For years, Nintendo has ruled the mobile gaming world, first with the Game Boy, then with the DS Lite. After an amazing run, though, the torch is being passed. Not to another gaming company, but to smart phone makers Google and Apple.

Over the next decade I believe smart phones will be where most gaming innovation will happen. The market for smart phone games is booming. A recent New York Times article reported that games make up more than half of the billion downloads from the Apple App Store. The App Store has about 15,000 games for the iPhone, and the Android Market has about 3,000 for Google Android devices.

Read more…

Animation is a very unique art form; it allows the filmmaker to control their story down to each individual frame. Each object, shadow, and line must be created and placed. The camera does not capture unintentional backgrounds, extra frames, or incidental light, there is only what the animator chooses to show.

The digital revolution in media production is dramatically changing the techniques, forms, content, and function of modern animation and is actively remixing it with other media forms so much that digitally-created animation is now nothing short of a new mode of cultural production and a totally unique form of motion-graphic storytelling of its own right.

The diversity of software tools available for creating moving images on a screen has contributed to the rise of a tremendous and diverse number of styles, techniques, and looks. The multitude of distribution channels further enforced the trend of convergence towards forms more suitable for display on multiple screen sizes and configurations.

As Manovich puts it in his review of Adobe’s AfterEffects, a popular suite for creating digital animations: “[A]s software remixes the techniques and working methods of various media they simulate, the result are new interfaces, tools and workflow with their own distinct logic. In the case of AfterEffects, the working method which it puts forward is neither animation, nor graphic design, nor cinematography, even though it draws from all these fields. It is a new way to make moving image media. Similarly, the visual language of media produced with this and similar software is also different from the languages of moving images which existed previously (Manovich, 2006).”

Read more…

Photo courtesy of Casual Games Association

Recently members of the casual games industry convened in Kyiv, Ukraine, for the 4th annual Casual Connect Kyiv conference.  The Casual Connect conference series is sponsored by the Casual Games Association and brings developers, publishers and distributors of casual games together for three days of presentations and meetings.  Other Casual Connect meetings occur throughout the year in Seattle and Western Europe (historically Amsterdam or Hamburg). Read more…

For years, video games were strangely absent from the social media tidal wave. Aside from casual games built into social networking websites, games didn’t support social media.

The recently released (Oct. 13) “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves” for the PlayStation 3, hopes to change that with a built-in Twitter feature. The game uses Twitter in a fairly simple way, by sending updates on a player’s progress to his or her Twitter account.

Twitter is also at the heart of a social media update to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 that went live today. It allows you to post tweets, read the tweets of those you follow, search and view trending topics. Along with a Twitter app, the Xbox 360 update also has a Facebook app to stay connected to friends through basic Facebook features.

These instances of Twitter in video games—one software and one hardware—still only scratch the surface of the potential to meld social media and gaming. The use of Twitter in “Uncharted 2” seems like a good way to market the game and to find other people who play the game, but beyond that it doesn’t do much. And the Twitter integration on the Xbox 360 isn’t very deep, as you can’t run the app while you are playing a game.

The real issue here isn’t how Twitter is integrated into games or hardware platforms, but how the gameplay can take advantage of social media’s best assets—connecting people and sharing information.

Read more…

September 22nd saw the arrival of Halo 3: ODST, a game that builds on the story of Halo 3 in new and interesting ways.  Unlike the first three games in the franchise, Halo 3: ODST does not feature Master Chief as its main protagonist.  That cybernetically enhanced super soldier instead gives way to “The Rookie”, a silent new recruit to the ranks of the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, those folks who literally drop into the fight from ships in planetary orbit.  They’re “the best of the best,” of course, but they lack the accoutrements that Halo players are used to using – they have no damage-absorbing and renewable shield, they cannot dual wield weapons, and they cannot run as fast or jump as far.  If they take damage they’ll need to find a health pack in order to heal.  In other words, the ODST soldiers are more mundane than good ol’ Master Chief, more normal.

In the world of video games, especially in the worlds depicted in first person shooters like Halo, normal is actually pretty exceptional. Read more…

On Sept. 9, the Beatles finally entered the world of digital music. This was an inevitable move, but what’s truly interesting is how they chose to do it. Well-known Beatles fan Steve Jobs has yet to secure the world-famous music catalog in a digital format for iTunes. So who did? MTV/Viacom and their video game studio Harmonix, which created “Rock Band: The Beatles” for video game consoles.

Money is said to be one of the sticking points in the negotiations to bring the Beatles’ catalog to iTunes. I have no doubt that money influenced the Beatles’ decision to do a video game, but I’d also bet that they wanted to do something different and cutting-edge. Read more…

If there is one thing that’s been part of video game culture since the beginning, it’s the debate among gamers over which platform is superior. Slinging insults at each other’s machines was easy with such a large arsenal of differences – graphical performance, exclusive titles and modding ability, to name a few. If you were a fourth grader at Pacific Drive Elementary in Fullerton, Calif., in 1993, you no doubt faced my position that the Sega Genesis was clearly the better platform because of how “cool” it was that you could turn blood on and off with the secret ABACABB code in “Mortal Kombat.” As fun as those debates were, I think the days of arguing about which platform is better will soon be over, as cross-platform gaming makes platforms less important.

Read more…

Sylea Sygall Second Life avatar

Following up on my original Digital Love post, on how a couple met in the virtual world of Second Life and fell in love, here’s the story from the perspective of my friend.  I had originally intended to edit both of these accounts into a digestible single post, but found their thoughts so compelling and authentic, I decided they should share this with the world, as they intended:

“I had been a fairly avid video gamer with my teenage son for some years before I explored the virtual world called Second Life. I had read about it and seen some media coverage, and because of my interest in the gaming industry, found the idea intriguing.”

Read more…