Play Perfect Balance, a free online game on Kongregate
http://www.kongregate.com/games/ttursas/perfect-balance/
Charlie's Diary: LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login_2009_keynote_gaming_in_t.html

Charlie Stross waxes on the future of gaming from the perspectives of technological progress, social change, and you. "I don't want to predict what we end up with in 2020 in terms of raw processing power; I'm chicken, and besides, I'm not a semiconductor designer. But while I'd be surprised if we didn't get an order of magnitude more performance out of our CPUs between now and then — maybe two — and an order of magnitude lower power consumption — I don't expect to see the performance improvements of the 1990s or early 2000s ever again. The steep part of the sigmoid growth curve is already behind us. Now that I've depressed you, let's look away from the hardware for a minute... Let's consider the consequences of ubiquitous terabit per second wireless data. The quiet game-changing process underneath the radar is going to be the collision between the development of new user interfaces and the build-out of wireless technologies."

Charles Stross predicts the future of technology and gaming

"It's exactly like a leaderboard in a game, where you want to have the bragging right of being on top, so you work harder at getting better," says Steffen Walz, a game theorist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Walz says governments worldwide are hiring designers to create games that encourage healthier behavior; he himself is creating one, where teenagers will run around their city with GPS-equipped mobile phones, unlocking prizes by visiting different locations.

using rewards & tracking to encourage everyday behaviours

"Games create drama and excitement," as Jane McGonigal, one of the leading thinkers in the field, told the crowd at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. "We've done that for years with videogames, and now we can apply that thinking to the rest of life."

Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can attach to e-mail they write. If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent's Outlook inbox. Reeves figured this would encourage people to send less e-mail: Those who are parsimonious would wind up with lots of tokens, which means when they really have something to say, they can load it up with tokens and make sure it'll get through. Sure enough, that's what happened. When a work group at IBM tried out Attent, messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal. E-mail overload ceased to be a problem.

Sid Meier's Rules http://bit.ly/atPXx (via @newsycombinator) [from http://twitter.com/tadej/statuses/1715393349]

Source of Sid's famous "double or half it" rule.

Double it or Cut it by Half One Good Game is Better than Two Great Ones ...

Rules to game design by Sid Meier

"If a unit seems too weak, don’t lower its cost by 5%; instead, double its strength. If players feel overwhelmed by too many upgrades, try removing half of them. In the original Civilization, the gameplay kept slowing down to a painful crawl, which Sid solved by shrinking the map in half. The point is not that the new values are likely to be correct - the goal is to stake out more design territory with each successive iteration."

David Rosen of Wolfire Games presents design lessons from 2D Boy's World of Goo in a youtube video.

aky way to have higher image compression ratios. That’s completely right, which is funny, since that was a case of a technical limitation that actually caused the game to look better with more depth. Very perceptive, thumbs up!”

Cool gra ;]

Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular Facebook Games era.

The not so hidden psychological traps in social gaming. And where it could lead (if the world wasn't such a messy place).

Jesse Schell talks about future of gaming

see page 2 for "frameworks-for-business" AND "jobs-hiring": Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to everything expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don't even have two of them: - Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day); - Complexity (so it's not mind-numbing repetition); - Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

5 addictive mechanics explained.

Now, there's no way they can create enough exploration or story to keep you playing for thousands of hours, so they had to change the mechanics of the game, so players would instead keep doing the same actions over and over and over, whether they liked it or not. So game developers turned to Skinner's techniques. This is a big source of controversy in the world of game design right now. Braid creator Jonathan Blow said Skinnerian game mechanics are a form of "exploitation." It's not that these games can't be fun. But they're designed to keep gamers subscribing during the periods when it's not fun, locking them into a repetitive slog using Skinner's manipulative system of carefully scheduled rewards. Why would this work, when the "rewards" are just digital objects that don't actually exist? Well...

I believe there is plenty more that can be discovered about pacing in games -- certainly some more scientific studies of heart rate, etc whilst playing games might unearth some real revelations about what makes the pace in games so emotionally involving and also what simply does not work.

game design possibilities: speed, tempo, threat, carrot/stick, chase

Interesting look at level pacing

Not too long ago, Jordan Mechner and Eric Chahi were chatting with Eric Viennot, a French creator and writer. Jordan Mechner single-handedly pioneered a type of cinematic videogame with Karateka in 1984 and Prince of Persia in 1989. Eric Chahi similarly single-handedly created 1991's Another World -- known in the U.S. as Out of this World -- a painterly cinematic videogame in a similar tradition. Jordan Mechner had the following advice to share, I think it's great advice.

Hmm these make Nokia ngage games look sexier.

Simply the 10 best iPhone/iPod touch games so far!

Ragdoll Blaster

Here's a list of the ten games that every iPhone or iPod touch owner should have. If you're missing any, download it now so you're not humiliated the next time somebody asks to check out your iPhone.

A game design post pertaining to implementing sword fighting in games

An interesting model for making duelling fun.

Via Wilson Miner (platte).

e paper variants going back to the 1800s that hide illustrations in the little curlicues of the margins. And there are new videogame versions like Mystery Case Files. For thousands of years, we've derived satisfaction from searching and uncovering—and we still do each time we turn up lost car keys.

brief description of the top addictive games and why there addictive.

Short takes on some addictive puzzle games.

on tetris: "A timeless classic. Fitting pieces together feeds the same pleasure center of the brain that gets off on packing a suitcase really well or squeezing all your groceries into a single bag."

Top 50 Best Game Design Blogs - http://tr.im/p2dW - Interesting and useful list of resources. (via @smashingmag) [from http://twitter.com/tadej/statuses/2238492287]

Interssante #socialgaming insights uit #Farmville “@ProximityWW: Insights on social gaming provided by Zynga http://bit.ly/dePTnk”

Every web experience designer can learn from the tactics deployed in FarmVille to engage members over the long term. Here are 8 tactics you should include...

Designing compelling user experiences

RT @philmichaelson 8 Ways FarmVille Designs for Engagement | Making sense of good and bad content http://bit.ly/bqa9BM