Andrzej Marczewski

Gamification Expert, author, consultant and designer. I love to write about it, talk about it and bore people to death with it! If you really want to get to know me, check out the About page.

Whilst Innovation may not be Dead, where is the Courage in the Games Industry?

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8707 arcade cabnets Whilst Innovation may not be Dead where is the Courage in the Games Industry

People often ask where the innovation has gone in the games industry. I have been guilty of it on the past. In fact, this article was going to be titled with that exact question.

However, the more I drafted the piece and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that innovation is still alive and kicking in our industry, albeit sometimes quietly. What is missing now is courage.

When I first really got into games, everything seemed innovative. People were really beginning to understand what games could be. This was back in the Days of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. Read More ...

If anyone can set up a website and review games, is the traditional games press doomed?

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The Internet is saturated with sites and blogs that publish games news and reviews at a phenomenal rate. Within seconds of press releases being sent out, they appear on the Internet in a dozen different ways. Technologies such as Twitter and Facebook allow us to release snippets of information without even needing to write a full article. Games reviews get published on the Internet days, weeks or sometimes months before the traditional printed press have a chance to release theirs.

I spoke to one very unhappy staff writer recently, who was complaining that he needed to have reviews written for a magazine that was to be published in 2 months time. He could not convince his editor that it would be pointless releasing reviews of games 2 whole months after everybody else. Read More ...

Google Just Don’t get Social

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Google have been playing with social networking for a while now. Wave, buzz and now Google+. Up until now they have failed to make any kind of impact, proving each time they just don’t understand what people want from social networking.

However, with the launch of Google+ it seems that they have gotten a bit more serious about the whole thing. You can’t move within google applications without some kind of new Google+ integration being announce. Up until now this has always been an extra feature, one that added value to any Google+ user. Read More ...

Treating the Klout

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Just recently, Klout in their scoring algorithm. This something changed quite a few people’s scores. Some for the better and some for the worse.

Now you see this proves the point I was making in Catching the Klout. Chasing numbers is, in many ways, pointless when it comes to social networking.

Using arbitrary numbers to check what kind of influence or engagement you have, can only be a small part of the over all picture. This is especially true when the numbers can be affected on the whim of developers at Klout. Read More ...

Why can’t I dislike something?

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When I was a school, we had a simple merit / demerit system to help improve behaviour.

Each child in the school was a member of a house (I was Owls), and good deeds or work earned you merit points, bad behaviour earned demerits for the house total.

At the end of each term, the merits were added up for each house, then the demerits subtracted and the house with the most merits won the house cup – yes, a bit like Harry Potter.

Some classes had weekly or monthly prizes for the child with the most merits as well. Read More ...

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