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A D&D Campaign dungeon that is 100$ and is designed to take probably years to play. Look at the map.

The dungeon adventure has been a staple of gaming since its earliest days. Now, AEG brings you the ultimate incarnation of this adventure classic: the World’s Largest Dungeon! This colossal epic will take characters from neophyte dungeon crawling all the way to epic levels.

Miles of passageways — filling a map the size of your living room — hold enough danger and excitement for years of adventuring. Every monster in the monster manual is included within its confines, all gathered into logical ecologies and never before seen diabolical hierarchies and encounters.

If your group is serious enough to fight its way to the top, the World’s Largest Dungeon is a challenge you can’t pass up!

Here’s some links to people who are documenting their adventure into this game…
The 20′ By 20′ Room: World’s Largest Blog

A Giant asteroid has crash landed and extinction may just be inevitable. You are a Velociraptor — and you should probably start running for your life! Run, jump, catch a ride with a Pterodactyl, eat power-up plants & other things, save all the dino eggs you can!

Jump into the multiplayer and test your speed against your fellow dinos as you race for glory — and to avoid extinction!

Gah, Pixel art is amazing, and so is this game. Very simple, lots of depth, very cute and lots of fun.

XGen Studios - Online Flash Games - Dino Run: Multiplayer Edition

Choose your race and command your army through 25 epic battles to conquer the land. Upgrade and buy extra unit types for your army between levels. Upwards of 50 animated soldiers can be fighting on screen at once!

Simple but expandable concept. Having a world map to conquer is an easy way to add depth to your game.

Play Warlords: Call to Arms, a free online game on Kongregate

God, read every word of this article twice. This is really good stuff. Nom nom nom. People are starting to notice that you don’t need a lot of money to make a great idea work. You also don’t need a perfect product as long as you’re evolving and flexible.

Martin suggests a new mantra: “Embrace the Chaos” — this requires a lot of letting go. His advice is to have faith that chaos is good for you, despite the lack of obvious guarantees. Whereas traditional programming is built on the principles of ACID (atomic, consistent, independent, durable), the web is built on the principles of BASE as introduced by Google (basically available, soft-state, eventually consistent). ACIDity creates trust but kills innovation, whereas BASE promotes innovation and still allows a certain level of trust. The trust comes in the “eventually consistent” part of the equation in which all your data coalesces — and provided you can get your vendors to agree to this model you have a non-obvious guarantee of trust and you can successfully sacrifice the “good” point of the triangle.

READ THIS ARTICLE

Remember when I said:

Also I am heart-exploady in love with the girl they used in the mac video.

I think my friend found her:
Larkin Clark

Through this interview with the director:
Interview with Dennis Liu

Call it Funware. That’s the name for applications with game-like mechanics and game-like behavior that really aren’t traditional video games. And Funware just might steal the thunder from video games, which may no longer have a monopoly on either interactivity or fun.

This concept was brought up a few times at GDC and it was generally laughed at. Like the guy spoke at panels and people basically giggled and said “hehe, cool idea.”

But as far as warm bodies using a product, and time spent doing so, ‘funware’ is now rivaling ‘gameplay.’ I’d rather not pit them against each other, though. Let’s all be friends! Some amazing, amazing points in this article…

Funware’s threat to the traditional video game industry » VentureBeat

This is insane. Sorry for the huge quote but it makes the most sense when you see it all in one clump:

Attent™ with Serios™ tackles the increasing problem of information overload in corporate email using psychological and economic principles from successful multiplayer online games and market economics. Attent creates an economy with a scarce new currency (Serios) that enables users to signal the importance of their outgoing email by attaching value. Recipients can use the Serios received to prioritize their attention to messages, and in return use their Serios to assign appropriate weight to their responses. Attent also provides tools to analyze and manage communication patterns and information networks in the enterprise.

The lively marketplace of ideas and communication patterns that emerges from this economy offers new insights into collaboration, teamwork, and goal alignment. The Seriosity solution to information overload will give your information workers more time, more thoughtful input, and more insight so that they can be more productive.

I love this, I wish I could use it, but I don’t currently suffer from information overload. I’ve worked in a few jobs where this would work well in, however. Just a facinating idea, and more proof that ‘game design’ is beginning to span more then just games.

Duder over at GU Comics made one about Grand Theft Childhood
, I lol’d.

GU Comic
http://www.gucomics.com/comic/?cdate=20080513

I read this book, Don’t Make Me Think, a few years ago and I find that it’s helped me out in many, many ways. Originally it was written with the intent on helping educate web peeps on how to build more effective websites. It focuses on use and usability of the web experiences you’re trying to create.

Many of these lessons carry over into game design and development, especially regarding the flow and learning curves of games. WoW does an amazing job of this, for example, with it’s extensive tooltip system, as well as the help tip system that works the very first time you play the game.

Granted, I’m not saying all games should be thoughtless. Of course you shouldn’t spoonfeed your user everything that they need all of the time. Certain game genres require your user to think as a base principle of the game. I’m mostly referring to more general and broad concepts like having intuitive controls and such.

That being said, one of the main reasons why I don’t play adventure games is *because* they make me think, and if you don’t think exactly along with the authors mind, you don’t get anywhere.

Dear Woody Hearn, author of GU Comics,
Please make it easier to permalink the latest comic. If I want to share it with people, it takes me a few seconds to figure out how to link directly to the page the comic is on.

• Clicking on ‘comic direct’ takes me to a screen that helps crybabys and whinermotors get to their precious comic faster now that it’s not on the main page. Thanks but I want to link directly to the comic.
• Oh, ok, what’s this? Clicking on ’share’ opens up a new tab, and a gmail window, as it appears to be a mailto: that I can share the comic via email with my friends. I have gmail set up to handle all my email, as well as all my mailto: links. This is awesome. Thanks for this. Except all that this does is put the letters GU into a subject field of a new email, and nothing in the body. Perhaps this works for other people, but not for me. My problem or your problem? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I’m probably not the only person who uses firefox and gmail as their main tools of the trade. Thanks but I want to link directly to the comic.
• If I link to http://www.gucomics.com/comic/, the comic will roll off the page a few days later and the historic post I’ve made will no longer make sense.
  If I click the comic itself, I’m brought to a discussion of the comic. Thanks but I want to link directly to the comic.
• Of course, I can directly link the picture but I’m sure you’d like it if my friends and fellow internetters were taken to the actual page and not just a jpg, so they could learn more about what your comic is about.

What I ended up doing was copying the ’share’ link location into a text document, snipping out this link, and using that. So much work. I am a busy person and this completely ruined my day.

I don’t understand why this is such a hard concept. Don’t make me think.

I apologize if I’ve made you into an example of good website use and useabilty, as well as good webcomic site design, but I get frustrated when I see people succeeding while still doing stupid things. I guess it’s just jealousy.

Yours Internetly,
-Tom Mannino