ProphecyBoy

Strange to think that the thing we've been working on for the past 6 months is launching next week. Huh. - more on Twitter

Games Save the World for eTech

Well, I just submitted my first conference proposal ever. It's for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego next March. I knew I wanted to submit something, if only to get in the habit of such things, but in the past two weeks it solidified for me that I want ...

Come Out and Play

The Come Out and Play Festival is this weekend in New York, and if you don't come out and play, you might be classified as an Enemy of Fun. It's a big game / urban game / pervasive gaming festival. What does that mean? Lots of people playing games in ...

Gaming the System: Dissenting Opinions

The heat has kept me from getting a decent night's sleep in days, with the side effect that I've been a little ADD since yesterday. While that helped me write a bunch yesterday, it also meant that I didn't have the attention span for reading, and my brain was only ...

Gaming the System: Opinion Polling

In my E3 wrapup from last week, I said that I think gaming is becoming both more mainstream and more engaging, with Nintendo leading the charge toward a different kind of entertainment. That's great, and I know we're all looking forward to wearing our Wiimotes on our heads, but what's ...

Gaming the System: belated E3, and a Wii in every home

It's been three weeks since E3 (photos), and I feel like a slacker for not having posted anything about it yet. But, the truth is E3 and my trip to the Nintendo World Store (photos) just fit too well into an epic cycle of thought that had been percolating since ...

Google Currency?

This Business Week article suggests that Google might be developing their own currency, making an end-run around PayPal (and just about everyone else). This is fascinating when taken together with the economies of MMOGs, especially Second Life, whose Lindens are easily converted to and from real-world currencies. If Google starts ...

All Over the Place

As Erwin spotted, the LA CityBeat article on StreetWars came out yesterday, with the recounting of my assassination right in the first paragraph: "It was only 6:15 a.m. when Special Agent DB* dragged himself out of bed and joined the other two members of his team, who’d been lying in wait ...

StreetWars spreads

I may be so soaked that I missed Drinks for the Dead, but StreetWars keeps on spreading. It will be featured on CNN tonight, and I just got an email from a CityBeat reporter asking to interview me. Me! The guy who got wetted outside his gym on Day 3! I'm ...

Smoked (…or Steamed?)

My brief stint as an assassin has come to an end. This morning, leaving Bootcamp, I was smoked by a gang of three just outside the door. I smelled trouble as I was leaving the building in the form of a red-bearded fellow who looked not sore enough to have ...

Cubes, Water, and Gaming

As of last night, I've officially upped the ante: not only have I begun playing Perplex City, but I'm now enmeshed in StreetWars, as well. I'd call them both Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), tho they're quite different. I won't go into all of that now (more after I've progressed a ...

Colophon

Turning coffee into feats of intellectual derring-do since 2001

Hi there, I'm Adam Simon. I'm the Creative Director and Co-Founder of Socialbomb, a social gaming startup in New York City. I recently graduated from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), doing research in large scale game design, social networking, urban computing, performative technology, and networked objects. You can find info on my thesis here, and a big list of all my ITP-related posts here

I sometimes work at area/code.

Projects that I've been a part of which you might have heard of include BootyDialer, The Invention of Murder, Rumplestiltskin (An Aretefactual Performance), & Sharkrunners

You can email me at adam @ [the name of this website].

Syndicate

Social Heroes: Games as APIs for Social Interaction (aka, my ITP thesis)

Because I've been busy/lazy and off the blogging habit, here, at long last, is my thesis for ITP, almost a year late. Comments and such are still more than welcome, as many of the ideas are still being worked on in my current projects, and Social Heroes itself is likely ...

Crazy Blind Date: A Quintet for Human & Computer

The appeal of Crazy Blind Date\ is immediately apparent, and seems custom-designed for busy city folks: “on very short notice we can set you up on quick dates with total strangers at public places like bars and coffee shops. You're not allowed to see their picture or even communicate.” Created ...
March 29th 2008
Tags: Social Software Studio, Thesis 2 Comments

Social Heroes

My thesis has split into two ideas, something which was foreshadowed at the end of my midterm presentation. I mistakenly assumed that one of the ideas would seem obviously better than the other, but that hasn't happened. Rather, I'm stuck with two ideas which I think explore the ideas I'm ...
March 16th 2008
Tags: ITP One Comment

PCBs from Eagle to Production

In this post I'm going to explain how to output files from Eagle PCB in order to send your designs off to be professionally fabbed. There are two major steps before this in the process: creating the electrical schematic, and moving from that schematic to a board layout. I'm not ...
March 14th 2008
Tags: Social Software Studio, Thesis One Comment

Thesis: midterm presentation & playtest

| View | Upload your own ITP Thesis: Midterm presentation (with notes) (PDF) Here's the midterm presentation I just gave in my thesis section (the PDF includes the presenter notes, and is perhaps more comprehensible). I felt like this presentation was a return to form for me - lots of photos, ...

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