https://market.android.com/details?id=air.au.com.escapetheory.ZombieNinjasGame

The development cycle from Flash to Android is now complete

Still to come:

- Sounds

- Music

- Leaderboards

- Sharing on Facebook

I will make another post when the game is complete with music, sound and a working leaderboard!

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The Standing Committee of Attorneys-General decided a few hours ago to introduce an R18+ rating for video games in Australia, in line with films and television.

With the exception of NSW which has abstained from the vote, all states and territories have agreed to implement the rating at some stage, and NSW is likely to follow after a separate meeting.

If you didn’t know, Australia is one of the few countries that do not possess an R18+ classification for video games.

This means that games rated Adults Only in the USA or Europe (like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto 4, Left 4 Dead 2 and Mortal Kombat) are refused classification and can’t be sold here.

What this meant was that some games (Left 4 Dead 2) are edited and released in Australia with toned-down violence to meet the MA15+ rating.

Other games are barred from entering the country since the developer refuses to edit the game (Mortal Kombat).

The worst scenario however, is that big budget games (Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto 4) are given preferential treatment, and reclassified as MA15+ with little to no edits in order to sell here. Year 10 students end up playing games that are meant for adults only.

Luckily for us, the end to misclassification looks near, and we adults can soon play the same games that the rest of the world is playing, while ensuring aussie parents know the difference between games for children, and games for adults.

Yeah!

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Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Now it's time for me to brush up on my Visual Basic and DirectX to start making some more impressive demos.

-G

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If you follow @garry_law, you can re-live the event tweet-by-tweet, but here's a chronologically-ordered summary of the tweets over the two days. Will post more in-depth articles on some highlights soon!

Premix 1/Jun

• cannot wait to see web tech keynotes @REMIXAU (and #premixau drinks tonight of course ) #remixau #RIA
• Mini hotdogs ftw @remixau #premixau
• Awesome! Mr percival live jam @remixau
• Michael (guitar) Cordahil takin the floor to introduce Dan Ilic, proves all cool people wear dark clothes @remixau
• Dan ilic believes #tv is killed by #internet . Netflix takes 20% of usa bandwidth. Farmville 70%, planking 10%
• @danilic great insight into building brands @remixau funny guy!
• #ie9 speed test on windows phone 7 mango. Deeplinking into apps looks so useful
• Music played by human body via #kinect sensor #remixau so much cooler than interpretive dance
• Good to see oldmate #microsoft researcher give insight into the future of lifeblogging for pensioners #remixau
• #kinect interface may be cool, but wont stop you from looking like a weirdo yet #remixau

Remix 2/Jun

• Will continue tweeting the #remixau conference today... after i sleep off the #premixau drinks from last night
• Just saw glasses-free 3D monitor in action. Effect works well in discreet viewing angles #remixau neet one for my portal 2 gaming
• Cordahil discusses midern web devs with aaron powell. 'Supporting lowest denominator is actually targeting a minority' #remixau
• Vaughan knight intro- wearing a portal 2 shirt, disappointed with lack of portal love in audience. Will talk about html5 gaming l8r #remixau
• Intro of dan beaty (he built the mr percival music app from last nite.) Will talk about SVG tech l8r #remixau
• Dan beaty wantd to build mrpercival app in html5, but it cannot support sounds. Needed sulverlight plugin #remixau . #flash also gets a nod
• Aaron powell takes the stage #html5 #remixau . html5 Boilerplate demo. Conveniently sets up your html5 project via template
• Aaron powell introduces modernizr and yepnope.js to simplify browser feature detection #remixau
• Vaughan knight takes the stage on #html5 games #remixau . Why? Ubiquity, broad reach, instant on, distribution, amazing community
• Impact JS demo- the html5 game framework looks like a great entry point for #flash devs to start building #html5 games #remixau
• if(zombies) { run(); } #remixau great advice
• Shane morris and nick randolph talking about 'inspirational' #windows 7 phone (mango). Qantas smart boarding pass app #remixau
• Nick randolph vs shane morris typify conflict between dsignr and coder: one hates version control, other ends copy with semicolons @remixau
• @soapcreative talkin abt worlds biggest pac man #html5 game, wont need worlds biggest monitor to play @remixau
• EaselJS allowed similar coding style as #actionscript. Mootools n modernizr also helped @soapcreative build pacman #html5 #remixau
• @jakkaj smashup presso, explains that consumer experience is of utmost importance, not bells n whistles @remixau
• Final #remixau presso by dan beaty on canvas n html5- points out #silverlight is used to get around #html5 audio limitations.
• Just saw #windows8 preview @remixau thx for following my live tweets on #remixau

