Medien und Lernen
Have you played the classic boardgame Scotland Yard/Mr. X.
The winners of the 2009 „Pädi“ – the pedagogic interactive award – were announced. The Website www.kindernetz.de/minitz won the award in gold in the kids category, „Line Rider – Freestyle“ for teenagers.
Other winners include „Rhythm Paradise„, „Maus DS – Der mausgeflippte Denkspaß“ and „Professor Layton and the Curious Village„.
I was happy to be part of the „Pädi Expert Team“ which took part in the decision making process of the award. There will be an award ceremony on November 12th 14-16 in the Munich Gasteig/Carl-Orff-Saal with approx. 600 guests.
More info on the award (in German)
Der pädagogische Interaktiv-Preis – bundesweit einzigartig in seiner Konzeption – basiert im Unterschied zu vielen anderen Preisen, die entweder auf die künstlerische Komponente, die technischen Details oder die curricularen Lerninhalte Bezug nehmen, zu einem wesentlichen Teil auf praktischen Erfahrungen im Einsatz der multimedialen Produkte.
Mit dem Pädi werden Lern– und Spielprogramme pädagogisch bewertet, die Kinder und Jugendliche in ihrer Freizeit nutzen.
Der Pädi ist einerseits eine Orientierungshilfe im schier undurchdringlichen Dschungel der online- und offline-Angebote für die Heranwachsenden und andererseits eine Auszeichnung für die Hersteller von pädagogisch wertvollen Multimedia-Produkten. Er ist ein Ansporn für ihre Bemühungen, sinnvolle Produkte für Kinder und Jugendliche anzubieten und damit einen Beitrag zur Förderung der Medienkompetenz zu leisten.
You can find more infos on the Pädi and a full list of the winners of this 12th here:
www.sin-net.de/paedi.htm
At the gamescom in Cologne especially the PSP game „Invizimals“ caught my eye.
The game allows players to interact with their environment, using the PSP Camera to look for and interact with „invisible“ creatures. It is the most convincing augmented reality game I have seen so far, while they still have problems with the prototype camera they were using at the gamescom.
Since beginning of May I am working for remote control productions running their research department.
remote control productions is an independent, internationally active production house, with an emphasis on mediation, development and production of entertainment software and research services. With its extensive experience and far-reaching contacts, remote control productions acts as an important interface between developers, publishers, distributors and investors.
It feels great to be here. The general focus of the company is very interesting with projects which try to do something new and/or have an positive impact on society or the video games business in mind. On top of that the company is very much involved in education, the local IGDA chapter, contacts to political institutions and the Verein für Videospielekultur (club for video games culture) on which I blogged here.
One of my main projects is our weekly newsletter which goes like this:
Up-to-Date in 30 minutes
Keeping an eye on current trends and affairs is an imperative for anyone concerned with the video games industry.With the RCP-Newsletter, remote control productions are offering a compact overview on the latest trends and news as well as concise figures. Whilst we are tracking the international market very closely, our special focus lies on Germany. This not only provides our readers with detailed information about international happenings but also with insights into the German industry and current political developments.
Our newsletter summarises news items from more than 40 different sources, relevant to the games industry, in a short and clearly arranged way, thus giving you the advantage of having all relevant news at hand in only 30 minutes a week.
The sections of the newsletter are covering the following areas:
- Current Market Data: Software-Charts with sales figures, global hardware sales and company reports
- PC and Videogames: announcements of new titles worldwide on all platforms
- Online: news about digital distribution, social networking platforms and online games
- Companies: fusions, takeovers, openings, closings and partnerships
- Technology and Hardware: firmware updates, new middleware versions, technical innovations, licensing of engines
- Politics, Culture, Events and Education: political decisions and amendments, cultural events, changes in education, conferences and events
- Feature Recommendations: articles and blogs concerning current topics and trends
- Event-Calendar: the most important conferences and events of the next three months
The RCP newsletter is released once per week (48 times per year) in English and German language.
What do you think about it? And if you are interested, please request a free sample copy at my new email address: utausend [) r-control.com 😉
I am really happy that I came across the „Videospielkultur e.V.“ (club for video games culture) end of last year. The club is very active organizing lectures and discussions on the cultural aspects of video games as well as their impact on society.
AND they are hosting the bi-weekly Games Lounge. There you can play the newest (and oldest) games from a massive library on good equipment. And as most people attending are from the games business it is also a perfect way to discuss games while making new connections.
For me the games lounge is what I always wanted to exist. And I am a bit sad that I will miss couple of them on my well earned post graduation travel to North America 😉 . It is just quite a sight to see the Bavarian Minister of Media playing guitar hero.
While working on my diploma thesis I am also doing some consulting. One of my clients www.fettspielen.de, a German online gaming website, went live April 2008. I was involved with the project since November 2007 while the strategic direction of the website was not yet decided.
I really like the graphical style of the website as well as how quickly you can browse through the different games. Using the site is very easy. For example every registered user automatically has a personal profile-site (check out mine). Please write me if you have any comments on the website. David An, the founder of Fettspielen, has many nice ideas for the future development of the site. And he got backing from Holtzbrinck, who also own StudiVZ the German Facebook. So Fettspielen is a name to remember.
Fett is German slang for cool, spielen means to play.
As I wrote in another post we sold neodelight.com and all our sources to 7Seas Technologies.
In January 2008 the Neodelight staff was in Hyderabad/India to train the 7Seas team on our sources. We wanted them to learn on the job and therefore created a nice little game with them which even has some serious thoughts to it:
When we were sight seeing in Hyderabad, we visited Lake Sagar, a picturesque but heavily polluted lake (to keep us from doing foolish things a man told us „When you swim here – you die!„).
Around the lake we saw many „not littering“ signs which hopefully will have an effect soon.
We crossed the need to train the team with the problem of the polluted lake and got as a result the game „Clean Sagar“ in which you have to fish out garbage from the lake so it can recover.
Three days after the idea the completed game was released on the official press conference and the game became a big hit in the press as well as with Indian gamers.
The other game which was released on the press conference was Mouse Maze. This very nice mouse avoider which we created in 2007 even won the FICCI FRAMES Best of Animation Frames Award for the online gaming category. By the way, Halo 3 won best console game and Gears of War best PC game awards.
So everybody was very happy with the press conference. Especially the fish in Lake Sagar.
