Professor Bob Stone to head up ANGILS
A new UK organisation designed to represent the serious games industry has officially launched today, with Professor Bob Stone of Birmingham University taking on the role of chairman.
The Alliance for New Generation Interactive Leisure and Simulations was first established in 2003 as a network for those interested in [...]

Oddworld co-founder Lorne Lanning has announced that he’ll be directing an animated movie entitled Citizen Siege, in association with John Williams’ Vanguard Films, producer of the Shrek series. Industry veteran Lanning chose his combative keynote at GameCity to reveal Oddworld’s latest project, which will be simultaneously developed as a videogame, using the same database of [...]

God of War developer David Jaffe believes that smaller games delivered through Xbox Live Arcade, Sony’s e-Distribution Initiative and Nintendo Virtual Console could be more lucrative in future than full size games.
Speaking to Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal about his first e-Distribution Initiative (EDI) game, Criminal Crackdown, Jaffe likened the development of smaller games to the creation [...]

Today, Hansoft announced that v4 of their Hansoft project management and collaboration tools has been released. With this new release, Hansoft now supports “Agile methodology.” This includes Agile methods like SCRUM and eXtreme Programming.
“The interest and demand for us to release support for Agile methodologies has been massive,” says Hansoft Managing [...]

From Frank’s Blog:
“At Nesta’s conference on supporting “making innovation flourish” event at the Business Design Centre I find myself lobbying civil servants from the DCMS about the governmnent’s ‘technology programme’ again. One of them asked me to send an email, so I did:
“This is an extension of the case I made to the Creative Economy [...]

Yesterday I attended the NMK session “My So Called 2nd Life” – there were a number of very interesting talks, very perceptive questions, and illuminating conversation in the bar afterwards. The talks were a good mix of big and small company plays and academic work.
As we delved into the various MMORPGS, ARGS, MOORs [...]

By Adam Crowe
LandgrabSorry. Here’s another post about Second Life. Anyone would think that there’s nothing else going on in the world apart from Second Life. There is something so truly compelling and open ended about Second Life because it’s one of the first web experiences that has opened up a huge chasm of opportunities and [...]

# Putting the Fun in Functional – Using Game Mechanics for Social Software – An excellent presentation on how successful social media sites like MySpace are like a game (via: Web Strategy by Jeremiah):
* Collecting: Impressive collections = bragging Rights * Points: Redeemable points drives Loyalty & Social [...]

The Middle Ground Gets You Cancelled: The Plight of Moderate TV Successes, and what it means for the games industry.
Last November, Grant McCracken wrote about long tails and fat middles, the discussion of the rise of indy films alongside the distribution of blockbusters, including the peril of being in the middle. He quoted what [...]

Virtual world travel agency opens (digital) doors
By Aleks Krotoski
In what could be construed as either opportunism or hyper-cleverness, two Italian entrepreneurs have opened the doors to a virtual world travel agency, Synthravels, as the virtual world boom approaches its apex. The pair promises to lead the uninitiated curious through some of the most well-known [...]