Addition to my "closing of 2009" post

A couple of things: first of all thanks to the feedback to my previous blog post! I just wanted to add that yes, I am also working with good guys at Paf and we are about to revolutionize online money gaming. Unfortunately I (and we) didn't have enough time to do it last year ;) But I can assure you that it will most definitely happen this year!

So yeah yeah! I am also spending a lot of time with online gaming, social media and iGaming (= online money games). There hasn't been that many innovations in years. Online slot machines and lottery games are surprisingly similar what they were already hundreds of years ago. But wait no more. The change is coming.

Besides writing about 2010 trends, I also follow how other people and companies see the coming year. Atm one of my favorite post is by Osma Ahvenlampi (CTO of Sulake, and Scrum guru). His viewpoint (blog post: "Technology factors to watch during 2010") is purely technical but good stuff! I especially liked "Browsers vs desktops: what's the target for entertainment software?" discussion. See picture. Read more from the blog.

He also have a good point that: "the history of the “computer revolution” has been about automation changing economies of scale to enable entirely new types of business. The same trend is continuing in the form of computing capacity becoming a utility in Cloud Computing, extreme amounts of storage becoming available in costs which allow terabytes of storage to organizations of almost any size and budget, and most importantly, developing data mining, search and discovery algorithms that enable organizations to utilize data which used to be impossible to analyze as automated business practices."

Osma, good stuff! People: read it!

2009 highlights and plans for 2010

I am a type of a person who likes to make plans. I am far too rational to be a dreamer and I like to take risks and confront challenges. Every year around this time I plan what I would like to see happening within next 12 months. Besides making plans I also tend to look back and see how well my 2009 plans realized and what surprises and good things happened.

Last year I lived in Copenhagen Denmark. I got an opportunity to work with excellent team at Guppyworks, a company developing 3D GuppyLife MMO. I was asked to join the team because of my background and broad knowhow on game design and the specific target group (teen girls). For me that period in my life was very fun but also educational. I would say the key learnings are related to MMO business and issues to consider when running a virtual community (also necessities to keep in mind when building an MMO, how to support community feeling, how to evaluate the balance between unique features or technical development and making something happen business-wise asap, how to keep up constant change or evolvement and balance between polished content or stable technology vs. doing things fast and dirty). How relevant it is to make radical decisions even if you are in between productional limitations and VC's expectations. And those radical decision do not only related to prioritization issues. That's so much more.



Another cool thing was when I decided to take a step to unknown and invested in a startup company called MySites. I have done investments but never on startups. Why did I do it? It was a combination of Heureka! and convincing pitch by their CEO Ramine Darabiha. The Heureka! moment was linked to basic needs and how to make things easier for average Internet users. The case reminded me of comedian George Carlin and his joke how humans spend their lives accumulating stuff. Soon they have problems of where to store all of it. The third challenge is to access that data (of various kinds) in multiple locations and channels.

I agree with trend reports and believe that MySites is answering to few key challenges of coming years. Issues related to the fact that media consumption is (constantly) changing, people ask for one stop shops and easy ways to share different type of data or content with their friends (and strangers). Content needs to be distributed -- the same content should pop up in multiple locations, formats and channels and be personalized. It is very clear that sharing no longer means e-mail, FTP or high number of dedicated services with their limitations. Also I have to say Ramine did really convincing sales pitch. We'll see what happens but he is a clever and dedicated person -- I would love to see more of that energy not only in startups but also within well established companies :)

Besides I did plenty of work with digital media and digital games. I am the head of IGDA Finland and I do game reviews and blogging for Tilt.tv, run Game Lab which develops experimental online game prototypes at Paf, I was in the jury deciding which Nordic game companies would get development fund, I wrote articles of the Finnish game dev scene to Pelaaja (Player) magazine, was in Nordic Game Jam 2009 jury and Live2011 jury, wrote few "digital media & games in a nutshell reports" for Ministry of Education, did consulting etc.).

I also did bunch of presentations (some of them are at Slideshare). My topics varied from game development and management to virtual identity issues -- and from business to academic talks. Just the way I like it. On top of that I wrote several articles and participated e.g. to Diginatives report (in Finnish) and Finnish Game Research Year Book 2009 (in Finnish). I also worked hard with a book focusing on digital media pioneer countries of the late 1990s (South Korea, Japan and Finland) and how social networking and novel ways to participate, contribute and develop digital content and services have changed the picture. It has been rather difficult to find international publisher for the book. If I get one more "no" as an answer, I will move to plan B to make sure the book will come out asap!

