“It’s better than Angry Birds,” said my nine-year old daughter.

And who am I to argue about that, but given that Angry Birds has dominated our house for the last two months, I was just a little surprised.

Now the first question, one might ask is: “Why are you letting your daughter play Angry Birds all the time instead of doing school work.”  Fine, good question.  But I would answer: “Because she gets her school work done quickly and because it’s actually her iPod Touch that Angry Birds lives on, and if I’m not nice to her, then I don’t get to play.”

See.  A simple answer.

Now the second question would be: “Why would she like Paranormal more than Angry Birds?!  Everyone loves Angry Birds!  It practically comes with any smartphone now.  Is there something wrong with her?”

Well, yes there is.  She’s my daughter, first off, and so that puts her behind the eight ball already.  But the real answer is that she has imagination.

I finally got around to loading up Paranormal on my wife’s iPhone last week.  Yes, I have to be nice to her too, or I don’t get to play with her iPhone either.  Strange how they’ve got me cornered like that.  But I digress.

The game loaded quickly and after finding how to turn the music off (fun for about one minute, then annoying) we started playing it.  The game really comes in three modes: investigations, spells and quests.  Wait.  I’m getting ahead of myself.  First, I should start with what the game is about.

The game involves being a supernatural bad-ass with the ability to destroy ghosts, cast spells, and cleanse the land of evil spirits.  I’m not sure what the official line on the game is since it is a movie tie-in, but that’s what we decided at the ol’ Carpenter house hold.

Through out the game, you gain experience, items, and sanity (it is a fictional game after all) for performing the above listed actions (questing, investigations and spells).  The kids immediately took to the investigations, since you can do it right then and there, spinning around with your “camera” and finding ghosts in the room you’re in.  You get more experience for faster and more accurate captures.

Actions in the game are regulated by mana.  Investigations and spells require mana, which regenerates over time.  You can purchase more mana at the store if necessary.  We didn’t need to.

The second part of the game is casting spells.  The hell holes in your area must be cleansed and kept down through spells.  Utilizing a drawing of a pentagram (very cool I might add, and would make my old elementary Catholic school nuns faint at the thought), the spell can be boosted.  This part of the game is a basic strategy game and involves moving around outside of the home to accomplish.

The last part of the game, the part the kids found to be the most fun (though they enjoyed it all), was the questing.  On the top down map, pins appear showing locations of quests.  Quests must be accomplished at the general area of the pin, so some outside adventuring must occur.  The quests don’t involve much beyond going to the spot, a point that could use some improvement in future games like this, but they did provide story items that helped make the experience spooky.  It also helped, as we were wandering around the neighborhood at 9pm, creeping near a quest point, that an owl hooted scaring the b’jesus out of us.

Overall, I give it two big thumbs up and so do the kids.  Ori Inbar promised the world that he would make games that required our children to get away from screens and adventure into the real world.   That’s the game that his company Ogemento delivered.  While there is some “screen time,” once we got outside, they barely looked at the iPhone and were busy filling in the rest of the game with their imagination.  Another plus is that, while the game uses augmented reality, I never really noticed the technology.  The game was more “experience” rather than “gimmick”.

And though I regularly write for Games Alfresco, which is Ori’s blog; I do not receive any compensation for my articles and most importantly, this article.   The app is free, anyway, so there’s nothing to be gained.  So phhtttt…, if you thought otherwise.

It used to be that every industry had its gatekeepers.

Music had the fat guys with cigars that Pink Floyd loved to sing about.  Factories had foreman that slapped each other on the back.  Corporations had bosses that controlled resources.  Political parties had precinct captains and party leaders.  And for the last decade, publishing has had agents acting as the gatekeepers.

All these industries still have and will have gatekeepers that control people and products not based on their merit, but on the connections and favors owed.  That will never change completely.

But now there are other ways.

I’m fond of reading Seth Godin, both his blog and his books.  I would recommend Tribes and Linchpin to everyone, regardless of the industry, even someone tending the house and kids on a daily basis.

For years, he’s been teaching how to get past the gatekeepers of the world, even when that gatekeeper is one’s own fear.  Gatekeepers were a necessary tool in the age of the Big Industry.  In Big Industry, economies of scale provided the economic boost.  Favors worked when there wasn’t much competition and information was scarse.  Now those lumbering dinosaurs are too large to function in this nimble mammal world.

