EXPLAIN LEEROY TO THE FISH: OFFWORLD ON AIR AMERICA
There’s a certain primary education process that I think a lot of us take for granted about games, and assume in other people. Case in point: yesterday, I was invited to be a guest on Air America Radio to explain precisely what it meant that Obama’s new FCC transition team co-chair was a level 70 Tauren shaman.
I’d made a lot of assumptions, actually, including believing the call to be a pre-recording that would get slickly edited down to a few seconds of soundbytes (which I had all pithily prepared) to go into a longer NPR-style news clip, assumptions which were summarily shattered 10 minutes before my phone was supposed to ring when a friend wrote on the wall of my Facebooks, “So here I am, listening to Air America… ‘coming up later, Brandon Boyer,'” and I realized I was about to be on live for quite a long time, facing questions I might necessarily not be up to answer.
That was somewhat relieved when host Ron Kuby led in the piece as I was on hold by rattling off facetiously sweeping generalizations of who World of Warcraft players were, and then brought me on to do some very, very basic explaining. Turns out: that’s a lot more difficult when you’ve been immersed eyeball deep in the culture for as many years as I have and have to take it all back to square one. As in: have you ever tried to explain what exactly ‘Leeroy Jenkins’ is or why it’s funny? I’d never had to, until I was live on national radio.
You can hear me valiantly try, though, via Kuby’s archives at Air America (though from what I gather the clip ends rather abruptly after an offhand ‘teamsters’ analogy). Coincidentally, and it would take me another few hours for this to click, Kuby is indeed one-and-the-same the Ron Kuby you hear ‘The Dude’ Lebowski ask for after the Malibu chief of police beans him with a coffee mug (!). Oh, right, and, you know, also a civil rights activist and lawyer of fantastic renown.
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BEHIND THE FRONTLINES OF THE VIRTUAL ECONOMY MAVENS
Journalist Julian Dibbell, apart from being the author of the excellent My Tiny Life (which you may have noted is a permanent fixture on my bookshelf), is someone who has intimate knowledge of the virtual worlds real-money-trading underbelly, having spent a year doing it full time for his more recent book, Play Money.
So I’m happy to note that his latest feature for Wired has just arrived online, which chronicles the rise, and rise, and sudden fall of virtual economy entrepreneur Brock Pierce. Pierce was one of the co-founders of IGE, a company that rose from the murky grey market of trading virtual items and currency for real world money, to going properly legit with a massive investment from Goldman Sachs.
As Dibbell explains:
I was around when RMT as a profession was almost exclusively the province of small-timers like me and the very notion of a multinational, 500-employee virtual-items business doing over a quarter billion dollars in trades was practically unimaginable. And I was around three years later when rumors of a $60 million Goldman Sachs investment in IGE first broke and for a moment it seemed possible that Pierce had a handle on something deeper and more enduring than just a profitable business: the future maybe, not only of virtual retailing but of economic life in general.
And I am here today, admiring the views at Pierce’s LA home, because I figure it’s my best shot at an answer to the only question I can think of asking in the face of a story like IGE’s: How did it happen?
The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire
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GUITAR CENTER SURVEY SHOWS GUITAR GAME PLAYERS BUYING REAL GUITARS
Guitar Hero and Rock Band creators Harmonix were founded on the hopes that they could inspire a league of new musicians through software, so presumably they’ll be happy to hear the results of a new Guitar Center survey which showed the following:
· Of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band players that do not currently play a musical instrument, two-thirds (67%) indicated that they are likely to begin playing a real instrument in the next two years.
· Nearly three out of four (72%) musicians who play games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band have spent more time playing their real instrument(s) since they began playing these games.
· Eight out of 10 (81%) of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band players that have been inspired to play an instrument because of the games would like to receive a musical instrument as a gift this winter holiday season.
· Sales of gear for first-timers at Guitar Center has surged along with the peak in sales for Guitar Hero and Rock Band. In the holiday selling season in the last quarter of 2007, Guitar Center saw a +20.7% jump in comparable store sales for beginner-level electric guitar & amplifiers. This surge grew even stronger through the first nine months of 2008, when Guitar Center’s cumulative comparable store sales for the category increased +26.9%.
arealguitar [Guitar Center]
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YOUR GAME FACE
Currently making the rounds due to a downright impolite remix I’ll leave it to you to find yourself (but suffice it to say is not one you’ll want to have your work speakers turned up for), is the New York Times’ video from Robbie Cooper’s ‘Immersion’ project, which is photographing the reactions of children entranced by games (from the sound of it, Call of Duty 4). From an interview with Cooper in UK’s Telegraph:
The plan is to settle on a group of 75 game-playing children – selected by a researcher to represent a cross-section of ethnic groups, income brackets and cultural backgrounds within Britain – and spend 18 months using the technique to film them reacting to different manifestations of screen warfare, be they videogames, news footage, internet videos or feature films. Cooper will then log their expressions and work with a psychologist and sociologist to interpret the results in light of the psychological profiles of the individual children.