Now you might ask what's for next year then? I am not sharing my plans at the moment, I will get back to those at the end of this year and see how I have been able to reach my goals :D Happy New year! Make plans! Change the world! Share happiness!

Hottest trends in games 2010

A year ago I suggested that the following five trends will have an impact to the games industry in 2009:

1. Tinkering
2. Networked experience
3. Alternative revenue models
4. Massively competitive co-ops FPSs
5. Networking mini games adding value

The list was relatively accurate. Tinkering definitely was and is an aspect in games. For example XBLA games, Scribblenauts and indie scene all brought up different approaches to tinkering and collaborative experience design. Networked experience most definitely was one key trend, though a bit differently that I anticipated. Nexon's Combat Arms reached 1M players in Europe and plenty of FPS titles were released. Also 2009 was successful year for Facebook games, especially Zynga remained in the news thanks to Mafia Wars, Farmville and others.

For the 2010, I went though my Twitter posts and put together a new list of trends and issues we most likely are about to see in 2010. I continue with the same idea as last year. By looking back you can see the future.

1. Indie
One can say that indie was a hot trend already in 2009. There definitely is an increasing amount of attention and interest towards indie games. Besides the games themselves, I think one especially interesting thing is storage and sharing. Those providing easier access, easier distribution solutions and easier business opportunities for SMEs and other independent developers will make an impact to the industry. I also believe that indie games will have a greater impact to mainstream games by adding richer variations than before. Thanks to new options for self-publishing and business opportunities for indie developers the attitude towards taking risks and opportunities to put out indie games will become easier. The key here is storage and sharing / distribution.

2. 3D gaming
Yes, just when we have get used to HD it is time to step forward. Avatar movie has given new hopes for Hollywood studios regarding 3D technology and when the movie industry is pro-3D, so will be games. Hilarious 3D movies and Virtual boy 3D were niches at their times in the 1990s. Now with bigger muscles (=bigger players) things will start to happen. Amongst others Nvidia is promoting 3D gaming. I think 3D will not add valuable experience for all games but it should be easily foreseen how 3D could add value for example to FPSs or adventure games. Still there are few hardware issues to be enhanced but we are getting there.

3. Persistence in games
Facebook games, casual browser games and virtual world/casual MMO developers seek for the next think to jump into with relative low risk level but clear competitive edge. I believe persistent game play will be one such differentiation factor. Persistence has been a thing under discussion for quite some time already especially in MMOs. When people communicate and entertain themselves with multiple gadgets and gaming devices and their media use is fragmented, persistence can add nice twist to gaming. You don't have to be a hard core gamer or a geek to play games over longer period of time. Persistence will add randomness and variety to the game experiences. The game will continue when you are offline but in a way it does not matter if you are offline for a day or a week.

4. Learning + games
Learning in games or serious games is another things that is far from novelty. Edutainment products appeared already at the end of 1980s as the next semi-big thing. Things holding back edugames has been their vague role in the market (commercial games or education software?), weak or non-existing distribution network and common ways to either do educational material formally or make business out of it. At the moment edugames are not really commercial games but not exactly teaching material either. Obviously there will be both but someone should start inventing and formalizing the picture to make a difference. In 2010 more funding will be directed to learning technologies. I sincerely hope that the development would be more startup than university driven.

5. Touch, Point, Gesture
Nintendo Wii brought point and gesture interface to the common crowd and iPhone successfully introduces touch screen (and gyroscope) for gaming. Project Natal and PS3 Motion Controller add more twist to gesture interfaces. Despite Microsoft's and Sony's efforts I expect to see more innovations in mobile regarding to point, touch and gesture. I also believe that this will be one area where games break out of the "games sector" and introduce playful interaction to other application areas as well. There are several examples already how simple game interactions have been utilized for example in advertising and information sharing. Entertaining and natural interaction is what is needed to navigate through vast amount of data and information.

Random thoughts of game business and funding

From me November was the month of funding. I was a member of the jury in Nordic Game Program (game development) and Live2011 project focusing on digital art projects. Both sessions made me to think of the gap between business knowledge (/business focus) and games development practices.