The publishing industry, one of the last of the great white behemoths, has just started to come to this realization–cue Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The last few years, Dean and Kris, have been speaking online about taking control of your career as a writer.  They’ve been talking about this privately at their wonderful workshops for a long time before that, but we’ll stick with what’s in the public record.

This honest self-reliant tone struck well with me and it reminded me much of Seth Godin, albeit specific to the publishing industry.  Now that the e-publishing market is available; many authors, old and new, are debating the usage of such systems.  Dean and Kris are leading such a debate on their dual blogs.  Instead of the big bad gatekeeper in the huge conglomerate buildings of New York, we only have our own fear holding us back.  No longer is the holy grail of an agent required to get a book sold (not that it ever really necessary, but that’s a different discussion all together.)

Seth Godin’s book Tribes talks about how to build a movement one person at a time, slowly, leveraging technology and using our passion and skill.  The old way was to get picked by the elites, sudden and full of heady success.  The new way is to build deliberately, slowly and full of frequent failures.

Seth says it best as:

“Does your project depend on a miracle, a bolt of lightning, on being chosen by some arbiter of who will succeed? I think your work is too important for you to depend on a lottery ticket. In some ways, this is the work of the Resistance, an insurance policy that gives you deniability if the project doesn’t succeed. “Oh, it didn’t work because we didn’t get featured on that blog, didn’t get distribution in the right store, didn’t get the right endorsement…”

Dean and Kris have been telling us the same thing for years.  Be it on rewriting through workshops, or giving up because of rejections, or sending directly to editors.  Being a writer the way they explain it is the same way Seth describes Tribes.  It takes hard work and patience.  You can’t eat an elephant all in one bite and becoming a writer is one mighty big elephant.

Those frequent failures are going to be painful.  When you sell to a big traditional publisher, you can always blame it on them because of bad marketing or a bad cover.  When your book goes out on the e-publishing market and it doesn’t sell as well as you’d like, then it’s all on you.  But that’s okay.  Getting it out there is the hard part and you’ll do better next time.

Matt Mullenweg recently wrote about Apple and their willingness to fail in his post 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number.  If Steve Jobs, the turtlenecked guru, can stomach not having copy+paste on his first iPhone, then I can give it my best and be happy with the result.

In Dean’s New World of Publishing and Kris’s Business Rusch , they explain how to navigate this new world of publishing.   One of the most important points they make to new writers is that the new model is going to be slow.   But that’s okay, Seth already warmed me up to the idea that building a tribe takes time.

Plus, meeting people along the way, one-at-a-time, is a lot more fun than plugging into a massive corporate box any day.

The production values on these indie game trailers boggle my mind.

The game initially reminds me of Conquest, but with a lot more bells and whistles.  Clover Studios has brought together location based gaming and tower defense, which makes for a good peanut butter and chocolate combination.   Though with any multi-player strategy game, off-time balancing will be an issue.

I’ve only just started messing with the game, so I’ll be sure to report back next week with a longer term impression of the game play.  So far it appears to be a step up from the other AR games we’re used to seeing these days, but we’ll see.

Aside from the antenna problems, its nice to see incremental improvements on magic lens augmented reality.

Now I can’t guarantee that it’s the first, but it’s a start.  The Faces app comes from Pixelshed and is available in the AppStore right now.

Make fun of your friends by putting new faces on their heads and share these images via email and Facebook.

Point your iPhone towards your friend’s face and a magical overlays will appear on the screen. Change the overlay by swiping left and right on the screen.

Faces is the very first app that takes advantage of cutting edge Augmented Reality (AR) technology on your iPhone.

Make the world your golf course.

That’s the tagline of the new iPhone app Gigaputt from Gigantic Mechanic.  Instead of clubs, you swing your iPhone in a Wii-like manner (though the accuracy is no where near the same) and hit your ball.  Unlike most AR iPhone games, this one actually requires you to interact with your surroundings rather than just spin in place and hit random buttons.  I’m sure there’s some way to include drinks and bar hopping into the game for the adult readers of GA.

The game is also being featured in the Come Out and Play Festival 2010 in New York on June 14th.