Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center. Photo courtesy of ETC website.

By Brian Taylor

Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center was founded in 1999 by drama and arts management professor Don Marinelli and the late Randy Pausch, professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design. An independent center housed in neither the School of Computer Science nor the College of Fine Arts, the Entertainment Technology Center is headquartered in a riverfront technology park along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, Penn., directly across from an old steel mill site that is now a mixed-use commercial-residential development designed to blend into the adjacent National Historic District. Its hallways are a pop-culture explosion (geek skewing sci-fi, where a life-size carbonite Han Solo statue leans next to Lara Palmer’s image hanging on a wall above a Blade Runner poster), the men’s room decorated in a Super Mario Brothers World 1-1 motif.

Matt Ployhar

By Matt Ployhar

I’ve been following slates, tablets and similar PC form factors for quite a while now. They’ve actually been around for a very long time when one comes to think of it -- at least a decade from what I can tell. There’s a ton of hype around them all of a sudden, since Apple released the iPad over a year ago. So where will they go next?

Lee Purcell

What defines a community is more than its geographic boundaries; it’s the element of people gathering together for a common cause, supporting each other’s well-being and interests, and advancing goals that strengthen both the community and its members.

In 1985, one of the landmark events was the founding of the WELL, a new computer service by the San Francisco gang that had published the Whole Earth Catalog. In his influential book The Virtual Community , Howard Rheingold described how people took to this new communication medium enthusiastically, forging friendships and relationships that spanned a wide range of common interests -- on both a professional and personal level.

Today, the online landscape is profoundly richer, deeper and more readily available to digital media artists. As bandwidths increase, processing platforms improve while becoming less expensive, Internet access becomes more affordable, and software applications create new tools for communication, collaboration and play.

By Matt Ployhar

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been cleaning out my contacts database. This is something I’ve been dreading for a long time, since the database currently has something like 16,000 contacts in it. That’s right: 16,000. Frankly, it was getting a bit unwieldy and difficult to find active contacts, so it was time for me to roll up my sleeves and just tackle it.

Well, after three solid days of cross-checking to see who was where and what the status of the company was, my ISV (independent software vendors) contacts tab alone went from nearly 13,500 contacts down to a little over 10,000. I’m guessing only a third of my entire database still contains what I’d call “active” contacts. So what happened?

By Matt Ployhar

DRM was a response to piracy, just like free-to-play was a response to piracy. I’d like to cover some of the leading causes and reasons I’ve heard over the years for why people pirate, or make copies of, a game:

1. They don’t want to pay for the game outright, or they feel it’s too expensive.
2. The game isn’t available in their region.
3. They want a digital copy of the game that they legitimately purchased.
4. DRM game performance was invasive and/or degraded.
5. They bought the game, then lost or scratched the disk and didn’t want to repurchase it.
6. There wasn’t a demo available.
7. To be malicious; they don’t like the publisher.
8. The mafia, gray and black markets.
9. They cracked the game because it was a challenge.

Cloud computing concept photo from Shutterstock.

By Rich Seidner

The rapid rise of cloud computing has been driven by the benefits it delivers: huge cost savings with low initial investment, ease of adoption, operational efficiency, elasticity and scalability, on-demand resources, and the use of equipment that is largely abstracted from the user and enterprise. There are fundamentally challenging questions that companies will be forced to grapple with as they decide what cloud functionality suits them best. The central issues include security, cost, scalability and integration.

Ghostbusters was an unusually long project for us. We started in January 2006 with a prototype. For the first nine months of development, we were working on recreating the ballroom scene where Slim is captured from the first movie, obtaining the movie license and getting the green light to develop the project. At the same time, we knew we had something special with the Infernal Engine. A few former Terminal Reality employees wanted to use our technology to create a game for themselves; hence our engine licensing effort began as well.

By Garret Romaine

Can you name the country that leads the world in movie ticket sales and the number of films produced? Hint: It’s not the United States. According to online sources, that country is India. Thanks to the huge demand for entertainment, India has become a hotbed for computer graphics and animation. The country offers talented technicians, competitive pricing and finished work of the highest quality, all on blockbuster titles you’re sure to recognize.

Matt Ployhar

By Matt Ployhar

I recently read an article about one of the big console manufacturers’ finances. It reported quarterly revenue reaching more than a billion, but after all costs, it netted less profit than what some PC games will take home in a month. The math pointed to a roughly 2 percent margin of profit. And, based on its performance over the last decade, this was an awesome year for the manufacturer! Remember, it’s not always about how much revenue you generate, but what you take home that matters most.

This begs some deeper scrutiny. Are consoles really that profitable? When they are, who stands to gain the most? If we follow the money, I think the results would astound most people.

By John Moore

Puzzle-based games and adventure titles that feature puzzles have been a staple of gaming for years. A newer entrant to the puzzle segment is Crytek, best known for first-person shooters such as Far Cry and Crysis. The company recently branched out into mobile games with Fibble, a physics-based puzzle game that focuses on the travails of a crash-landed extraterrestrial.

Fibble, available on the iPhone, iPod and iPad, marks Crytek’s first mobile offering as well as its first puzzler. We recently talked to Kristoffer Waardahl, studio manager of Crytek Budapest, about the company’s new development direction.