Nordic Game funds are given out in two rounds per a year. There were 84 applications on the second round of 2009 and eight applications eventually got funded. The level of applications was high and competition fierce as always. Even if the criteria has been the same for years already, the center of funded projects tends to change from a round to a round. Naturally this has a lot to do with the scale of projects submitted. Certain trends stand out on every round -- something it is location based gaming, other times casual iPhone or Facebook games or children's games. This round several innovative or experimental projects got funding including Kung-Fu Live (tracking players' movement with a camera), Rapture (collectable card game goes iPhone and Facebook), Uplause Crowd Game (massively multiplayer crowd playing game), Dream Machine (classic adventure with claymation style) and Pinball DJ (music interaction concept for handhelds and mobile). Besides those also few social games and MMOG were funded.



A couple of days after Nordic Game award gala I spend one day with Live2011 student projects. There the focus was more on digital art so necessarily no business values were expected but still games, web sites or animation projects submitted to the competition didn't seem to have any answer on how to monetize or fund the project -- except applying for grants, stipends or other cultural funds. That made me to think of ways to improve the business side of game industry. People have kept repeating for years already that game industry should be taken seriously. That it already is multi billion dollar business and employing thousands of people. Bigger than music or box office sales bla bla bla.

It is definitely more passion than business intelligence driven. There are lots of entrepreneurs doing their own share to enrich the range of games available. The founders of game companies often include designers and techies who started the companies because of passion. Many game developers work with games because they love games, games programming or game art. Not because they just need a job. The state of mind is very different compared with many other industries. This is also one weakness of game developers. Too often technical skills outreach business knowledge. Even companies developing brilliant games around the world fail just because of that. While possessing a great deal of enthusiasm and talent, they rarely share the same desire for negotiation, operations, finance, management or operations.

I would love to see the business side to flourish with the same creativity and passion seen in games. One way to do that is to aim higher. Even if the companies were founded amongst friends (with certain skills) to do something fun and hopefully beneficial, without business thinking or goal settings the dream can easily fall into pieces. This is often the result of a fact that the game industry has a higher than normal set of the right people in the wrong places.

So what there is to be done? There are lots of business opinions and ideas to be found from various books. Harvey Mackay in his book "Beware the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt" outlined a formula for success. Success = focus + determination + goal setting and courage. I would add that success also has a lot to do with social connections, networking and practicing. And changing direction when needed. I feel this is something game developers should seriously consider if they want to keep up with the competition.

Multiverse and idea bubbles

Yesterday I joined Idean 10 years party in Helsinki. Idean is user centric design company which has come a long way with user interface design and ideation work within last 10 years. As a company Idean delivers also an interesting story of entrepreneurship. In the beginning of their path, they had good mix of will, luck or coincidence and trust (from seed funder) to get things going even if they hadn't a clear image what the direction would be. This was actually one of the idea bubbles (see below) I found inspiring and something I will take further.

Idean was kind and generous enough to invite Joseph Pine to give a talk at the event. Joseph Pine is famous for The Experience Economy book he wrote together with James Gilmore in 1999. He gave the same presentation in Amsterdam earlier this year so check out the video & slides if you are interested to know more about multiverse.

Besides writing books Joseph Pine is consulting and spurring executives around the world. In Finland he is working at least with Elisa (telecom), Lapland tourism and Lappset (playgound equipment for kids). In his presentation he summarized his previous three books [to put it short: ] and focused on multiverse discussion which will be described in detail in his next book.



Pine referred to Stan Davis who coined term “mass customization” in his book “Future Perfect“ and started playing with theory of existence (universe). That space and time are forms of existence in the real world and matter its substance. He picked up a word "no-matter" from Stan Davis' book and started from there. If there is no-matter there must be no-time and no-space as well, right? Well.... Anyway. he managed to define no-space = virtual and no-matter = bits but no-time is a bit trickier one. Pine talked about some sort of continuum (past-present-future). I was thinking merely multitasking and mixing real time and asynchronous communication to add "flexibility" to time in some sense. Basically he illustrated the dichotomy or duality between real and virtual as well as various "forms" within virtual and real.

I find it rather complex model to describe that there is real and virtual and various technical solutions enable hybrids such as augmented reality. Maybe hybrid reality would be enough? But of course Mr. Pine's model is one ideal or sort of framework and a way of thinking. So maybe I am too practical here. The presentation inspired questions regarding the role of a man in this multiverse, persistence and noise regarding to service design and experience or user-generated content and the definition of authenticity. Pine & Gilmore wrote a book about that: what authenticity means to the postmodern consumer, and how companies can render their offerings as “really real.”.

