Google's experiments in digital creativity - great summary of what's been good lately

This has it pretty much everything that's been interesting in the past year or so. OK I'm lying but it's a fantastic resource. Go and see Google's experiments in digital creativity right now if you've not already - how many have you seen before?

FaceBoxLive

Interesting example of the blurring between 'mainstream' social networking and games and the interesting convergence we are getting to...

Facebook and XboxLive - as Eurogamer noted, plans are afoot for XboxLive-rs to use Facebook through the 360 (as well as Twitter) in the next few months. Although the boards question how much they actually want to share their gaming habits, tweet achievements and the like with their friends, it has a lot of potential - from easily adding your FB friends to your gaming friend's lists to (dare I say it,) targeted advertising that might also be a bit more engaging. If nothing else it will make redeeming beta demo/map pack codes off twitter easier!

Let's take Facebook and gaming to its logical conclusion - as we all know, Facebook is actually just a massively multi-player online game where the aim of game is to collect 'friends' ;)

Unreal Call of Brothers 5: a labour of love

I have loved making this - as an avid FPS gamer (first person shooting games) on PS3, this was a great little project for Be Broadband.

We (the company I work for), were asked by w00tmedia! to create a game for Be to showcase their broadband offering and show why it's so good for FPS gamers - where great connection speed and crucially a low ping rate is important.

Using our own experiences of bad connections (usually being fragged online by a few shots whilst you've emptied a clip into the target) we came up with the game concept and mechanics. And for the treatment - we wanted to shoe-horn as many FPS games as possible (see the cyborg-terrorist baddies f'example), all in a casual game - well if you could you'd be playing a proper game right now too - wouldn't you? ;)

Play it at http://blaster.bethere.co.uk/ Turn your headphones up, and if you like it, embed it to your blog or whatever!
Illustration pwnage by SketchyBeast and AS3 carnage by Barrax

Unreal Call of Brothers 5: FPS game for Be Brodband

Pizza Hut / Midnight Club LA: great example of brands and games bumping naughty bits for WIN:WIN

Midnight Club Los Angeles Pizza Hut Tournament. MCLA is a street racing game, and this tournament invites PS3 and Xbox360 gamers to download a (free) map extension of LA, and race for the best times on it in order to win a big prize.

This is a helluva lot better than a bunch of in game billboards or what-have-you: a DLC driving map, an amazing prize (year's supply of pizza) and a brilliant brand tie in. This is great because:

• it's free, so no feelings of "hmm. I just paid more cash for DLC to be advertised to. Again"
  
• there is a real prize, and a good synergy (yeuch bad word, sorry) between gamers and brand/product
  
• it sounds like a carefully considered, tailored promotion

I hope the map is great, the tournament well managed and it goes well - as it shows how brands, marketers and gamers could all get along nicely in future.

Rockstar, PSN and Xboxlive get to turn their property into a media space, and Pizza Hut get to engage gamers in a deeper way than just interruption or mere in game branding.

Infinity Ward Crowdsourcing on Twitter

@fourzerotwo, the community manager for Infinity Ward, makers of the massively successful Call of Duty 4, asked for community feedback on features for its sequel, Modern Warfare 2. He asked us to use Twitter, hash it as #mw2, and it went pretty mental. you can see the #MW2 twitter usage here.

Working in digital marketing and loving COD4, this was a very interesting example for me to follow. As it became the biggest twitter trend within a day, I'm very interesting how 402 will mine the information. There is plenty of crowdsourcing the community here on the official IW forum too.

Personally - I used Wordle to make the word cloud you see above, and also used a trial profile on a social media monitoring tool to drill down, which really highlights why a system like that is worth the cash - the degree of granularity that is possible (as well as being able to pull in #mw2 stuff from other sources) really opened my eyes. I could dig into a topic, cross ref by time and even look at each tweeter's other social media connections (402, if you're reading, give me a shout!).

For my money, here's what I think the community wants:

• Guns: more guns (duh)
• Snow: a snow map
• Persononalisation/customisation: for the in game character and gun customisation
• Better integration with online community and achievements (off PSN, XBOX Live etc)
• More perks, attachments (silenced sniper a big ask) and rewards for prestige mode (ranking up constantly)
  
• A bigger, co-op story mode
• Maps: more of them and a UGC/map editor for consoles

Image shows a wordle of Twitter's #mw2 xml feed. Dan got me on to Wordle.

Kutiman's thru-you YouTube music project

Sometimes I'm asked to define what social media is in a little soundbite. It's damn hard as it's a very broad term for a lot of stuff. Essentially I define social media as: anything which allows someone to publish, create, collaborate on content, and form networks around that content digitally. But as you see, this means little (although it does kind of cover your arse).

I'd prefer to point to examples and Kutiman's YouTube project "Thru-you" is a wonderful example of social media and creativity. He's taken individuals' music clips and made his own tracks from them. He's linked to them/credited them too. The sum of its parts is greater than each element on its own; it's a kind of mash up and still it needed a great creative idea (his vision to make new songs from others') to be special. This is not just a case of asking the community or adding a Digg button!

As his site can go down here's a link to the 'mother of all funk chords' on YouTube.