Seth Priebatsch, the CEO of SCVNGR, a company developing an interesting eponymous location-based gaming platform, gave a talk at TED recently. He covered some interesting ground, including a few game design patterns with in-game and real-world examples. If you’re as interested in this stuff as I am, it’s worth 12 minutes of your time:
Is it [...]
Back in March, I posted my Thoughts on Titanium, which we were using at the time to develop Texas State’s iPhone application. Since that time, we’ve become increasingly frustrated with the system, and have finally decided to leave it behind and rewrite the application in a combination of native Objective C code and HTML/CSS/Javascript.
This isn’t [...]
This has been a fairly quiet summer for us. We’ve had no huge adventures, as we’ve recently had to replace both a minivan and our home HVAC system, leaving us with very little money for substantial trips. I have, however, had the chance to take each of our children out for a day on the [...]
Ah, the blessed hour between the time I wake up and the rest of the house slips free of sleep.
Quiet. Peace. A chance to read, to write, to meditate, to pray, and — a wonder! — not just hold back entropy, but to make a little progress against it. Worship by making breakfast tacos and [...]
At the University where I work, there’s always a ton of Professional Development activity going on around campus, most of which is centered on training sessions for which people can register. That has always been an arduous, labor-intensive process, with real live humans handling every aspect of managing those registrations — reporting on class sizes, [...]
Back in the early days of digital cameras, I bought a Kodak DC220 camera. By today’s standards, this camera is wholly unremarkable: 1MP resolution, 2x optical zoom, and a funny shape. But it had one feature that stood out, and which modern cameras entirely lack: a scripting language. Anybody with a modicum of technical acumen [...]
Kathy and I spent this past weekend down in San Antonio to celebrate our 15th anniversary. We had considered traveling farther afield in recognition of the significance of the milestone, but after recently replacing both our van and our home’s air conditioning system, we decided that something more modest would be in order. Since we [...]
At long last, the official Texas State University iPhone App is released!
The team brainstormed and prototyped the original version as a learning exercise at the beginning of the year, but once Marketing got wind of it, it quickly became a high-priority project. I’m really proud of my crew, who have all stepped up and contributed [...]
I wrote a piece about a year ago called Workplace Motivation and Game Mechanics which summed up some of my ideas for bringing some of the compelling character of video games to the office. Since then, some much smarter people have been doing some thinking and experimenting with similar ideas.
Jane McGonigal gave a terrific talk [...]
I’ve had intermittent access to an iPad for about two weeks now through work, and finally feel like I have a grasp on what it is, what it’s good at, and what it lacks.
First off, the iPad doesn’t do everything. It’s not a full-on replacement for a computer. In fact, you can’t even get it [...]