Even though I didn't get that much out of the presentation it is always good to exercise your brains and listen to different speakers. Even if the message would not shake you that much there is always some idea bubbles or red ribbons to be combined what whatever you and working on at the moment. I am very much thinking of experience of gamers at the moment and playfulness on the Internet in more general sense.

So besides being inspired by coincidences related to startup's, I also met cool people at the party, got some alternative views of what makes online gamers tick and got a couple of good but random ideas :) Now it is up to me to refine them further with the help of red ribbons, idea bubbles, insights and thoughts.

IGDA Finland November event, Finland Game Jam kick off

Do you want to know how the leading game studios do their demo? Or are you interested in Global Game Jam event which shall take place in January 2010? Game Jamming will happen in over 50 location around the world at the same time. It will be 48 hours of sweat, ideation, game mechanics, coding, sound and graphic design, team work and networking.


Remedy Entertainment will give a demo of Alan Wake and Gorm Lai will talk about Global Game Jam (GGJ) event. The talks will take place at the IGDA Finland Presentations session (venue: K13, time: 5PM). At 7PM the crowd will move to Cuba Cafe for after session networking. We will also show some GGJ videos and games at the bar. Join us on 17th November!

More information from: http://igda.fi/

MindTrek - there and back

MindTrek conference is the only conference in Finland providing good crossover of anything and everything to do with digital media. This year MindTrek attracted nearly 800 participants. Sunny Thursday was well spent at the conference. I chatted with people, followed start up lauch pad session and had good time at the party (thanks Jussi & other friends!). The organizators of the conference had invited some bloggers (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, The NextWeb, StartupMeme, Techpulse360, ChipChick, and toothlesstiger.com) to cover the event. If you want more indepth report from the event or open innovation environment Demola – check out the blogs. Of course MindTrek has also good Twitter coverage and good stories at other blogs. For example Katri Lietsala blogger about Chris Messina presentation (in Finnish!). You can also find a video of the talk titled ”Identity is the platform” from the web.

Another keynote speaker came from Google. Mr. Jyri Engeström talked basics about snack size media. You can find his slides from Slideshare.

Start Up Lanchpad was a combination of ”real” start ups and companies that are already stabilizing their business. Pitching is not traditionally a Finnish way of selling your business idea or product. We truly have to learn several lessons still but I was actually pretty excited and impressed by the pitches. In my opinion the jury didn’t always address that relevant questions (except Mrs. Sharon C. Ballard – I liked her clear, relevant, tough and well put questions). Still it was really interesting to see new products (software and hardware) presented in pitch-format. My absolute lanch pad favourite was Kamu World. One member of the jury questioned the unique quality of Kamu World without AR-aspect which according to Jussi Laakkonen was mainly targeted at hard core users of Kamu. I think both brand image and Kamu character are differentiating Kamu from the competitors. It is true that interaction and gameplay is in line with other Facebook games / application but then again – Facebook games and applications are still evolving. I expect games in social networking services to evolve greatly within the next few years. At the start up lanchpad competition Kamu World is competing against f.ex. Virtual Air Guitar, Epooq and MultiTouch screen. The results will follow shortly.

So: this year my MindTrek experience was a bit of this and that – I wish I would have had more time to follow game related presentations but oh well – maybe next year. Last night I had to rush to Helsinki to be ready for an interview at 7AM. I talked about future of gaming at the morning television show at MTV3 channel.

Online video rules ok

Interesting research data from comScore (with US focus).

• The top video ad networks in terms of their actual delivered reach were: Tremor Media Video Network (19.5 percent penetration of all online video viewers), BrightRoll Video Network (16.2 percent penetration), and BroadbandEnterprises.com (14.8 percent penetration).
• 81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 582 minutes of video, or 9.7 hours.
• 120.5 million viewers watched nearly 10 billion videos on YouTube.com (82.6 videos per viewer).
• 44.9 million viewers watched 340 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
• The average Hulu viewer watched 12.7 videos, totaling 1 hour and 17 minutes of videos per viewer.
• The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

Eig09 Innovation keynote

This might be of marginal interest but those into online gambling & iGaming might find it interesting at least.

Eig09 Innovation keynote

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Popular social networking activities

Even though I do not totally agree that "to be an Early Adopter of Technologies Goes Mainstream" this is an interesting article.

"For decades, the adoption and use of the latest technologies was limited to a subculture: Whether called “tech enthusiasts” or “gadget geeks,” the implication was that most of the world got along fine with older, established products and services, while a smaller group pursued the most leading-edge technology." But now Forrester Research suggests that we’re all gadget geeks now."

