10 iPhone Games You Must Own | Game | Life from Wired.com
http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/01/ten-iphone-game.html

Latest list of games you must have if you own a iPhone/iTouch.

January 2009 01/2009

Scratch for older kids?

build a pc

MaximumPC.com is the best online resource for PC Features. Visit Maximum PC and read about How to Build a Kick-ass $800 Gaming PC.

Ever since video game consoles moved to optical discs manufacturers and users have battled over backups Manufacturers fear that if

XBox immersive environment. Centre for Digital Media Masters program likely going to use with their collaborative design and problem solving sessions.

light and dark game

a neat puzzle game with an eraserhead-like feel.

Very minimalistic and surreal black and white side scrolling puzzle game with a unique feel. Carry balls of light to the exit.

Awesome. A puzzle game about carrying you're own space exploration with your avatar, creating reality around you

LucasArts Posters is discussed at LucasForums - General Discussion

I need to get a print!

Monkey island posters!

destop backgrounds

great wallpapers

millions of blog entries: that no one will read apart from five people

Ding! Correct! This, right here, is why I have never played an ARG. And why I would love to get paid to write one.

a hilarious, soul-searching talk by Dan Hon of ARG development company Six to Start at the Let's Change The Game conference held in December 2008.

بازیهای آنلاین جالب،با فلش پلیر

Can't guarantee the originality - but nice execution!

multiplayer online casual gaming

There are loads of free PC games out there, but many of them aren't worth your time. These will have you hooked for hours.

Sehr interessante Abhandlung über die Mechanik des Spiels „Pac Man“.

This web page is dedicated to providing Pac-Man players of all skill levels with the most complete and detailed study of the game possible. New discoveries found during the research for this page in December 2008 have allowed for the clearest view yet of the actual ghost behavior and pathfinding logic used by the game.

[everything you may not know about PacMan]

multiplayer online casual gaming

Hey, times are tough. Games are expensive. What are you going to do, stop playing them? Hah! You can give your credit card a break and still stay up until 2am yelling at your computer monitor if you just know where to find all the best free PC games. Of course, the Web is a front of free entertainment. There are more lame flash games out there than you could possibly catalogue, and even a few really great ones. A Google search for "free games" will take you to any number of portals where you can play ad-supported flash games, or even awesome paid flash games like Robokill.

Some decent picks. I ended up playing Dyson for like 6hours after i read this. Worth browsing.

Navegador web para videojuegos

World of Wacraft In Game Browser

Pretty good list of options for burgeoning game developers.

A collection of audio samples from Super Nintendo games and hardware.

how gaming is good practice for collaboration, strategy, etc.

History, tools and a bit more info on the possibilities of gaming within the library.

cloud computing online games, no need for latest gaming computer, gaming for the mass market arena

Tag: : The Future of Video Games

OnLive: The Future of Video Games

Awesome twitter games!

will try these games later

Developer details the process for putting the full version of the original game on the iPhone

Joy! Wolfenstein 3D has come to the iPhone. I'm playing and loving it. Here's an amazingly detailed article from John Carmack on the design process.

I had been frustrated for over a year with the fact that we didn't have any iPhone development projects going internally at Id. I love my iPhone, and I think the App Store is an extremely important model for the software business. Unfortunately, things have conspired against us being out early on the platform.

police quest !!

Sarien.net is the portal for reliving classic Sierra On-Line adventure games, multiplayer, in your browser.

Welcome to Sarien.net, the portal for reliving the classic Sierra On-Line adventure games. With its focus on instant fun and a unique multiplayer experience, Sarien.net hopes to win new gamers' hearts and promote the adventure game genre.

You loved your classic NES so much you would blow the cartridges for hours on end just to play. Now you can play those same wonderful games online for free.

