Handy Vandal's Almanac

Games and gambling and social media are combining in profitable new ways:

Crowdpark, a startup developer focused on social betting games, today announced investments totaling about $6 million from Target Partners and existing investor Earlybird Venture Capital. This brings the Berlin-based company’s total amount of funding to approximately $8 million. Waldemar Jantz, partner at Target Partners, will also join the board of Crowdpark.

The funding will be used to enhance the technology, develop cross-platform, create new games, and hire more talent in game design and development.

Crowdpark products offer players the opportunity to bet on real life events in sports, entertainment, business, politics and other topics, and to compete against each other in betting events, using virtual currency. Since the game runs in real time, players can change their bet at any time, as the event or news unfolds.

The company said this is made possible by its patented dynamic betting technology that enables forecasts in social gaming in real-time “similar to how people play the stock market.”

– Chris Marlowe @ dmwmedia.com

Darren Gendron, who had never designed a board game, has just designed Scurvy Dogs: Pirates and Privateers Sail the Seas.

Has the project got sea-legs? It probably does now, thanks to favorable coverage in The Washington Post:

Darren Gendron sees an opportunity — a niche, really — that he believes he can seize. It involves board games. It involves Gendron becoming a part of your Wednesday game night, entering the collective cultural consciousness through the living room. It involves pirates.

… Once the purview of larger game companies, such as Parker Brothers and Hasbro, game design is opening itself up to passionate, niche hobbyists.

Gendron wants to self-publish his game, and he estimates that he’ll need $20,000 to get it off the ground, through a micro­investing site called Kickstarter.

He has one week left to raise the money that might allow him to achieve the dream.

– Monica Hesse @ Washington Post

“Countless start-ups are incorporating game-design strategies, hoping to eventually grow revenue off of consumer data, or by using a combination of data plus game-mechanics to influence consumer behaviors.”

Your customers hoard airline miles and covet their status-symbol black American Express. What was once called “consumer incentives” is now known as “gamification”—and here’s how to integrate it into your company and win consumers’ hearts and minds while you’re at it.

– Christine Lagorio @ Inc.com

From a Seattle Times editorial:

For-profit colleges have successfully marketed a compelling story in which they star front and center as benevolent purveyors of the American dream through education and gainful employment.

The reality is the complete opposite. Former students testified before a U.S. Senate oversight committee this month about exorbitant tuition costs and unfulfilled promises of good jobs. One student spoke of completing a program in video-game design and ending up in the video games section of a Toys R Us.

– Seattle Times: March 27, 2011

Synergon: “Where dreams come to die”

Synergon was conceived as a satire of office culture and corporate-speak, but expressed in the language of a D&D-style role playing game. What originally started as a joke among employees quickly expanded to include basic rules and longer lists of abilities and skills. Pretty soon it became apparent that it could be made into a fully playable table-top RPG.

Synergon is supposed to simulate BLARPing. LARPers (or Live Action Role Players) are a group of people who get together to act out roles, usually in a vaguely medieval or fantasy setting. You may know them as those-guys-that-hit-each-other-with-foam-swords. BLARPers, on the other hand, are Business Live Action Role Players, and they play make believe every day in the office.

The comparison between LARPers and business people quickly becomes apparent when considering how many people in the business world are just making things up as they go along.

– synergonrpg.com

Via BoingBoing.

I believe it’s time for the obligatory Dilbert reference. Let’s see … yes, this will do nicely:

In the beginning was Pong. And in the beginning it stood alone. But not for long ….

In September 1972, Atari’s Nolan Bushnell and Allan Alcorn installed the prototype Pong machine at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. The idea was to make a computer game that was “so simple that any drunk in any bar could play.” And boy, did they ever.

… Atari didn’t have the patent on the technology and very quickly the vast majority in the machines eating quarters around the country were knock-offs. Of course, Pong itself was “inspired” by an electronic ping pong game that was in the Magnavox Odyssey home system. To keep up, Bushnell continued to innovate, as did everyone else. Call it a volley between King Pong and his brethren, while an invasion from space was on its way.

– From Everything You Know is Pong by R. Bennett and E. Horowitz

I’m very fond of Pong. Not that I spend a lot of time playing it; but I like the idea of Pong, I’m pleased that it exists.