Finnish gamers in the limelight

Hello world from Stockholm Sweden. Today I am visiting Jadestone and Paf in Stockholm. Last week I gave a presentation on "video gaming trends" and I am about to put those thoughts into a slide set format shortly. I have also been putting together a presentation for EIG09. And what's EIG you might wonder? EIG is the European iGaming Congress and Expo that will be held in Copenhagen mid September. I was asked to give an Innovation keynote (focusing on online gambling and future of iGaming). It has been fun to put the presentation together. I will put both of the slide sets to Slideshare as soon as I have given the presentation / finalized the trends slides (mid September most likely).
IGDA Finland season 09-10 will start officially next Tuesday. We have really superb season coming up. We'll start with Everyplay session on September the 8th. Everyplay is a social games startup. Currently they are developing Kamu World for social networking sites (Facebook at first). It is a new virtual hangout featuring playful Kamus. Check it out! Early version of it is already online and Finnish speaking readers might also like to check out newest Pelaaja magazine. September issue focuses on Finnish game development scene and there is a couple of words about Everyplay and the future of gaming as well. All in all IGDA is a perfect context to catch up what's the latest with Finnish game developers and well as to network with all the bright minds. More information about the event from Igda Finland site. IGDA will also organize Presentations series. The first session will be in October and focus on Global Game Jam. Finland will get our own Game Jam next January! More information available in October at Igda.fi.

Another nice games related event is Social Gaming night at Villi Wäinö (Kalevankatu Helsinki city centre). It is held every Tuesday at 7PM by Jolly Dragon.

Btw. I noticed that I have been writing this blog since Feb 2006 and managed to put together some 200 posts. I started using Twitter in in Dec 2008 and I have already sent over 400 posts. The benefits of both blogging and microblogging are starting to show. I will continue doing both also in the future. Check out Twitscoop.

Btw2. Found this pic. Mobile social networks (UK).

Assembly09 post mortem (from my viewpoint)

Four sunny summer days were well spent indoors at Assembly09. I was promoting a game concept & prototyping competition, meeting friends and following compos. There was high number of fast and extreme music entries, some nice fast graphics entries and - as expected - some amazing entries to 64 and demo compos. Some of my favorites (any category) were Proof of Concept, Frameranger and irrelephant. Check out all Assembly Compo entries from Assembly TV.

For those who don't know: Assembly is one of the biggest demo scene & gaming events in Europe. Assembly Summer gathered ~6000 participants out of which 500 are girls! Awesome - Go girls! Assembly is about participating in compos (in music, graphics, programming demos etc.), hanging around with friends, playing games (lots of WoW and and CS players around), chatting, staying at the Arena 24/7 for 4 days and eating lots of junk food. It must be overwhelming experience for the youngest participants which were not much more than 10 year olds. It was also nice to see some people staying overnight with their small babies. That was kinda cool - Go Next Gen!

Besides gaming and compos there was ArtTech seminar running on various topics. I followed indie sessions. Cactus gave a good preso [the same (?) as at GDC09], Blueberry Garden show didn't give that much new ideas and Petri Purho was such a Prince Charming as always. He were basically going through a set of really funny and cool indie games. My favorite was the "get that f**ing raccoon out of the gears!" game (EnviroBear), turning levels thingie (Punishment) and Cactus stuff (Psychosomnium) of course. If not groundbreaking new ideas, at least we got good laugh by watching Petri playing.

Paf Concept & prototype competition will be running until the end of August09 and the results will be out by the end of September. Assembly compos were dominated by men but I truly wish to see entries from girls to this concept competition. All in all -- it is all about good new ideas!

2nd chance: blogging on games at Tilt.tv

RT: My game blog at Tilt.tv blog (in Finnish).

Happiness is a state of mind

Top 3 dancing videos for raising the level of happiness:

1. Unity one minute rave

2. Where the hell is Matt?

3. Brown pants' party / wedding video

Editing a book and preparing for Assembly09

I am putting together a book focusing on three pioneer countries of the 1990s in digital networking (wired/wireless). The book focuses on 15-29 year olds in Japan, South Korea and Finland and shares very interesting hands-on examples of digital networking and how it is changing the work life as well as ways to spend spare time. It will be out next year! We will also be sharing quite a bit of research data and articles online. More about that later. One relevant / related data from comScore: "Social networking has become a mainstream online activity among all age groups, with 80 % of the total U.K. online population having visited a site in the category in May09. Penetration was highest amongst 25-34 year old Internet users, 89 % of whom visited the category during the month, followed by 15-24 year olds (86 %)."

