Archive for October, 2007
Super Mario - Wii Tour
by Pedro Silva on October 30th, 2007
Marcas patrocinam Pro Evolution Soccer
by Pedro Silva on October 29th, 2007
As marcas nacionais que estão incluídas dentro do jogo Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) 2008 sob a forma de publicidade estática nos painéis em torno do relvado são Pizza Hut, Powerade, Sagres e SportZone, disse ao M&P Rui Videira, director de comunicação da Ecofilmes. A SportTV também está associada ao jogo através de uma parceria, a exemplo do ano transacto, referiu o mesmo responsável. A Vodafone é a única marca comum a todos os países. “O acordo com a Vodafone engloba, para além do patrocínio no jogo, a exclusividade por um mês do jogo PES 2008 para telemóveis”, especificou o director de comunicação da Ecofilmes.
À excepção da SportTV todas as marcas são estreantes como patrocinadoras do PES. Segundo a Sagres esta será a primeira vez que uma marca de cervejas em Portugal aposta no patrocínio de jogos virtuais. Segundo fonte da Central de Cervejas esta é uma aposta numa nova forma de comunicação. A Sagres decidiu apostar no patrocínio do jogo pela “afinidade do target do jogo à nossa marca e abrangência de cerca de 100 mil utilizadores do jogo”, explica a mesma fonte. Com este apoio a marca reforça os valores de “portugalidade, espírito patriótico” e de união, associados ao futebol. Com a associação da Sagres ao futebol há uma “aproximação da marca ao target ligado com o futebol e ao target mais jovem”. A ligação entre esta cerveja e o futebol já é antiga, já que desde 1993 a Sagres é a patrocinadora oficial da Selecção Portuguesa.
Para a Sagres, este patrocínio representa uma revolução na forma como comunica com os seus consumidores, que tem vindo a seguir uma linha jovem, irreverente e moderna. “Estando sempre atenta às últimas tendências e tecnologias, a marca consegue manter a sua actualidade, reforçando o contacto com as camadas mais jovens da população”, refere a empresa.
Além de uma conferência de imprensa a comunicar este patrocínio, que se realizou ontem, “vamos ter acções nas lojas do off trade a promover o jogo na compra de cerveja Sagres”, explicou a fonte da Central de Cervejas.
A nova edição do jogo inclui acréscimos em termos de pormenores estéticos, modos de edição alargados, controlo e jogabilidade.
Rui Videira escusou-se a revelar os investimentos de cada uma das marcas.
Fonte: www.meiosepublicidade.pt
Valve’s Virtuosity
by Pedro Silva on October 24th, 2007
Valve may well have outdone itself. Inevitably, such a claim sounds a touch hyperbolic given the history of the company; over the last ten years, the people of Valve Software have created one of the most successful multiplayer games of all time in Counter-Strike, redefined excellence in the singleplayer shooter genre – first with the influential Half-Life, then again with its stunning sequel – and modernized the way games are delivered using Steam a digital distribution platform and community service.
Now, with the release of The Orange Box, Valve’s ambitions seem to be ascending in an exponential curve. Putting aside the exceptional quality of the games therein, the manner of its release epitomizes Valve’s tendency towards unique, and often brilliant, experimentation: The Orange Box is a compilation of five parts, bringing together the two previously released installments of Half-Life 2 and three entirely new prospects – all for the price of a single new release.
“We had these three projects under development – Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal – and they were all sort of converging,” explains Gabe Newell, Valve’s founder and leader, recalling the conversation which brought about their amalgamation into a single product.
“We were looking at this trying to figure out what to do. In the end we determined to stop thinking about it in terms of schedules and certification processes and start thinking from the point of view of a customer. What would they think about something like The Orange Box? I felt it’d be really exciting for them, and because that was an easy decision for a gamer, it became an easy decision for us to do that. If finding that compelling concept for your customers is the filter on your decisions, you’re almost never going to go wrong.”
