Television, Meet Games: Gamasutra Article

Previous

: Game Investment Conference East 2010

Next

: Engage Expo 2010: TV Brands And Virtual Worlds Panel
RSS feed for comments on this page
  • Bold Text
    Example: [b]Bold[/b]
  • Italic Text
    Example: [i]Italics[/i]
  • Underlined Text
    Example: [u]Underlined[/u]
  • Struck-out Text
    Example: [s]Struck-out[/s]
  • Colored text
    Example: [color=blue]blue text[/color]
  • Alignment
    Example: [align=right]right aligned[/align]
  • Website link: Link to another website or URL
    Example: [url]http://www.website.com/[/url]
  • Website link: Link to another website or URL
    Example: [url=http://www.website.com/]Some website[/url]
  • Email link: Create link to an email address
    Example: [email]you@yoursite.com[/email]
  • Email link: Create link to an email address
    Example: [email=you@yoursite.com]email me[/email]
  • Image: Show an image in your post
    Example: [img]http://site.com/image.jpg[/img]
  • Code Block: Unformatted code block
    Example: [code]Code block[/code]
  • Unordered list: Unordered list
    Example: [ulist][*]item 1[*]item 2[/ulist]

Gamasutra recently posted a feature about the intersection of television and games. In it they highlight one of New York's own companies involved in the space, Area/Code.

The article looks at the growing number of television networks actively publishing their own original games and seeks to determine what is motivating this sudden interest in doing so. According to the Adult Swim team, one part of it has to do with the amount of time games can engage players and how that can translate into nearly 30 minutes of ad exposure, opposed to 5 minutes using the traditional model.

"That is huge," he says (Jeff Olsen - Creative Director, Adult Swim), "and it enables us to not only generate good advertising revenue, but we're also selling some of the games onto the iPhone platform, where every paid game has made it to the Top 50 Paid Games section." He also intends to syndicate some of the Adult Swim games in order to find a larger audience.

Area/Code in particular thinks there's tremendous potential for extending television programming to other media. The article looks at the experiences they've had working with clients such as, MTV, A&E, The Discovery Channel, and more. One of the more interesting insights is The Sopranos A&E Connection game they developed in conjunction with the popular HBO series.

Area/Code co-founder and creative director Frank Lantz described the gameplay: Players used cell phones to collect pieces and compose an online game board to anticipate what might happen that night on TV, much like Fantasy Football works with sports.

When the The Sopranos TV show started, the players' online game boards came to life and animated in synch with the TV signal. As the characters, settings, and objects appeared on TV, the corresponding pieces on the game board animated and scored points.

It's creates a fascinating dynamic, that of bringing the actions on screen into a real world context, and it's especially exciting to see a company in NYC responsible for exploring and innovating in this space. What do you guys think? What are your experiences with developing these sorts of games?

 

To check out the article in its entirety please visit: Television, Meet Games

 

(via Gamasutra)

 

Add to Digg LinkedIn del.icio.us Facebook Technorati Reddit Google
02/19/2010 by NYC_GI

No one has commented on this page yet.