Charlie Stross waxes on the future of gaming from the perspectives of technological progress, social change, and you. "I don't want to predict what we end up with in 2020 in terms of raw processing power; I'm chicken, and besides, I'm not a semiconductor designer. But while I'd be surprised if we didn't get an order of magnitude more performance out of our CPUs between now and then — maybe two — and an order of magnitude lower power consumption — I don't expect to see the performance improvements of the 1990s or early 2000s ever again. The steep part of the sigmoid growth curve is already behind us. Now that I've depressed you, let's look away from the hardware for a minute... Let's consider the consequences of ubiquitous terabit per second wireless data. The quiet game-changing process underneath the radar is going to be the collision between the development of new user interfaces and the build-out of wireless technologies."

Charles Stross predicts the future of technology and gaming

the Game Mastering Blog

P

foda!

this actually looks pretty good

The music industry does like to insist that filesharing - aka illegal downloading - is killing the industry: that every one of the millions of music files downloaded each day counts as a

David Lammy, minister for intellectual property, said: "Illegal downloading robs our economy of millions of pounds every year and seriously damages business and innovation throughout the UK. "It is something that needs tackling, and we are serious about doing so." Well, up to a point, minister. Ben Goldacre took apart the rather dodgy calculations behind the claims on Saturday. But it left me wondering. Why does the music industry persist in saying that every download is a lost sale? If you even think about it, it can't be true. People - even downloaders - only have a finite amount of money. In times gone by, sure, they would have been buying vinyl albums. But if you stopped them downloading, would they troop out to the shops and buy those songs? I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different. I think they're spending the money on something else.

Yes, downloaders aren't spending money on the music industry, and in that way they are hurting it. But I'd argue that the true volume of "lost" sales is nowhere near the claims made. Assume that music couldn't be copied (as many games can't). I don't think that the volume of music sales would equate to all those downloads. At best, it would be £600m larger.

Construct a well-fortified space station and mine asteroids.

"This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes."

Brilliant experiment about Alice and Kev, two homeless characters created in Sims 3. It makes me want to try out Sims 3 for myself and create my own characters.

Grumpy Gamer Stuff and Things

Ron Gilbert plays the original Monkey Island for the first time in 15 years and shares his thoughts.

About a year and a little more ago, as I began designing the uber-awesome DeathSpank at Hothead Games, I played all the way through The Secret of Monkey Island to refresh myself on the puzzles and dialog. I know this will come as a shock to many of you, but I don't spend my evenings playing through Monkey Island. It's probably been 15 years since I sat down and really played it. Much like the experience of watching the Maniac Mansion Speed Run, it bought back a lot of memories and little tid-bits of facts, so I started keeping notes and in celebration of all things Monkey Island, I thought I'd share them

The Making of Monkey Island, by creator Ron Gilbert

The title says it all

25 awesome Cross-platform games you can download for free

Game

g

Nicely-designed flash game.

Here's some creative game design. You're an updraft, and you have to keep hailstones in the air while they grow big enough to cause more severe property damage.

website where you can publish your own game

Print-on-demand comes to game making. Quite a cool resource for rapid prototyping.

They make boardgames that you design.

self publishing site for diy board games

It is time you took that game you created and publish it.

time travel RPG game? this is very interesting

World's first meta-time strategy game

Hazardous Software's Achron, meta-time strategy game: a real-time strategy game with freeform time travel, where players and units can jump to and play at different times simultaneously and independently.

time travel game

the world's first meta-time strategy game, a real-time strategy game where players and units can jump to and play at different times simultaneously and independently

Yet another list of games.

Thank you to everyone who emailed asking about a World of Goo Soundtrack. This is probably as close to an "official" soundtrack I'll ever make for the game World of Goo.

When I was a kid, we played outside with the other kids in the neighborhood with most of our free time. We also made the most of recess at school. We kept ourselves quite occupied without any of today’s modern technologies. Listed below are some no-tech games that you may have enjoyed as a kid. I sure did. Some can be done indoors. Some can be done by yourself or with just one friend. But most of them are best when done outside with a group of people. Also, most of these games can be changed or improved by making up your own rules. Use your imagination!

