Author: trippenbach

Wealth, Power . . . Gaming.

The Entertainment Software Association is the pro-game lobby group in the US. Now they’re starting to play a new game: election politics. Capitalizing on its improved respectability, the video game industry intends to establish a political action committee to donate money to game-friendly politicians and candidates. “We will be writing checks to campaigns by the […]

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Serious Trauma – Now in Games

How serious do you like your games? . . . how about trauma serious? TruSim, a division of Blitz Games, is working on a learning simulator for training combat trauma medics. (Karmic opposite of America’s Army?) They’re using some pretty advanced tech for it, too. Check out their demo – complete with cool soundtrack, and […]

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What he said.

There’s a good article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun germane to what we’ve been talking about here on Meme Vector. Jim Rossignol writes: Games aren’t a waste of time. Don’t let their fun facade fool you: they’re changing us, enabling to defeat with complex problems and navigate strange spaces. They’re improving and educating the people who […]

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CBC . . . scores!

UPDATE on jPod [This post brought to you thanks to Mark‘s sharp eyes, googlage, and commenting] Not only does the series look cool, the Mother Corp has scored a multiplatform goal with this one. There’s an in-character blog from triad boss Kam Fong, a website for Neotronic Arts, the book’s fictional game dev company . […]

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World of Fat

Steve Easterbrook, boss of McDonalds UK, recently blamed video games (among others) for obesity: “I don’t know who is to blame,” Mr Easterbrook says. “The issue of obesity is complex and […] there’s a lifestyle element: there’s fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past […]

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Immanent Gaming

Game dynamics are about motivating people. And you can put game dynamics into almost any activity to motivate people to participate. Like running, for instance. Jane McGonigal, doyenne of the ARG world, has Nikes (and a little imagination) that make running into a video game. She’s just posted on the shoes she’s using – they’re […]

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Pass the Ammo

What makes some stuff spread through the internet like a flame through a field of firecrackers, while other stuff sits on YouTube for weeks and gets crap-all attention? And how do you make the good viral meme stuff? Mark wrote about this recently. The trick seems to be in creating unique bespoke content for the […]

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