Tag Archives: Game Developers Conference


A ticket to play

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… Every year thousands of tech-seeking tourists cross the Golden Gate Bridge to attend events: the Game Developers Conference, Apple Keynotes, the Web 2.0 Summit – there’s an expo for everyone.

In such a tech-friendly town, it’s not surprising that computing is spreading into public spaces, affecting the way citizens interact with their urban environment. The first stop? That most boring of public places: the bus stop.

Routed to the stop

In late 2010 large touch screens were …

Tags: crowd crowdsourcing Game Developers Conference Golden Gate Bridge interface microwork san francisco Twitter Web 2.0 Summit widesourcing

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Science and the “Nobel” art of gaming

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… science fun. Back in November we blogged about Foldit, a freely-available online protein-folding game. Foldit players contribute directly to scientific discovery: the more proteins they fold, the closer scientists get to curing diseases like Alzheimer’s and AIDS.

Refusing to be out-innovated by mere protein professors, geneticists at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University have created EteRNA. EteRNA is another folding game: this time the goal is to help create the first large-scale …

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Madmen join the game

Posted on March 20, 2010 by Ville Miettinen

… spend a large portion of your free time fighting wars, racing cars or shooting monsters in a video game. In which case, you’ll have to take my word for the fact that just as in the real world, advertising is now pervasive in the virtual world of video games. While I’m not that avid a gamer anymore (I’ve spent the last 15 years in the games industry, and – like dealers of non-virtual drugs – I don’t get high on my own supply), my annual pilgrimage to the Game Developers Conference …

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Free from the chains: how crowdfunding is changing game development

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Tommaso De Benetti

… is now changing these rules.

Traditional publishers vs the crowd

Funding is a big issue for game developers because making good games costs money. A lot of money. Developing a decent downloadable game can cost up to $2M, while a high class retail product can easily blow out the budget to $40-50M. That’s not the kind of money you can ask the crowd for, right? Wrong. Apparently now, it is ($2m that is, not quite $40m… yet).

Double Fine, a company founded by Tim Schafer and employing …

Tags: Brian Fargo crowdfunding crowdsourcing Double Fine Productions Graphic adventure game Kickstarter Long Tail microtask microwork monkey island Ron Gilbert Tim Schafer

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GDC 2011: Angry birds, happy Finns

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

… screen, this time of year is exciting for other reasons: SXSW festival in Austin, and the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

This year I was sadly unable to attend SXSW because of other commitments (the organizers of SXSW refused to change its date for me on such short notice). With all that is currently happening in the gaming industry and the prominence of Finnish companies at the GDC, there was no way I was going to miss this as well.

Fringes in fashion

I was …

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