Bummed because you've got a new Wii and the Twilight Princess hack won't work on it? Have an older Wii but you don't want to buy Twilight Princess just to install Homebrew? Try the free and easy bannerbomb exploit.

"It's exactly like a leaderboard in a game, where you want to have the bragging right of being on top, so you work harder at getting better," says Steffen Walz, a game theorist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Walz says governments worldwide are hiring designers to create games that encourage healthier behavior; he himself is creating one, where teenagers will run around their city with GPS-equipped mobile phones, unlocking prizes by visiting different locations.

using rewards & tracking to encourage everyday behaviours

"Games create drama and excitement," as Jane McGonigal, one of the leading thinkers in the field, told the crowd at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. "We've done that for years with videogames, and now we can apply that thinking to the rest of life."

Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can attach to e-mail they write. If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent's Outlook inbox. Reeves figured this would encourage people to send less e-mail: Those who are parsimonious would wind up with lots of tokens, which means when they really have something to say, they can load it up with tokens and make sure it'll get through. Sure enough, that's what happened. When a work group at IBM tried out Attent, messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal. E-mail overload ceased to be a problem.

I've already highlighted some of the excellent photography in the latest issue of France's games/fashion mag Amusement, but this one's even more special: a series of photographs from the magazine's Made of Myth feature, in which photographer Marc Da Cunha Lopes ("aisakie") shows us the factory work behind the most iconic games of the past few decades: the smelting of Sonic's rings, the chiseling of the 1-Up mushroom, and the rubber-pressed rebounding blocks of Arkanoid.

produced by Joss Whedon with Penny

SUPPORT US! PURCHASE THE MP3 @ AMAZON AND ITUNES!AMAZON MP3: http://bit.ly/amazonavatarITUNES VIDEO: http://bit.ly/itunesvideoITUNES MP3: http://bit.ly/itun...

Felicia day rocks...that is all.

Victor

Old man has World or Warcraft criteria for dating his daughter.

L33T the parents.

Follow CH on YouTube, MySpace, iTunes, Facebook & Twitter.

It's easy to forget that the PS3 is a fully-equipped PC in your living room attached to your house's best monitor. Installing Ubuntu can help you remember, and play SNES games in the process.

map making

Sweet!

Fun with maps. Somewhere on it a useful discussion about building your own fantasy/alien world maps can be found, I have been told.

People who draw maps. :)

Awesome online game

A new, Serious ARG (SARG?), from the people who brought you Perplex City. This time, commissioned by Channel 4 and aimed at teens. '...its goal is to illustrate the threats, dangers and opportunities of life online'. It doesn't have any offline activity, as far as I can tell, which makes sense with this demographic, the fact that Channel 4 is involved and the subject matter. It's a little to leading in the interactivity though, and not at really transmedia, so not strictly within the realms of what has come to be known as ARG. Still, interesting to see a current, non-commercial example of a participation drama.

Game supposedly teaching how to behave "responsibly" on social networking websites (and alike).

Nuorisolle suunnattu peli nettiturvallisuudesta

I finally lost my mind enough to try to tackle one of these big guys. For those unfamiliar, Big Daddys are the protectors of the Little Sisters in Rapture, an underwater city devoid of morality which has degenerated into chaos and insanity. They are huge, fast, strong, and as it turns out, a solid pain in the ass to build.

WHOA! cosplay de Big Daddy

awe-some

decent time passer

A new animation game where you could play as single or multiple player.

Dragon Age online.

By http://bit.ly/Tweets2Delicious

annually on sales of virtual goods. Need a shotgun to do that next job on Mobsters? No problem. Pay with a credit card, paypal, or your mobile phone and it’s all yours. And people are obviously very willing to buy these virtual goods. Nothing new there.

Wie sich Farmville

via cpalow, alok

Major media can’t stop applauding the companies long enough to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success.

facebook economy

We don't need many cues to help us pretend. We'll find meaning in the noisiest noise - just give us a tiny signal and we'll come up with a message.

