It’s been another great week. My Minecraft article gained a lot of attention, the Love Your Pirates article featured briefly on Reddit, and some previous posts were republished on Inside Social Games, Gamasutra and Gamesbrief. The blog broke over the 8,000 unique readers mark, but has fallen back a little to 7,700. This is due to the CityVille surge from last month falling out of the counting period. Subscribers are all up as well, with over 100 people each on Twitter and Facebook, 368 via RSS and 51 via Email. Welcome all!
I was travelling and working a lot in Ireland this week, so I couldn’t post as many in-depth pieces as normal. However it gave me more opportunity to think of the larger argument that I’m making with the book. I’m asking myself ‘If I were to give a TED talk, and needed to tell the What Games Are story in 18 minutes or less, what would that look like?’
This Week’s Posts
- Connections: This is the third part in the series on the engagement hierarchy. This part talks about what games need to do to become memorable rather than just amusements.
- Love Your Pirates: A widely read post, this talks about pirates not as enemies, but as potential allies. Seeding matters more than ARPU, and conversation gaps are far more damaging than sales gaps.
- Numina: Players often infer more in a game than is physically there, and these experiences are called numina. Numina exist on the periphery of a game (blink and you’ll miss them) but are the gateway to thaumaturgy.
- Little Wins: A small observation that I made while waiting for a bus. It’s on the role of wins in everyday life, wondering whether those wins are a way to understand game dynamics, and whether a game dynamic can be defined by the little wins it enables.
I’m travelling more next week, this time to the USA, so posts and comments will probably be interrupted for a few days. However worry not, I’ll be back!
The engagement hierarchy link has an extra "http//"
Posted by: Brian | 30 January 2011 at 02:05 PM
Thanks! Fixed now.
Posted by: Tadhg | 30 January 2011 at 04:36 PM