"15-24 and 25-34 year olds averaging 5.4 hours per user per month compared with 3.7 hours per month among users age 55 and older. Social networking was the second most popular online activity in the U.K. based on average time spent per user (4.6 hours), trailing only instant messaging (8.6 hours)."

Age Profile of U.K. Social Networking Site Category Visitors May 2009 Total U.K., Age 15+ - Home & Work Locations Source: comScore World Metrix
Age Segment	% Reach	Average Hours per Visitor
Total U.K. Internet Audience	80%	4.6
Persons: 15-24	86%	5.4
Persons: 25-34	89%	5.4
Persons: 35-44	79%	4.3
Persons: 45-54	77%	3.9
Persons: 55+	67%	3.7

*Excludes Internet activity from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

This is also interesting: "Kids from two to 11 years of age are spending 63 percent more time online than they did five years ago, says a report released Monday from Nielsen Online. Children in that age range were online an average of 11 hours in May 2009 versus just 7 hours in May 2004." (Source: Nielsen/Cnet)

I am also preparing for Assembly09 which is just nine days away. I (together with the Paf crew) have been putting together concept & prototyping competition. I am especially hoping that women will see that competition as an opportunity. A prototype of a game is always a bonus but not a must. All in all -- Assembly is really fantastic event, I would recommend anyone just to check it out. It is quite pricey (35 euros) but there is lots of things happening, concerts and dj sessions every night etc. Hope to see you there!

Insanely twisted shadow planet

Video Games | Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet | Exclusive Extended Trailer HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

A cup of coffee and some exergaming in South Korea

Five years ago I was in the lead of a research project titled Exergame at the Technical Research Centre of Finland. Back then we estimated that exergames will become a big business within the next 5 years. Our guessing came true. Nintendo Wii is one of the most exposed example of it. Then again I would say that Wii is just a start. I am expecting to see more exergame innovations appearing especially for mobile terminals. Smart phones and iPhone has changed the idea of a cellular phone and with cheaper components phone manufacturers can integrate gyroscopes and measument techniques into portable devices. Naturally things will also evolve in pc and console gaming. Sony and Microsoft (Natal) are behind Nintendo but still already far away in developing their own motion control solutions for games.

Within the last few days exergaming has been on the headlines around the world. In Finland playful Move and Play exhibition is currently on at Heureka science center in Vantaa, Korean Arirang today tv show had an interesting story on Xergames (click the link & register to see the video starting at 40:45). Additionally Nintendo will launch Wii Sports Resort shortly (at Times Square in NY). I also received a press release claiming that: "Kids as young as three years old are picking up the joysticks and clicking away at computers, especially if they have older siblings whom they wish to emulate. It's important to catch kids at an early age to teach them about fitness". My Gym promotes children's fitness centres in the US and provides information regarding nutrition and everyday exercise. Basically My Gym and exergames have the same goal and somewhat similar means to reach the goal -- being: positive feedback, easy access, casual exercise, playful and fun context, self-acting state, instant feedback and measuring performance.

I am happy to be a part (or additional power behind the scenes) of a R&D project focusing on novel exergame solutions. The project is run by MoFun (the creator of Circus game) and Technical Research Centre of Finland. I also heard that social gaming initiative is about to start in Finland. Even though it focuses more on social gaming for adults than actual fitness gaming or exergaming -- I am sure you cannot 100% separate those from each other. I will write more about the initiative as soon as it is up and running.

Gamers' Night at the Movies

Night at the movies got totally different intrepretation when IGDA Finlandinvited IGDA volunteers to experience big screen gaming at Sello Bio Rex movie theater. After the last screening ended in the night, gamers started entering the building. Three screening rooms were reserved for game playing until next morning. Gamers got to choose which NES, PS3 or Xbox 360 games they would prefer playing and did so until it was already sunny and quiet Sunday morning outside the theater.

Movie theatre gaming was an immense experience! Playing Deadspace on a big screen truly was scary but also Ghostbusters and GTA4 did well on a big screen. Besides horror, shooting and adventures, social games such as SingStar was played along with NES classics Mario and Chip 'n' Dale.

Movie theatre gaming was an event to remember and positive feedback is a reason enough to arrange the event again. Besides tournaments and party gaming we might also experiment 3D gaming next time.

User inclusion in games

User Inclusion in games development, focusing on development process

User inclusion in games

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Game Business Development

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Game Business Development

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