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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!
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Filtered by Category: Games
Flash Forward Boston: Day 1
This week I’m happy to be at Flash Forward in Boston. I’ve been to coming to this conference since 1999 or 2000. I forget which year it started. It’s always exciting to see the presentations and find out what the best Flash heads are doing now and what’s coming down the pike.
I attended 4 sessions today, the first day of the conference. The day started with the Adobe Keynote address presented by Kevin Lynch. Mr. Lynch has been the face of Adobe at many of the FFs I’ve attended. For this conference, he gave an summary of all the recent Flash developments Adobe has introduced over the past several months. One of the most interesting to me is Adobe Air which provides a way of making desktop applications from Flash content. As an added bonus, Adobe also gave every attendee a copy of Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0. Thanks, Adobe!
The next 2 sessions I attended were ActionScript 3 for Designers by Rich Shupe of FMA and OOP for the Noob by Peter Elst of Mind Studios. I’ve been playing around with Action Script 3 some and I got quite a lot out of both of them. Peter was good enough to post his session notes on his blog. Check it out here.
My last session for the day was Video Game Opportunities with Flash by John Say of Say Design. His primary topic was casual games. If you check out his company’s site, saydesign.com, you’ll see many cool casual games in the portfolio section. At his company, they prefer to develop games in Flash. There are several advantages to Flash. The development process is easier than traditional programming. There is also a great advantage in distribution since the Flash Player isn’t limited to a single computer platform since Flash games easily play on the computers most people think about when Flash is mentioned--PC, Mac and Linux. In the past year, Flash has moved to our TV screens with the Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 3. Causal games also have a good marketplace on XBox Live, although they are not Flash based in that case.
The highlight of the entire conference was also on the first day, The Flashforward Film Festival. You can check out all of the nominees here. Bitey Castle won the People’s Choice Award for his wonderful 30 days: 30 shorts project. Be sure to check it out here.
Advertising • Conferences • flashforward • Development • Flash • Gadgets • Games • Internet • Technology • Training • Trends • (0) Comments • Permalink
When You Stick an Ad in My Game, It Better Be Good.
Can you imagine Mario trying to save a big can of Pepsi for Princess Peach? Maybe if you complete the whole six-pack, you get a rare bonus Crystal Pepsi!
If you’re reading this at some distant point in the future, I sure hope you don’t find Mario World invaded by Pepsi, but the video game landscape has finally caught the notice of big advertisers. I recent read Is In-Game Advertising About to Take Off?, an article discussing how ripe video game players are for reaching with advertising. Gamers can’t really change the channel, TiVo a game to skip an ad, or take a bathroom break from a game so they can skip ads if they are incorporated into a game. They not only have to “watch” the ads, they have to participate in them. Reaching gamers “in game” is like shooting fish in a barrel. These gamers are also a highly sought after demographic.
I do work in advertising and I truly believe that advertising does not ruin everything it touches. When done well, advertising can be really enjoyable and that’s why Very Funny Ads is a great place to spend time. The thing I fear are the bad advertisers fumbling into gaming with arm loads of cash (thus getting their way) and ruining the gaming experience. The article does mention this as a challenge, but it’s one of the last things mentioned.
Another challenge is the need for advertisers to focus on the players’ experiences. “Advertisers have to be creative and provide gamers with tangible benefits from the ads; if they are just interested in displaying their ads, their efforts will eventually fail,” Parks Associates’ Cai told the E-Commerce Times. Techniques now being tested to tighten the bond between player and advertiser include special promotions, rebates, coupons, newsletters and text messaging follow-ups.
Getting advertising and video game integration right will take time and quite a few stumbles. If you take the typical number of commercials you see watching one hour of TV as an example, only a small percentage of them are actually good. Is this the same ratio we can expect from advertising integrated into video games?
Some thoughts come to mind in this area.
- Instead of integrating an advertising message into a game a person has already paid $50 for, a better solution is probably having extra levels or optional areas of games sponsored by advertisers, complete with parental controls to give parents the ability to block advertising from their kids if they choose.
- Perhaps the advertising can actually offset the price of the game. This was the promise of advertising invading movie theaters, but the hoped for discount never materialized for movie goers.
- I thought the Burger King XBOX 360 games were a really nice examples of gaming and advertising playing well together. The fact that they required you to purchase actual game disks made the delivery of the games a little clunky to me though. Now that digital distribution has come to consoles, this probably will cease to be a problem.
- Mobile phones, from a conceptual level, seem like an ideal place to let consumers spend some spare moments having fun while getting a brand message. The problem, at least in the US, is that the service providers and the phone manufacturers have so many different standards and restrictions, that reaching your consumer effectively becomes a huge burden.
Advertising • Gadgets • Games • Trends • (0) Comments • Permalink
Building a Wii from Legos
My favorite toy as a child, before I got my Texas Instruments TI99-4A, was my Lego collection. I could spend hours playing with Legos. I always seemed to run out of the bricks I needed before I could complete some grand project I envisioned, but I had a blast anyway. I wish I had photos of the stuff I built back then. Sigh.
Legos seem to be an obsession with a lot of geeks on the web. There’s a great site called Brickshelf where people post photos of their constructions.
Someone recently posted what I think of as high conceptual art on Brickshelf—a Wii constructed out of Legos. I loved the marriage of the two toys from two different periods of my life. I’ve reposted the photos below.
That’s geeky cool.
There Goes 6 Hours, Or, My Day with Civilization 4.
I’ve been a fan of Sid Meier’s Civilization games for many years. I’ve played Civ 1, 2, and 3. All have been some of wonderful time sinks. After putting it off for a long time, I finally broke down and bought Civilization 4 when I saw that it was optimized to run on my Intel Mac. My aging copy of Civ 3 was PowerPC only and it was time for the upgrade.
I’m not sure why, but every iteration of this game is literally makes the hours disappear for me. There have been a few games in my life that have been able to do that. The original SimCity was a fascinating game. I also like SimCity 2, but they’ve gone downhill for me since then. Another great game for consuming the hours was Ico, for the Playstation 2. The difference with Ico is that once you played it, it was over. There wasn’t much replay value for me, but it was a beautiful game.
Getting back to my addiction to Civilization though. The only game that has compared to its drug-like draw has been World of Warcraft, aka WoW. I’m going to have a tough even tomorrow because WoW is getting its first expansion released tomorrow, The Burning Crusade. My copy has shipped and should be waiting for me at work tomorrow. I’m not addicted enough to run WoW:TBC on one computer and Civ4 on another tomorrow night, but as you can see, it has crossed my mind.
