Author Archive

Wow, AllAboutSymbian has just put up a really interesting article which gives their perspective on the challenges and opportunities for the next generation of N-Gage. The article lays out some past successes (N-Gage Arena, first party games, and the marketing of Pocket Kingdom), some problems, and how they think we are mitigating some of those problems. Apart from being an excellent and objective article, it also provides a pretty good overview of how the next generation of N-Gage gaming is going to work, i.e. it’s going to work across different Nseries devices and other Nokia S60 devices.

The one thing they were highly critical of in the article was the continuing use of the N-Gage brand name, which they gave some pretty well thought out reasons for. I’m not sure it’s quite as black and white as they laid it out in the article, I think perceptions change with experience and if we can provide a great experience what the brand means will change.

BTW the guy behind the success of Pocket Kingdom, Scott Foe will be speaking at GDC, check him out if you get the chance. I’ll be there as well but not speaking, but I might be blogging about stuff going on there.

Our good friends from north of the border have created a really awesome online ad campaign that involves some online gaming, and in fact the idea is that it’s your left hand competing with your right to see who will control the phone It’s called Push to Start:

I know it’s not next gen gaming but it’s a really fun campaign. What do you think “eh”.

The multimedia group is doing a survey that will help develop the next generation of the Nokia Podcasting application. There is also an update to the existing podcasting application so it will run on the N95 if your lucky enough to have one

Tip of the hat

This is an interesting presentation from Shufflebrain that talks about game mechanics in the context of social media (web sites like myspace and youtube). What they are saying is that aspects of rich social web sites like myspace and youtube are kind of like a game, in the fact that you are collecting, trading, getting “points” etc. Really interesting stuff, especially if your helping design a web site to support a game platform

Anyway, the aspects of game mechanics they break down in the presentation are:

1. Collecting

2. Points

3. Feedback

4. Exchanges

5. Customization

Tip of the hat