Month: January 2010

Coming to the end of making even gaming painful and hard….

By AMH

It is a convenient coincidence that a number of interesting articles about different aspects of gaming and gaming culture have surfaced in time for the last week of my intersession course. Develop magazine recounts the stories of the ten biggest flops as games in the past decade – the reasons behind the failures are the most interesting part MSNBC reports that the size of certain portions of your brain predicts your ability at playing video games – an odd claim given that “video game” is a very broad category and I don’t tend to think that there is a single … Continue reading Coming to the end of making even gaming painful and hard….

Next Advertising Frontier

By AMH

There are a lot of interesting angles to the possibility that Google is developing technology to detect billboards and other ads in Google Maps street view images and replace them with their own ads. This news is based on a patent application, so it may not even happen. But it raises the question of whether Google even wants to get into doctoring their images to such a degree. Blurring out a detail or removing an image is one thing, but if users know that what they see may not be reality, will they lose faith in the reliability of the … Continue reading Next Advertising Frontier

Up is Down. Down is Up.

By AMH

I’ve been playing a lot of games recently (but for work!) and I’m trying to be attentive to what makes me remember a game. Being a Tetris fan got me to check out First-Person Tetris, but I expected to find it gimmicky – when you rotate, the screen rotates around the piece instead of the other way around. But it ended up being a nice variation on the original that adds a small bit of extra complexity to a familiar game. It adds a single thing that complements the game play nicely, and executes it well. Unfortunately, after a few … Continue reading Up is Down. Down is Up.