General

[Video Games] Moving into serious games

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Smart insights in Getting Serious About New Opportunities: On Game Developers And The 'Serious Gaming' Market", a gamasutra paper about new contents and methods for serious games development.

Let's face it, the games business isn't all fun and games, because sometimes the business of making games isn't as much fun as we'd wish. It's tough out there - business is hard, and publishers don't always want to be your friend. Wouldn't it be great if there were some other markets to prospect, and you could diversify, ignoring the general whims of publishers, cellphone carriers, portals, and the general gaming public at-large? But diversifying in the games business isn't very easy - we can't suddenly shift gears and start a resturant or consumer goods company. However, you can diversify by selling to others who have a need for game developers, besides the usual suspects.

[Work] CSCW course

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Today, I worked on the slides for the course about Computer Supported Cooperative Work I am going to give with Pierre. I came up with this simple logo and did some research about the projects we want the students to carry out. I now need to set up the web portal/platform to support the course. we are going to use teamframes, the paltform developed here at CRAFT

The goal of this course is that students become able: • To analyze the impact of a groupware system on the cooperative processes. This requires constructing an experiment and analyzing team interactions with both qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques ( project 1) • To specify a groupware system that supports specific teamwork processes. This requires analyzing the process to be supported and understanding the relationship between groupware features (architecture and functionalities) and cooperative processes. ( project 2). To meet this end, we will take roomware design as the example. It's pretty innovative and I think it could be more appealing/motivating than ugly shared whiteboard. Moreover, fast prototyping and participatory design techniques could be nice to use in this context.

Project 1: Comparative analysis of using a collaborative simulation software in two experimental conditions. Each students group has to run experiments with four pairs, one in each conditions. The experiments will be run in CRAFT's laboratory. Students are invited to do themselves she task. The project includes 5 data analyses that have to be delivered on the dates specified in the agenda.

Project 2: Design of a roomware that is a piece of software to be integrated into a table. The project aims first to design and build the table (designing the plane shape and adding standard legs), to run experiments with teams using a plastic whiteboard pasted on the table as well as using their laptops, analysing the video recordings of these experiments an designing the software that could be provide dif the plastic whiteboard was replaced by a computer screen.

[TheWorld] moving further geo-caching

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A new game we should play! la feuille explains in his blog that he likes finding books that were previously sent to specific person by the editors (with a carefully written dedication of the author) in bookshops specialised in second-hand books.The game is simple: find those books and tell the author his gift has been sold! That could be a way to notice which are crap...

Position Paper for a workshop about Game Analysis

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Our position paper (.pdf) for the workshop (British HCI conference)Games and Social Network: analysis of multiplayer games has been accepted. Analysis of a Location-Based Multi-Player Game by Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin

The growing number of location-based services fosters the creation of multiplayer games that take place in real settings and leaves open the question of how to analyze data generated along the game. We are interested in ubiquitous computing games in order to use it as a platform to study how people rely on spatial features in terms of collaborative interactions. The crux issue here is how to analyze the wide load of data generated by the game in an ubiquitous computing context. How should it be studied? What kinds of data may be captured and what sort of analysis should be conducted?

[Tech] Are blog the ultimate social software?

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I really think blogs are cool social software, I already expressed this feeling here. There is now a debate about this.

Peter Caputa, guest-blogging at socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com says “Blogging is the Ultimate Social Software.” So far so good, but he makes that statement based on this assertion — “I think it is safe to say that sharing information is at the center of social networking.”

This I disagree with. Peter is right about blogs as a social networking tool (Dina Mehta and Lilia Efimova make the same argument) but the thing that makes it work isn’t information sharing. The thing that is at the center of social networking is social networking.(...) the post only makes sense in a social context, and the effect of reading it can’t be reduced to an analysis of its content.

[VideoGames] Alternative Game Controllers

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Gamasutra paper about alternative game controllers. This topic is very trendy since now we have a wide range of different controllers: josyticks, joypads, cell phones, tivo remote controls, keyboards...

The game controllers there sparked some ideas of how they could be used for creating innovative games, and bringing back a few classic toys of our youth. Some of these concepts may be little more than interesting distractions, but I hope this article makes a few game designers--as well as the controller manufacturers--sit up and start thinking about designing some cool games to go along with them.

What about a power glove revival? Cheesy but so nice :)

[VideoGame] A GPS Poker Game

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It seems that I am in a strange mood today, posting lots of stuff about ugly mobile games. There is a GPS-based poker game:

GeoPoker is a GPS game in which players try to assemble the best poker hand by being the first to find a moving container holding a GeoPoker log. Each time the container is found, the finder is awarded one virtual playing card at random. Each finder chooses the next hiding spot for the container and the GeoPoker log.

[VideoGames] Already retro wireless games

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Wireless games are not that old, but there already are nice retro-games (I mean with old-season interface, black'n white with a poor menu interface). I am joking here but it seems that video game companies missed the train: they don't perceive the added values of cell-phones: a mobile tool with: - voice communication - a positioning system - a digital camera - a low-cost messaging system - wap/gprs communication protocols

Come on guy! With all those possibilities...

[Tech] Presence Awareness Tool

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Alex discovered a nice feature of iTunes: a presence awareness tool:

Spreading the iTunes meme at work has had an unexpected effect: I can now easily see how's around and who's not in the office, just by looking at my "Shared Music" option