Unfortunately Rebecca is unable to attend DemoCamp’s Gaming Edition this evening so Nancy Zimmerman has been kind enough to take on the liveblog - thanks Nancy!

What: DemoCampVancouver06 - Gaming Edition [wiki][Facebook event]
Where: Workspace in Gastown
Presentations Include:

Bleeding Edge iPhone Development
Parveen Kaler, Smartful Studios
Self-Publishing Games Direct-to-Consumers
Dustin Sacks, Sillysoft Games

Starting out with a panel about gaming in general.

How many people have a gaming console? About 15.

How many people think of themselves as gamers? [oops - missed this response - typing!]
Will discuss business aspects of gaming tonight.
Panelists:
Dustin Sucks - owns Sillisoft games. Develops strategy games. Will talk about indie gaming.
Jamie Change - has done retail, online, currently doing purely online pc, free to play. Will talk about economics of Xbox dev’t.
Parveen Kaler - [oops - missed - will try to fill in]

Q: Is indie gaming like indie films?

P: Halo is summer blockbuster; but all games are ‘games’ - doesn’t like the term ‘casual’ games.
D: Name ‘casual’ means it takes less up front to get into them. Not such a steep learning curve. More accessible.

Q from audience: Do any of you try to bridge online/console/etc?

J: hasn’t seen it work yet (eg. Majestic).
P: benefit of iPhone is it has it all. May be more options.

Q: Is gaming mainstream? eg. Halo (more…)

Okay so it’s not really an IQ test, it’s more like trivia… and I LIVE for trivia. The CBC has had two editions of “Test the Nation” thus far and they’ve been pretty successful. I’ve played along from home and online and learned a bit about myself each time. This installment will be, “Test the Nation: Trivia”, focusing on the 21st Century World.

In early December my fellow Metroblogging author Ryan announced that he’d be going to Toronto for the next installment of Test the Nation. Very cool, I knew he’d do bloggers proud. This morning through the magic of Twitter I also found out that local blogger and radio personality, Buzz is also on the bloggers team.

Well in my inbox this morning was a lovely note from someone at the CBC asking me to apply, which I did, and now I’ve been accepted and will be flown to Toronto in a few weeks. I’m going to Toronto for a weekend to play a big huge nationally televised trivia game on a team with other bloggers Awesome.

The show will be LIVE on January 20, 2008. The teams set to compete in studio are Bloggers vs Flight Crew vs Backpackers vs Cab Drivers vs Celebrity Lookalikes vs Chefs. I know they’re secretly bringing me in as a celebrity lookalike… jk.

The only REALLY bad thing about this is that it’s the same day as the Skate for a Cure that I’ve been raising funds for and we also have a Vancouver Blogger team. I’m wondering if I can transfer my account to John so he can be the skater? I don’t regret raising money for childhood cancer research, not one bit - but missing out on skating at GM Place is pretty heartbreaking. Who knows, they will probably do the fundraiser again next year so I’ll be sure to try again.

At any rate, wish us luck and also leave me a comment if you’re another blogger who will be on the team. I’ll of course be blogging the journey across the country and as much as I can about the experience.

To prepare, I encourage my teammates to try out the “Mental Gym” which has question in the same category that we’ll be given. So far I’ll only share my “Mental Gym Test #4″ results that were 90%… as for the others… I need a little more work.

Update: There’s a Facebook Group that has some neat photos up of the set and what the actual broadcast will look like.

UPDATE: Here’s a list of all those on the Bloggers Team (more…)

The CBC is all into testing us Canadians with their interactive programming. The first of the ‘Test the Nation‘ series was a giant nation-wide IQ test where you would watch the program on TV (live), follow along on the web, or grab a paper copy to record your answers. Then your score would be compared with everyone else’s coast-to-coast [Miss604]. A little graph would display in which percentile you ranked and who was the smartest in the country. The results were broken down in to several categories including male or female, left or right handed, meat eater or vegetarian/vegan and folder or scruncher.

The second installment is called “Watch Your Language”, testing Canadians and their grammar [InsidetheCBC]. Immediately I thought of an episode of 30 Rock.

Tracey:So how you doing over there Theo Huxtable?
Twofer: I’m doing good.
Tracey: Nuh uh. Superman does good. You’re doing well. You need to study your grammar son.
Frank:Wow, that was embarrassing for you.

Test the Nation’s talking and writing things goodly edition will air September 9 at 8:00pm (local time) and you can download the scorecard to get a head start.

While looking over a new theme that we’ve been working on for a while, John and I got into a heated debate over fonts. Yes, our household is just THAT geeky.

I flashed a screenshot of the theme-in-progress to my co-worker, Chris who said there’s a part of it that reminds him of “that little tank game”, he then proceeded to demonstrate with his fingers, the movements of the tank and tag on some sound effects “eeeee oooooo crrhhgggglllhhhhhh!” I totally knew what he was talking about.

Way back when, my brother, sister and I used to have two games on our computer. One was with two gorillas on top of skyscrapers and you had to adjust velocity and angle, then toss a banana at the other person’s gorilla. Any banana that missed, left a crater and the cityscape would vanish around you, while battling. They also had a version of it on Intellivision [wiki]. Quality gaming, I know.

Another, was Tank Wars - the game Chris was getting at. All the computer-run tanks were named after dictators and warriors, Atilla, Musollini, Adolf, etc. To play a much-updated version of Tank Wars, visit a site that lives up to its reputation, AddictingGames.com.

Chris also says I should be a “Verdana sales rep” since I can sell anyone on it [previous post about fonts yes, I have a previous post about fonts].

Update: Found a forum post about the gorilla game, “Apes”. Someone actually re-created it, sweeeeet.

Firefox 2.0 is out today. Thanks to John for imbedding these updates into my brain and also thanks to dingoRUE for the informative post. Miss604.com is best viewed in Firefox so hop to it! With that out of the way…

I’m a sucker for trivia. I’ve got a pretty competitive streak and I sometimes like to think I know everything. Combine that with some friends and a friendly board game, and you’ve got yourself one heck of a night. A way to combine all that excitement with 8+ hours a day of being online is to “play” Guess Where Vancouver on Flickr.

“…In this group you should post intriguing pictures of something (people, place thing) in Vancouver, Vancouver… Don’t give away the location in your title, description or tags. Let others try to guess where and what you took a picture of.[guesswherevancouver]”

Mind you, I’m not very quick at guessing. I usually know the place but someone (cough seanorr cough) has beat me to it. Either that or the photos are so amazingly good and hide their locations so well, I’m at a loss. (more…)