Margaret Robertson is a mentor here at Crossover Montreal 09 and a gamer -- as you can see if you checkout her links. I've included some of my notes on her presentation with each link.
World of Warcraft - Margaret has personally spent 830 hours playing it over 4 years, which is a lot more time than you might spend on a TV series. Users of WoW spend $15/month to play which mounts up to $1.8 billion a year. Players stop watching TV.
Bejeweled is a a match 3 game, the biggest commercial game in the world. It is the direct opposite of the World of Warcraft in that the game play is short and discreet, it's run by a low-tech machine and its simple to play with nothing for you to learn. Still players are known to put in 11 hour a day on the game.
According to Margaret's presentation, games are really big business. People tend to slot games into either the hardcore and casual game categories, but there is a lot of crossover between the two categories. Both are played by many people of many ages with about a 65/35 male/female split.
Parking Wars is a game funded by A&E US as an accompaniment to a television series about traffic cops. The games uses information about your Facebook friends and your strategy will depend on what you know about those friends. It has had a huge following in face there has been a far larger audience for the game than for the TV series it compliments and has engaged the audience for far more hours than the show. In fact it has served up more pages than the entire A&E website.
Sneeze was made for 10-20 thousand pounds and became absolutely massive with over 15 million plays.
1066 is a game developed to go with a Channel 4 series on Vikings. The game takes a very different approach than the TV component
Kingdom of Loathing is a game built created by Zack "Jick" Johnson a guy with few programming skills. It's written in html -- not flash. He drew the images himself. The game has a big community of devoted players who support the game with donations and by buying merchandise. If you donate $50, he'll personally draw you an avatar to your specifications. He's making some serious coin off the enterprise.
Jane McGonigal's Top Secret DanceOff isn't exactly a game. It's a community engaged in "dance quests" and dance offs which they record and upload. Very cool, participatory, funny. It was built without sponsorship or funding just for the pure love of the idea.
Find more videos like this on Top Secret Dance Off
Cross-posted to Running With My Eyes Closed.
