The Acagamic

I recently wrote a book chap­ter (PDF) for Mark Grimshaw’s book Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments pub­lished by IGI Global. Since the book is rather expen­sive, a list of the chap­ters was com­piled by the authors, which can be down­loaded from their web­sites. I think, this book deserves to be read by every­one inter­ested in game sound, so here is the chap­ter list (with links to the PDF files of each chap­ter). Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you like the new buzz term or not. Gamification — that is the use of engag­ing play­ing prin­ci­ples applied to desk­top and con­sumer appli­ca­tions, prod­ucts, and ser­vices — is a big thing in research and (non-game) indus­try. Even SIGCHI was kind enough to let us orga­nize a CHI 2011 work­shop on gam­i­fi­ca­tion. It is inter­est­ing that most of the buzz sur­round­ing gam­i­fi­ca­tion comes mostly from peo­ple out­side the games indus­try (prob­a­bly the game indus­try just does not like the term and the badges con­cept). However, in December 2010, Valve took up gam­i­fi­ca­tion con­cepts to pro­mote Steam sales, which I found par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing. The sales gam­i­fi­ca­tion was called “The Great Steam Treasure Hunt” and it fea­tures all gam­ing con­cepts nec­es­sary to fos­ter engage­ment in the Steam com­mu­nity: rules, goals, chal­lenges. Read the rest of this entry »