Game design. We love games. Games are everywhere. And you know what? They’re interactive. Like people do things with a controller, and then the game does something different. We love that. We love interactivity. We love the back and forth. And we love thinking about this in terms of brands. Like when someone’s interacting with your brand, that’s interesting, right? And isn’t it interesting how this interaction is so much more than people just watching pictures in order?
Then there’s the amount of time people play games. Man, they spend a lot of time playing games. A lot of time playing a game, interacting with and maybe even thinking about your brand. That’s pretty cool. You don’t really get that as much with a quick hit viral video.
Casual games, puzzle games, silly games, massively multiplayer online games. Any games. Games in flash. Games on your iPod. Games on the XBox Live Arcade. Games here. Games there. Games everywhere. We love them, you love them, we love building them, and they are effective. And fun.
About a year-and-a-half ago we set out on an adventure with General Electric. Over the course of a few months we explored GE and blogged our observations and ideas. As we explored the different business units we started to realize that one of the things that ties GE together is that everyone works on problems that touch a lot of people but can be so large or abstract that it’s hard for even nerds like us to really comprehend the scale of what they are up to. It’s pretty hard to get your head around trillion dollar infrastructure projects, but it is really interesting, and its really important, and as we dug in, we started thinking about a new context to talk about this stuff.
While we were on the road we spent a bunch of time batting around ideas for how to solve this problem. One of the thoughts we had was to launch a “show’ for GE that explained the big problems they were out there tackling. Slowly, as we added more meat to the bones, what has become The GE Show began to emerge.
When we were thinking about a show we knew that we weren’t interested in doing it the way everyone else does (take what would be 30 minutes and fit on the big screen and make it three minutes in a small box). We spent a lot of time thinking about how to make a truly web-native show, creating modules with various types of interaction, in place of the segments that normally make up TV shows.
It’s with that approach that we’re super excited to announce the first episode of The GE Show is live and on the web. Our first episode tackles the world of healthcare, specifically hospitals, helping to illustrate the size, scale and complexity of these incredibly important institutions. The episode is made up of five different modules which take you from introducing the problem with an infographic to a game that helps show just how hard it is to allocate resources inside a hospital to a video segment that shows off some of work GE is doing in the space.
We’re hoping to launch a new episode every few weeks, with our next installment covering electric vehicles, so make sure to subscribe to stay updated when new ones come out (you’ll notice the button in the upper right corner on the episode). Awesome.
Check out the new Youtube Mash-up game for Google Chrome. It’s YouTube videos sliced with embedded Google, LastFM, Trends and Twitter apps to make for a pretty fun little game.
Confirmation that doing bad things in GTA Chinatown Wars is good for mankind :)
Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.
On a normal day I wake up, do my showering and hygene junk and stuff so I can look good for the day, and over breakfast I open up my computer to check my email, read my RSS feeds and various favorite websites, all while listening to some awesome god damn music. When I get home from work, I’ll usually check out what’s on Hulu or Netflix. On occasion I’ll also open up Photoshop to get some work done at home. As I thought about all of this over the past month, it struck me that for everything but Photoshop, the iPad can be my home computer.
A few days ago, while watching a number of people on the train to work all playing various games on their iPhones, it struck me: this platform is still very much in its infancy, and game developers have only begun to scratch the surface for what is possible. The games we are currently playing are the Duck Hunts of the platform, and perhaps that’s even too optimistic. We are playing Pong on these things. What will games look like in five years? I am far too excited to find out.
The same is true for this entire device. After my first day of having this in my hands to play with, it truly is the wonderful device we were promised. I sat up late last night watching Netflix streaming video in amazing video quality, and this AM I found an awesome recipe for brussels sprouts that I’m dying to make. All the while it hit me, this shift from mouse + keyboard + monitor as the devices you interact with, to hands + screen is honestly a larger shift that I think I anticipated. The mouse as a pointing device is no longer the abstraction for guiding you way to what you want, now you just touch and do. Interfaces become much more direct now. Current design models for sites out there rely on a user hovering their mouse over elements to create tool tips, drop down menus, and button states… this all needs to be rethought for devices like this. What are interfaces going to look like in fives years? I am far too excited to find out.
This device is far from perfect, but it certainly is awesome. Haters are gonna hate, but deep down, like the iPod nearly ten years ago, this is a huge change in how things are done. And so far, if this is just the first of many devices to come, well, the future is gonna be pretty wild. Marty McFly would be proud.
Now when is someone gonna invent the hoverboard, god damnit!
You know that Red Bull makes an energy drink. You may even know that Red Bull puts on those wild events where people drive shit off a dock into water. BUT did you know that Red Bull invented it’s own sport (Red Bull Air Race) or a helicopter that can do a back flip? Has two Formula 1 teams? Hosts a Cliff Diving world series? Could definitely take your dad in a fight? Throws the biggest world wide break dance competition? Made downhill full contact ice hockey racing a real thing? Probably not.
That was the problem for Red Bull online: diffused presence, minimal cross-pollination of their awesome properties, poor search, and no clean way to show off and share their sickness. The truth is, Red Bull is everywhere, and they wanted to show everyone who has ever taken a sip of their magical beverage what they mean by “Red Bull Gives You Wings”.
We spent the last few months working with Red Bull and just launched the new Redbull.com! It’s pretty fabulous really. We took all their different properties across the globe, housed them within one awesome CMS, made the site content driven, and got out of the way of all the sick content that you really want to see. Oh yeah, and it’s built in HTML (unlike their previous sites that had heavy use of Flash) so it’s now search friendly and easily shareable and trackable. Bitchin, right?
Take a look at the homepage. It’s built to be modular and highlight the best of the best. It even has a feed that is sortable by media type.
Scientists once decried my knowledge of mammoths as “very, very poor”. In fact, my entire knowledge of mammoths could be distilled down to a few simple bullet points:
They can be used as vacuum cleaners
They can be used as showers
They are pretty much not around anymore
Fortunately, this all changed when I had the privilege of helping some Barbarians on a project for the wonderful people at the San Diego Zoo. The Zoo has a brand new exhibit called Elephant Odyssey that teaches visitors about Asian elephants and their prehistoric ancestors, Columbian mammoths.
on August 17, 2010 at 01:48 PM