The New York Times – Video Library – Immersion
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THE SUPER STREET FIGHTER II TURBO HD REMIX CHAMPION HYPER PLUS REMIXES
Our favorite part of Capcom’s HD enhanced and remade Super Street Fighter II Turbo Remix release about to go live on the PlayStation Network today? In keeping with its recent track record of solid bonus material for its retro revivals (speaking here mainly of Mega Man 9‘s faux-NES cart CD case), Capcom’s put together a very well curated mix of hip-hop/DJ artists doing Street Fighter based songs, which it will be releasing for free alongside the game.
Particularly, the appearance of DJ Qbert (whom you can preview via the project’s MySpace page) doing the scratch-happy comic book cut-up narratives that are his trademark does us proud.
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BEN MARRA’S VIEW FROM VICE CITY
Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal comments on (recent i am 8-bit contributor) Ben Marra’s GTA:Vice City inspired sketch, “Illustrations like this make us wish for the videogame equivalent of The Criterion Collection,” which just about sums it up perfectly.
Benjamin Marra [via EGO…trip]
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GIMME INDIE GAME: GRAVITY BONE
This is one of my biggest regrets of 2008: had I played Brendon Chung’s indie PC game Gravity Bone on first glance it would have made The Offworld 20 without question. Instead, I waited until after the new year, thinking it’d be a game I’d have to sit down and take in like a slow meal.
This turned out not to be true: you can finish Gravity Bone in about as much time as it takes to complete many games’ tutorials, and get more out of the experience than you did most games in their entirety. If Portal was gaming’s latest great novella, Gravity is its mini-comic: colorful, concise, and economical.
The less said about the actual mechanics of the game, the better, as any exposition threatens to give away its best twists. The generics, though: it’s a double-mission exotica-tinged snapshot of the life of a contract killer and his infiltration of a secret jet-set society; spy-fi by way of Fellini’s leisure life and LucasArts’ Grim Fandango. None of this is said, of course, just confidently implied through its symbols and traces of its signal drifting number-station mumblings.
Currently employed at Pandemic designing levels for EA’s just released Lord of the Rings: Conquest, Chung’s mini-game feels like an exercise in escape, a nights-and-weekends rough sketch of the kind of games he by all rights should be doing full-time. Even with its double-take ending (and for all its gnawing mysteries [what was going to be mapped to inventory slot 3?]), it’s over all too soon, and — though he’s detouring through his top-down Xbox 360 Community Game Atom Zombie Smasher — it’s something we sincerely hope he comes back home to soon.
[Bonus love: Take a closer look at its second mission office-tower directory — you might notice some familiar names.]
Gravity Bone [also at Blendo Games]
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ROLITO UNLEASHES NEW PATAPON TOY
With the release of Sony’s second installment of rhythm/strategy game Patapon due in Japan in just days, Rolito — the French designer who lent his “delicious vectorial poison” to the game — has shown off his latest related toy, a new pop-art patterned Bearbrick from Medicom.
While it lacks the contrast and visual punch of his first Bearbrick, this one has the added benefit of actually being released to the public (the first being doled out by Sony and others as promotional items), albeit as part of a blindbox series. December will also see the release of a cell strap set of individual Patapon ‘ultra detail’ figures (I’m partial to the lackluster second and the grimacing fourth).
Patapon x Medicom (3) [Rolito]
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LITTLEBIGWATCH: PLAY WITH KANDINSKY
I’ve been following KirbyKid’s delightfully obscure blog for some time, where he’s been showing an almost troubling level of dedication to deconstructing the gameplay of everything from Super Mario Bros. to Treasure’s excellent roll-your-own DS shooter Bangai-O Spirits (check his critical-glossary for an extrapolated glimpse into the madness).
It was with some interest, then, that I noted his most recent entry, in which he explains how he put LittleBigPlanet‘s level editor through its paces by attempting to bring a Kandinsky painting to life, garnished with a layer of generative and improvisational music:
# I looked to paintings like the one above for inspiration. I also looked at Kandinsky’s paintings from his “Improvisation” series.
# Another idea from the list is for a level that uses musical sounds to create a harmonizing melody. As the player moves closer to the end of the level and as the player platforms more boldly, the generated music would sound more cohesive while matching with the player’s platforming tempo and prowess.
# I decided to combine these two ideas harmonizing around the concept of improvisation. The abstract, non structured, freedom of the Kandinsky paintings (form) will influence a similar freewheeling, intersecting style of platforming. And the musical, positional sound design will blend with these two ideas to create a circular, playful flow throughout the level that moves the player in any and all directions.
Having taken the level for a spin, I can comfortably say that Jimi Hendrix’s song structures make for a happier Guitar Hero level than Kandinsky’s art makes for a platformer — its shapes too chaotic to make for pleasing play — but I sincerely applaud the attempt to break LittleBigPlanet from its traditional bonds and do something entirely unique, and will be eagerly watching further efforts.
Critical-Gaming Network – Blog – Improvisation #1 [Critical-Gaming Network]
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THE IRONY BEING NO-ONE EVEN READS THEM ANYMORE
Excellent eBay cool-hunting blog gamesniped recently linked to an auction for an original PDP-11 manual for seminal text adventure Zork, autographed by creators Mark Blank, Dave Lebling and Joel Berez, along with an original business card from developer Infocom.
Its final price? $2,348.31. The funniest part? Gamesniped’s ultra dry warning before their link: “Now, before you see the price on this auction, you should know that there is a very active collecting scene dedicated to Infocom games.” [via Waxy]
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