Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Game Play’

In five days, Zynga raises $1.5M for Haiti via Facebook games

Zynga’s gamers have donated more than $1.5 million in the past five days for Haitian earthquake relief. They did so by making donations directly from within Zynga’s top four games on Facebook.

Zynga, the biggest maker of social games on Facebook, said that some 300,000 Zynga game players from 47 countries have purchased virtual goods inside the games, with all of the proceeds for the specific game item sales going to the U.N.’s World Food Programme. FarmVille users, including me, donated a total of $1 million. Users in FishVille, Mafia Wars, and Zynga Poker were also able to donate money. Donations were also promoted via all of Zynga’s games, which reach 227 million monthly active users.

The donations reinforce the notion that social networks such as Facebook are extremely well tuned for rallying people around causes. And Zynga’s integration of the donation into the actual game play makes it easy for players to do good while they’re having fun. In FarmVille, for instance, i bought some white corn seeds with real money for the benefit of Haitian relief. Meanwhile, I can now plant those sees in the game to grow crops and make virtual money faster than I could before. For more information, check out Zynga.org.

Read the whole story…

Pearltrees: A Design Interface for Remapping the Web

It’s rare to look at a bookmarking tool and feel convinced that it’s going to win a design award. Pearltrees is such a product. The French site offers us a new way to explore and contextualize the web. In what looks like a mind map structure, users collect “pearls” (links to articles, videos and web pages) and drag and drop them to form a body of knowledge that folds and expands upon itself. In an interview with Pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe, ReadWriteWeb found that company already has a loyal user base including our friends at ReadWriteFrance.

Sponsor

Said Lamothe, “We wanted a type of game play that was playful to use and map the web…and the fact that you can group and ungroup content easily means that you can re-catalogue it and keep it current.”

Rather than looking at the web as a series of linear pages, this service lets us build tree graphs of connecting arguments, share them and then break them at any time. Using a browser bookmarking tool, we can add and connect related pearls or ideas, place them within other pearls or start a new pearl tree (or train of thought). Rather than displaying a list of items, your pearls connect to your profile. You are literally the center of the universe and your thoughts follow you wherever you go.

Naturally, as a newly anointed God of information, other great thinkers will gravitate towards you. Shared pearls connect you to others and allow you to view their collections. From here you can choose your favorite content and omit the noise. From here you can email your pearls, embed them in your blog or broadcast them to Twitter and Facebook.

The Future of Touch Interfaces

Given the unique user interface of Pearltrees, Lamothe expects that the company will roll out feature releases and enhancements on an ongoing basis. Says the CEO, “Once we’ve launched the web interface, the potential of a touch product will be very exciting.”

At this point, I almost fell out of my chair thinking about the possibilities. Using Pearltrees in conjunction with a touch interface would be extremely practical. Rather than swiping down long lists of links to find articles, images or videos, users could tap on their desired pearl and follow the connectors to the information they wanted. Not only would this greatly improve the research experience, but it could also change device design.

For some reason, many touch interfaces mimic the experience of the first personal computers. We are offered a series of boxes from which to start our applications with little room for reorganization or prioritization. The Pearltrees model may prove to be the most efficient way to navigate period. To try the product register at pearltrees.com or click on ReadWriteFrance’s pearl below.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

iPhone TCG to charge $9.99 for in-app purchases

Filed under: Gaming, Software, iTunes, iPhone, App Store

Just the other day I was talking about how prices were all over the place for in-app purchases, and now here’s a company that’s just going all out with the microtransaction model (or macrotransaction, maybe, in this case). Urban Rivals is an online MMO trading card game, and they’re going to start selling packs of the cards directly within the game. And the pricing is interesting — you can buy one pack of three cards for 99 cents (same as the price of the game itself, though there will be a free version to play as well), or you can pick up 11 packs of those cards, 33 cards in total, for $9.99, almost ten times the price of the actual game.

This is an interesting case: the game itself already has a working model outside of the App Store, so they’ve already proven elsewhere that people will pay for this extra gameplay, not to mention that players of the iPhone game can play right alongside players on other platforms. And there’s an interesting twist with the game’s currency — outside of the iPhone, the game lets you either win currency which you can then use to buy cards, or buy the currency with real money and then buy cards with that. But Apple has apparently said no to ingame currency being sold for real money, so instead, Urban Rivals is selling cards during the in-app purchases, skipping the ingame currency completely.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not this will actually work — just because the game is successful outside the iPhone doesn’t mean it’ll work on Apple’s platform. But if in-app purchases of this kind do become a big deal, we might see other developers trying to come up with ways to sell content like this — for developers who feel that the App Store’s prices are too low, they may instead be able to come up with the funds they need through sizable in-app purchases.

TUAWiPhone TCG to charge $9.99 for in-app purchases originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

EVE Online unleashes Unholy Rage on in-game currency traders

CCP, the developer behind the popular online title EVE Online, hates players who hope to profit in real money from its game. Those who buy and sell ISK, the game’s currency, are not only exploiting the game, but unbalancing play. That’s why the company decided to go drastic: a program they called “Unholy Rage,” whereby 6,200 paying accounts were banned at once. The results from the mass-banning of all those real-money traders were more dramatic than anyone expected.

Read the whole story…