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The problem with gamification of course, was that the people who were trying to do it didn't know their games from their elbows. While the number of good brains in the gaming arena goes up every single day, there are still very few people really get what makes games tick in the first place - and that's just among people who make games professionally. People who work in marketing generally don't even understand how marketing works, let alone games, so once they'd attached their feeding tubes to it, gamification was never really going anywhere.

I bet Mary will, too...

I have something of a background in games myself (my Wikipedia page is largely about it), and so much of the second-hand nonsense spouted by marketing folks about gamification pains me.

That bizarre image of our host dressed up as the most basic of the Angry Birds had a purpose: it was setting the scene for the arrival of Mikael Hed, CEO, Rovio, the people who are stealing away our lives in avian/porcine conflict…

There was a little background on the game, and its roots in sketches for an entirely different game, and its growth to ubiquity. The differing business model of Android versus iPhone apps seems to have been as much an access of accessibility as anything. On iPhone, you have to have an iTunes account to manage the device, so that's an easy route to the market. The app store ecosystem is more complex, and the free-plus-ads seems to make it easier to get the game onto people's devices - and it was a gamble that has paid off financially for them.

It's interesting, because as much as Angry Birds has become a cultural phenomenon, there hasn't been much evidence that Hed has a clear idea why that might be. Even the sell-out success of soft toys based on the game seems to have caught them by surprise. If anything, they seem to be leaving it to partners to build revenue from merchandise, while they continue to expand the platforms the game is available on. For example, he's taking about consoles and downloadable content as a major target for next year.

Fun talk, but in the end, Angry Birds is Angry Birds, and phenomenons are rarely repeatable.

Other Bloggers

• Rachel has a more detail account of what Hed said.
• Tara picks out some of the staggering gaming stats

The presentation that most people have mentioned to me as changing the way they think about something was Joi Ito's talk on gaming. Me? I loved it, but then the talk was about World of Warcraft, and I'm a player. ("Hi, my name's Adam Tinworth and I'm a night elf druid").

Ito started of with a crowd-pleasing assault on the perception of gaming in society as a whole.

"We still say 'addicted to games'," he said. "We don't say 'addicted to church' if people go to church every week."

He's quite right - it's a non-useful way of viewing the situation. It's rooted, he explained, in the way we use language around the internet, at least in the English-speaking world. We have this word "cyberspace", which implies a separation between the online world and the "real" world. We have "real" friends and "virtual" friends.

"For kids the internet is ubiquitous. It's not something you log into or out of," said Ito. And, to them, gaming is certainly not the "masturbation-like activity" many adults seem to view it as. For one thing, people are often interacting with existing friends in the game...

So what is it?

When your teenage years comes back to haunt you:

Found via Workbench

Technorati Tags: adverts, d&d, dungeons&dragons, roleplayinggames, rpgs

For those of a geeky persuasion:

Gamethink is a new gaming blog of impeccable pedigree. It should be a great read, once it builds up a head of steam.

The All New! All Different! Howling Curmudgeons takes a combination of comic-esque typography, a fun attitude and some insightful writing and applies it to the comics world - with both fists! Better fun than most comics blogs.

A voice from the distant past on Wraith-l resurfaces to reply to my comments on RPG reviewing made some time ago.

Lea responds to my ideas thus:

Adam argues for "a single source of good, edited, commissioned reviews run by skilled people and provided by a team of experienced gamers and writers." I'm not sure this is practical. It takes time and effort to deliver the kind of analysis that Adam wants, something that few experienced gamers and writers, with many other calls on their time, would be able to commit to.

That's not to say that few people could or would deliver good reviews or criticism. The problem with Adam's proposal, I think, is that it puts the onus on a small circle of people. If the community wants "Basements and Bugbears" reviewed, the editors have to commission someone to review "Basements and Bugbears." This is hard work for both the editors and the reviewer

My good friend Bruce Baugh says what really needs saying about Call of Cthulhu

Gaming Reflections, 1: Call of Cthulhu

Rock on, Bruce.

Bryant (of Population: One) has set up a new group gaming blog, which has got off to a good start:

The 20' By 20' Room: Welcome!

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to talk about reviews. You see, a good friend of mine, Mr Bruce Baugh, is busy undergoing a firestorm of mixed messages on his latest project, the D20 edition of Gamma World. This is an almost inevitable side effect of the internet age. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, true enough. What most people fail to realise is that they are not entitled to have that opinion taken seriously. The ability to bash out a few hundred barely coherent words and post them on the internet does not automatically make your opinion worthy. That respect has to be earned.

How do you get this respect? To answer that question, let's take a little step back into the past.