SeriousGamesMarket informs about the keynote speech by Will Wright at Games Tech 2010. Will Wright is designer of popular games like SimCity, SimEarth, and The Sims. Wright spoke on the intersection of military gaming and commercial gaming technologies.
Games Tech 2010’s primary objective is to promote the use of game technology within the Department of Defense, inviting participation and exchange of Ideas. For more information and some great insightful presentations visit the official Game Tech 2010 conference website
Sara Huizenga (@socialsprouts) informs : Want to change the world but only have 99 cents? Armchair Revolutionary is here to help. Set to launch into beta on Tuesday, Armchair Revolutionary is a Web-based social activism platform designed to harness large-scale crowdsourcing and the boom in social gaming in a bid to support a wide variety of science and technology ventures that could benefit the world at large.
Started by the founders of The Hollywood Hill, said to be the largest social change membership organization in the entertainment-industry, Armchair Revolutionary is meant to bring people’s interest in helping support worthwhile causes and the iTunes-era simplicity of spending 99 cents on something intriguing together with innovators who need funding to get potentially world-changing projects off the ground.
Built around a series of eight social activism tasks–gifting, VoIP phone calling, e-mailing, uploading, downloading, voting, forms, and quizzes–Armchair Revolutionary is seen by its creators as a one-stop shop for today’s Web savvy and altruistic communities to make a big difference, one small step at a time.
Ariel Hauter, co-founder and President of Armchair Revolutionary writes on HBR blog on why 99 cents ?
In the run up to our beta-launch, we thought about many different payment models, but in the end, we’re going with what we think is a unique donor approach. We’re limiting financial gifts to 99¢ increments. We’re pretty optimistic that this somewhat counter-intuitive approach to fundraising is actually what’s needed.
Here’s why: The web is finally reaching a level of donation and payment scalability that micro-transactions can really add up. We’ve all witnessed the crowdsourcing fundraising successes of Moveon.org and the recent Haiti effort. Armchair Revolutionary takes this model to extremes, by limiting gifts to 99¢ per project (or project phase) for each user, thus reducing the risk-per-donor to a near-zero level per project. At this level, we’ve also eliminated any financial barriers to participants, tapping into a whole new marketplace for funding. It also supports a high-volume of projects per year as each donor is more capable of contributing to a full "portfolio" of projects as they roll-out per week. We anticipate scaling up from 20 projects in our first year to around 250 in the coming years.
Their press section informs that even being sitting on a chair they are truely revolutionary by being first in so many things:
The world’s first social activism website combining a micro-financing platform and one-click task technology (voip, email, upload, download, voting, forms, quizzes) to engage the public in supporting innovative science and technology projects.
The world’s first to combine social gaming with social activism for science and technology projects.
The world’s first website to offer the public the opportunity to help micro-finance for-profit social ventures (i.e. launch for-profit companies that provide social good). In most of these situations, Armchair Revolutionary will use the public’s contributions as investment capital and receive equity stakes in the start-ups it funds. As these equity stakes mature and come of value, Armchair Revolutionary may exit / cash-out and reallocate those profits to new social projects.
The world’s first social activism website to enable its users to personalize their public profiles with digital art produced by professional artists (ArmRev’s Visual Artist Program at http://www.armrev.org/artists)
Andrew Webster on Arstechnica suggests that the future of gaming is cloud computing. Interesting read on the past relations between the cloud and the gaming world and how it is shaping up for the future :
Many non-gamers and casual gamers who’ve heard the cloud computing hype might be surprised to learn that the cloud is actually changing the way we play games. From the ever-evolving Steam and Impulse to upcoming services like OnLive, the cloud has already had a serious impact on the games industry, and with a slew of new services on tap for later this year and next, that impact is slated to grow enormously. This shift to the cloud has implications far beyond the gaming experience—every aspect of the multibillion dollar business of gaming will be affected, from distribution and sales to quality assurance to anti-piracy controls….
More young girls are being exposed to console games, especially as their fathers introduce them to that world as a way to bond with them. In late November, president of Nintendo America, Reggie Fils-Aime presented several data points outlining the current gender breakdown of console play in the U.S. Reggie estimates there are 45 million people playing video games as the primary players in the U.S. Of those, Nintendo is estimating 26% are female, or roughly 11.7 million.
Of those, 80% are on the Wii, 11% are on the Xbox 360 and 9% are on the PS3.
* Wii – 80% = 9.3 million * X360 – 11% = 1.29 million * PS3 – 9% = 1.05 million * Total = 11.7 million Females
John Koller of Sony told us, "Before the holidays we made a big push in our advertising campaign by appealing to a wider demographic. Women see the benefit of having a game console that also works as a Blu-ray player, and that has definitely boosted our sales into the dual-console households."
And David Dennis, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 spokesperson believes that, "Certainly social networking functionality like Twitter and Facebook appeal to a female audience. Studies have found that in general, most social networks have more female users than male, including Twitter (about 59% female) and Facebook (about 57% female). In addition to Facebook and Twitter, there is a lot of functionality in Xbox LIVE that appeals to women. With Xbox LIVE parties, users can connect and share movies, music, photos and gaming experiences with friends on the same couch or across the country. Women are an important audience for us, and we’re offering a variety of entertainment experiences that will appeal to them."
Wanda Meloni ( Twitter : @wandameloni ) is a market analyst with M2 Research. Before starting her own research and strategy consulting firm she was president of DFC Intelligence and worked as an analyst at Jon Peddie Research. She tracks gaming and entertainment as well as the tools, technology and development pipelines. She has been quoted in multiple publications such as the Wall Street Journal, London Times, NY Times, SF Chronicle and Computer Graphics World. She holds an MBA in Strategic Marketing and International Business and speaks several languages. (Bio from the Gamsutra blog profile)
TED: Ideas worth spreading : Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.
