1）据gamasutra报道，美国总统奥巴马在最近的2013美国计算机科学教育周活动致词上鼓励年轻学生在学校掌握计算机技术，亲手制作新电子游戏，而不只是购买新游戏。

他称掌握这些技能不仅关乎学生的未来前程，更关乎国家的未来前途。若要让美国一直保持令先地位，就需要年轻的美国人掌握能够改变人们生活的工具和技术。

2）据venturebeat报道，TinyCo与20世纪福克斯日前宣布将合作推出基于《恶搞之家》的手机游戏，预计该游戏将于2014年初上线。

在此之前，20世纪福克斯曾与Rovio合作开发基于动画电影《里约大冒险》的手机游戏《愤怒的小鸟：里约》，并与Gameloft联合推出了基于《辛普森一家》和《冰河世纪》的手机游戏（游戏邦注：热门手机游戏《The Simpsons:Tapped Out》是EA为默多克新闻集团旗下的福克斯数字娱乐公司开发的游戏，并显示了动画电视剧在手机游戏领域的巨大发展潜力）。

Family Guy(from gamezebo)

福克斯移动副总裁Matt McMahon表示，TinyCo团队是同其他12或15家公司竞标得到该项目开发机会，TinyCo表示该项目团队规模比一般的TinyCo大两倍，因为需要许多动画师制作能够表现幽默感的动画效果。

3）据gamasutra报道，《Minecraft》开发者Markus Persson在最近出版的新书《Minecraft:The Unlikely Tale of Markus ‘Notch’ Persson and the Game that Changed Everything》中回忆了自己2010年获得Valve工作要约的情况。

Markus Persson(from indiegamemag.com)

当时他在Valve面试的内容包括编程实践，见到了包括Gabe Newell和Robin Walker在内的多个Valve团队重要成员，面临着是否要接受这份工作的艰难抉择。但最终他还是拒绝了这份工作，因为他觉得自己能够和Jakob Porser（之后成为Mojang另一名联合创始人）能够自己创造更美好的未来。

4）YouGov及Mobile.co.uk最近调查显示，虽然有65％的受访者很排斥别人在说话时，还有人在玩手机的行为，但还是有88％年龄介于25-34的年轻人承认自己会在社交场合掏出手机。

using phone during date(from shyluk.blogspot)

40％受访者甚至在约会过程中使用手机，23％承认曾因在电影院使用手机而破坏社交礼仪，49％承认在上厕所时使用手机。

46％认为他人在面前频繁查看手机会让自己恼火，65％认为如果自己在谈话时有人使用手机就会很生气。

5）据insidemobileapps报道，Storm8日前宣布成立第三方发行部门，为游戏开发提供包括营销、销售、在线运营、盈利和设计等方面的服务。

war of dragons(from insidemobileapps)

该公司首家合作伙伴是Mad Head Limited工作室，Storm8已将后者的游戏《Tower of Saviors》更名为《War of Dragons》并引进美国市场，该游戏发布首周已跻身加拿大和澳大利亚App Store免费应用榜单前25名。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）’Don’t just buy a new video game – make one’

By Mike Rose

“Don’t just buy a new video game – make one.”

- U.S. President Barack Obama helps kick off Computer Science Education Week 2013.

As part of the Code.org organized computer science event, Obama implored kids and young people to learn computer science in school, and get involved with making games and apps.

“Learning these skills isn’t just important for your future,” he noted. “It’s important for our country’s future. If we want America to stay on the cutting edge, we need young Americans, like you, to master the tools and technology that will change the way we do just about everything

“Don’t just play on your phone – program it,” he added. “Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t.”（source：gamasutra）

2）TinyCo cuts deal with Twentieth Century Fox to take Family Guy into mobile games

Dean Takahashi

TinyCo and 20th Century Fox are announcing today that Family Guy is going to become a mobile game. That should make the millions of fans who watch the Fox television show happy as mobile is becoming a big platform for favorite mainstream brands.

The success of the mobile game hit The Simpsons: Tapped Out, created by Electronic Arts for Fox Digital Entertainment (part of the Rupert Murdoch News Corp. empire), showed that there’s a big market for funny games. And that’s what TinyCo is shooting for as it builds the free-to-play game and collaborates with Fuzzy Door, the writers of the Family Guy cartoon.

Now Fox Digital Entertainment (part of Twentieth Century Fox) has tapped San Francisco-based TinyCo to build a Family Guy game for launch in early 2014. The show has been a hit for more than a decade, so Fox has entrusted TinyCo with a big responsibility. For TinyCo, this is a chance to put a well-known brand on a game and help it stand out from the sea of competitors in the app stores. But both companies insist it won’t just be a throwaway experience.

“The reason why people love Family Guy is because it’s funny,” said Chelsea Howe, the senior game designer at TinyCo, in an interview with GamesBeat. “All of the mechanics works to serve that idea. Our design goal has been a ‘laugh every session.’ That was an inspirational goal for the design team, and as we play-test it, it is becoming the reality.”

Fox has had good luck in the mobile game business so far by playing the field with gamemakers. It has been launching products in the iPhone market since 2009. It worked with Smule to do a karaoke mobile game based on the TV show Glee. It worked with Rovio to create the Angry Birds Rio game, which had a tie-in with the Fox movie Rio. It did the Simpsons game and the Ice Age Village game with Gameloft.

“We’ve been smart or lucky to pick some really interesting partners along the way,” said Matt McMahon, the vice president of mobile at Fox Digital Entertainment. “We’re very focused in making something intrinsically made for the platform and can hopefully have a nice run on it. It’s not just a repurposed marketing thing or repurposed web experience. People can have our brands and an extension of their worlds in their pockets every single day.”

