Get Your Game On

A number of health journals have started reporting on a study out of Oxford where subjects suffered less flashbacks the week after watching a terrifying movie if they played Tetris immediately after the viewing. That's right, Tetris is a potential cure for post-traumatic stress disorder.

For those who entered the casual gaming aspect of the
ScreenBurn at SXSW Game Design Challenge, this article should help you hold your head up high against all those story-hyped console games. I wonder what Dr. Julie Ratner's panel on
Funologists would to say about that?

Continuing our discussion from yesterday, 1UP reports that Graham Joyce has agreed to write the story for Doom 4. For those unfamiliar with his work, Joyce is a British author who has received many awards, including the British Fantasy Award, Imaginaire Award and the World Fantasy Award. Did I mention that he's British? 1UP wonders how much potential there is for an FPS about a lone space marine fighting the denizens of hell, but it worked okay at the end of Alien and Predator.

For a gaming example, SXSW will have the Deep Focus marketing folks scheduled to discuss their plan for EA's Dead Space, which involved such story-building elements as a comic book and prequel DVD.

Image Source: id Software

Few days give such a clear view of how vast the video game landscape has become as today. First up, the Writers' Guild of America for 2008's announced its nominees best game. The nominees include a number of franchise pieces like Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, Fallout 3, Star Wars: the Force Unleashed, and Tomb Raider: Underworld. Joining all the franchises was Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble.

On the other side of the spectrum, however, a game with no real scripting topped $1 billion in sales, as the Guitar Hero series (and its admittedly Grammy-laden catalog) crossed the threshold in a record-setting 26 months.

Not to be caught on the outside of this pitched battle between music and storytelling, SXSW will feature talks including Nabeel Hyatt's Are Music Games the New iTunes? and James Milward's The Future of Visual Storytelling Is Interactive – Or Is It?

Image Source: Red Octane

CNN ran an article this week on the personality types of entrepreneurs. You know, those who might sign up for Accelerator looking for their idea to become the next Twitter. Or those dedicated freelancers and artists who signed up for the ScreenBurn at SXSW Game Design Challenge (results coming soon!) looking to create the next Fallout 3 or World of Warcraft or Tetris.

"You need to be in denial or in ignorance about the huge challenges you face," Kawasaki, the former Apple Computer executive and alltop.com founder, told CNN, "You have to believe that it wouldn't be hard for you to succeed."

That's what we're here for, to help you get your denial on and succeed. Just take a look at Joel DeYoung's panel, Being Indie and Successful in the Video Game Industry.

You know a great idea when it starts popping up everywhere you look. Take the idea of low or no code game design as a classic example. Microsoft has announced Kodu an upcoming application for the Xbox 360 that will allow users to design their own basic games with little to no programming. USAToday reports that Kodu uses image-based coding to bring to life a variety of characters and objects. All in all, it seems the application will at least resemble LittleBigPlanet for the PlayStation 3.

Not to let consoles have all the fun, those who recall Microsoft's BizSpark Ignition party last November might remember Gendai Games, which is working on a similar low code system for designing iPhone games called GameSalad.
Looks like this is a hot idea that just might come down to the best platform. Which almost certainly means the Facebook version is just around the corner.

What might SXSW have on topic this March? Raven Zachary's panel, iPhone: The New Gaming Platform, and Tess Snider's So You Want to be a Game Programmer…could have a few ideas on how this latest hot idea shakes out in the end.

Image Source: Microsoft

Stanford professor, digital copyright reform activist, and SXSW alum Lawrence Lessig popped into my television screen last night to take on Stephen Colbert.

Lessig was there to promote his new book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Remix offered Lessig a chance to tote new commerce as arenas that allow the free mixing of ideas rather than the isolating of existing works via copyright. He even commented on Colbert's own Blue Screen Challenges as an excellent example of making money from the forum of convergence, even if the content is free.

Of course, we at ScreenBurn know full well the beauty of user-generated mods, but can't help wondering how Lessig's view on copyright might affect Susan Wu's talk on Virtual Goods or Steve Swedler's panel, How Social Networks are Killing the Revolution.

Some interesting ideas are floating around as March draws near.

The Hearst Corporation, via subsidiary UGO, has acquired 1UP in a deal announced yesterday. Lots of competing voices talking about this move, but you can read the UGO announcement and the thoughts of 1UP editor Sam Kennedy, respectively.

The move offers an infusion of talented gaming writers for Hearst, while also providing a powerful media company to back the current staff at 1UP. Hearst clearly sees this as a new media move since one causality of the merger will be the end of venerable magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly.

However, thankfully, the digital presses—and the related posting threads—will continue to go on!

Image Source: 1UP.com