One day my drum student Amanda walked into her lesson, sat down at the kit, and played a fast single-stroke roll - a skill she’d never demonstrated before. I asked Amanda if she’d practiced a lot in the past week. With a sheepish grin on her face, she admitted, “No, but I played [...]
A hat tip to Dan Taylor over at BBC for pointing out this lovely little viral that allows you the passive, sit-on-the-couch-and-munch-crisps viewer (well fiddle with laptop) to be the star of Spooks. FaceSpook is a personalized video tool where your face is mapped onto a character in an action scene - and all via [...]
There have been many MMOGs that come and go and initially appear to be contenders out to take a slice of the 65% of the market share that World of Warcraft has in online games arena. Blizzard are making around $500m per year in clear profit from their subscription model and a similar amount in [...]
There has been a lot in the news recently of serious VC funding for Serious Games. This one reported by TechCrunch from Lumos Labs called Lumosity which got a smooth $3m is typical of the current rush. The robust business model for ‘improvement games’ echoes some of my 1990s research into business models around ‘old [...]
A company called MegaPhone have just launched a public video game on MTV’s giant screen billboard in Times Square. The game is designed to bring people together in public spaces and you interact using your mobile phone as a controller. Jury Hahn is the Korean born face behind this new public spectacle and she’s profiled [...]
Grand Theft Auto IV, Take-Two Interactive’s crown jewel of the sandbox game series, reportedly sold over 6 million copies of the game for Xbox 360 and PS3, earning the company over $500 million dollars in the first week alone.
Sales of the Grand Theft Auto games have historically been very swift, with composite NPD and VGcharts [...]
Very interesting research from Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson who have just researched for ($1.5Mill US) and written a book called “Grand Theft Childhood” which makes the claim that rather than video simulations (games for the oldie readers) being about social rejects the actual opposite is true. Those children who are not exposed to playing [...]
Watch this space…. I am just filtering through a lot of information that has just surfaced about the next generation XBox 360 controller that Microsoft maybe working on.. When I get some conclusive evidence, I will post it up, but in the meantime here is the “general” synopsis…
Firstly I have no idea about the physical [...]
Just for fun, for all you LAMP’ers who are movie makers and game designers, here is a fascinating article on how you should arm yourself to survive a zombie apocalypse if ever needed for your project…
Step one, Know Your Zombies.
The idea of the zombie derives from Voodoo lore. Voodoo (or voudou or vodun) is [...]
We don’t talk about our own home grown, cheap-cheerful, DIY projects on water-cooler that much but this could be classed as cool I think. A ‘amateur’ production flow scenario showing how tools at the disposal of many folk now can do some interesting stuff. The remarkable thing was that this was a quick 5 hour [...]
Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature though featuring games, blogs and web tools. Six digital fiction stories are being released over six weeks.
We lost a big name in the gaming industry on the 3rd March 2008, Gary Cygax. If it wasnt for the vision of this man, pretty much every role playing game be it analog or digital, would not exist. He created the enthusiasm and the culture surrounding the whole role playing genre, which ultimately has [...]
A cross-post from the main LAMP blog cause this is cool…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTv975gPvow
A mini ARG (Alternate Reality Game) with virtual world parallel components as part of the 8th LAMP residential in Marysville, Victoria Australia.
We have been running LAMP residential workshops for nearly 3 years now and on the first day we normally run a team bond/building game. [...]
Kynogon, a private company, is being bought by AutoDesk. Kynogon’s Kynapse ai middleware is used by leading games companies including Blitz, EA, Lionhead Studios, SEGA and THQ. Kynapse is also used for serious gaming by industry and defence. More about it here.
I wonder if maya or 3DS Max will soon offer some in-built ai functionality?