Russell Davies explains the power of play, not for our kids so much as for other adult, explicitly stating what many of us don't admit: we pretend an awful lot, especially in boring social situations, usually as a function of inattention, rather than directly interacting with a game. His analysis is fascinating, and his recommendations for recognizing and making our games of pretend valued parts of our lives comprise some of the best innovative, game-changing musing in the field of technology, entertainment, and design that I've come across yet.

"I think that's why we find Jason Bourne so resonant. It's easy pretending to be him. Because most of the time he's just commuting."

As I grew older, this conclusion lay dormant and unexamined in my mind. RPGs continued to be my favorite genre. I relished the opportunity to watch interesting, lovable characters develop and interact in epic storylines. (Comparatively interesting and lovable, anyway - say what you will about Cecil, but his quest for redemption revealed a lot more depth than Mega Man's quest to shoot up some robots.) And I loved feeling like a hero. I saved the world in Final Fantasy IV, again in Lufia II, then again in Chrono Trigger.

How many gold medals would Michael Phelps have won if all he cared about was making it across the pool? How many championships would Jordan have if all he'd wanted to do was dribble the ball down the court? Sure, you can make it across the country in relative comfort. But let me ask you this: How many spare wagon wheels do you think Michael Phelps takes with him? Why not push a naked, starving family to the brink of collapse and hunt your ass off for food all the way to Oregon? Isn't that what Jordan would do?

This reminded me of this - http://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html - which was discovered almost to the detriment of my GPA right around finals time last spring.

Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Short Imagined Monologues

"Listen, son, we need to have a talk. This isn't going to be easy for either of us. You are not my son. I'm sorry, I know this will come as a blow to you. But the fact is, no son of mine plays Oregon Trail like you do. "

No son of mine plays Oregon Trail like that...

The ever-knowledgable Rands waxing intellectual on nerds and their games. A great read.

a must-read, as usual.

How games appeal to the nerd mind.

Jim Rossignol on the villains lair (nice HL2 and Shadow of the Colossus refs)

Game developers are unconstrained in their designs for the enemy. Such designers will be punished with poor sales, not death in the gulag, if their designs for the overlord are unpopular. They could go anywhere with the homes of evildoers: halls of electric fluorescence, palaces carved from corduroy, suburban back yards.

אם משחקים היו יותר קרובים למציאות - קורע מצחוק: http://bit.ly/16EkQS [from http://twitter.com/talgalili/statuses/4051825453]

A little realism would make some games way more awesome. Others, not so much. We asked you to show us what would happen if video game makers started adding a little realism to their games. The winner is below, but first the runners up.

If you have some geek gamer referencies, you'll enjoy that!

Yeah, what if? :P

Picture (High Res) of the complete Gameboy Timeline, from the Game&Watch up untill the Nintendo DSi

1989, baby!! (via Rhea)

Sid Meier's Rules http://bit.ly/atPXx (via @newsycombinator) [from http://twitter.com/tadej/statuses/1715393349]

Source of Sid's famous "double or half it" rule.

Double it or Cut it by Half One Good Game is Better than Two Great Ones ...

Rules to game design by Sid Meier

"If a unit seems too weak, don’t lower its cost by 5%; instead, double its strength. If players feel overwhelmed by too many upgrades, try removing half of them. In the original Civilization, the gameplay kept slowing down to a painful crawl, which Sid solved by shrinking the map in half. The point is not that the new values are likely to be correct - the goal is to stake out more design territory with each successive iteration."

Every year, we throw a big, game party to ring in the new year. This year (2010) is our house's 100-year birthday, so we celebrated with cupcakes......and the cupcakes were a game. Here they are in random order - see how many you can guess! Mouse over the question mark to reveal the answer.

brilliant - includes settlers of catan, carcassone and sorry :)

20 RPG game series with descriptions

[In the latest in his popular Game Design Essentials series, which has previously spanned subjects from Atari games through 'mysterious games', 'open world games', 'unusual control schemes' and 'difficult games', writer John Harris examines 10 games from the Western computer RPG (CRPG) tradition and 10 from the Japanese console RPG (JRPG) tradition, to figure out what exactly makes them tick -- and why you should care.]

