I suppose there are going to be selection bias issues when polling players in the World of Warcraft, but nevertheless, the results are interesting—and as election day is upon us, let’s hope that the election polls match all of the other polls we’ve been hearing about.
Hit play or watch Election Duel! at Youtube.
Oh and if you’re an eligible voter in the US elections, and have not voted today, STOP READING THIS WEBSITE AND GO VOTE!
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It’s a terrible time waster, but if you’re looking to kill your afternoon, try Whiteboard Tower Defense.
Warning: The following link leads to an extremely addicting flash game. Luckily there are only 20 levels and then you can go to sleep. At least, that’s what I did.
The Onion News Network presents a story about a Warcraft sequel that lets you play a character playing World of Warcraft.
For the record, despite the fact that I’ve played a lot of video games in my time, I’ve never played World of Warcraft.
Even better than the homemade touch screen hack, Johnny Lee has come up with a head tracking hack that could certainly be turned into many REALLY cool games.
See also: Johnny Lee speaking at TED.
Today I stumbled on a video that shares an inside look into 24 The Game’s “integrated marketing campaign”, a kind of viral/interactive mystery created to help generate buzz on the new Sony Playstation game.
I’m not a fan of the show, in fact I haven’t ever watched a full episode, but I found the intricacies of the marketing campaign fascinating. I have to admit, if I had received one of their emails, I would have been intrigued.
Julian Dibbell has an interesting article in the New York Times about China’s growth industry: gold farming.
Gold farming is the term used to describe playing Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMO’s) to collect gold and other valuables and then sell them for real world currency. Though it’s not a lot to any individual worker, the amount of cash involved may surprise you.
In 2001, Edward Castronova, an economist at the University of Indiana and at the time an EverQuest player, published a paper in which he documented the rate at which his fellow players accumulated virtual goods, then used the current R.M.T. prices of those goods to calculate the total annual wealth generated by all that in-game activity. The figure he arrived at, $135 million, was roughly 25 times the size of EverQuest’s R.M.T. market at the time. Updated and more broadly applied, Castronova’s results suggest an aggregate gross domestic product for today’s virtual economies of anywhere from $7 billion to $12 billion, a range that puts the economic output of the online gamer population in the company of Bolivia’s, Albania’s and Nepal’s.
Previously: Play Money is Now Out and Professional Game Playing Conclusion
Check out the top ten best 8-bit games as rated by the Game Trailer Countdown. A couple of my favorite 8-bit games, Tetris and Excitebike, didn’t make the cut, but the GT list does have some classics.
A Korean venture start-up claims to have developed an audio sequence that can communicate with addicted game players below the conscious level. The company wants game manufacturers to play the embedded subliminal messages when a young user has kept playing after a preset period of time.
From The Korea Times article:
“We incorporated messages into an acoustic sound wave telling gamers to stop playing. The messages are told 10,000 to 20,000 times per second,” Xtive President Yun Yun-hae said.
“Game users can’t recognize the sounds. But their subconscious is aware of them and the chances are high they will quit playing,” the 35-year-old Yun said. “Tests tell us the sounds work.”
Any scholarly evidence I’ve ever read up on has indicated that subliminal messages don’t work, but apparently marketing such messages is big business.
Xtive applied for a domestic patent for the phonogram and is looking to take advantage of the technology in other sectors.
“We can easily change the messages. In this sense, the potential for this technology is exponential,” Yun said.
More than just a simple puzzle game, Sprout features beautiful charcoal drawings as the basis for its graphics and style—a flash game that thinks it’s a children’s storybook.
I was first introduced to the game “You Don’t Know Jack” by my high school physics teacher almost ten years ago. On the last day of classes he let us chill out and play the addictive flash based game where high culture and pop culture collide; I’ve been a fan ever since.
Now you can play a single player version of You Don’t Know Jack online. You can also browse their older “Dis or Dat” games via their blog or after you finish the 7 question game.
It’s hard to believe that the Nintendo Entertainment System was released 21 years ago. Last year, GameSpot sponsored a documentary celebrating the early years of Nintendo.
I particularly enjoyed the demonstrations of how to make your Nintendo cartridges run. I recall that for the first few years of Nintendo playing at our house we never had to blow on the games, I guess it was only in the later years (early 90’s) when games weren’t babied so much that dust was allowed to collect on the exposed circuit boards, and the ritual of blowing on games before you loaded them began.
Here it is, Flashback NES:
Hit play or watch fullscreen at Google Video.
Quad! It’s like Tetris without gravity. Rows erase vertically as well as horizontally, and what’s left moves toward the centre instead of down. You win when the corner peices touch in the middle. Oh, and I should mention, it’s addictive.
Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, the new book by Julian Dibbell is now available.
Julian’s goal was to earn more money selling imaginary goods (ie. online gaming goods) than from his “real job” as a professional writer. He came up short of his goal by only a few hundred dollars and, though I haven’t read it yet, I understand the book documents the entire endevour from day 1.
In addition to bookstores selling his book, Play Money will also be available in the virtual world of Second Life (in the currency of that world—Linden dollars).
From the press release:
In-game versions of Play Money designed by Second Life coder/publisher Falk Bergman are available for L$750. These copies can be signed by Dibbell at his in-Second Life interview with journalist Wagner James Au on July 27th. For the Second Life resident who needs something a bit more tactile, L$6250 buys a real-life copy of Play Money, shipped with care to the buyer’s real life address, in addition to the standard in-game version.
(At the time of this press release, Linden dollars are trading at approximately L$300.00 to the US$1.00. Adjusted to US dollars, an online copy costs US$2.50, and the price of a real-life copy bought in-game is around US$20.85.)
I’ve previously written about Julian’s professional gameplaying.
A patient group of 67 extras, 4 hours of shooting, and 390 images later, some creative people in France have recreated Space Invaders using people as pixels.
Translated from French:
Who doesn’t remember SPACE INVADERS, one of the first video games? With the orders of a vessel, it was a question of defending the Earth from space invaders… And well, most of SPACE INVADERS took place on June 24, 2006 at the Belluard festival.
See the Space Invaders video (qt).