Extenuating Circumstances

Wow. Really interesting.

New SMMORPG? MMOSRPG? studio

"So fresh off production of The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes and Emergency Room: Real Life Rescues, it seemed like a natural fit to combine the two elements and start on a game based on the TV series House M.D." Ooh.

Unsurprisingly, a misleading headline.

Wow. "The sales breakdown is depressing: it sold best on the 360, with 62,000 units moved. The worst? 3,300 units on the PlayStation 2."

Oh look. We could come out with a "ripped from the headlines" mission pack for Smokescreen every couple of weeks or so…

Hm. I spy a diagram coming along. "Games need to be consolidated into several formats, and everyone needs to work to make that happen," Wada said. "We all take our format as a given, and nobody considered it, but I think it's going to be more important."

Well, yes. That's one way of looking at it: "The first unanimous request from the guys was that we needed to have more girls at our parties," he said. "I was in total agreement; this made complete sense to me. But the core problem is that our parties were about good beer and music that we liked. It was just for us. We were missing our audience. We were building stuff for ourselves."

A misleading headline. Plourde wants to fail in documentation, not in code: "Getting the "failing early" out of the way when a game is still in the design documentation process is critical, he added: "It costs less to fail during documentation than production. When I said we had no time for iteration, that's not entirely true. We had time to iterate design, but no time to iterate the code."

"New content for a new generation"

Grass is always greener: "Levin explains: "We're trying to figure out a way to maintain a profile as an independent producer, which is very tough over here. I was in the UK two weeks ago and it's really refreshing to see a robust and thriving independent production community there. But US regulations have only really benefited the larger media conglomerates, by trying to control our IP to a greater degree.
"

""The root cause of this issue was limited time, and our decision to focus more on delivering what we had promised with the 'Write anything. Solve everything.' The slogan was the right one in the end, but it hurt the second most important part of the game, the controls. " – great concept, hard to play

Thank God the TV industry is escaping the long dark tyranny of the overnights: "What’s clear is that traditional ratings systems are due for an overhaul — and indeed, NBC, Time Warner, News Corp., Viacom, CBS and Disney are forming a new TV measurement system to take on Nielsen"

"Ben Terrett is a designer and partner in the Really Interesting Group – a multidisciplinary organisation that leads the charge for ‘post-digital design’. A new online game targeted at educating teens about Internet privacy is top of Terrett’s list."

"Until now Twitter users have only been able to send and receive tweets from their online account or by text message." Or not.

""My thought is they don't need to be fun; they need to be engaging," the designer said." – see the Schindler's List Game Argument

Sorry, still think this is a fan thing.

In adland, the acceptable word for ARG is "treasure hunt"

What an incredibly depressing view of the future.

I would've loved an England & Wales version of this when I was a student. It would've made the boring subjects marginally more tolerable.

"“The thing is,” Pincus says, “we really, really, really need the revenue. So in our case it’s not evil. We have to do this kind of stuff. We have no choice.”" – Hilarious

Haven't read the paper, but neurons > cat != smarter > cat

"There is also an impressive feature that enables you to draw things on a sketchbook… which are then translated into virtual items in the game. You draw a picture, hold it up in front of the camera and the system will try to copy it (it only works with good lighting conditions)." – Beat that, Milo. Shipping pets win.

"Nobody believes me. So I had to record it." – for all my cat loving friends

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, APART FROM THIS COD OVER HERE

Facebook fails

Hm. Idea.

Amelia, Jeremy and Patrick all speaking separately

""The [blog update] would flash out with a spy shadow, and then [gaming site and community] Shacknews would light up, with everyone going, 'It's going to be the Spy! Oh my God!' And then it would go away five seconds later, and other people on Shacknews would say, 'It's not the Spy, you're lying!' Then people would take screenshots [of another flash], and other people would miss it, and say, 'No, that's Photoshopped. This is the real one.'"" – ARGish

"Code Of Everand is the result of over two years of work with the Department For Transport by Area/Code principals and designers Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, not only because of its size and ambition, but also because of the complexities of developing it for a government body. The project, after all, has gone through several incarnations and has been on the brink of cancellation twice." – Two Years.

"The programme follows regular Grey's Anatomy cast members and is shot in documentary style mainly in Joe's Emerald City Bar, a locale often seen in the TV series. Food brand Bertolli is onboard as sponsor." – note it's not got "Grey's Anatomy" anywhere in its name, but does have the main cast in it.

I still haven't played this, but "It’s bullshit, isn’t it?" seems about accurate. It's like trying to have a proper debate about geopolitics inside a bad Michael Bay/Bruckheimer movie.

"we're using the H.264 codec at a rate in the region of 700kbit/sec. The quality is probably as good as H.264 can get on this device."

Jan Libby and Steve Peters, on Elan Lee: "[Lee would ask:] that’s really cool, but how is it fun? How is it engaging?" SEE: EVERY TIME SOMEONE MENTIONS QR CODES.

This is really, really gorgeous

Experimental Gameplay Workshop still doesn't feel that experimental

Charlie on the Digital Economy bill.