Some very interesting news today: Apparently, one third of business for Unity 3D is from non-games companies, i.e. music, film and advertising. It’s not particularly surprising that a technology that, from a user perspective, functions similarly to flash would gain that kind of adoption from big media organisations, given that they have years of development [...]

Following on from Kim, Alice and Dan, and with a bit of poking from Toby, here are five things I’ve been thinking about recently.
1: Games heritage and the provenance of game designers. Specifically with videogames. Within the industry, there are interesting podcasts like A Life Well Wasted, new games journalism altered the way people think [...]

Toby pointed me to a very interesting presentation by Sebastian Deterding, related to the things I’ve been writing here about system fatigue and game design. The presentation, embedded below, is about the trend of putting points and leaderboards on everything, as if these husk-like metagames are enough to keep people hooked or make something tedious [...]

Russell Davies says something important in this blog post and its very lucid follow-up. It relates to my concerns about a lot of pervasive apps, both in the real world and on the web: A great many things that have been trumpeted as game-like have actually proven to be quite dull. I’ve let this niggle [...]

Some very interesting design thinking on the iPad from Matt Gemmell here. I don’t have anything to add to it, I just want to point to it, as it’s explemplary, deep, lengthy thinking on the subject of designing for a new device.

This DICE talk is doing the rounds (to me via Kim Pallister’s notes and Nicholas Lovell’s embed).
I’ve often thought about designing game rules into everything: what if a mundane job could be made compelling by game rules? That simple rule systems can become compelling is something I talk about a lot. From The Game and [...]

I’ve heard reports of interdepartmental awkwardness for years at the BBC, which is apparently why Channel 4 have raced ahead in games while the BBC have failed to commit. Until now, that is, since BBC Worldwide are now courting developers and publishers to develop their IP into videogames. They seem serious this time too, hiring [...]

Matt Jones from BERG has been nominating console games for the Designs of The Year Exhibition, and they keep getting rejected.
On one level, I can see why: shooters such as Left 4 Dead 2 and Bioshock and aren’t the kind of things that represent games particularly well to outsiders, even though they may be visually [...]

Ars Technica ran a rather provocatively titled piece last month, entitled “Innovating problems: why DJ Hero flopped“. Harsh, but it did suffer from lackluster sales, mostly likely because launching something quite niche, during a recession when seasonal games sales aren’t looking great so far, with a three figure price tag isn’t, ahem, the most obvious [...]

Lately I’ve been working on Get In The Game for Northwest Vision and Media, and as a part of that I’ve been listening to pitches for games. Several companies have pitched ARGs, and it occurred to me during the last pitching session that absolutely everyone I heard speak about or pitch ARGs seems to approach [...]