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Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
| Time |
Event |
| 9:44a |
FANGO FASHION Profile: TATTOOED STEEL High-grade stainless steel. Aerospace-quality titanium alloy. Ingredients for your next WORLD OF WARCRAFT sword? Nope, these are the building blocks for some of the most badass horror-inspired personal accessories around. Meet our new friends at Tattooed Steel, makers of handcrafted cuffs, belt buckles, rings, and dog tags. Tattooed Steel merges some of the world’s toughest metal mediums with cutting edge outsider art designs to create highly original—and surprisingly affordable—personal accessories. Here’s how it works: Tattooed Steel teams up with a series of signature artists, and literally tattoos their designs onto stainless steel and titanium alloy. The designers they work with offer a range of styles and influences: classic Americana tattoo designs; graffiti inspired art; contemporary graphic design; comic book art; and, of course, the horrific and the gothic. These are artists who are absolutely not afraid to represent ideas of death and darkness in their work, and by combining their fearless artistic vision with non-traditional mediums they create highly unique, and amazing cool, products. Not only is the product unique, so is the way Tattooed Steel does business. A totally ecommerce business, Tattooed Steel actually cares about the artists they work with, providing royalties for their work, plugging their other projects, telling their story, and supporting their vision. Most importantly, they are giving these artists the forum to showcase their work, which so well represents those that live the FANGORIA Lifestyle, but are often rejected by the mainstream. As the company expands and develops, they will be looking for artists from all over the world to submit their designs through the community section of their website, www.tattooedsteel.com, to possibly be featured on their products. So for all you aspiring horror artists out there get sketching. And for the rest of you miscreants, get over the Tattooed Steel site now and pick up some products; you’ll not only be supporting your fellow freaks, you’ll end up looking a lot tougher than you did when you started. | | 9:48a |
Drug addiction, alcoholism, cyberdependence? ...WoW! Issued by: Sparkplugs Placement Agency
With SEACOM (a full service provider of international fibre bandwidth along the East Coast of Africa to southern Africa, Europe and Asia) just months away from fruition, we can now look forward to the positive impact it will have on companies and individuals both locally and worldwide. Enhanced internet access and inexpensive amounts of bandwidth is bound to boost small and large businesses, not to mention the endless opportunities it will have on our education and healthcare facilities.
This is exciting news for our YouTube fanatics - streaming videos and downloading audio files will now be painless and fast!
Then there is gaming...
Over the years online games such as World of Warcraft have come up in discussions amongst recruiters worldwide (except SA).
Now most of us would see this as just another game right?
Since debuting in North America on November 23, 2004, World of Warcraft (Activision Blizzard) has become the most popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) around the world. The game exceeds 11 million players worldwide.
"MMORPG" is the most instantly gripping, involving and demanding entertainment technology ever invented. The addiction rate appears to be about twice that of crack.
Employers (US, Europe and Asia) are specifically instructing recruiters not to send them World of Warcraft players. There is a belief that WoW players are not focused on their work and distracted most of the time...
This was the opposite sentiment a few years ago when Yahoo! employed a Senior Director who was an avid World of Warcraft player and according to Wired magazine:
“The process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace.”
Dr Orzack, a clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts and founder of the Computer Addiction Service, says: "These games are very elaborately designed to ease you in gently, entice you, and keep you there. And it's a cycle: people begin to spend too much time playing and their careers and personal relationships begin to deteriorate."
At the end of the day, when hiring, most recruiters and companies will never be 100% sure whether they are hiring a drug, alcohol, porn, gambling or game addict. A candidate's personal life is confidential and unless it directly affects his/her performance, no one will or should have the right to discriminate against an individual's personal vices.
This is a risk that is taken every day when making that employment offer; the question is - should we be worried? | | 9:49a |
PCGA: PC Game Market Worth $11 Billion In 2008 The PC games biz was worth around $11 billion in 2008 including massively multiplayer online games, says a new report from the PC Gaming Alliance and DFC Intelligence.
According to the report, the growth of online digital distribution, the growth of free games with a virtual item purchase model, and the sale of game cards at major retailers like 7-Eleven were the three biggest trends of the year.
That $11 billion figure makes the PC the largest single games platform in the world, says the PCGA, and the lead platform in both developed and emerging markets. The North American and Western European market alone had revenues of $6 billion in 2008. The report says top games regularly generate over $50 million at retail revenue, with MMOs generating over $100 million in annual revenue after 5+ years. World of WarCraft’s annual revenues are put at $1 billion.
In emerging markets like Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, the relative rarity of high-end systems has been a major driving force for online casual games. Major portals such as Pogo and Yahoo! now generate over $100 million in annual revenues.
The PCGA is a non-profit organization consisting of game publishers, developers and hardware manufacturers interested in promoting the PC as a games platform. The new report was compiled by research and consulting firm DFC Intelligence, and can be read in full at the PCGA website | | 9:50a |
GDC: McGonigal: Game Developers Will Shape the Future of our World The IGDA Education special interest group keynote this year was delivered by Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute of the Future and notable ARG designer (ilovebees).
Here, she asked the question: “Are you optimistic about the future?” (incidentally you can receive her slides automatically by mailing slides at avantgame.com.)
“I think game developers have some of the most reason to be optimistic out of anyone on the planet,” says McGonigal. She proses that about 1 in 2000 people have a chance of altering their own future.
“That’s based on the concept of having 3 million game designers, developers, hackers, and counting. I have determined that game platforms are the best thing we will have in terms of determining the future.”
The great work of game designers over the next decade, says McGonigal, will be to redefine life as we know it. Games, she says, have the power to change our actual world.
There are 5 key forces that drive us toward a game designer’s future, she says. These are:
1 – sustainable happiness
2 – persuasive technology
3 – the engagement economy
4 – programmable reality
5 – superstructing.
