Games for Financiers

So I* launched a new game last week, on behalf of JWT and our client Bloomberg: Labyrinth, a taxing arcade-style game designed to drive players insane.

The impetus behind this game was a simple marketing challenge: convey the advantages of Bloomberg's enterprise-level Trading Solutions platform to an audience of investors and traders who are too busy (and often times too cynical) to care about enterprise-level software. To hook these alpha dogs, the game plays to their competitive spirit, presenting them with a series of ridiculously difficult mazes and puzzles - and inviting them to compare their performance against others within the financial community.

Trading Solutions comes into play via in-game power ups - based on the products' unique attributes - that let you "exploit" your way to the top of the leaderboards. Life's not always fair, I know.

I'm also proud to say that (I think) we've made the first Web registration flow that lets you play your way out of the site if your credentials aren't accepted. Give it a shot at http://www.bloomberglabyrinth.com.

* By "I," I mean I was its creative director. Which means I got to pretend I was doing everything while a team of incredibly talented programmers, producers, artists and designers (including the brain behind The World's Hardest Game) slaved over its execution.

Augmented Reality Needs Games. Not the Other Way Around.

That was the basic gist of my keynote presentation, delivered at Metaio's Inside AR 2011, a leading industry conference.

The Future of AR is Gaming: Vertigore CEO Josh Shabtai at InsideAR 2011 from Josh Shabtai on Vimeo.

I Feel So Square.

Off-The-Shelf Virtual Reality. Only $34.99.

It's the name that's been throwing everyone off.

A few weeks back, toy maker Hasbro released an inexpensive piece of plastic called my3D, billed by many as an update on the classic Viewmaster: a stereoscopic viewer that connects to your iPhone or iPod Touch.  The primary focus from media so far has been on the toy's promise of bringing 3D to iOS devices, which is understandable, given the name.  But the real story is far more interesting.

my3D is the first virtual reality device that's truly accessible to the mass market.  

It's a deeply immersive, spatially aware experience that combines 360-degree navigation across 3 axes with rich 3D sound and visuals... and it retails for under $35.  It'll be available at more than 1,700 Target stores, which is no small development.  It doesn't perfect the concept of virtual reality by any means, but it does open it up to mass audiences for the first time...

...which is a revolutionary feat more than four decades (or, by some accounts, almost 600 years) in the making.  

I've been thinking about this for some time, having spent the last few months creating software for the platform. My company, Vertigore Games, developed two launch titles for my3D: a 360-degree shoot-em-up called Sector 17 and 3D panoramic virtual tour Teleport: LA. 

And yes, I'm biased... but when I first got my hands on a my3D prototype, I knew I'd caught a glimpse at something significant: an inexpensive device with the potential to change a player's proximity and relationship to a game.  Equally important, it suggests opportunities to create new, natural user interfaces and experiences that will be relevant in a post-smartphone/tablet world.

If you've ever (secretly or not) enjoyed the Lawnmower Man, grab one.  It's lo-fi sci-fi.

27 Years Later...

After 8 months of being sworn to secrecy, my company, Vertigore Games, just announced that we're developing the first augmented reality Star Wars game.  You can see some early test footage here.

The story goes back even further than 8 months, though.  This game has literally been 27 years in the making.

Way back in 1983, my mom took me to a ratty mall arcade in Columbus, Ohio. I was four years old.

I remember her giving me a quarter to go play that amazing, vector graphics-based Star Wars arcade game.  She held me up to reach the game's control yoke, where I (briefly... come on, I was 4) piloted an X-Wing on its trench run through the Death Star. It was amazing and probably the first time I'd lost all sense of where I was while playing a videogame. Definitely not the last.

Anyway, I crashed and burned and my mom put me down.  According to her, the first thing out of my mouth was, "When will there be a Millennium Falcon version?"  She said she wasn't sure, but that there probably was.

I looked for that damn Millennium Falcon for the next two and a half decades and, failing that, decided it was time to just go ahead and make one.  And here we are.