Say goodbye to any productivity

When you don't have the time or resources to commit to a full-fledged FPS, strategy game, or RPG adventure, a fun, fast, browser-based game is sure to satisfy. We reveal our favorites—both current and classic

This year's edition of the $800 gaming rig is an order of magnitude leap over last year's edition.

This year's edition of the $800 gaming rig is an order of magnitude leap over last year's edition. Gaming on an $800 PC now needs few compromises.

"Tech and Gaming News and Reviews - TIME.com"

Tech, Games, Comics, Movies. We Promise Not to Tell.

BoingBoing's curated games page. Personal fav: Everyday the Same Dream

games to get, from boing boing

The Games Factory provides everything you need to manufacture Arcade games, Platform games, Adventures, Screen Savers, and much, much, more. You simply click on an object, drag it to the play field, and click on the action it should perform. We supply all the heroes, monsters, powerups, and other objects you need, plus the sound and music for your games. Of course, you can easily add your own, custom items if you choose.

A great programming software program for kids

RT @thomasjhardy: How Social Gaming is Improving Education - http://bit.ly/a4vwi5 [from http://twitter.com/axbom/statuses/8777021752]

How Social Gaming is Improving Education

Enter social video games as a solution — immersive environments that simulate real-world problems. Today, technologically eager schools are replacing textbook learning with social video games, and improving learning outcomes in the process. Here’s how they’re doing it.

mmo game from the founders of Flickr

How to the design a chees/poker AI without frustrating the player

An interesting Gamasutra article on how to introduce human-like stupidity into your AI by making your AI smarter rather than dumber.

The leading Game AI community site, information source and knowledge base focused on helping developers learn how to build artificial intelligence into their simulations.

18 AI hatası ve çözümleri

Fantastic collection of AI bugs.

Great video talking about "gaming" invading every day life and blurring the lines with reality

Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular Facebook Games era.

The not so hidden psychological traps in social gaming. And where it could lead (if the world wasn't such a messy place).

Jesse Schell talks about future of gaming

Get New Orleans, Louisiana latest news. Find photos and videos, comment on the news, and join the forum discussions at NOLA.com

"As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers' rules -- disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular."

Interesting blog about Professor Myers' research and paper on MMO rules vs MMO social norms

David Myers, a Loyola professor and computer game scholar, looks at his computer screen with his "City of Heroes" online computer game character "Twixt" reflected in his glasses at his home in Slidell Friday, July 3, 2009. "Twixt" became perhaps the game's most reviled, abused player because his playing methods were unpopular.

tips to tweak vista for better gaming performance

Windows Vista was heralded by its creators as being a speedy operating system. However, it didn't take long for users to realise that Vista's performance was generally no better than Windows XP, and in many cases was actually worse. Working with a PC that isn't performing to its maximum potential can be a frustrating experience, but this is particularly true if the machine is used for gaming. But there are a huge number of tweaks that can be applied to help make working with Vista less exasperating.

WEEK 8 -- 03/10/2010

In February 2009 Dmitri Williams

4 years, 400k players ~=60TB -- about 475k/s, slightly > 1k /user/sec.

Thanks to a partnership with Sony, a team of academic researchers have obtained the largest set of data on social interactions they've ever gotten their hands on: the complete server logs of Everquest 2, which track every action performed in the game.

m psychologists to epidemiologists have wondered for some time whether online, multiplayer games might provide some ways to test concepts that are otherwise difficult to track in the real world. A Saturday morning session at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of

Food for data miners

Until very recently, almost no literature was devoted to game design, and what there was tended to be quickly made obsolete by the speed of technological developments. After the day’s final meeting had ended, I realized that, for the two decades that I had been playing games, I had unwittingly been at the mercy of the constantly changing orthodoxies of game design. I knew that some games seemed more fun than others, but I would have struggled to explain why. Bleszinski and the other Epic designers came to this form as children. Growing up playing games, they absorbed the governing logic of the medium, but no institutions existed for them to transform what they learned into a methodology. Gradually, though, they turned a hobby into a creative profession that is now as complex as any other. They have established the principles of a grammar of fun.

