Episode 34 – One Way Ticket to Mars

You too can apply for the one way ticket to Mars by participating in the www.mars-one.com other worldly event.  You need to be ready to leave planet Earth, for good.  By round three of the selection process, the TV audience, just like on American Idol, will select the group of four pioneers to travel to Mars.  There have been over 1,000 applications already, before any announcement was even made!  This is a novel way to select our future interplanetary pioneers by leveraging entertainment for funding & publicity.  Michael M and Phaedra imagine other such games that could be use to … Continue reading

Episode 28 – Dating Flashmob

Michael and Phaedra express their love of martial arts, and how they don’t mind deceiving themselves in the least, by gaining cardio exercise benefits while doing something inherently fun.  “Dirt runs faster than I do” says Phaedra, thinking that zombies chasing her would be a great motivator to run even faster!  Talk about living in the undead moment!   Phaedra and Michael talk about a wide variety of alternate reality games (ARGs), from the recently started Google Niantic Project, to the stolen Audi (from 2006 if you can believe that!) to the MIT Game Lab’s Smithsonian game.   Then, the … Continue reading

Episode 26 – Business Process Management and Immortality

Phaedra and Michael M, missing Michael R, have a very rare in person walk through memory lane conversation on how the Innov8 game was used to help explain Business Process Modeling, and how rapidly it was adopted buy universities all over the world.  Such repurposing first person shooter and then later real time strategy game engines in support of marketing and understanding BPM was highly successful in many ways. Phaedra expanded on the subject by commenting that now, such process optimization games are being used to help expose the optimized new processes as a byproduct of gameplay, by how the … Continue reading

Episode 22 – Play for Free on Free to Play

Phaedra and Michael M discuss free to play game economics — both from the game designer and the game player perspective as well as how this changes when the game is focused on individual paying players vs larger enterprises as the target market.  With micropayments for in-game purchases being the revenue source for free to play games, Phaedra mentions that at the recent Game Developers Conference that free to play games can be more profitable than $50 boxed games.  Michael shares that he likes to avoid such in-game purchases, hence the title of the show.  🙂   Cross genre gameplay … Continue reading