This kind of agility and flexibility is a rare freedom, and for it to be directed with such audaciousness is rarer still. If this was not evidence in itself, it takes only a few hours at Valve’s Seattle offices to realize that the company is exceptionally idiosyncratic, even when placed alongside the frequently unorthodox working environments of other videogame virtuosos. Ask nearly anyone what their job title is, and they will take on a pensive expression before suggesting that they might be a designer.
Read all article in: www.next-gen.biz
The Flash Game Business - Making A Living Online?’
by Pedro Silva on October 20th, 2007
The world of free-to-play browser-based Flash and Java games has largely thrown the gaming world’s familiar business arrangements on its head. In this latest Gamasutra-exclusive feature, Kyle Orland examines the different ways of monetizing free Flash content.
Do ads work? Potential players can easily be turned off by overt marketing, but striking a good balance can be effective with the right tools:
“MochiAds’ system has a leg up on portal sites like Kongregate, Hsu claims, because their ads will stay with the game no matter how many sites it eventually ends up on. “Advertisers are trying to come to terms with how content is spreading on the web,” Hsu says. “More and more we’re in a fragmented market. Not everybody’s gonna visit major portals anymore — it’s not about Yahoo or MSN or AOL. We’re moving beyond the walled garden and people are spreading out to MySpace and Facebook — everybody has their sort of niche sites. As these things spread, content spreads. We’re trying to educate advertisers that it’s not so much about the site they reach, but the people they reach.“
Others, like Kongregate’s Jim Greer, feel that being able to charge for their work is the developer’s ticket out of the “gaming ghetto:”
“As it stands now, the advertising and sponsorship money involved is just too small. ‘Let’s say Armor Games gives you a sponsorship for $2,000. You get another $1,000 from ad revenue, another $1,500 from prize money, maybe Miniclip licenses your game for $5,000… you might make $10,000 to $15,000 on your Flash game — and that’s a really successful Flash game.’
The relatively low ceilings mean the best developers tend to not stick around in the Flash market, Greer says. ‘What seems too bad to me now is that developers will have a big success in the Flash game world and then they’re kind of forced to change platforms if they want to go beyond that — they’re forced to take a job at EA or scrape and scrounge and find a way to get a game on Xbox Live Arcade.’“
You can now read the full feature, with more on how developers are — or aren’t — making a living in browser-based games (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).
Source: www.gamasutra.com
Wogger
by Pedro Silva on October 19th, 2007
Lembram-se do smorost? Este é do género. Divirtam-se.
Nintendo é o anunciante do ano
by Pedro Silva on October 18th, 2007
“A consola Wii fez renascer uma companhia e animou todo o mercado dos videojogos. Essas são, para a Advertising Age, razões de sobra para a Nintendo ser considerada a empresa anunciante do ano. A marca, adianta a publicação, sobrepôs-se a uma galeria, onde se incluem, entre outros concorrentes de peso, a Apple, a Nike e a Unilever. Além de ter sido um sucesso de vendas, a nova consola teve ainda o mérito de alargar a abrangência do seu target, normalmente associado a adolescentes, a várias gerações. De resto, contrariou a tendência de retracção da venda de consolas no mercado norte-americano e, ao contrário das marcas concorrentes, conseguiu a mudar a forma de abordagem a este tipo de jogos.Os cerca de 155 milhões de euros despendidos pela Nintendo em comunicação tiveram como resultado a campanha, de imprensa e de televisão, criada pela Leo Burnett dos Estados Unidos, onde se vêem dois japoneses a chegarem num Smart ao país para incentivar os norte-americanos a jogar na consola Wii. Estratégias de marketing inovadoras na blogosfera são outra das razões que explicam o reconhecimento da marca por parte da Ad Age.Aliado a estes aspectos não terá sido indiferente o facto da consola ter ocupado durante vários meses o primeiro lugar do ranking de vendas nos Estados Unidos, num mercado, onde a anterior consola da Nintendo, a GameCube, tinha uma quota de mercado relativamente pequena face à Playstation e à Xbox”.