CliffyB and the world of the video game.

The New Yorker has a typically in-depth, insightful, and light-hearted profile of the lead designer behind Epic's monster hit "Gears of War" video game series.

"Why did mushrooms make Mario grow larger? Why did flowers give Mario the ability to spit fire? Why did bashing Mario’s head against bricks sometimes produce coins? And why was Mario’s enemy, Bowser, a saurian, spiky-shelled turtle?"

There has been some really good journalism devoted to video games lately, including this New Yorker profile of Epic's lead designer.

Cool article about Gears of War and Epic Games

see page 2 for "frameworks-for-business" AND "jobs-hiring": Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to everything expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don't even have two of them: - Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day); - Complexity (so it's not mind-numbing repetition); - Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

5 addictive mechanics explained.

Now, there's no way they can create enough exploration or story to keep you playing for thousands of hours, so they had to change the mechanics of the game, so players would instead keep doing the same actions over and over and over, whether they liked it or not. So game developers turned to Skinner's techniques. This is a big source of controversy in the world of game design right now. Braid creator Jonathan Blow said Skinnerian game mechanics are a form of "exploitation." It's not that these games can't be fun. But they're designed to keep gamers subscribing during the periods when it's not fun, locking them into a repetitive slog using Skinner's manipulative system of carefully scheduled rewards. Why would this work, when the "rewards" are just digital objects that don't actually exist? Well...

Carsten

rede-social social-network gammers

GAME ON: Top 5 Social Networks for Gamers

As per Mashable. Social networks that appeal to gamers.

Five great social networking destinations for gamers to hang out online.

Computer games driving developments in AI (bots getting smarter)

By Jonathan Schaeffer, Vadim Bulitko, and Michael Buro First Published December 2008 Can video games breathe new life into AI research?

This project has so far produced a formal system for analyzing and classifying a team’s opening moves. That may not sound like much, but this task proved immensely challenging, because positions and actions are not nearly as constrained as they are in a game like chess. Researchers in our group have used this formalism to analyze computer logs of more than 50 hours of tournament-level play between seasoned Counter-Strike teams. Soon, we expect, computer bots programmed to learn tactics from such logs will play reasonably well—doing things a person might do. It’ll be a long time before these bots will be able to beat expert human players, though. But that’s not the objective, after all—they just need to make for entertaining adversaries.

The game is called F.E.A.R. , short for First Encounter Assault Recon, and its use of AI, along with its impressive graphics, are its prime attractions. The developer, Monolith Productions of Kirkland, Wash., released it in 2005 to rave reviews, including the GameSpot Web site’s Best Artificial Intelligence award. Such recognition means a lot to the game’s creators, who face stiff competition in what has become a multibillion-dollar industry.

Can video games breathe new life into AI research?

I believe there is plenty more that can be discovered about pacing in games -- certainly some more scientific studies of heart rate, etc whilst playing games might unearth some real revelations about what makes the pace in games so emotionally involving and also what simply does not work.

game design possibilities: speed, tempo, threat, carrot/stick, chase

Interesting look at level pacing

Die Welt Verbessern durch Spiele. Interessante Idee, muss ich mir aber beizeiten mal ansehen.

This is the Offical Playstation Blog For Europe Inc UK

Not too long ago, Jordan Mechner and Eric Chahi were chatting with Eric Viennot, a French creator and writer. Jordan Mechner single-handedly pioneered a type of cinematic videogame with Karateka in 1984 and Prince of Persia in 1989. Eric Chahi similarly single-handedly created 1991's Another World -- known in the U.S. as Out of this World -- a painterly cinematic videogame in a similar tradition. Jordan Mechner had the following advice to share, I think it's great advice.

