Posts tagged ‘Jane McGonigal’
Avatar
by Barry Chudakov on June 17th, 2010As everybody knows, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash coined the modern sense of the word avatar, from the Sanskrit word avatāra, meaning something similar to incarnation. Before James Cameron’s runaway hit movie, an avatar was considered a three-dimensional model representing you or an alter ego in computer games; or a two-dimensional icon on Internet forums and other communities.
That was so five minutes ago.
The Gaming Metalife
by Barry Chudakov on April 26th, 2010Let’s start with the obvious: gaming is big business. While much has been made of the Apple iPhone app economy, it pales by comparison with gaming. Money is one way to measure our involvement with gaming; time is another. The average number of hours spent gaming per week has gone up from 7.3 hours in 2009 to 8 hours in 2010. This graphic from Online MBA provides an excellent overview: