Daniel Rehn, an artist and designer in Southern California, is collaborating with Jeremy Douglass, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD, on a research project they call the Video Gameplay Database. Noting influences from people like Ben Fry and John Maeda (among others), the “database is organized around two core objects: video recordings of game play and representations of those sessions.” Rehn expects games scholars to contribute observations, video and the like to help create data visualizations that will also encompass a range of information from storyboards to recorded gameplay sessions. He also seems to intend to make this work available

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Rob Hale’s discussion of a Damnation making-of video raises a very interesting point. The top down diagram that most levels emerge from does not lend itself particularly well to creating rich vertical spaces. It’s possible to create verticality after the fact, but rarely is it significantly navigable. I’ve personally wrestled with this when designing tabletop RPG maps, which are not only designed top-down but played the same way with a erasable grid mat and miniatures. Adding height variance to a space almost always makes it more interesting for the players, but it’s often difficult to make the vertical space

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Recently, Amazon.com purchased one of the larger game portals, Reflexive Arcade. As part of the integration, Amazon chose to lower the prices on all the casual arcade games to $9.99. This angered publishers , causing PopCap and others to pull their games from the portal.

Jeff Tunnel (founder of Garage Games, and currently at Push Button Labs) says this about Amazon’s price change :

Now the flood gates have been opened, and I am telling you to look out below. Today Reflexive, recently acquired by Amazon, opened their new download store, with lowered front tier pricing

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