The Future Of Gaming

March 17, 2010

Here’s the video for an interesting speech by Jesse Schell entitled “Design Outside The Box.”

Topics of the speech include:

  • the psychology of games – making them sticky
  • the consumer desire for realism and authenticity as a recent trend
  • technological convergence/divergence of devices, the iPhone, the iPad, and the “pocket exception”
  • the possibility of game achievements improving behavior
  • the fact that there are more FarmVille players on FaceBook than there are Twitter accounts

Achievements are already leaking over to non-games, some items that could have been mentioned:
Read the rest of this entry »


Netflix Prize May Have A Winner

June 29, 2009

The Netflix Prize has entered the 30-day notification period as a team has announced that they have achieved a 10.05% improvement over the original Cinematch algorithm.

Some further background on the contest can be found in a nice writeup in Wired from last year.