What’s more interesting is the map of Paris they’ve put up, in the style of the maps in World of Warcraft comparing, say, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to Light’s Hope Chapel in the Eastern Plaguelands.
Thursday, March 20, 2008, 19:49
Section: Miscellany
I’m going to be upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.something shortly (only, what, two years late?) and playing around a bit with templates for the next few days. If you see a logo that doesn’t look like mine, it isn’t; I just haven’t built a new one yet.
Likewise, there will be some new modifications made, and probably turned on and off as I decide which I like. If there’s any that you like (or miss — the old ones will likely just be going away), feel free to say so.
EDIT #1: Upgrade complete. New templates and mods coming next.
EDIT #2: I think I’m going to go with this theme, although it’s going to need a lot of customization.
EDIT #3: Gravatars enabled. No, I don’t have these, either, but I’ve seen them on some blogs, and liked them. I intend to set up a few. If you’ve got custom avatars, they’ll show up on this blog now, and in the future.
EDIT #4: OK, the whole page re-rendering every time a tab is clicked on the Branford Magazine template was irritating me. I think I’ll go with this one instead.
Even before Electronic Arts roiled the video game world on Sunday with its $2 billion hostile takeover bid for Take-Two Interactive, even before Phil Harrison, president of Sony’s worldwide game studios, announced his resignation on Monday, one could plainly see the creative and financial disruptions underlying the industry’s explosive growth.
Last week more than 17,000 artists, writers, designers and executives convened here for the annual Game Developers Conference. On the surface there was little news: few major announcements of new games, few major deals. But in private it was easy to read the sea changes reshaping what is now an $18 billion domestic industry as it grows from niche pastime to mass medium.
Those themes emerged perhaps most clearly during talks with executives from each of the industry’s three titans: Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America; John Schappert, a vice president in Microsoft’s games business; and, certainly not least, Mr. Harrison himself. Mr. Fils-Aime was riding high, while the others appeared to be trying to figure out how to catch up. And this was just days before Mr. Harrison announced his resignation and before Electronics Arts effectively conceded that it too feared being passed by.
The big story in the game industry’s tremendous growth over the last few years is that the smartest companies are finally designing games and game systems that appeal to the broad public, not just a small cadre of tech-savvy youngsters. Nintendo’s fabulously popular Wii console is Exhibit A, but is also joined in that vein by games like Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, World of Warcraft and even casual office games like Spider solitaire, Bejeweled and Peggle. In short, companies that are making games more accessible are growing like gangbusters, while traditional powerhouses with a traditionally limited strategy of building around the same old (if you will) young male audience have stagnated, both creatively and on the bottom line.
It just happens that the roster of old-school industry laggards includes big names like Electronic Arts, Microsoft and Sony. The leaders of the new wave include companies like Activision, Blizzard, Nintendo and PopCap. This is the dichotomy that became so clear here at the Game Developers Conference.
I really like this video, although I suspect the jukebox imagery will be incomprehensible in just a few years, unfortunately.
This song got bashed a lot when it came out, for marking a break with Liz Phair’s classic sound. I can only assume the people who said that hadn’t picked up her previous two albums, and were basing their response on her first album. She’d been trending this way for a while.
This song got played in a lot of chick flicks and the like, which just goes to show what I’ve always said: Most people don’t listen to lyrics at all. This isn’t a happy little love song. This is a song about cheating on your significant other.
Get a load of me, get a load of you
Walkin’ down the street, and I hardly know you
It’s just like we were meant to be
Holding hands with you when we’re out at night
Got a girlfriend, you say it isn’t right
And I’ve got someone waiting too
What if this is just the beginning
We’re already wet, and we’re gonna go swimming
Hardly ordinary chick flick fare.
Anyway, I like this tune, and not just because it makes me laugh to think of how many “happy romance” scenes it’s been played under as the soundtrack.
