Deus Ex - Human Revolution

For those not familiar with the Deus Ex style, it typically features heavily choice based game play, multiple approaches to every single task you can do, and most importantly: hidden secret societies engaged in secret wars over technological and economic balance.

Deus Ex and Deus Ex: The Invisible War, both featured your character being the recipient of nano technological modifications, allowing you to upgrade certain systems present in your body, for the furthering of your means. This is still so in Human Revolution, however, as it is the prequel to Deus Ex, you can kiss nano-technology goodbye. 

Bunchball, the self-declared "inventors of gamification" has pushed the boundaries of gamification propagation with it's release of Nitro for Salesforce.com.

 How well can we communicate through digital means? What about body language? Facial Expression? Location?

“¼ people pay attention in conference calls”, says Philip Vanhoutte, Managing Director EMEA of Plantronics. Several studies over the past decade consolidate this view, with some listing as little as 10% paying full attention.

Well, it's been an experience.
I've fallen just short of my story a day objective, but I might be able to push myself with a few feature/portal submissions!

Earlier today the SA President's Office official Twitter account decided that it should promote the upcoming show "It's for Life" on DSTV 107 (at 7PM).
The twist of the matter is (beyond the fact that people follow the SAPresident account for presidential announcements, not show recommendations) is that two of Zuma's daughters feature in the show.

But, can we complain? What is expected of public figures on Twitter, certaintly the account can no-longer claim to represent the Presidential Office, or Zuma in his role as President, because he has clearly used it to promote his family members personal interests.

The novelty of having a phone has worn off a bit. Same goes for the official email address.
The work however. The work is still good!

I managed to get my first article  for ITWeb published today, interviewing  ITWeb employee Joe Diedericks about his recent win in the Blackberry App Master Challenge. You might see MyDigitalLife's version here, and I have to say, I prefer my headline. :D

Do you know what divagate means?

You could be feeding the hungry!

Hey all, Been a while since I last wrote, exams and the like took up some time.

Some of you may have noticed in the absence between this and my last post, that Gamification has really picked up and been caught on the global radar, with BBCNews even offering an explanation of it, and a brief rationale as to why it might be successfully implemented. So, now that I've given myself a cyber pat-on-the-back for predicting the trend, I'd like to move along to an interesting little "semi-gamified" social networking tool.

It's called Klout and it, with your blessing, accesses your varying social networking sites to form an analysis of your importance, prestige, style and how much of an effect you have on what your fellow networked users use. Giving you interesting titles and achievements as it does so!

As I wrote back on the 11th, Escapist Magazine has put together a short video trying to inspire and explain some gamification concepts within the education field. 

My previous article explained some incentives and bonuses that this approach could garner, with teamwork bringing about class bonuses, and even modifiers to your "experience points" (essentially a less punitive gauge of course perf0rmance).

Before I continue with this however, I thought it might be interesting to mention that several leading Game Designers despise gamification totally, believing that subverting

There are many fields that Gamification could theoretically be applied to, but it is one thing to theorise and hypothesise, and quite another to actually test and draw results. 

Extracredits (a content creator for Escapist Magazine) recently posted a short video answering some questions by educators world-wide, centred around how to implement gamification techniques in the field of Education (Primarily at Secondary/High School levels). 

They touch on many different techniques, but the one that stuck with me the most was the reinvention of our current marking system. We currently mark in an exclusionary fashion, were we look at an ideal piece of work as worthy of full marks (for example 100%).