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Nacht van de nostalgie videomapping from mathijs on Vimeo.

VERY FREAKIN COOL ANIMATIONS!

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After writing my book ‘Laat met je merk spelen’ – soon to be published in English (end of 2010, called A Brand New Playground), I have started to become more philosophical and keep thinking why games are so special to me and to hundreds of millions of people around the globe…
Today I had an insight why games are so cool and the reason is that in games ‘heroes never die’… comparable to most books, comics and films. We love heroic creatures and wished they live forever, protecting the world from harm.
It is only in real life that our life is so precious (we have only one). Still – our best friends, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters die even though they’ve done nothing wrong. In epic films like Lord of the Rings, some heroes die (Boromir), but the real heroes (Frodo and his friends, Aragorn and Gandalf) fortunately don’t. I wonder how we would feel if they would all die and we would have to start to get to know new ‘heroes’ in part 2 and part 3 of the book / film…
How would you feel if you buy a RPG or action game and after playing it for ten minutes, your hero dies and the game is truly ‘game-over’? Would you be angry? Or would you accept it and buy the game again (or choose a new / different hero)? I guess you would be really disappointed and angry. How much is a virtual life worth? Wouldn’t you be much more cautious playing Call of Duty if you would have to pay a dollar for each life you spoil? It would make the gameplay much more interesting I guess, because the ‘stakes are higher’. Maybe it would even be interesting if you gain 50 cents for each kill you make, compensating the costs you make for each life you spoil… ? And the more kills you get, the harder it would be for people to kill you (a build-in experience/skill-model, like in Fallout 3 for instance).
It would be interesting to see if a game-developer would take the chances of developing a game with these mechanics in it!

>A Dutch presentation about the past 10 years of Digital Media usage in the world…

>A nice overview in what way virtual goods can add value to gameplay or add value to your business model! Cool brands can actually make a lot of money selling their products within virtual environments (in-game). The horse in this example (slide 15) brought the developers of World Of Warcraft more than 2,5 million dollars in turnover in less than a day! More information through www.BrandNewGame.nl

> Incredible to see that Football manager is in the top 10 list of most popular games.
An amazing 2 million people play games through Steam every day!

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Pivot from Pivot on Vimeo.

Check out this cool short film animation from my dear friend Kevin (amongst others) at Artibite.

This is the link to the website: http://pivotthemovie.com/

>Check out this SlideShare Presentation about gaming, market data, social behavior, mobile 3G usage and more…

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