What Is Gaming?

Yesterday, several of us got together at Pentascope in Amsterdam to explore what gaming means to us. Matthijs van Zutphen from Crossing Signals had organized the afternoon as birthday present to himself, and had invited 9 very different people from different fields and a range of ages and expertise to discuss the concept of gaming.

Juriaan van Rijswijk was the only person there who has any realtime experience with gaming as a fulltime business. He's consultant - Game Entertainment Europe, and he's got game - WZZRD Game Cafes. At any given moment in time there are a minimum of 2.8 million gamers in play on Lineage, the top online game site worldwide. They need Internet access with serious speed and no glitches. One second slip and they've lost.


Complete social communities come alive through these gaming platforms - life imitates art and vice versa. People find one another and pool their talents together to compete and play.

Gaming is shaping the internet service infrastructure choices. Questions like what gives us the fastest connection - Digital subscriber lines or fiber optic? What formats and channels provide the best access for that little device most used for gaming, the mobile phone?

By the end of this sessionm, we were wiser and have decided to see what value we can create by pooling some of our talents together to play with ideas for new applications that engage people through games. Stay posted.