo Kim, an American behavioural neuroscientist…
1) Enable ‘collecting’
2) Reward with points
3) Facilitate feedback
4) Enable exchange
5) Allow customization