Nadya Direkova, a Senior Information Architect at Avenue A Razorfish, talks about how to make web and software experiences more engaging by using techniques pulled from game design. Nadya offers examples such as reward systems, aesthetics, social systems, avatars, stats & missions, and many more. If you haven’t been exposed to this idea, the talk is a great overview and should compel you to explore the idea further. Get the slides here.

Project Natal, a gestural input device, is being promoted by Microsoft this year at E3 is attempting to promote their ubiquitous computing platform. Hot off the heals of several other videos promoting Microsoft’s vision for the future, Project Natal focuses on the video game arena. Nonetheless, the vision is illuminating and enticing.

At GDC 2009 in San Francisco, OnLive founder Steve Perlman and COO Mike McGarvey publicly introduced their company and the technology they have been working on the past many years. Taking cloud computing to a new level, their video compression technology has enabled them to compress video at speeds imperceptible to even the most hard-core video game enthusiasts. The compression speeds have allowed them to create a new delivery model for video games which now marks the advent of the seamless cloud computing experience.

MEGAphone is… phone-call controlled, real-time, multi-player gaming on big screens. At UX Week 2008, Dan Albritton talks about the challenges related to designing for such an experience. With mobile servers linked to the phone network via a measly 3G connection, the system must account for the differences between button presses on various phones, handle volume normalization, and be responsive with a large number of users.

Rahul Sood, founder of VoodooPC and Mark Solomon, Lead Designer share their design philosophy behind the HP Firebird gaming PC. Marketed as a next-generation Gaming PC, the Firebird ushers away an era of large, highly expandable, and expensive computers, and comes in as a moderately priced high-performance PC with a very small footprint.

Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, speaks at Google. Luis talks about his research on utilizing the abilities of humans to solve problems which are difficult for computers by creating games for people to play.

Over 9 Billion human hours of solitaire were played in 2003. It took 7 million human hours to build the entire Empire State Building. It turns out it took 20 million human hours to build the entire Panama canal. I want to show how we can make good use of these wasted human cycles and that is what I mean by human computation.
-Luis von Ahn

Designers at Bungie Studios, makers of the game Halo, discuss the trials and tribulations that go into designing fun and engaging multiplayer maps that are as exciting after playing 100, 200, and even 1000 times.

Microsoft offers some great behind the scenes footage for Halo 3 from the designers and engineers at Bungie Studios.

It’s great, there’s 90 guys here, half of them are artists, half of them are engineers, and it is like oil and water. All the left brain people and all the right brain people… and both groups thing they are really the people in charge.
-CJ COWAN (Boy Wonder)

Consider the impact auto racing (visibility, technologies) has had on the automotive industry. Computer games have evolved into a similar relationship with the computer industry. Because we get to design the problems that our players face (the game challenges) we have an opportunity to push the boundaries of graphics, user interface, AI, metrics and simulation. What we’re currently learning about mapping these abilities to the psychology of our players will be used in the mainstream software of the future. – Will Wright