Links that haven’t found their way into other posts:
Maxis has made groundbreaking simulation games for a decade. Their newest will let you evolve creatures from single-celled organisms to land-based reptiles, to people, to beyond. The ecosystem exists online and contains other players’ creatures. The flash intro on their site does an incredible job of condensing a pretty radical and broad idea for a game into 60 seconds that make you want it right now.
A few links today that haven’t found their way into other posts yet:
Yahoo Research’s ZoneTag – With only “two clicks”, you can snap a picture on your phone and upload it to Flickr with the location auto-tagged. They do this by determining your location using the nearest cell towers when you take the picture. Great idea, but it only works on a few Nokia phones at the moment. It’d be great to see more applications of this kind of data… location auto-tagging will make applications like Flaggr so much smoother. Greater precision and access to mobile location data are direly needed in this space.
The massively-multiplayer online game Second Life is sponsoring a fellowship for creative arts in their virtual world. One lucky applicant will get $4,000 (real money) to produce works of visual or performance art (virtual art) in the Second Life game world. It seems unusual and a little strange today. In a decade, when real life and virtual words are irrevocably meshed, it’ll seem perfectly normal.
Go to Flickr Leech, hit go, and delight at the hundreds of examples of how beautiful our world really is. (It shows today’s most interesting photos, as determined by Flickr’s users.)
Tyler heard about the Web site from a girl named Anna down the street. He initially dismissed Neopets as “little ponies and stuff,” but before long he had given up Grand Theft Auto for Faerie Paintbrushes…
A generation agrees. Neopets has a staggering 25 million members worldwide. It has been translated into 10 languages and gets more than 2.2 billion pageviews per month. These dedicated Neopians spend an average of 6 hours and 15 minutes per month on the site. That makes Neopets the second-stickiest site on the Internet – ahead of Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and eBay… What’s more, its demographics are the stuff of marketers’ dreams: Four out of five Neopians are under age 18…
Not unsurprisingly, the game makes advertising an integral part of the experience. (Forget product placement, think sponsored characters, minigames, etc.)
Your kids will live inside massively multiplayer online games. If they aren’t already doing so.
This weekend’s NY Times Week in Review featured a short article on games as an art form. There’s no question that games, especially those of recent vintage, can be breathtakingly beautiful–the writer asks whether they can be considered a new art form. The article itself isn’t all that great, but there are a few quotes worth reading:
In an address to students learning to be game developers at the University of Southern California, Mr. Spielberg, who has since contracted to create three games, challenged the industry to improve the storytelling, character development and emotional content in the same way it has enhanced the images and action. The medium will come of age, he said, “when somebody confesses that they cried at Level 17.”
Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested that [games] are equally close to dance, as a medium of performance, or architecture, as a medium of creating unique spaces.
…video games have become “the major cultural activity of the generation 30 or 35 and below, the way movies and literature were for earlier generations,” said James Paul Gee, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
It’s a young medium, and whether the art in games lies in a film-like emotional narrative experience, the intricate and beautiful gameplay, or in “the sum of performances” as many players interact with a virtual world, remains to be seen. One thing’s for sure: wherever this goes, it’ll be big. In the country that gave the world Hollywood, we already spend more on games and the consoles to play them than we do on movies.
I don’t play many computer games, but I am absolutely convinced that games will become (and in many ways they have already become) a form of media as important in our society as music, books, or films. It’s not just that as today’s generation of teenagers ages, they’ll spend more money and time on games than any that preceded it, but more and more games can legitimately be called art. Taking aside the average first person shooter, some of the more popular RPGs of the past decade have employed the narrative emotional characteristics that make other media beautiful and immersive. An interesting trend to watch for sure.
Here’s a quote from a recent Wired article:
As it turns out, my friend back in 1997 wasn’t alone. Aerith’s death in Final Fantasy VII was “a sort of watershed moment for the gaming industry,” Bowen argues, because in their written notes on the surveys, many gamers singled it out as the first time a game caused them genuine heartache. I went back and re-watched the scene, and I can understand why; it’s nearly Wagnerian in its sadness. As Aerith collapses, a ball of life force emerges from her body and falls slowly away, each bounce triggering the opening notes of her funeral melody. No wonder teenagers are now lining up to watch symphonies perform music from the game. It’s that heart-piercing.
Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs) are fascinating. Adoption by players has been astonishingly fast. The number of hours players spend in their virtual worlds keeps growing. Entire, working economies have emerged, to the point where you can make your living (in the ‘real’ world) by living a life in a virtual world.
Estimates put Blizzard’s annual revenues from World of Warcraft, one of the most popular examples of the genre at three quarters of a BILLION dollars. No joke. And that’s after the customer’s plunked down $40-$50 to buy the game at the store.
MMORPGs are shaping how a new generation interacts with each other. Several people I’ve spoken to have told me that most of the time they spend in the game isn’t solitary play–it’s time hanging out with friends, usually friends who live or go to school far away. It makes sense, of course. It’s still not quite okay for your average 19-year-old guy to call up his friends from high school to ‘catch up’ every few days, even if he wants to. But chatting while slaying monsters? That works.
One of the most interesting recent developments? Disease. Online, simulated disease that’s apparently not the intended product of the game publisher (Blizzard, in this case), but the outcome of the millions of variables and players interacting in ways no one could have predicted. Rather similar to that thing we call ‘life’ in the real world.
Blizzard recently added the Zul’Gurub instance to the game, where Hakkar, the god of blood, uses a devastating disease attack on anyone who dares fight him. Seeing as how it’s a disease and most diseases are contagious, it shouldn’t be shocking when some players come back and haven’t been cured.
And that’s exactly what’s happened. Players are returning from this instance to towns with the diseases, spreading it, and Blizzard’s in a panic to keep things under control. GM’s have started to quarantine players in an effort to control the spreading, but players keep leaving the quarantine areas.
His latest project is Photojojo. If you like photography, you will like Photojojo.
Before Photojojo, he was a founder of The Daily Jolt, an online community on 100 college campuses, helped create a non-profit called ChangeThis with Seth Godin, and brought the technology un-conference BarCamp to NYC. He also started a weekly casual coworking session called Jelly.
And he's consulted for companies such as Pearson, Apple, and Creative Good and co-authored The Big Moo, a WSJ best-seller, with Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, and others.
Maxis has made groundbreaking simulation games for a decade. Their newest will let you evolve creatures from single-celled organisms to land-based reptiles, to people, to beyond. The ecosystem exists online and contains other players’ creatures. The flash intro on their site does an incredible job of condensing a pretty radical and broad idea for a game into 60 seconds that make you want it right now.
Kara’s going cold turkey on spending money. Not a dollar on anything but groceries for two months!
The massively-multiplayer online game Second Life is 
