Social Games vs Multiplayer Games: A Commentary on Raph Koster’s Social Mechanics Presentation
I thought that since I’m not at GDC, it might be interesting to write a review-from-afar. I looked at the core of his ideas, many of which center around cooperative gameplay, then raised questions over whether they were appropriate to the social game space. Below, I suggest some alternatives that may have been missed in the presentation, and finally I ask whether social games have a next level of sophistication to them at all.

Weatherspark: Gent
infoporn!

Augmenting a Live Talk with Overhead Projector Style Infographics – information aesthetics
MAYA Design CEO Mickey McManus has recently demonstrated the power of using subtly animated infographics during a live TEDx talk. While the talk on "Information Liquidity" is already mind boggling by itself, the short visual interruptions that merge sophisticated illustrations with the concept of old-school overhead projectors (or maybe they represent the prototypes of next-gen thin film computers…) is quite an original approach to keep the audience engaged

A Week on Foursquare
We collected every check-in on location-sharing service Foursquare for a week starting at noon Eastern on Friday, Jan. 21 until noon on Friday Jan. 28. Foursquare, which provided the data, removed all material that could identify an individual user.