My 15 minutes…all in one week
It’s been a good week for me in the press. The weekend before last included the OLPC game jam, as well as my son’s high school graduation and the start of the Games For Change festival in New York.
There was an in which I was featured:
But now he is working on a game called “Melting Point,” which has been built to educate both children and adults about the environmental factors of global warming by allowing them to experiment with various environmental, scientific and political factors in a simulation game. Quirk originally wanted to take Melting Point to consumers in the traditional gaming manner. But as the idea came closer to commercialization, he realized that he couldn’t follow the same blueprint.“Originally I was going to sell to the mass market as a downloadable game that took two hours to play,” Quirk said. “But it’s too difficult as a small company with limited funding, so I have simplified it to a 5-minute Flash game.”
That short game will act as a marketing tool for a full-length game that Quirk hopes will be adopted by a partner and become server-based, where it can be sold to educational institutions or individuals.
For the OLPC Game Jam, we had a couple of articles. in Mass High Tech:
Local gaming professionals on tap to participate in the event include Kent Quirk, chief technical officer of Waltham-based[sic] CogniToy LLC.
“Let’s put some powerful tools into the hands of the kids, and let them take their learning further,” said Quirk, who is volunteering his time for the event.
A nice article by Hiawatha Bray, the Boston Globe’s technology writer:
This weekend, about 17 game developers will try to do just that during a “game jam” at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham. They aim to crank out seven or eight titles in three days, according to Kent Quirk, chief technology officer of Cognitoy LLC, a game development company in Acton.
“Games can’t teach everything,” said Quirk, who will participate in the jam, “but they can make some kinds of learning a whole lot more palatable.”
And finally, The Needham Channel did a news report, so I finally got to see what I look like on TV. Can’t say I’m too impressed, especially with the still shots in the teaser, but I wasn’t terrible.