Edu games can be fun: My Little Cook
Posted: June 5, 2012 Filed under: game criticism, game design | Tags: gamesforhealth, gamification, seriousgames Leave a comment »
My four year old son was nervously jumping from one fast paced game to another, actually bored at the iPad. I asked him:
“Do you want to try a new game?”
“Hmmm…”
“It’s about preparing and cooking a cake.”
“But I can’t do that!”
“Let’s see.”
So we started playing My Little Cook: in the game you a young cook that moves in this cardboard made animated house, has to get the right ingredients, mix and cook.
A love story or a quick one? Games and their players
Posted: May 8, 2012 Filed under: game design, marketing, monetization | Tags: game design, game marketing, game mechanics Leave a comment »
A preliminary note: while studying the problems and stories concerning videogame marketing, I sometimes find an interesting perspective under which your game or game idea should be examined. The game marketing field is complex and immature, and does not seem to be approachable in systematic ways. So maybe the “lens” approach used by Jesse Schell for game design:
Good game design happens when you view your game from many different perspectives, or lenses.
can result useful also in video game marketing.
One such a lens has just been published by Tadhg Kelly on What Games Are, and is introduced by
Forget everything else for a moment and consider that your game is just a graph of users over time.
There are several factors that influence your game’ users/time graph, one such graph from the post:
Several factors and resulting graphs are in the linked article. What matters is that when planning your (our) game marketing, we consider it through this lens and make the game design and planned marketing coherent with the curve we want to obtain. If for example you are planning a game for free-to-play and for virtual items sales, you should indeed ensure that the imagined graph is not like the one above, so game design should include enough content to get users to return to the game.
The unlikely commercial success of Sword & Sworcery
Posted: April 30, 2012 Filed under: game design, game management, marketing, monetization | Tags: game design, game marketing, game monetization, sworcery 1 Comment »
What follows are traces of the path that led to the commercial success of indie game Sword & Sworcery.
More I get connected in the indie videogame field (and all its applications), more I meet projects which to me seem doomed to failure. I am bored to silently nod to unlikely ideas and ineffective marketing plans, in order to follow my law of not frustrating ideas without offering alternatives.
Reading, writing, playing, storytelling and again…
Posted: April 18, 2012 Filed under: game design | Tags: storytelling, videogame, videogame script Leave a comment »
The circular relationship between stories and videogames:
- creating a videogame from a novel, from a movie
- writing a plot for a videogame
- writing a videogame script
- the story/stories generated by the gameplay
(Sometimes the game aim is generating stories.)
Different direction, tools, techniques, results.
See Storytelling and video games.
Diorama art as videogame inspiration source
Posted: April 16, 2012 Filed under: game criticism | Tags: art videogame, videogame art Leave a comment »
Seen often discussed “videogame is art?”, but maybe it’s the other way around. Two pictures of a beautiful work by Thomas Doyle, and more works here.
You can follow me at @ppolsinelli.
Entering the videogames world market
Posted: March 28, 2012 Filed under: game management, marketing | Tags: game design, game marketing, game production Leave a comment »
Slides for a talk I just gave in Florence at Incubatore Imprese:
Game monetization lenses
Posted: January 17, 2012 Filed under: game design, marketing, monetization | Tags: game design, game designers, game designs, game mechanics, game monetization, marketing, monetization, reputation systems 1 Comment »
In my various drafts of game design which I’ve put together in the last months I tried to adopt the free-to-play monetization model. In principle I assumed that virtual items and their sales techniques could be an addition to the game design, something like a layer that could be added at the end to monetize the game.
