Audiopuzzler
September 8, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Here's an interesting example of what I've recently called a performative game: Audiopuzzler, created by Georgia Tech PhD student Nick Diakopoulos. The idea is this: the game offers puzzles comprised of audio content from videos taken from YouTube or news feeds. The player has to listen to these snippets, transform them into text, and fit the pieces together. The result, Nick hopes, is an enjoyable experience that also creates time-stamped transcripts of video. CAPTCHA creator Luis Von Ahn calls these "game with a purpose," a name I don't like for reasons explained in the article linked above. As Roger Travis ...

Kiwi Training Games
July 15, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Down under in New Zealand, there's a serious games studio called Straylight. They've got some pretty snazzy and sophisticated-looking corporate training games, including a business training sim called The Sports Store Ltd and a forthcoming simulation of the life of a professional chef called The Kitchen. Unlike the Gordon Ramsay Hell's Kitchen game (I have to admit I'm looking forward to it on Wii), The Kitchen focuses on food safety training, which seems like a problem that should have general applicability. Mostly, though, the work looks great. Straylight also runs a blog called Meaningful Play on a variety of topics ...

Sun's Identity Hero
May 28, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

It's been a while since I've seen a thoughtful online advergame. Here's one that surprises on a number of levels. Sun has a new game called Identity Hero, an arcade-action game that features features from the company's Identity Management Solutions, which is apparently some suite of IT management tools for compliance, network, and auditing management. In the game, you take the role of an IT Manager trying to avoid various threats, using the software products as powerups. The game is cute and high production value, but more importantly it does what so few advergames bother to do: it simulates (albeit ...

iTunes App Store can reject you for any reason
May 7, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Following my occasional series of gripes about Apple openness (1, 2, 3, 4), I thought I'd share a part of the agreement iPhone application developers must accept in order to be able to publish to the forthcoming iTunes App Store: 6.2 Selection by Apple for DistributionYou understand and agree that Apple may, in its sole discretion:(a) determine that Your Application does not meet all or any part of the Documentation or Program Requirements then in effect;(b) reject Your Application for distribution for any reason, even if Your Application meets the Documentation and Program Requirements; or(c) select and digitally sign Your ...

Ohmigod, I'm like totally going to the virtual mall
October 24, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Paul Hemp points us to a Harvard Business Review article on the future of e-tailing in virtual worlds. The article claims that e-commerce is going to shift from web transactions to online simulations of shopping, via virtual malls in 3d worlds. The usual references to American Apparel's store in Second Life, but goes beyond virtual stores as advertisements to suggest that shoppers will meet up online to go shopping. Sociologist Bob Moore calls it a return to the "social and recreational aspect of shopping." I'm probably cynical about everything these days, but I wonder if a return to the shopping ...

Disaffected! Universal Binary for Intel Macs
September 7, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

One of the nice things about getting mentioned in the NY Times Magazine is that a lot of people then email you about how they can't run your game. Intel Mac users: a Universal Binary is now available. Please be gentle with our bandwidth; if you have a PPC Mac, just grab the old PPC-only version, which is almost half as big. We'll be moving all of these to mirrors and sites like download.com in the near future, methinks. ...

Review of Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins
August 1, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

I read Henry Jenkins's new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide this weekend. The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest. Jenkins is a multifaceted media scholar, a critic of vaudeville, fan fiction, comics, film, games, and more. He is also the founder of the Education Arcade, an MIT group interested in the intersection of videogames and learning. And so, even though the book addresses games as a minority subject, I offer this review to alert our readers to Jenkins's current thinking. ...

Top 10 Disaffections
July 4, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Since we launched Disaffected! back in January, we've enjoyed a continuous stream of feedback, some good, some bad, all interesting. I've shared portions of it in private presentations, but when I showed the game at the Games for Change Exhibition last week in New York, I reminded myself to write about it here. For those of you just tuning in, this January my studio Persuasive Games released Disaffected!, a videogame parody of the Kinko's copy store. Probably the fastest way to read up on the game is in this MTV News article, by Stephen Totilo. I'll spare listing the press ...

Conference organizers unknowingly set stage for McDonald's Interactive hoax
June 9, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Stephen Totillo of MTV News has written a great story on the McDonald's Interactive hoax we covered a couple days ago. Here's what the real McDonald's had to say: Reached for comment Friday (June 9), McDonald's spokesperson Julie Pottebaum said, "This is an outright hoax and a complete misrepresentation of our people and our values. Anyone who knows the facts about McDonald's' social responsibility track record knows that we're a recognized leader on the environment." And apparently the connection to La Molleindustria's fantastic McVideogame was in fact accurate, although not in the way we expected. It was born out of ...

McDonald's Interactive Sticks it to McDo... or do they?
June 7, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

This post has been updated, please see below. This story has also been updated, please read here According to their website, McDonald's Interactive was founded to help the parent company strategize about future markets. Yesterday, they announced their "intention to split from McDonalds." Why? Said co-director Andrew Shimery-Wolf: "We can no longer stand by while McDonald's corporate policies help lead the planet to ruin." According to Shimery-Wolf, the group had created McMarketplace, a simulation of the global effects of the burger business. It worked well for training, but in long-term predictions, business ended in 2050, when everyone died due to ...

