Monthly Archives: February 2008

As always, GDC was a great experience. I highly encourage those of you who have never attended the conference to do so next year. This is especially true for students who are looking to break into the game industry — … Continue reading →

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Posted on February 26, 2008 by David J Edery

GDC Session: Advertising & Games (slides now available)

Posted on February 21, 2008 by David J Edery| 1 Comment

Thanks to everyone who happened to attend my GDC lecture. I’m really very flattered that we had standing room only, despite something like 25 other sessions taking place at the same time (several of which I would personally have liked to attend!)

For those who asked, please feel free to download my slides here.

Next-Gen did a brief writeup of the session, which is nice. They focused on the “in-game-ads” portion of the talk. One point that didn’t make it into the Next-Gen writeup, which I’d like to clarify, is that while highly-integrated ads are indeed very effective (when done right), non-integral ads (like virtual billboards) can also be effective when done right — just in a different way. The influence of non-integral ads is more subconscious, and is limited to “low information” messages (like logos and images.) Anyway, it’s all there in the slides. :-)

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Posted in Ads-in-Games

Games and Violence

Posted on February 12, 2008 by David J Edery| 11 Comments

As I mentioned several months back, my friend Ethan Mollick and I are writing a book tentatively titled For Fun and Profit: How Games are Transforming the Business World. As our publisher’s deadline approaches, I’d like to occasionally bounce early draft excerpts off of you all in hopes of getting useful feedback. And, to be honest, I find it difficult to maintain this blog and write my book simultaneously, so I’m cheating a little bit. :-)

My first draft excerpt has nothing to do with business, per se. It tackles the thorny issue of games and violence. Ethan and I feel that we cannot ignore this issue if we want our book to be taken seriously by a broad range of readers. But we also don’t want to get mired in the issue — after all, there are so many other things we need to cover! So we’ve tried to be brief, clear, and to the point. Tell me: did we succeed in getting the point across?

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Posted in Industry Issues, Legal / Politics, Social / Cultural

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LeapFrog has unveiled the $50 “Tag”, a plastic stylus that turns paper books into interactive playthings. It will be available this summer with an 18-volume library of children’s classics. Seems to me like a really neat learning tool for kids! … Continue reading →

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Posted on February 9, 2008 by David J Edery