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This week I presented a guest lecture for the firstyear students at the UNSW school of media. It was a pleasant trip down memory lane as I visited the same school I graduated a few years back.

Brigid Costello, my lecturer, generously allowed me to set the students' Flash assessment task, so I look forward to seeing the result of their work.

Unlike the previous years, a much smaller group of the students were actually looking to pursue a career in animation or web development. In fact, the majority of the students turned out to be journalism majors, so I did my best to tailor my presentation for the writers in the room.

After working in the industry for almost 5 years, the process of design, development, approval and deployment had been drummed into my approach to work, so it took some time to put myself into the shoes of a uni student once again.

The life of students are jam packed with parties, drinks and the occasional assessment, so I did my best to emphasise the importance of actually planning out projects before diving into them. Secondly, I kept bringing up the importance of open communication to the client and getting consistent feedback. Of course, the theme was not just applicable to Flash or digital advertising, but to everything in general.

Judging from the oohs and aahs when I showcased some of our work, I think I got at least some attention to the importance of approaching work in a structured manner, but I think the real test would be to see the quality of the Flash assessments created by a class of journalism majors in 2 weeks' time.

Will post updates!

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Let's see some examples and I'll explain.

3D / Charts with misleading volumes

Ok, this is one of the mind-benders, have a look at this:

This is a simple pie chart - the green section is actually representing more of a portion than the yellow section, but because of some jazzy 3D effect, the artist reduced the volume of the green section, making it seem like it is actually less statistically significant than it really is. Humans perceive depth as well, it's just a natural response. Making things seem less important than they really are can be useful if you were drawing a graph for climate-change skeptics, for example.

This is the opposite of the previous graph. lots of things are wrong here, but somebody's decided their 3D Studio Max skills are best served making the big yellow section (the majority statistic) look the least significant by tapering it down to a cone at the bottom. Even the 1% readings above it look like they have more volume than they deserve because they are wider and fatter. Why on Earth is 1% Electricity and 1% Purdue completely different sizes? What is this chart trying to show?

Dodgy Polls/Surveys

One of my favourites, you'll find these all over the place, and here's just one made-up example:

DO YOU LIKE PEANUT BUTTER?

Yes, I eat it every day: 15%
Yes, I don't mind it: 30%
Yes, but I don't eat it every day: 20%
No: 35%

See what I did there? Now I can headline the survey article with "Majority of surveyed people do not like peanut butter". Trust me, this happens so, so often...

Thoughts

Two quick examples out of a thousand times I've looked at published facts and shaken my head in disbelief. You can, however, use this knowledge to your advantage when presenting your next Powerpoint presentation to place a little psychological spin to your statistics.

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Enjoy!

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I can't say any more at the moment, but you can be sure that something big will happen in this space in the next few weeks.

Game on!

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Yesterday, I listened to a few talented presentations at this year's Annual Future of Advertising at the Powerhouse Museum.

One person in particular, Rob Moore (Digital Marketing Manager, Roadshow Films) was able to put into words what I had suspected for a while - that game mechanics can be used to further your advertising goals.

This is not to say that we should rush to include Flash minigames and virals into every advertising campaign, but rather take advantage of easily-identifiable gaming personas that your user has.

