New and Noteworthy

Like us, you’re probably having a busy summer. Still, we really appreciate the fact that some of you have found time to leave comments, RT our tweets and suggest future blog post ideas for Michael’s social game design blog. Thanks for that! We’ve been working on a number of exciting new publishing and speaking projects, and we’re also working on developing new games, so I thought I would give you a little update.

We’ve received some great news from one of our favourite interactive and creative conferences, South By Southwest.  They really liked our idea for a panel discussion we suggested on the topic of understanding how social games motivate behaviour, and how that power can be used for good. We’d love to have Michael speak on this topic with a number of other experts to add their insight, and we need your help to get the spot. SXSW uses a community voting system to select the participants, so the more votes we get the more likely the chances are of us presenting next March. The SXSW Panelpicker is officially open as of Wednesday, August 11th. (That’s tomorrow!) All you have to do is visit the Web site, http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/, sign in and vote.

Since there were more than 2800 different music, interactive and film panel proposals submitted this year, the competition is stiff. But we like to think that competition is just another form of validation and so we’re ready! Please vote for Michael’s panel called “Social Games: Manipulating Your Brain Chemistry, for Good” and/or RT this post to get others to also join in the voting process. We really appreciate it! More news in a bit, but until then, you can always email me at victoria [at] ayogo dot com if you have any questions or just leave a comment.