Into the Woods
I just finished running Into the Woods in Bristol at igfest and it went really well. The game mixes street games and social games with a bit of theatricality to hopefully deliver a compelling experience. I envisioned the game as a series of linked fairy-tale games. I had playtested all of the elements of the ...
The iradescent fun mine
Things were awfully bright and glowing in the old fun mine this week. I largely spent the week working on levels for our port of LEGO Fever to the iPhone from the PC. On Wednesday I realized I hadn’t actually done level design in over a year. That’s kind of a strange realization when you ...
Live-action micro-transaction
It’s real world microtransactions: Pennies for a chance to take a swing at a LARPer.
Checking in on the state of real-world games
I recently wrote a piece for the casual game website Gamezebo about MyTown and Foursquare and the state of real-world game mechanics. Being there is playing there: Checking in on the emergence of location-based games Right now most of these games/services revolve around check-in mechanics. And I can totally see why, check-ins are the atomic ...
Gigaputt on the iTunes Store
Gigaputt, our new golf game has been out for about a month now and has sold decently. We were featured by Apple for a week, which boosted our sales 10 times over. But as many app developers know, the iTunes Store is a giant haystack. It’s worse than finding a needle in a haystack. At ...
The casual gamification of the world as investment opportunity
Dean Takahashi had a good talk with a number of venture capitalists over at Venture Beat. The most interesting point I thought came from Tim Chang who had this to say: Gaming 3.0 is about leveraging game mechanics and models to re-invigorate other markets: humans are inherently geared towards addictive behaviors and biases that can ...
Big Games – Spring 2010
Big Games New York University / Interactive Telecommunications Program – Spring 2010 Greg Trefry gtrefry at iamtheeconomy dot com 646-644-1995 Office Hours: Friday after class, 6-6:30 PM or by appointment Download Syllabus Class Description What happens to games when they escape the boundaries of our tabletops and desktops and TV screens and living rooms? From ...
Listen up game designers
Charles Pratt has been conducting a series of great podcasts with different game designers and academics under the name Another Castle. He’s interviewed everyone from Eric Zimmerman to Jesper Juul to Heather Chaplin. He even interviewed yours truly–giving me the chance to expound on the Come Out & Play Festival, my definition of “casual” games ...