I saw the tweet about click through and take pictures and NG would mail you artifacts if you played their game Mission Expedition | Expedition Week- National Geographic Channel. But I didn’t think they’d be real, actual artifacts. And then I saw the sponsor banner link for Ancient Resource.

Ancient Resource is the name that Gabriel Vandervort does business as. Vandervort is a former documentary producer and writer, having worked on programs that aired on the History Channel.

Vandervoort claims on his site that his inventory comes from old collections that were brought into the U.S. prior to the UNESCO conventions.

These items come from years of collecting and study. Many of my pieces have been purchased at auction (single items, or as lots). I also buy old collections and museum deaccessions. I never purchase or export items from forbidden countries such as Egypt, Mexico, Greece, Iraq, Italy or Turkey. All such items have come from old collections brought into the USA prior to 1969 and the UNESCO conventions.

National Geographic has come under a great deal of criticism from the archaeological community for how it deals with treasure hunting. The black market trade in stolen and looted antiquities is only surpassed in global value by the trades in drugs and arms, it rivals human trafficking.

                          

More recently, scientists at the University of Washington began using a game called FoldIt to solve problems related to molecular science and, as the title suggests, folding and design of proteins.

Today, IBM released CityOne (a “serious game” in the company’s own parlance) to help urban planners, civic and business leaders make cities “smarter” or more environmentally and socially sustainable. CityOne is a massively multiplayer online game in the real time strategy category.

via IBM Releases CityOne, A “Serious Game,” For Urban Planners, Civic Leaders And Executives.

                          

The 15 Most Offensive Video Games Ever Made – PCWorld.

                          

“Video games are just another media format for conveying information, whether it’s narrative information, or story, or another way to express visual effects, or AI or computer programming,” said U of C librarian Jerremie Clyde, who is overseeing the collection’s production.

According to Clyde, games have educational value. His research interests include video games as scholarship, so it’s no surprise he is working to start this collection at U of C.

“Places like Simon Fraser University have had a similar collection for some time and these collections are becoming much more common in Britain and Europe,” he said. “Studying games as a media, whether it’s in social sciences, communication and culture, education [or] digital humanities, is becoming more popular.”

via The Gauntlet® News – Video game centre installed on campus.

                          

The social-gaming juggernaut, responsible for some of the most popular social games on Facebook like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, is responsible for handling a deluge of traffic from the roughly 10 percent of the world’s Internet population who play its games. Zynga can add up to 1,000 new servers each week and has begun expanding into both public and private cloud storage and infrastructure to cope with the massive amount of traffic, Lee said.

via Zynga CTO: We turn on 1,000 new servers a week for FarmVille and other games | VentureBeat.

                          

10 Mind Blowing Facebook Games Statistics.

                          

CultureLab: Can video games be art?.

                          

Finally! After in-game ads have been around in some form for around 30 years, there’s finally a study that links them to an increase in product purchase. Nielsen recently worked with EA and Gatorade to look into how much exposure to in-game ads would increase product sales. The result? 24% increase in purchases and an ROI of $3.11.

While there has been a lot of in-game research over the past few years, most of it looked at increase of awareness. The closest studies got to measuring movement of product was self-reported purchase intent; the last mile of actual behavior was never really measured. Up until this study, the best research I saw was a study partnered with comScore’s media panel to look at changes in online behaviors (such as search) after exposure to in-game ads. Based on the increases I saw in that data (and all the self-reported purchase intent studies), the 24% figure seems in line.

via MediaPost Publications By Golly, In-Game Ads Work! (Maybe) 09/17/2010.