Recognize the Icons in this video?! Long Live Play!!

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The new campaign by Sony PlayStation… I like it a lot 😉

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Monday, October 17th, 2011

A Brand New Playground to be released during 'Games for Brands' convention in London

>This weekend I will be finishing my book ‘A Brand New Playground’… finally – a year of hard work comes to an end… 😉

The book will be released during the ‘Games for Brands’ convention in London on the 27th of October.

Also I will be handing out the Dutch version of my book (‘Laat met je merk spelen’) during the High Tea with our Prime Minister Mark Rutte in London in November 2011! How cool is that!?

Please feel free to download and spread the free summary of ‘A Brand New Playground’, which you can download HERE and let me know what you think.

I will make the full book available starting November 1st 2011 – so be sure to check out my post about that end of October!

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Friday, October 14th, 2011

Deloitte Business Simulation Game

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An interesting example of a real classic ‘business game’ to serve the three P’s: People, Planet & Profit for (in this case) TNT. Employees where challenged to think of creative solutions to help TNT expand without harming the planet.

I will try to add some slides of the pdf presentation I saw soon.

More information can be found on Deloitte’s website.

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Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

The Internet changed… an overview: 1993 vs 2011

>Thanks to my dear friend Lessie Hampton a great overview of the evolution of internet comparing the current (2011) with 1993…

Created by: Online University target=”_blank”

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Thursday, October 6th, 2011

LANA DEL REY-VIDEO GAMES

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Lana del Rey understands why I need to play video games even though loving my fellow humans 😉

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Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

Twitter Facts by Virtual MS

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Via: Buy Twitter Followers

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Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

TABLET THERAPY: TOUCHSCREEN GAMES IMPROVE MENTAL AND PHYSICAL REHABILITATION

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copied From the esa newsletter

TABLET THERAPY: TOUCHSCREEN GAMES IMPROVE MENTAL AND PHYSICAL REHABILITATION

University researchers and occupational therapists across the nation are utilizing mobile game technology, made popular by widespread play on smartphones and tablets, as a critical therapeutic tool. These professionals are seeing real benefits in the use of touchscreen games for those with both physical and mental disabilities, including children with autism and cerebral palsy.

These disorders greatly impede motor functions and severely restrict social skills. To improve these deficiencies, therapists traditionally rely on repetitive physical exercises and behavioral learning. However, these practices often fall short of successfully equipping affected individuals with basic skills necessary for independent living. Today, academic researchers and software developers are working to create digital games for multi-touch devices that engage patients, and advance communication and physical learning, in a way that traditional methods cannot.

University of Iowa researchers developed several games that enable autistic children to interact with each other and recognize facial expressions. These games include a program requiring children to create stories verbally with their peers, while simultaneously collaborating to draw the stories on a touchscreen, and a program that teaches children how to understand emotions by manipulating an image of a face or cartoon character by dragging their fingers across a touchscreen. Similar multi-touch applications, such as TapSpeak’s TapSpeak Choice 2.0 and Xcellent Creations’iConverse, help autistic children communicate to the world.TapSpeak allows users to record messages, download pictures, or use a text to speech function that supports 20 languages. iConverse functions as a picture exchange communication system, featuring six built-in communication tiles that represent an individual’s most basic needs. Using a touchscreen, the icons provide both a visual and auditory representation of each specific need.

Touchscreen games also help patients with cerebral palsy improve motor functions. One such game, developed by researchers at Harvard University and called Catch the Butterflies, requires patients using touchscreen tables to control the position of a virtual butterfly jar by holding a rubber ball against the angled device. Patients practice capturing butterflies that appear on the screen by sliding them into the digital jar with the aid of a physical pen held in their other hand. Both programs improve reaction time and hand-eye coordination by requiring patients to repeatedly perform simple motor functions.

Patients can download many of these programs for free and use them on a variety of popular tablet devices, providing an accessible and cost-effective treatment option. Incorporating multi-touch technology in physical and communication rehabilitation offers an engaging way to enhance traditional treatments that ensures patients play an active role in advancing their health.

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Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Flying back today!

> Just a quick note to report to my dear and well respected readers that I will start blogging soon! I’m currently in Singapore, but I’ll be back in Holland tomorrow! For members of IAA in The Netherlands – please join me Thursday evening in Amsterdam for the event about using games as a marketing tool, it’s in Macy’s.

For English readers – please join me in October in London on the ‘Games for Brands’ event (Please check my previous post about that) – I will be launching the English version of my book there (and it will be free throughout the rest of the year online as a pdf).

And for my Russian readers… I will most likely be speaking in Moskow in November. Nostrovya!

Also I am moving office (and home) to Amsterdam starting this week until the first of October, so don’t think I’m not busy! 😉 I’m just not busy blogging, but I will be again soon I promise: new cases, new data on gamers, mobile, social etc.

Send me any requests you have on Twitter @BartHufen or #Gamification

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Monday, September 19th, 2011

GDC Europe 2011 – a brief update

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The first day at GDC (Game Developer Conference) in Koln (Cologne) was impressive.

I saw 3D games comparable to Unreal Tournament on PC on an iPad 2 taking advantage of all things Unity (an engine for game developers) has to offer. If you want to check out some great games, developed through Unity, check out their website and check out the Transformers 3 game (and the showreel below).

Unity Spring 2010 Highlight Reel from Unity3D on Vimeo.

A presentation by Wooga once again confirmed that (Social) games as a freemium with in-game transactions (ingame economy) is the new-to-last business model to earn money on games. The company is in place since 2009 and already released a top 10 Facebook game. 95% of their players find their game through the platforms it runs on (Facebook).

Henric (the presenter) stressed that it’s the gameloop (the game mechanics) that determines whether a game is fun or not. The gameloop is preferably based on existing and ‘known’ processes, like gardening, driving, building a city, etc. and has no more than 4 to 6 steps. For instance: buy a piece of land, grow vegetables, harvest them, make money, buy land, grow (other / new / better) vegetables, harvest them, make (more) money, etc.

Then Playdom – one of the bigger publishers of casual (and social) games, showed that to make an internationally profitable game, you need at least an audience of 15 mln people, since on average only 1% is likely to play the game and only 1% of that percentage will buy ingame content regularly, hence making your free-game profitable.

1% of 15 mln = 150.000 people
1% buys a lot of ingame stuff, say €40,- per year = €600.000,-
9% buys some stuff to experiment, say €10,- per year = €141.000,-

Which is a total sum of €741.000, which basically means you can have a development team of up to 7-10 people (an average team for a social game and 1 year production).

They showed some key-facts on Facebook and other Social Media users.

In China, about 200 mln people have subscribed to Qzone, the largest Chinese social network.
There are 111 mln Spanish speaking people on Facebook
Local Russian social networks account for 34 million people.

Some other countries:

France: 33 mln
Germany: 21 mln
Dutch speaking (Netherland, Belgium, Dutch Antilles): 4,6 mln
Italian: 19 mln
Arabic: 16 mln

The main purpose of a social game should be to keep your players happy, don’t frustrate them and don’t challenge them too much (according to Playdom). They expect to be rewarded for their efforts and actually managing expectations is probably the most important part in developing a social game. Below some more facts about the German game market, as you can see – 23 mln play games and almost 50% are women…