He noted that TinyCo had “great monetization chops but a vision beyond that” that fit well with the Family Guy brand. Howe said the team made the game more character-driven than a typical TinyCo game. TinyCo’s games have been downloaded more than 85 million times.

“We want to have an experience that is authentic to the brand,” McMahon said. “TinyCo approached us. They competed with 12 or 15 others and made it through the process. We like to keep our finger on big indies that are on the rise in mobile games.”

Andrew Green, the head of business development and business operations at TinyCo, said his company’s team jumped at the chance to work with writers of the show to build the game. Howe said the team is more than twice the size of the usual staff that TinyCo uses for a game, with lots of animators creating a lot of animated content to deliver the game’s humor.

“We flew some of our design team to the Fuzzy Door studio and spent a day a week teaching the writers game design,” said Howe. “That collaboration helped us pull off our ‘laugh every session’ goal.”

“We have comedy writers on staff, and they’re supplementing the work with the writers at Fuzzy Door,” McMahon said.

McMahon said the team is focused on building a strong original story, making the content into a kind of role-playing game for the player inside the world of Quahog. Each side quest is like an episode of the Family Guy TV show. The goal is to make content that lasts for a long time, or several years — far more than a typical mobile game.

Howe said that the developers are shooting for two solid months of content at the very beginning, but the title will be updated continuously. It will debut on both iOS and Android.

“If Miley Cyrus does something crazy this week, we can make fun of that in the game a day later,” McMahon said. “We’ll do content updates every four to five weeks. We’ll do more than seasonal content packs for Thanksgiving or Christmas. We’re excited about the ongoing operations for the game.”

Family Guy star Peter Griffin, said, “It’s really fun. Plus, if you play it for more than three hours, it counts as going outside!”

TinyCo recently raised $20 million from venture capitalists Pinnacle Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Suleman Ali founded TinyCo in 2009, and it has launched more than a dozen successful mobile games.（source：venturebeat）

3）’Minecraft was my chance to create a Valve, rather than work at Valve’

By Mike Rose

“Somehow, I felt that Minecraft was maybe my chance to create a Valve, rather than work at Valve.”

- Minecraft creator Markus Persson recalls the job offer he received from Valve back in 2010.

As detailed in book “Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus ‘Notch’ Persson and the Game that Changed Everything”, which has now been translated into English and excerpted by AllThingsDigital, Persson had plenty of tough decisions to make around the time that Minecraft began to explode.

His job interview at Valve included a programming exercise, meeting the various members of the Valve team including Gabe Newell and Robin Walker, and deciding whether to take the job.

In the end, the indie developer decided to turn the job offer down, as he felt that himself and Jakob Porser, soon to be one of Mojang’s other co-founders, could make a good go of it themselves.

It’s worth reading the extract to get a feel for how Persson handled his last year before Mojang. The full book can be found on Amazon.（source：gamasutra）

4）40 per cent of Brits aged 25 to 35 use a mobile while on a date

by Phil Tottman

Even though 65 per cent of people find it annoying when others use a mobile when another person is talking, 88 per cent of 25 – 34 year olds still admit to using their phones at a social event, reveals YouGov, and Mobile.co.uk.

40 per cent even use their mobile while on a date – I can only imagine those people are still single.

Us Brits do tend to pride ourselves in our manners, and we certainly like to grumble about those who have none.

However, our worsening addiction to our mobile devices is making an impact on how polite we are being.

23 per cent have admitted to breaking social convention by using their phone when in the cinema, and slightly more acceptable, 49 per cent do so whilst on the toilet. Nothing wrong with that.

Certain actions get different reactions, as 46 per cent get more annoyed when users check their phone too often, 65 per cent get rather peeved if a phone is being used when someone else is talking.

But its when someone is talking loudly on the phone that takes the biscuit. God help anyone that does that in front of a Brit, we’ll have a good old grumble.

Rob Hodges, mobile communications expert at Mobile.co.uk, said: “Using a mobile phone while talking with a friend or on a date was once seen as impolite, but it seems more and more people are doing it as our attachment to smartphone grows.（source：mobile-ent）

5）Storm8 launches third-party mobile games publishing business

Jon Robinson

Storm8, a leader in the mobile social gaming space, announced today the launch of Storm8 Publishing, a third-party publishing business that will provide marketing, distribution, live operations, monetization, and design expertise to game developers looking to add their promising titles to the service.

“Our first launch partner is Mad Head Limited, and we’re bringing their game Tower of Saviors to the U.S. and renaming it War of Dragons,” says Perry Tam, Storm8 CEO. “We expect this to be a really, really big hit, as it’s already a very big hit in the Eastern world.”

Boasting 8 million global downloads (as Tower of Saviors), Storm8’s design optimization helped gear War of Dragons toward Western audiences, helping the title instantly jump into the App Store’s Top 25 Free Apps charts within the first week of availability in both Canada and Australia.

“With Storm8, we bring value to the ecosystem, says Tam. “First of all, we have a huge network of users, with 50 million monthly active users. Also, our users are all gamers and they are all very dedicated gamers eager to try new games. So I think  that by itself brings a lot of value to our partners.

“In the last 12 months, we’ve consistently had at least five titles in the Top 100 Grossing chart. That proves that not only do we have a huge network, but our users are highly monetizable. In the past, we have built all of our games, and I think our expertise and everything that we’ve learned throughout the years making our own games will make for a strong collaborative effort with our partners who join the program. Being around the block for such a long time in a very young industry, we believe that we have much more to offer our partners in terms of marketing, packaging, distribution, and gameplay, as well as relationships that we have built in the past that we can now leverage.”

And seeing that Storm8’s games have been downloaded over 600 million times since the company launched just a few years ago, Tam’s point rings loud and true.（source：insidemobileapps）