Yes, the mysterious Real Ray site turned out to be a Coke campaign based on the charming GTA-styled TV spot. They did send out a couple of clues by email over the past month in an attempt to make it ARG-like.
Electronic Arts is opening up its The Sims Online game to free membership, renaming it into EA-Land, and introducing a number of changes, the following one being the most interesting:
“In EA-Land, game data is available to the internet through web services so users can add gadgets to their Google pages to monitor the state of data they care about in game, for example, if a store is open.” (source)
There will be user-created assets and an economy, of course. And, likely, ads.
“Recreating Movement is a computer program for analyzing film sequences and has been developed within a diploma thesis.”
On Kottke, a great round-up of time-merge visualizations. Below, “1000 cars racing at the same time“, a video overlay of many play-throughs. Besides the obvious fun factor, it’s a great tool for averaging user interactions within an environment.
MySpace did launch its own game portal after all (told you so). Unlike, say, Kongregate or Yahoo Games, MySpace lets users to embed games elsewhere (your MySpace profile or a blog; see Line Rider below it turns out, you can embed the game, but it’s not playable outside the MySpace domain, so profiles only). The game I played was preceded by a pre-roll, but we will probably see advergames there pretty soon.
And Valleywag believes Electronic Arts is eyeing the social games space, too: “Former EA Los Angeles general manager Neil Young is in charge of a “stealth division” believed to be EA Blueprint, which will develop and publish games to social networks.”
“More than one million PlayStation 3 owners are taking part in Folding@home, the distributed computing project run by Stanford University.” The research helps finding cure for Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many cancers.
The distributed computing application runs on many platforms, including the newest game console from Sony. Wired says “PS3s currently comprise about 74 percent of the entire computing power of Folding@home.” The instructions on how to download the required software are on the Playstation blog.
Some teraflop stats.
Image source: Pietel on Flickr
Adverblog points at an ongoing campaign in Belgium that is remarkably similar to the last year’s commercial by Coke about a thug turned do-gooder in a Grand Theft Auto – like city. If this is an ARG, than it’s the very beginning of it, since the site doesn’t offer any clues yet.
Brand Experience Lab shares some results from the in-theater games they did for MSNBC (The Newsbreaker) in the US and for Volvo in the UK (video below).
For the Newsbreaker:
78% played the game
93% want more games in cinemas
86% prefer a game to an ad
71% unaided MSNBC brand recall
75% more likely to use MSNBC
Definitely one of the coolest ad things from 2007.
Human-computer interaction researcher Johnny Chung Lee at Carnegie Mellon demonstrates how with a Wii remote and a custom code you can turn your TV into a 3D display.
– Thank you, Erwin.
Not too many of those. Actually, just one.
DrPepper’s Matchcaps is simple re-skin of Bejeweled. Not horribly imaginative, but this press release says it’s the first advergame for iPhone (it came out in November 2007). So far, it seems to be the only one.
Fingerfracture is a concept for Vans from Miami Ad School that surfaced a few weeks ago. Just mock-ups for now, but way cooler than a simple re-skin.
Another mock-up: iPhone game controller. Clever and obvious.
Looks like MySpace is working on a gaming portal. The URL for this page is games.myspace.com. This could be a hit if the games are less like the ones you can find on other casual game destinations (Yahoo Games, for example) and more like Facebook app games with a stronger social component to them. Social advergames on MySpace would also be an interesting ad channel.
There are plenty of Flash games out there for MySpace users to embed already, but I haven’t seen any that let you play with your friends.
Oh, and to the readers of this blog: I just got back from a vacation with no internet hook-up, but now we are back to our regular programming.
Also, this is the 2008th post on this blog since the beginning.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