Serious Games and the Japanese Toilet
May 4, 2006 - by Gonzalo Frasca

Serious Games Source, Gamasutra's new sister site, is a welcomed addition to set of online resources for people interested in games with an agenda. I just published an article for the site, called Serious Games and the Japanese Toilet. It mainly deals with training games not just as training tools but also as communication tools. It is written from a designer perspective but I hope it can be interesting to non-designers as well. ...

Persuasive Games launches Disaffected!
January 17, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

I'm happy to announce that my studio Persuasive Games has released Disaffected!, a videogame parody of the Kinko's copy store. The game puts the player in the role employees forced to service customers under the particular incompetences common to a Kinko’s store. It gives the player the chance to step into the demotivated position of real FedEx Kinkos employees. Feel the indifference of these purple-shirted malcontents first-hand, and consider the possible reasons behind their malaise -- is it mere incompetence? Managerial affliction? Unseen but serious labor issues? Disaffected is the first in (what I hope will become) a series of ...

Japanese Finance Games
June 15, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

Thanks to Serious Games Japan maven Toru Fujimoto for tipping us off to My Dream and Bank, a Japanese Flash-based advergame intended to teach high school students about the basics of finance and starting a business. The game was produced by the Japanese Bankers Association, and according to Toru 100,000 copies were distributed on CD-ROM to schools and home users, free of charge. From what I can tell about the game, the player can choose one of four characters, each of which has a different personality and business goal -- internet entrepreneur, hair salon owner, coffee shop owner, and fashion ...

Yet another Monopoly
April 25, 2005 - by Gonzalo Frasca

I doubted about posting this, since there are so many flavors of Monopoly out there. Guess what? There is a new one now, the Warren Buffett Monopoly. So, in case you are interested, there it is. Certainly, the history behind Monopoly is far more interesting. Since I am talking about this game, I should point out an errata (mea culpa) that I made while writing about Monopoly's original designer: she was not Quaker. Actually, Quakers played their role in the process, but rather than reading it here, you should go out and buy a copy of The Playmakers, one of ...

Corporate Responsibility Game
October 25, 2004 - by Ian Bogost

BT (formerly the more descriptive British Telecom, for us KFC folks) has released Better Business Game, a game about managing social and environmental issues in a business. This is interesting in light of our recent collaboration with The Corporation, which also takes up the issue of social responsibility in business. You might also want to check out the Code for Corporate Citizenship (or its UK equivalent the Corporate Responsibility Coalition) for more information on this topic. This reminds me, does anyone else remember calling (800) 445-5667 from the USA? That's the BT Direct operator line, toll-free stateside. I recall this ...

Live from the Serious Games Summit DC
October 18, 2004 - by Ian Bogost

I am back from our London show opening (pictures soon) and here in DC for the Serious Games Summit. The conference has a very "official" feel, thanks to CMP, which is an important step. Oddly, no badge lanyards tho, only pins. Aren't lanyards the sign of officialness? Anyway, I'll do my best to cover the conference here, but it's multiple track and I'm doing a talk and a panel, so you'll get my view of the event rather than a general view. Update: coverage continues below as it happens, so to speak, from the back of the room. As usual, ...

Visualization is the new eBusiness
June 12, 2004 - by Ian Bogost

I was in New York most of the week, first on a panel at the Serious Issues, Serious Games conference -- which I'll write about soon -- and then hanging out with my friend Britt Blaser, the Dean campaign technology adviser who was instrumental in making the Howard Dean for Iowa Game happen. Britt and I spent a lot of time thinking, talking, and doodling about games and game-like visualizations for some new projects he's working on. Back in the late '90s I remember hearing about Fortune 1000 companies commissioning "digital dashboards" for their executives to get real-time snapshots of ...

IT Manager Game, now featuring Women!
June 1, 2004 - by Ian Bogost

Well, the ruckus about Intel's failure to include women in their first go at the IT Management game seems to have inspired them to correct the problem! The new version of the game features female IT managers, staff, and other employees. Welcome to the 20th century. Since I finally got to play, I can say something about the game. It's quite a clever idea, but I think it should be categorized as a hybrid advergame/training game. The way the mechanics work, you pretty much have to upgrade your systems to the best Intel products you can afford. It took me ...

Does Intel play with women?
April 23, 2004 - by Gonzalo Frasca

Here's the thing. It seems that Intel launch an IT Manager Game for training IT people. The fact is that the game is now offline (there is a message on their site:" Your Interest in the IT Manager game is appreciated. Intel is currently making revisions to the game, please check back again in the end of May to test your IT Manager skills." Verterblog.dk reports that what happened is that the game DID NOT GIVE YOU THE OPTION TO HIRE WOMEN! So, it is quite interesting that Intel pulled the game out and is "making revisions" to it. I ...