Must Play

The "free to play" model is interesting and a great lesson in community based (social) Internet marketing. Better to get MORE people using and contributing since the DATA they provide can be turned into currency.

There are several things I like about this study including how it shifts thinking about games as superfluous and moves them to important and educational - a point Steven Johnson makes in Everything Bad Is Good For You.

As a dyslexic who spent many hours with his hand under his chin spelling words phonetically. The learning about sound was fascinating. Researchers think if they can control sound and visual stimulation, like in a video game, dyslexics may learn better (faster).

This is what I remember about dyslexia - learning was so HARD, so inefficient. The other kids could write and spell. I struggled with those outward manifestations of "learning", yet my mind was capable of grasping complex concepts (for a ten year old).

I could DISCUSS those concepts too, but I couldn't WRITE IT DOWN at least not in a way anyone but me could understand it. There is another lesson in this post - don't limit your thinking about how to solve a problem to a narrow band.

How can you add some "video game dyslexia study" into your marketing. Can you make your marketing a game? If you think about it getting people to know and love you online is a bit like teaching a dyslexic, a dyslexic in a hurry.

Wow, botched launch leaves even hard cord SimCity fans wondering WTF. 

GaaS despite its funny initials could provide a peek into the future of....well everything. We've already seen a MONSTER TREND toward appification (smaller code updated more frequently) and along comes "cloud gaming".

Benefits of "cloud gaming" include:

* More room on your hard drive (some games can take 14 gigs).
* Games are saved in the cloud so hard drive crash = no worries.

* Better Game Play (thanks to way memory is handled).
* More efficiency will change game development (eventually).

Love this paragraph despite only partially understanding it:

"With recent breakthroughs in hybrid streaming, such as what CiiNOW has done by streaming video and graphics primitives at the same time, it’s much easier to send complex information to mobile devices, tablets and computers at lower bandwidth. Some games are provided through file streaming, a method in which a small percentage of the game is initially installed on a graphics-capable device to allow immediate play.

During play, the remainder of the game continues to download. For movie, TV or less graphic intensive games, video streaming- or video on demand- eliminates the necessity of a game console. Although game consoles or PCs will probably continue to be prevalent, cloud gaming will likely continue to gain popularity as a way to experience new games without having to buy entire game systems."

What I can understand from those points is something we found with CureCancerStarter.org. Use of cloud services allows for "larger" pages to load faster. The impact on web and game design of building in cloud benefits is hard to over estimate.

Great article on the state of mobile gaming. Love this section:

As the gaming industry shifts its focus from computers and consoles to mobile devices, the demand for new games rises, as each smart device owner becomes a gamer: the number of gamers will reach 1,55 billion this year.[2] The availability of these new gaming devices, broad-band coverage, the screen size and new business models are influencing the gaming expansion.
 

Mobile games are becoming an increasingly important component of the global industry and currently account for 33% of all app downloads and an impressive 66% of all app revenue[2]. They are also the most time consuming: 32% of our time on mobile we spend playing games, far ahead of browsing (20%) and Facebook (18 %)[3].

- See more at: http://www.neomobile-blog.com/html5-mobile-game-momentum-neomobile-invests-boostermedia/#sthash.W6Z2gajZ.dpuf