I was very lucky in being able to see Jesse Schell at the Long Now Foundation last night. I won't be able to do his talk justice but they'll have the video up soon and the slides are below.
View more presentations from Jesse Schell.
He's a brilliant thinker about the impact of games on culture. He talked a lot about Gamepocalypse and continued from where he left off at DICE. Two things he talked about I thought were particularly brilliant:
DICE 2010: "Design Outside the Box" Presentation Videos - G4tv.com - Watch more Tech Videos at Vodpod.
1. There's money for the first person to make the first cheap waterproof screens that can go on a shampoo or shower gel bottle. He called it 'shamporn' and I bet Axe will do it.
2. He talked about the impending launch of the cloud based gaming site OnLive. He talked about how a lot of gamers were saying this would fail as they want the console to give lower latency in response, etc. But that misses the point. Most gamers (see explosion of Wii, social games, etc.) don't want technological perfection, they want a game that's good enough and is fun and social. So an offering that has inbuilt the ability to watch your friends play, have a community, etc. might actually be very big.
Anyway, a very smart man. I suggest you read his book. It's a different, and perhaps more culturally important, type of storytelling nowadays.
As someone who isn't a natural gamer, I found this book incredibly fascinating: http://www.amazon.com/Extra-Lives-Video-Games-Matter/dp/0307378705
It actually made me want to quit advertising and start working on video games. (Except for that whole blowing things up, blood-and-guts nonsense.)
Posted by: Jenny Nicholson | August 10, 2010 at 09:49 AM