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world, securely and privately show content to your friends and family, or blog the photos and videos you take with a cameraphone.

Portal gun OMFG

Amazing model of the gun from the game "Portal."

A growing number of game makers on Facebook are making money from virtual goods — from poker chips to virtual clothes that users can buy or earn while playing gaming applications with their friends on Facebook. The combined ecosystem of these game developers and other companies supplying services to them could generate half a billion dollars in revenue in 2009.

A good insight about a classic board game, and why video games are getting better at more than just entertaining.

What’s irritating about the games is that they are exercises in sheer randomness. It’s not that they fail to sharpen any useful skills; it’s that they make it literally impossible for a player to acquire any skills at all.

Here are 20 of our favorite free role playing games for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

"The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people."

Interesting read on social gaming, e.g. FarmVille: http://bit.ly/bLPIEK – Jacob Bøtter (boetter) http://twitter.com/boetter/statuses/12443260031

Cultivated Play: Farmville liszkiewicz's picture

He admits he really didn't know what to anticipate in terms of revenue; there was nowhere to go to research how well microtransaction-based MMOs did elsewhere. "We just jumped in," he recalls. "There were no data points and, frankly, every game is different, every play population is different, and extrapolating from one developer's data to your own is, well, an interesting intellectual exercise but it doesn't necessarily tell you what to expect." Four and a half years later, James has learned a lot -- that the average revenue per user (ARPU) is between one and two dollars a month, but only about 10% of his player base has ever paid him anything. As a result, he says, approximately 5,000 gamers are generating the $230,000 in revenue he sees each month.

What Are The Rewards Of 'Free-To-Play' MMOs?

Welcome to Ponged, the latest and greatest destination for real gamers looking for FREE, fun, online games! Ponged serves up a library of over 500 free games across seven different genres – including Action, Shooter, and Strategy. Our games have been hand-picked by hardcore gamers with a “quality over quantity” mindset, and represent some of the best free online games currently available.

Few startups have a chance to revolutionize an industry. But if entrepreneur Steve Perlman’s OnLive lives up to its goals, the company will disrupt the entire video game industry — to the delight of both game publishers and gamers.

A guy has developed a data compression technology and an accompanying online game service that allows game computation to be done in distant servers, rather than on game consoles or high-end computers.

OnLive kan de wereld van de game industrie op zijn kop zetten Motivatie: een toekomstbeeld van een journalist, altijd leuk om zo inspiratie te krijgen waar het allemaal heen zou kunnen gaan

“This is video gaming on demand, where we deliver the games as a service, not something on a disk or in hardware,” Perlman said. “Hardware is no longer the defining factor of the game experience.”

"Mike McGarvey, chief operating officer of OnLive, said the new technology 'breaks the console cycle where a gamer has to buy a new machine every few years.' If this happens, the obvious losers are Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo." The death of platform-dependent games is, for my money, absolutely essential to their development as a viable cultural form.

game console using cloud computing

Andrew shared this link: http://dwdb1.tk [from http://twitter.com/Andrewstopheles/statuses/5282050993]

Funny flash game where you play a minotaur who owns a China shop

Play an adorable and earnest Minotaur wobbling around your delicate shop (you can earn money by selling goods, or by going nuts and smashing everything for a Rage Insurance payout).

Serve fine china to discerning mythological customers. Breaking items will cost you money. However, break LOTS of items and you'll enter Minotaur Rage, a crippling psychological condition. Your insurance will reimburse you for any items broken while enraged.

e paper variants going back to the 1800s that hide illustrations in the little curlicues of the margins. And there are new videogame versions like Mystery Case Files. For thousands of years, we've derived satisfaction from searching and uncovering—and we still do each time we turn up lost car keys.

brief description of the top addictive games and why there addictive.