Por: Filipe Pacheco
Fonte: www.meiosepublicidade.pt
Phone is ringing
by Pedro Silva on October 17th, 2007
Joguem em: http://www.aooa.co.uk/THE%20PHONE.swf
Learning to Play or Playing to Learn
by Pedro Silva on October 17th, 2007
A Critical Account of the Models of Communication Informing Educational Research on Computer Gameplay
by Hans Christian Arnseth
Introduction
The proliferation of networked computers, gaming consoles such as the Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Gamecube and handheld devices such as the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, have made computer gaming part of mainstream culture. This has also resulted in a renewed interest in this topic among educational researchers. In any case, the fact that computer games have become a major industry means that in many people’s lives computer gameplay features as a very pleasurable and entertaining, but also at times frustrating and challenging, activity. However, the pleasures and rewards of gaming are very much mediated by social relationships in and around games, and both their representational and ludic aspects get their significance through their embeddedness within specific gaming communities and cultures (e.g. Squire, 2002). That is to say, computer gaming constitutes and is constituted in socio-cultural practices. The aim of this article is to provide an argument for the relevance and fruitfulness of treating computer gameplay as a contextually situated form of practice. By working through a selective set of relevant research in terms of how games have been employed for the purpose of learning, but also the ways learning activities themselves might be orchestrated as a kind of game play, certain problems with treating games as specific texts or objects with specifiable effects on cognition and learning will be identified and discussed in some detail. Thus, this is not a review of research. On the contrary, it is a critical discussion of particular research practices including the theoretical models employed to understand and analyze games and learning. As such, the studies that are discussed are selected because they exemplify a certain way of doing and conceptualising research and not necessarily because they are particularly influential or extraordinary.
Read all: http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/arnseth
Artificial Intelligence: The Too-High Heights of Human Intellect
by Pedro Silva on October 17th, 2007
“Artificial vision gets sharper all the time. Artificial walking has made great robot strides. But artificial intelligence is brain-dead. Why? Because while researchers have built awesome technology, they’ve failed to grapple with philosophy.
Early computer scientists like Alan Turing and John von Neumann attempted to spin logic circuitry into thinking machines. So they designed their creations to excel at tasks they thought embodied the heights of human intellect: calculating sums, analyzing geometry, and playing chess. In 1958, a computer beat a human chess player — albeit an inexperienced one — for the first time. Buoyed by this success, researchers embarked on a long attempt to invent a machine that could (a) talk just like Turing, (b) walk around in a robot body looking at stuff, picking it up, and using it neatly, (c) read newspapers and maybe correct the editors, and (d) program its own successors.
The notion of intelligent machines inspired a blizzard of books and movies, but practical returns were meager. Over the years, computers failed one commonsense task after another: manipulating unfamiliar objects, understanding natural language, distinguishing a dog from a cat. Despite steady advances in hardware, no machine could think as far as to laugh at a pratfall or make a bad pun.
In pursuing human-style intelligence, the geeks blundered into the deepest, densest, darkest thickets of metaphysics: consciousness, cognition, perception, self-awareness, and how “we” manage to “know” what we know. It turns out that activities like playing chess — things that require sorting and searching — are relatively easy to program, whereas tasks that require some understanding of the world at large, like doing the laundry, are unbearably complex. The metaphysical issues around AI are at a standstill, mainly because metaphysics is old and canny and doesn’t move forward in the linear manner of technology. Researchers, their grand illusions and ambitions dashed, fell into a long “AI winter” of shrunken budgets and general indifference.
Nowadays, Google “knows” pretty much anything you ask it. But its insanely fast and powerful work is modestly described as data-mining, not thinking. That vast, globe-spanning, superpowerful, ultrawealthy Web spider has yet to awaken and declare, “I am Google.”
But if it starts writing philosophy, all bets are off”.
Source: www.wired.com
IN REACTION
by Pedro Silva on October 16th, 2007
Um pouco mais tarde do que inicialmente previsto e depois das merecidas férias (digo eu), foi tempo dar início a um ambicioso projecto que aproveito para apresentar: IN [RE]ACTION. Além dos projectos desenvolvidos e que foram a causa desta paragem mais prolongada, no site desta nova empresa de design de comunicação, têm ainda acesso a um video de apresentação. Espero que gostem e vamos lá voltar ao jogos… blip blip.