Episode 52 – Swapping your Battery in 90 Seconds

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While many people are taking the day off in the U.S. to recover from all the sounds of the fireworks, the Michael’s take the time to check out some new glasses which you can wear via your iPad.

We then look at how a blog post by Ramin Shokrizade over at Gamasutra, where he discusses the tips and tricks that Free to Play game designers use to get money from players. We decide it would be put to much better use if we can take these techniques and use them to help business and employees improve their skills and efficiencies. Can you identify who will use a game for the best outcome verses those who may just be using it to pass time? What about how some games or businesses use progress gates to help self select players. When do you decide not to play any more? We answer all of these questions.

We then look at how Tesla is changing the rules in how long it takes to tank up your electric car! Will this help change the buying behaviors of car shoppers?

Finally, we want to hear about how you think gaming can be used to help more young women and girls become engaged in Engineering and Science. We’ll be talking about it next week on Games At Work dot Biz!

Show Links:
Glasses iPad App
Michael M’s Glasses
Michael R’s Glasses
IBM Virtual Universe Community
Ian Smith on Twitter
The Top F2P Monetization Tricks by – Ramin Shokrizade
Simpsons Tapped Out
Star Wars the Old Republic
Dungeons and Dragons Online
Dan Ariely – Predictably Irrational
Under Armour – Michael’s favorite shirt
Lego iOS super heroes!
Southpark – Make Love not Warcraft
Swapping out your Battery in no time!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:25 — 18.7MB) | Embed

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Episode 51 – Tea. Bojangles. Hot.

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Dan Brown's Inferno

Dan Brown’s Inferno

Phaedra and Michael M riff on a number of topics, ranging from Dan Brown’s most recent book to embeddable computing games.  The premise of Dan Brown’s Inferno, which focuses on the rapidly expanding human population on Earth provides a launchpad for thinking about how games have helped people work through very difficult situations.  Phaedra mentions that the recently discovered 3 super earths could be a solution.

Mobile isn’t just something you can do with your thumb.  While today’s mobile devices are ones that you hold in your hand, as in a smartphone or tablet, it is easy to imagine that the interface and interaction will be via voice, gesture or thought in the near future.  With this in mind, Michael and Phaedra imagine what games might be like in 5 years, when games may take advantage of embeddable and wearable computing.  Phaedra postulates that MMO-style mobile games will be the rage, with people within a certain radius will be flagged as a “level 25 mage” coming up the escalator next to you.  Michael adds that a subdermal computing device may vibrate to alert you to the presence of that character in the game, and Phaedra adds that Google Glass may show that person as the character.  Gazoom!  Laser tag where you use your body to shoot, and you would feel it based on the devices that you are wearing.  Holographic gameboards to play chess in thin air.  People acting out stories, movies, books together in the same space, or in specially designed rooms hundreds of miles away from one another.  The future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades!

We are just delighted to have had you dialed our way.  You can find us on G+, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and much more.  Please friend, tweet, comment or even email us topics you would like to hear us discuss.

Selected show links

Dan Brown’s Inferno — http://www.danbrown.com
Super Earths — http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/06/packed-star-system-may-have-three-habitable-super-earths/
Bojangles — http://www.bojangles.com
In-n-Out Burger — http://www.in-n-out.com
Contact lenses as human augmented computing from DogearNation e119 — http://dogearnation.com/2009/09/06/dogear-nation-episode-119-heebie-jeebies/
Games for Change Conference — http://www.gamesforchange.org
Ian Bogost — http://bogost.com
Interview with Ian on e17 — https://gamesatwork.biz/2012/08/26/episode-17-things-are-weirder-than-expected/

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:22 — 28.2MB) | Embed

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Podcasts and patents

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A few weeks ago, both Michael M and Michael R came across the same content about a challenge to podcasts which could change the way many of us provide and receive our content. In the US there has been a claim that a specific patent from the mid 1990’s is underlying how most podcasts are created and distributed.

The podcast community has been asked to help find prior art to invalidate the patent in question. For more information please check out the following link. Also, if you are a Podcaster, please link to this article and ask your community to help out too.

Episode 50 – Sexy Time

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We begin our family show with a bit of risky fun including Oculus Rift going adult with an upcoming VR Adult Game called Wicked Paradise. We reminisce a bit about old school games Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Leisure Suit Larry, and are surprised to learn that an updated to Leisure Suit Larry is just around the corner. After a bit of fun discussion we get serious discuss the latest security test on Wall Street where they are playing War Games on their infrastructure. Can they benefit from something like Chaos Monkey? What if these threats could leverage Adaptive Learning? Can you? Of course you can, check out our discussion of Knewton – the adaptive learning platform. Also, check out our post on Google+ about game based learning.

Links:
Wicked Paradise
Oculus Rift Co-Founder Dies in Police Chase Incident
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
Infocom
Leisure Suit Larry
Wall Street plays Cyber Warfare!
Chaos Monkey
Gamers really do see reality differently!
Adaptive Learning
Behind the scenes of the worst parking ever!
Desert Island Jukebox
Phaedra – Guild Wars 2
Michael R – Mine Craft
Michael M – Guantlet
Breakout!
Punch Out

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:44 — 14.7MB) | Embed

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