Short takes on some addictive puzzle games.

on tetris: "A timeless classic. Fitting pieces together feeds the same pleasure center of the brain that gets off on packing a suitcase really well or squeezing all your groceries into a single bag."

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Bonne initiative que ce Humble Indie Bundle : un pack de 5 jeux originaux dont VOUS fixez le prix http://j.mp/9WtdAm

all Mac/linux compatible games; contributions to EFF

Gaming on Linux has always been a relatively non-existent activity. For the longest time, it was nearly impossible to find any games that would run on Linux, let alone popular 3D games. As the operating system has grown and morphed, however, this is slowly changing, with more companies releasing their online games with Linux support (Americas Army) and 3D games being created specifically for it (Urban Terror). Here is a list of 35 high-quality, well-working games that will run smoothly on Linux:

10 Awesome Vintage Video Games You Can Play Online http://ff.im/-ku0dz

Game Damage, a new gaming TV show written and presented by an unholy trinity of Yahtzee Croshaw (of the Escapist's Zero Punctuation), Guy 'Yug' Blomberg (of Australian Gamer) and Matt Burgess (of Australian Gamer also). It's new, it's (hopefully) entertaining, and it needs your help.

Sims 3

Cult story drawn from an experiment in homelessness in SIMS 3.

Of course, the whole point of this is to turn your media center into a game console—you don't want to sit and play games on your TV with a keyboard (or maybe you do, in which case you can skip this section). If you have a gamepad already, you can configure that—if not, though, I highly recommend an Xbox 360 controller, which is USB and has drivers available for Windows direct from Microsoft. For Mac and Linux users, I know this third party driver worked well on my Mac in the past, and the xpad kernel driver or this third party Linux driver should work in Linux (though I have not tested either myself).

A guide on playing roms through xmbc

We love XBMC media centers for watching movies and TV, but if you like video games, they can do so much more. With a simple plug-in, some configuration, and a USB gamepad, you can play video games straight from your set-top box.

10 of the best free games you should play today Releases new and old from every genre : TechRadar UK

oh sweet Jesus, Google invested in Zynga? so much for "don't be evil." http://goo.gl/FgAc – Jeff Atwood (codinghorror) http://twitter.com/codinghorror/statuses/18578849294

Google has quietly (secretly, one might say) invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. (via TechCrunch)

"Google Secretly Invested $100+ Million In Zynga, Preparing To Launch Google Games" http://j.mp/aaPgNh

Google starts the gaming service, actually the social network based games. At the end, Zynga is the winner who takes all the attentions from many companies interested in social games including facebook, yahoo, google and etc. That is, there is always a niche business.

Google aism to make Zynga (creators of Farmville) the cornerstone of Goolge games; expected to go live late Dec 2010 - posted circa July 2010

Google Games Part ... Duex?

Bladur's Gate

A step-by-step howto guide on modding Baldur's Gate (both games and its expansions) into one massive, awesome RPG.

Bladur's Gate

A step-by-step howto guide on modding Baldur's Gate (both games and its expansions) into one massive, awesome RPG.

Bladur's Gate

A step-by-step howto guide on modding Baldur's Gate (both games and its expansions) into one massive, awesome RPG.

free steam game alien swarm pc

The making of cow clicker, and a look at the trend of social games

In which he describes the hows and whys.

Une excellente crique et analyse sur les "jeux" sociaux.

Compulsion explains the feeling of struggling to return to something in spite of ourselves. Its flipside involves the disrespect of time that we might otherwise spend doing more valuable things—or even just pondering the thoughtful and unexpected ideas that an asynchronous game might raise. Social games so covet our time that they abuse us while we are away from them, through obligation, worry, and dread over missed opportunities.

"You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom "premium" cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called "mooney"), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends' cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence." -- Reminds me of the game where you do the dishes.

The dialectic between theory and practice often collapses into a call and response panegyric. This in mind, I thought it might be productive to make an example that would act as its own theory.