Yesterday McDonald’s debuted in FarmVille, the popular Facebook social game with its own farm - giving players the chance to play with the Brand and win prizes.
The program was created by appssavvy and OMD, and includes a McDonald’s Farm where players grow tomato and mustard seed crops and can earn prizes.
I’m surprised that more brands haven’t worked with Zynga.
via: Brandweek
“Impresario”, our gesture and voice controlled theater game concept, is finally completed. It is designed as an online multi player game for the upcoming xbox360 with kinect extension. This extension offers highly detailed full body motion capture of up to four players in front of the screen. The gained information is used to interact with the corresponding game.
“Impresario” is the visual output of our Bachelor thesis “Theater as a Casual Game”. It is written and designed by Peer Dräger and Joschka Wolf at the department of media design at the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University in 2010.
also see http://impresario-game.com/
This monday, June 22., I attended the GAMESplaces International 2009 Conference in Frankfurt am Main. Here are the bits I found interesting:
Nintendos ways of marketing the Wii and the DS to women.
Silja Gülicher (Senior Assistant Manager PR Nintendo Europe, GER) presented two cases in which Nintendo targeted women in a different way.
1. Based on the insight that 60% of the book sales in book store today are to women, Nintendo approached several book stores to sell Nintendo DS games (the software) in their stores. After adding the DS hardware to the offering, the sales of the software and hardware went up considerably. Some book stores even have “Nintendo corners” now.
2. Nintendo talked to Tupperware to include the Wii and Wii Fit in their “Home Parties”. Nintendo would take the Wii where the women are and Tupperware would have a product to attract a younger audience. Tupperware agreed and Nintendo sold hundreds of Wii units this way.
The Keynote presentation style
Jason Della Rocca presented his keynote “The evolving games industry ecosystem” in a very interesting form. He drew most of his presentation slides with an stylus and a tablet live on stage. This had a very honest and being part of the process feeling to it.
He sees the games industrie adopting the “google model” of launching products/games in beta and evolve them over time to reduce the risks of game development.
What was missing
Besides talking about the latest technical advances in CPUs, GPUs the conference lacked any news or visions of future interface for playing games. Everybody seemed fixed on the status quo using games-controllers, keyboards and mice. Location aware and augmented reality games, with posible new interfaces on mobiles have not been mentioned at all.
Most of the talks should posted as podcast in the coming days or weeks as it has been in the previous years.
