Entries Tagged 'Practical information' ↓

These days we have an information explosion and it is difficult to keep up. In fact it is remarkably easy to totally miss something of importance to only find out months later. To help there are metasites like Google news and Digg that sort through everything to tell you what is important.

But now we have a further step up the evolutionary tree, a metasite of metasites. With a load of other important sites thrown in for good measure. It is called popurls and it really is rather neat.

Now this can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing. It is a good thing in that you can get a view of the web in minutes that previously would have taken possibly hours. The bad thing is that it presents you so many juicy stories, so many opportunities for knowledge, that the temptation is always there to drill down for more detail. And then you find that you have lost a day!

The second site is something we have desperately needed. Basically the rate of change has become so fast that many people you work with have missed out on various whole lumps of technology. Countless times I have had to explain what a wiki is, or a blog, or bluetooth or whatever. And of course there are gaps in my own knowledge. And I don’t know where they are until, embarrassingly, I need them.

So  Wired Magazine’s Geekipedia is a brilliant idea. They describe it as: People, Places, Ideas and Trends You Need To Know Now. I wish this had been around to get people to use in the past. And reading it has certainly filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge. This really is something you can point the people you work with at so that everyone is up to speed.

So do you know anything as useful as these. If so why don’t you use the comments to tell us?

Improving Game Marketing: The Game Purchase Process From A Consumer’s Point Of View

Frank N. Magid Associates, Inc.  MI6 conference,  June 28, 2006, still recent enough to contain much that is valid.

2008 MI6 conference details.

For many years now the movie industry has put a lot of work into the quality of your cinema going experiences. They have used technology to ensure that the picture and sound quality is consistent and accurate. So that everything that you see and hear is exactly as the studio intended. And they use this authenticity as a marketing tool.

Now it is possible for us in the games industry to go some way to ensure that our customers have as authentic an experience as possible. What I am talking about here is using technology to calibrate all the monitors in a studio to give a perfect image. So the game looks like it’s makers intended. Obviously you are still relying on the calibration of the customer’s monitor. But at least you are half way there and you know that if the customer has their monitor set correctly they will see the game exactly as it was seen under development and so exactly as the development team wanted. Of course keen gamers can use the same technology themselves.

The technology is the SpyderTV PRO™ 2007 from Datacolor of  Lawrenceville, NJ, USA and consists of a piece of test equipment and some software.  This scientifically measures contrast, brightness, colour, tint, colour temperature presets and cuts/gains so you can quickly and easily calibrate every monitor in the studio to perfection. Then you will know what your game really looks like! Here is a review.

Remarkably the Spyder only costs $1199, so this is not an affordability issue.

Of course this low price means that keen gamers can buy a Spyder themselves to set up their own televisions and monitors. This means that they will see a game exactly as that game’s designers saw the game when they were developing it (as long as the developers used a Spyder). A really nice level of authenticity.

So do you think this is a cheap way to getting a great technical feature that you can use to help you market your games? Or just another toy for your tekkies to play with?

Social networking is a massive and amazing phenomenon of our times. The statistics are staggering with about 100 major services. Friendster has 47 million members, hi5 has 50 million, MySpace a massive 192 million and even the upmarket Facebook has 34 million. And for business folks there is Linkedin. I was told about this at the beginning of this year (a lifetime ago in the social networking world) by a new media consultant friend and so eventually joined. Since then it has pretty much doubled in size, currently to over 13 million members.

For business networking it is like a golfclub, multiplied by several thousand. You can put your CV up on your profile, or not, it is up to you (I have). You very quickly build a series of links to people you know, people they know (2nd degree) and people they know (3rd degree). You can then use these links to find jobs, people and business opportunities. You can use the search tools to re connect with former business associates and schoolmates which is very useful. Most of the members are senior executives, MBA graduates etc as per the intentions of the site. But the games industry seems to have hijacked it and everybody has joined, from QA to CEO. Just type your company into the People search and you will be suprised who is in.

Linkedin members seem to either be very conservative and gradually build a group of people they know well or they are totally promiscuous and just link like crazy on the basis of that is what it is there for. Some say that it is Pokemon for grownups. Being a contrarian I went for a mixed approach. I could have ticked the box of every Codemasters person current or past, but didn’t. On the other hand I did connect to some super linkers to get the maximum connections. So my current statistics are 1st degree 204, 2nd degree over quarter of a million and third degree over 4 million. So I am connected to about a third of everyone on Linkedin, you can find my page here and if you want to link to me please do.

Some people are amazingly promiscuous, Ron Bates has over 34,000 first degree links!! So if you link to him it gives you a massive network in one go. A list of the most promiscuous can be found here and just linking to a few will quickly get you past 3 million total links. However after that you get diminishing returns as they are all circle linked to each other. There is a feature you can use when you become a paid up member of Linkedin called OpenLink Network which allows for a much higher level of promiscuity. People who are in this will link to anyone and usually have their email address in their profile (I have) so you can link to them as an “other” . Once you have this you can use the people search intelligently to find and link to people you don’t know. Tick the OpenLink only box in the search, ask for the results to be in number of connections order and put Computer Games as the industry. This will give you a list of the most promiscuous linkers in our industry. Link to a few of these and a few other similar searches and you will very quickly be linked to pretty much the whole industry!! Obviously if you are linked to me you can link to the OpenLink members on my list without having to become a paid up member!

 Something like this is very useful for the recruiters but the way it is structured keeps them pretty much out of your hair and, lets face it, if they are any good at their job they already have your phone number!

So if you have any views on Linked in why not share them by replying here?