Somebody’s nicked Heroquest, we rarely have enough of us in for a decent game of Werewolf and my Rock Band expertise doesn’t extend far beyond songs by the Police (oh, the joy in their eyes as they’re forced to play ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ *again*!), so I bought some new stuff for game hour this week. I wasn’t around for the deboxings this morning though, since I’ve taken the day off to recuperate after juggling like a trained octopus all month.
Finished Mass Effect this morning, finally. Expected it to be good and it was, although the Paragon ending left me a bit cold and the romance stuff was eye-rollingly bad. At least [spoiler alert!] Kaidan didn’t pounce on Shepard at the end. Thinking about it… if ME’s supposed to be a trilogy, I wonder if we’ll be able to import our Shepards all the way through?
This weekend I braved the freshly BORISed transport system to attend GameCamp 08, an informal do up at 3Rooms to give people who do stuff with games and technology some face time together for pretty much whatever purpose we like (within the limits of acceptable decorum and the fire code).
The session schedule was pretty packed and I couldn’t make it to everything I fancied due to things happening concurrently, but I managed to pick many awesome brains, eat 17 brownies and sun my translucent arms for the first time this year, so I wouldn’t dream of complaining.
Continue reading ‘Not my typical Saturday’
Every Friday morning my whole team spends an hour playing games together. Anything we fancy: Magic, Munchkin (which we haven’t picked up in awhile, actually)… Werewolf’s a popular one ‘cos we can play as a big group. The main point of Game Hour is having fun, but it’s also a great opportunity to learn one another’s playstyles, gain cooperative experience across game teams and even practice demoing skills - since with each new game there’s at least one of us who’s never played whatever-it-is before.
Last Friday, a couple of the guys were super-organized and brought in Mario Kart for the Wii. We’ve got a Wii in our games room, but unfortunately someone had borrowed its power cable for a couple of weeks (!) so we couldn’t actually play anything on it. Having only five players, which isn’t quite enough for Werewolf, we decided to fall back on an old classic: HeroQuest.
Although a suspicious number of our brothers had apparently played HeroQuest back in the day, none of us ever had so we spent the first half hour pawing at the game pieces and trying to figure out the rules. In defiance of typecasting, I picked the Dwarf character. (You can’t go too far wrong hacking at everything with an axe.) We each entered the the dungeon from a different place on the map, and sortof individually winged it through sections of the pre-made level one dungeon, fighting goblins, finding a bit of treasure and falling into traps.
The game was rushed and improvisational - not quite HeroQuest as intended, but a great experience. With five minutes left it descended into all-in PvP vs. the Elf, which I’m happy to say (since my Dwarf started it), the Elf lost. Next to a particularly spirited game of Rock, Paper, Scissors with my daughter, it was the most fun I had all week.
…after an eventful week. Until Friday I was in Seattle visiting colleagues at ArenaNet - had some good meetings, did a little shopping, played a little Rock Band. Super fresh air out there, it’s really nice. Rained a lot, but that’s OK. And the Dalai Lama was in town for Seeds of Compassion, which was quite psychologically calming.
Before normality could set back in, I very unexpectedly got a new PC yesterday after considerable drama trying to put the guts of mine into Dave’s old case (in hopes of quieting it down some, as its constant roar was like riding in an airplane). Now I’ve got more speed (+), loads of storage (++) and Vista (?). I’m up past my bedtime playing with it. Which is bad, since I’m back at work tomorrow. Oops…
Ever one to be on the bleeding edge of what’s going on in tv today, I’ve just finished watching Veronica Mars. I’m not gonna go on and on about this, but I have to ask: how on earth did that show suffer viewing figures low enough to cause it to be cancelled? Was it badly promoted? Terrible time slot? Cos I don’t get it - VM was every bit as clever, fun and teen-swoony as Buffy was, so why didn’t it take? (I hope for their sakes that Rob Thomas and the CW think that one over hard while planning the spin-off to 90210.)
But more to the point: if heavies like Stephen King and Joss Whedon loved the show, and fans are devoted enough to keep their fansites alive a year later, shell out a whopping £78.50 plus travel to see Veronica and Logan at a con in the UK (compare with £55 for the WoW Invitational) and $800+ to take a VM-themed cruise… then why has Veronica’s story skidded to a halt? A tv series demands a lot of infrastructure and investment: in crew, locations, promotional stuff - but a story just needs, well, a story, and a way to tell it, right?
Continue reading ‘Keeping Veronica alive - on the cheap’
Back home after an eventful couple of flights on Monday; now entertaining my mother who’s visiting from Virginia.
I’ve got quite a bit to catch up on from days 3 and 4. Happily, sxswi is churning out podcasts now. Video too - click through from here.
Recommended: You Are Here: Gaming and User’s Geolocation in Web 2.0
Queued up: The Suxorz: The Worst Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007; Hi-Tech Craft: Why Sewing and Knitting Still Matter
One for the fellas at work (sorry, no swag :/): Expression Engine 2 Sneak Peak (not my spelling!)
Rachel Clarke Bibrik Ltd
Jeremy Ettinghausen Digital Publisher, Penguin Books
Roo Reynolds Metaverse Evangelist, IBM
Dan Hon CEO, Six to Start
Dan Heaf, BBC, moderator
Heaf: How can games, stories, puzzles etc. help engage users with your brand? We’ve seen in film and tv that these techniques have been put in place to great effect. Outside of those genres, can such tactics be effective? Continue reading ’sxswi 2008: day 2, Stories, Games and Your Brand’
OK, so in the afternoon I went to Stories, Games and Your Brand, another panel featuring Dan and other smart people. Tony’s notes are less rambly than mine. :) As a result of being in that session, I missed Zuckerberg’s trainwreck of an interview, but now all the sour faces I encountered outside Ballroom A afterwards make sense!
Kathy Sierra was next up in A with Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users. Packed house. Predictably fun talk - my notes don’t capture it well so it’s worth waiting for the video.
Finally, The Supercollider: A Hero of the Social Network, Matt’s panel. [Edit: there's a summary at dessalles.] His slides were superb. Two people tripped over my charger, but thankfully no-one was hurt (although some hard-disk protector feature on my laptop kicked in, which was worrying until it didn’t actually do anything and went away).
Et voila! Now I head off to some drive-thru to pick up dinner, like a very sad person. For the best really I think, since I’m flying back tomorrow and need to pack, be properly hydrated etc. Have fun, moo party people! ;)
Charlene Li Analyst, Forrester Research
I’m going to be talking about social strategies for revolutionaries. The idea behind the revolution that’s happening today is that people are getting together and mobilizing on the internet, and companies don’t know what to do about it.
Continue reading ’sxswi 2008: day 2, Social Strategies for Revolutionaries’
First attempt at liveblogging! Why not? Don’t laugh.
My fingers are tangle-prone, so there’s some paraphrasing.
Daniel Burka Creative Dir, Digg/Pownce
Joshua Porter Founder, Bokardo Design
Chris Messina, Citizen Agency
Todd Sieling, Ma.gnolia
Porter: We’re talking about social design strategies. To give you a bit of background about where we see the space, we’re in a third phase right now. The first phase had static html sites you could just read, one-way communication. In the second phase, sites could save info and started 2-way communication (banking). In the last few years we’ve seen a huge rise in social communication, e.g. Facebook and Myspace social networks, object-based SNs where users upload content of some sort.
What we’re talking about are the design issues that come over time as you see more and more social interaction between your users. These are counterintuitive, and very hard to predict. Today we’re talking about the problems we’ve seen and our solutions to them.
Continue reading ’sxswi 2008: day 2, Social Design Strategies’
