Tag: me

I was interviewed for the Playyoo blog

I was interviewed by Playyoo the other day

Most of you will prob­a­bly know I’m involved1 with this new mobile game com­mu­ni­ty called Playy­oo. I haven’t blogged about it here explic­it­ly because most of my con­tri­bu­tions so far are still being devel­oped and will hope­ful­ly hit the inter­net around Decem­ber. I have an excuse to talk about it now though, because recent­ly I was inter­viewed by the peo­ple of Playy­oo for their blog. Read about my thoughts on the role of social­i­ty in (mobile) gam­ing and how that will work in Playy­oo’s meta-game, as well as what I think about casu­al games and the unique game design oppor­tu­ni­ties for mobile.

A quote from the inter­view:

What does the term ‘casu­al game’ mean to you?

‘Casu­al,’ to me, says some­thing about the lev­el of atten­tion and engage­ment that a play­er has (or is required to have) with the game. For me as a design­er, casu­al games pro­vide inter­est­ing chal­lenges. It might seem sim­ple to cre­ate these casu­al games, but they’re actu­al­ly quite tricky to pull off, or pull off well, that is. From a game design per­spec­tive, I think it’s more chal­leng­ing to pull off a high qual­i­ty causal game than yet anoth­er first-per­son shoot­er game. 

Read the rest of the inter­view over at the Playy­oo blog.2

  1. They’ve hired me to do game and inter­ac­tion design. I have been work­ing on mobile games, a game cre­ation tool, and a web-based meta-game. [↩]
  2. Thanks to Alper Çuǧun for the pho­to that’s in the post. [↩]

Signals from the Leapfrog offices

Or in oth­er words, what I’ve been up to, besides keep­ing myself busy over at Info.nl.

  1. Reboot 8 is shap­ing up to be anoth­er great con­fer­ence. I’m already look­ing for­ward to see­ing Matt Webb and Chris Heath­cote speak, among oth­ers. I’m also still think­ing about doing some­thing myself, the ques­tion is: what? 
  2. While we’re on the top­ic of con­fer­ences, make sure you don’t miss The Web and Beyond — the 10th annu­al SIGCHI.NL event. I’ve been help­ing with the organ­i­sa­tion and must say it’s promis­ing to be an inter­est­ing look at the web 2.0 phe­nom­e­non from an inter­ac­tion design perspective. 
  3. I have a heap of arti­cles and posts lying around wait­ing to be fed to my del.icio.us account (I actu­al­ly read all that stuff before both­er­ing you with it). Now to just find the time to tag them all – to think this stuff is sup­posed to have a low cog­ni­tive load! 
  4. Right after vis­it­ing Reboot 8 I’ll be off to beau­ti­ful Italy for some much need­ed R&R. Be sure to keep an eye on my Flickr pho­to­stream for slight­ly crap­py cam­er­a­phone shots of Napels, Rome, Flo­rence and Venice. Look­ing for­ward to that! 
  5. Final­ly, you may have won­dered about the “mar­tial arts enthu­si­ast” bit in this blog’s intro­duc­tion. Between all of the above I’m get­ting myself ready for some exam­i­na­tions in Take­da Ryu this sum­mer. When I get back from Vien­na, I hope to be a cer­ti­fied teacher’s assis­tant and sec­ond dan in Aiki­do. Wish me luck.
Now back to our reg­u­lar pro­gram­ming – death­ly silence while I get some more client work out the door.

Plazes can make you famous

Plazes logo

Well – sort of. Yes­ter­day I received a sur­prise vis­it at the office from guer­ril­la vlog reporter Marie-Claire. She’s doing a piece on plazes and decid­ed to vis­it some peo­ple who were online in a radius of 2 to 5 km. The inter­views will be post­ed on the site of Bright – Nether­lands’ own Wired-killer. Make sure you don’t miss my thought­ful com­ments on the many uses of everyone’s favourite geo-social service. ;-)