-
Some pretty disturbing news from Sweden about youth gangs. (If you like me don’t read Swedish, Google does a pretty good job of translating this.) The article posits that the way kids get caught up in these gangs is through abusive games such as ‘slave deck’ but I think that is taking it too far. If there’s any play at work here, it’s young people mimicking the dog-eat-dog world of business. That might be a cynical reading of this piece, but there you have it. More likely than some evil ruleset subverting kids into becoming mafiosi.
-
“URBLOVE is a service that in an innovative way combines urban exploring and games, with user-created content. It is both a service for location based mobile games mainly in urban areas, as well as an online community where these games are distributed. On the web community users can create their own games and share their experiences with each other.” I had a chat with one of the girls behind Ozma recently and what I liked the most about the platform they’re building is the decidedly low-tech approach they’re taking. Urblove is text message driven, making it very accessible to young people who tend not to carry around iPhones and the likes.