Gaming is big business — and vice versa:

Play to win: The game-based economy

Companies are realizing that “gamification” — using the same mechanics that hook gamers — is an effective way to generate business.business ….

– JP Mangalindan @ cnn.com

Via Slashdot, whence this thoughtful comment:

“Gamification” is a fuzzy description of operant conditioning. Anything with a bit of intelligence (dogs, parrots, maybe even sheep, and certainly humans) are wired to get a little jolt of pleasure after successfully negotiating a crisis situation. It’s how we learn. What games do is short-circuit this by providing lots and lots of crisis situations, and providing the player with ways to get through them and win, and get that little burst of success-feeling. Some people are seriously susceptible to this kind of shenanigans and spend all their time enjoying their imagined success at Farmville. Others do the same thing climbing the corporate ladder and running companies. In that case, of course, it’s not imagined success, it’s the intended result of how we’re wired, operating in a complex social environment. In any case, it’s an essential system for learning in humans, and while it sucks that people are getting really good at twisting it to manipulate other people, it’s still vitally important and ubiquitous.

– smellsofbikes @ Slashdot

My two cents? To borrow an old adage for a new ad age:

God sends Farmville; the Devil sends more Farmville.

Above: Laurentius de Voltolina meets Pac-man

Students who may have been scolded by their parents for spending too much time playing video games are turning their passion into a promising career, thanks to more universities offering degrees in video game design and development.

The Entertainment Software Association reported last week that 300 American colleges and universities are offering courses and degrees in video game design, development, programming and art this academic year, a nearly 20 percent increase over last year.

– Johanna Thompson @ Ashland Daily Tidings: August 24, 2010

Images:

• Liber ethicorum des Henricus de Alemannia, Einzelblatt, Szene: Henricus de Alemannia vor seinen Schülern by Laurentius de Voltolina
• Pac-man

Slashdot recently posted On Why Making a Blockbuster Game Is a Poor Goal.

From the comments:

What I take away from the article is that Bioware can make games like that because they have a proven track record of making games like that financial successes, but that a development team with a less powerful resume probably couldn’t get it done. Not because the team wouldn’t be up to it creatively or technically, but because in the current market, management/investors wouldn’t have enough faith in an unproven team to let them take the time to do it right.

– Mongoose Disciple

And:

Of the games that try to be the biggest, baddest, most epic ever, only the top X will be making a profit at all. Most will actually make a loss.

And that is something that seems to escape most people, sad to say. From people going into making games with delusions of being paid a million like Carmack, to kiddies who think that pirating a game is some kind of act of resistance to some uber-rich fatcat who’s only charging 40$ for it because of greed, to people starting some monumental epic as some mod and expecting to finish it with 5 people in a few months, to fanboys arguing that a publisher is the incarnation of pure Evil if they had an upper limit at all for budget and didn’t give the team an infinite limit on money and time to produce the perfect game, to ultimately the devs end publishers who increasingly compete only in that segment. The fact that there’s a finite amount of money to chase in that segment seems to be genuinely news to most people.

It’s not even a matter of “get off my turf” as some other poster made it sound. We have the equivalent of, say, 90% of the car makers deciding they want to compete only at the Bugatti Veryon end of the market. Or 90% of the computer manufacturers deciding they want to make only supercomputers. Sure, it’s great if you do manage to sell the next Bugatti Veryon for 1 million a pop, but there are only so many buyers who will buy at those prices. If actually all major companies, from Ford and Fiat and Volkswagen to Bugatti and Ferrari decided to make only supercars in that segment, that most _will_ make a loss. Same here. There simply isn’t enough money in the market to cover the costs of _everyone_ who wants to make the next super-game.

– Moraelin

This is interesting news: tax breaks for the videogame industry:

The government has finally recognised the importance of the games industry as a revenue generator for the UK. Surely the fact that everyone’s a gamer now must have helped….

… After months of persistent lobbying by the industry’s trade body Tiga, the government has agreed to work out a range of tax breaks for UK games companies.

… But is there more to this than economics? Does the government’s shift in stance symbolise a fundamental change in the perception of videogames, away from a demonised social scourge and toward a vital cultural force?

- Keith Stuart @ guardian.co.uk