The use of 'game' in this context is aimed to engage the user in a way that fixed advertising cannot.

Rob showed us several screenshots of video games: Flight Control, Trauma Centre, Football Manager and Farmville. He notes that the theme of the game is rarely the representation of having fun - directing aeroplanes to land at a busy airport terminal is a notoriously stressful job, yet it was the most downloaded game on iTunes for a very long time.

"If you can make landing planes fun," Moore says "anything can be fun."

Trust me, this job is more stressful in real life.

He went on to talk about a credit card company (American Express?) that first started issuing cards with different colours to represent different stages of loyalty: green, gold and black. Consumers quickly saw the cards as levels of prestige to be earned and compared with their peers. Foursquare, another obvious example is built heavily on the 'Achievements' game mechanic, with an elaborate business model to promote advertiser exposure, but Moore was quick to state that he doesn't believe the business is sustainable enough, nor is the gamer reward great enough for Foursquare to last much longer.

Prior to this, loyalty programs were straightforward - X points equated to Y dollars in value, but tapping into the gaming mentality of the consumer redefines the loyalty system, becoming something that cannot simply be labeled by a price-tag.

The psyche of the typical gamer-consumer is rewarded by several key gaming elements:

• Willingness to trust them with important tasks.
• Scaled tasks that are accurately matched with their skill.
• Lots of collaboration.
• Involvement in an inspiring story/quest.
• Distribution of continuous feedback.

For the refined gamer, or as Rob calls the 'virtuoso' gamer, we can identify them by the following characteristics:

• Social fabric - they are well networked, and community-oriented.
• Urgent optimism - they are eager and positive-minded.
• Blissful productivity - they can knuckle down and do things they love to do constantly.
• Epic meaning - they glamourise the meaning of 'epic' achievements, to win from the edge of defeat, or to make dramatic success.

A gamer on the verge of 'Epic Win'

Knowing our audience is only part of the equation though, and I asked Rob how and when us practitioners should choose to implement gaming mechanics in our digital campaigns. He noted that there is definitely no winning formula. "It should be part of the original concept" he said, but he noted that designers should abandon the idea if it doesn't look like it will work in a meaningful way.

Thanks to Rob Moore  for his insightful presentation.
Thanks to Jane McGonigal for her research and theory, part of which was presented by Rob.

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The phrase 'The Medium is the Message' was coined over half a century ago by Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan.

Marshall McLuhan

The meaning of this phrase is that media and its message are linked to each other in a way so that our perception of the message is influenced by the medium in which it is presented.

Consider the council 'No Parking' sign. This 'no parking' message would have a much different meaning to that of a hand-written 'No Parking' note sticky-taped to a signpost. People treat the council sign with more respect than a hand-written note because of the authoritative assumptions we expect from a council sign.

By applying this thought process, how can we understand some of today's media that was not available at the time of McLuhan's writing?

Let's look at a Youtube as an example.

Video was the historical successor of the photograph in becoming the definitive source of truth. Over the decades however, as video-editing suites became more accessible to the general public it has cast a new media cynicism on videos as a trustworthy medium. Today, this can be seen in no better place than in Youtube.

Youtube videos have conditioned video consumers with the attitude that everything could be fake, and in user comments of many popular videos, cries of 'fake' whether seriously or satirically reflect on the user's distrust of videos.

Truth however, is not the only measure of a medium's worth (in fact, this is far from the case). Youtube is entertaining; it is a socially-oriented and trend-savvy medium that is instantly recognised as a site full of colourful characters and on-demand entertainment. For videos, Youtube sets the audience's expectation for a social message where people may interact with the author through comments or video replies of their own.

As media practitioners, we need to understand the mediums in which we choose to deliver our message. An advertising campaign can be presented through viral games, rich-media banners, microsites, video installations and more - it is imperative that we know why we present the way we do, and consider alternatives that will supplement the message that we are trying to share.

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