Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: September 23, 2010
A new scheme called Walk to School, launched in the UK, is encouraging schoolchildren to walk to work in return for metal badges. The programme aims to encourage schoolchildren to walk, rather than be driven or take public transport, in a dual effort to combat obesity and traffic congestion. The reward sub-scheme is called “Walk [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: September 12, 2010
Facebook Stops Counting Short Impressions From Facebook’s announcement titled “Higher quality impressions”: We are continuously improving our advertising platform. Today, we are excited to announce new, more stringent impression quality policies that ensure you are receiving the highest value from your advertising solutions on Facebook. Because Facebook users are extremely active on the site, sometimes [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: July 24, 2010
Barely a new Android handset comes onto the market without a raft of reviews and comparisons as to whether it’s better than the current iPhone. There are over two million Google search results for “android iphone comparison”. Invariably the comparisons focus on lists of features such as screen resolution, battery life, applications etc etc which, [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: July 10, 2010
I’m an addict of the biggest bike race in the world: the Tour de France. I’m a relatively new convert as this is only my third year of following it avidly, but my late arrival to cycling fandom is mostly down to my not appreciating just how subtle and varied an event it is. If [...]
Posted by: Peter on: June 16, 2010
Great article about skill in gaming. Let’s make a graph. The horizontal axis is player skill. On the far left is no skill – just random button-pushing. On the far right is perfect videogame godhood, always doing exactly the correct thing at the correct time in the correct way. The first time you play a [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: June 4, 2010
There’s an excellent presentation on SlideShare called “Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games“. It ties into a lot of the debate about whether adding points and badges to a task is enough to “gameify” it, but rather than delivering a straight “no, it isn’t” (which seems obvious) the presentation looks [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 27, 2010
Fun gaming story of the day from the BBC: Gamblers spent thousands of pounds on a Blackpool hoopla stall – unaware the odds of winning were 2,600 to one. The pictures show the wondrous prizes on offer for any lucky winner. I’m not 100% sure the term “hoopla” has crosses the Atlantic particularly well, but [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 26, 2010
The Show’s Format There’s a new game show on this week called “The Million Pound Drop“. Put in its simplest terms, the idea is to give 2 people a million pounds and then watch them lose it all over the course of 8 questions. Here’s the trailer: The structure is as follows: The 2 players, [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 21, 2010
FarmVille is leaking out into the real world with the launch of Farm Cash rewards for buying Green Giant vegetable produce. It’s an interesting link-up: buying vegetables in the real world can help you to build your virtual farm. My first impression was: what an amazing concept. Real-world farm produce tied to virtual-world farm produce. [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 12, 2010
Discussing online privacy is all the rage at the moment, largely driven by Facebook’s Open Graph and instant personalisation double-whammy, and exacerbated by security leaks in launch partners. Straightforward security bugs aside, it’s hard to disagree with some of Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas that sharing personal info online is becoming more, not less, acceptable to the [...]
