OFFWORLD/BBTV: STATUS REPORT EDITION
While we here at Offworld gather exclusive content for future editions of Offworld’s BBtv transmissions, our second update is a status report, telling the wider world what we’ve been getting up to over the past week (including the rapid growth of our Boing Boing Steam group, as we all gather for Left 4 Dead extended plays), and a quick rundown of the new things coming to the site in the following weeks.
As usual, here’s the direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable rather than the Flash.
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PADDLE YOUR WAY THROUGH AN 8-BIT RAID
Why we love other peoples’ idle hands: they do brilliantly devlish things like take one-off April Fools gags by World of Warcraft makers Blizzard and bring them gloriously to life. But man! Is it as hard as you’ve heard.
The Molten Core [via Rock Paper Shotgun]
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WE CAN FIX THAT WITH DATA
Terminally obsessed with player statistics — and with good reason, it being one of the top contributors to making their games as balanced and smart as they are — Valve have published current total Achievement percentages for the first week of Left 4 Dead sessions.
What do they show? That Smokers really aren’t all that bad, apparently, that it really is sort of every-Survivor-for-themselves, with only some 15 percent doing the majority of healing and pill giving (though we’re happy to see that 25 percent that have healed others when they’ve been on the outs themselves), and that it’s really quite hard to stay away from that Boomer vomit.
Left 4 Dead – Achievements [and thanks to the best-named-games-blog-on-the-internet for the entry title]
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1UP-ZINE TAKES US TO OUR FUNSPOT
Upon further investigation this happens to be a bit old, but I’m going to fork it over anyway, for a number of reasons: a.) it was just indirectly pointed out to me by my old co-worker Simon Carless, b.) it gives me an opportunity to mention the always excellent work Raina Lee has done, and 3.) I’m hoping it’ll prompt her to properly finish.
Lee is the recent author of Chronicle Books’ Hit Me With Your Best Shot: The Ultimate Guide To Karaoke Domination, but prior to her empty-orchestra empire she earned her street cred with the 1up-zine, spanning three lovingly hand-crafted screenprint and xerox issues that brought an entirely different perspective to the usual print-media affairs. The writing was always personal, usually unapologetically nostalgic, and Raina gathered top class talent to do comics and art interspersed between the articles.
You can see a preview version (pdf) of her still-unfinished fourth issue, with some road-diaries of a cross-country trip to classics arcade Funspot, and a history of the joint itself from Twin Galaxies’ Walter Day, who you’ll all instantly recognize from his role in the fantastic King of Kong documentary.
Funspot special 1up-zine PDF [via GameSetWatch]
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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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