Though her arguments for each can’t be replicated perfectly here, I will address some of her salient points.
McGonigal says that to be happy, humans crave: Satisfying work to do, the experience of being good at something (comparatively), time spent with people we like, and a chance to be a part of something bigger.
“These four things are what games do,” she says. “Positive psychology is coming to the conclusion that multiplayer games are the ultimate sustainer of happiness.”
Scientists agree as well that that dancing with other people creates a perfect happiness, because brains sync up if people dance to the same beat, and this elicits a very strong sense of happiness, akin to the strongest opiates.
“How can people dance together without being humiliated?” she asks. “But then I did more research and I found out that when people get humiliated, they get even happier!” Humiliation is a way of showing people we’re vulnerable – and they like it because they gain power. We are happier when we’re humiliated around people we trust.
Wikinomics says that “we must collaborate or perish.” McGonigal points out that it took 100 million mental hours from a highly diverse knowledge community to create Wikipedia.
It’s hard to get people to collaborate on things like this, but “It’s not hard to get people to contribute cognitive hours to a game, or a game world,” she says.
“It might only take 5 days of World of Warcraft to create Wikipedia,” considering the vast number of players. “There’s no reason why we can’t take real world work and real world problems and seductively conceal it in a game world. Gamers have no problem doing work and doing collaborative things, you just have to figure out how to make them care about it.”
“The idea is that game developers over the next decade and beyond, will be able to remake reality. Make us happier, make us smarter, and make the planet more resilient,” she added.
60% of kids in developing countries are gamers, and 97% of kids in developed countries consider themselves gamers. So it’s just up to developers to forge this future, McGonigal notes. A post-session Q&A echoed some of my skepticism, asking if developers have all this power, why haven’t they already done it?
To this point McGonigal offered: “We’ve been building up an arsenal of strategies for reinventing the human experience, and maybe we’re starting to realize that some of our games are more powerful than we anticipated. We didn’t know our own strength.”
“I think we’ve been a little seduced by our power to engage people. I think maybe only recently have we come around to the idea that we have to use that power to do good. We haven’t done it because we’ve been so good at what we’re already doing that we haven’t felt motivated to do it. But now that the world is sort of falling apart, people may be thinking about doing something.” | | 9:51a |
You have no rights in World of Warcraft Opinion: Now shut up and keep grinding
I think we've all spent so much time playing World of Warcraft that we've started to mistake it for an actual country. So when the ruling Blizzard party passes a law banning add-on authors from advertising or soliciting cash donations within the game, we all react as if it is a civil liberties issue.
It's not. WoW is a game, not an economy. Blizzard isn't against wow gold farmers and powerlevelling services and nagware add-ons because it wants to be the only one to make money from WoW. Blizzard is against them because it wants to protect the image of WoW as a fun game, which ultimately is the best way to protect its own revenue. Blogger sites are predicting the imminent implosion of the add-on community, but the reality is that there are really only two commercially run add-ons affected by this new rule.
The first is Carbonite, an add-on that makes questing easier by telling you where to find things. This has two versions, one paid for by subscription and a lite version that nags you in-game to upgrade to the paid version.
The second is Quest Helper. QH is the most popular add-on in the game, with over 20 million downloads. It does much the same thing as Carbonite but it is paid for with donations. There is a nag message in game to prompt you to donate.
Both add-ons sound as if they are doing the same thing in the same way, with the same commercial motive. But QH is a voluntary project that became a full-time job for its author because it was popular enough for discretely solicited donations to pay the bills, whereas Carbonite was run as a money-making exercise from the start and exhibited a lot of the web sleaziness you see from wow gold spammers and powerlevellers. In other words, Carbonite is the bathwater and QH is the baby. It's a shame they both had to be thrown out together, but it's hardly the end of WoW add-ons.
I still believe that the game as a whole is improved by the new rules. Virtually all add-ons are free because they are developed by enthusiasts who just want to make the game better. If people only worked on things that directly resulted in financial reward, none of us would have exalted reputations with any faction. Yes, you should be fairly recompensed for your hard work. But programming WoW add-ons isn't work, it's a hobby.
Or at least, it is now. | | 9:52a |
Opinion: Now shut up and keep grinding Demand for subscription massive multiplayer online games (MMOG) will top $2bn (£1.3bn) by 2013, according to a new report. The study, by analysts Screen Digest, said the market had been driven by attempts to emulate World of Warcraft. The findings suggest that the MMOG's market in Europe and North America grew by 22% and was worth $1.4bn (£0.9bn). There are at least 220 active MMOGs, although many of these are exclusive to South East Asia. Speaking to the BBC, Piers Harding-Rolls - senior analyst with Screen Digest - said that despite the recession, subscription MMOG's were still showing significant growth. "Some games are eroding World of Warcraft's (WoW) position - Warhammer Online and Age of Conan being the two most significant - but that's more down to their growth rather than any decline on WoW's part. "WoW's market share was 60% in 2007 and 58% in 2008, but in terms of revenue, it went up year-on-year and is still going big guns. Mr Harding-Rolls said that a combination of new title releases, different payment systems, and games that target specific demographics had helped the rise in popularity of MMOGs. "If you look at the example of RuneScape, this is a game pitched at a teenage audience. You can play it for free or you can pay a premium and get a better service without advertising. "It's an effective way to build a subscription base, rather than the traditional routes that involve PR, hype and having a service that has to be almost perfect from day one," he said. The report examines revenue made from subscription based services, rather than total player numbers, in Europe and North America. Size matters Some games - such as the German title Panfu and Tribal Wars - are in the 10 most popular games when it comes to player numbers, but not in terms of spending. In addition, some games - such as Warhammer Online - were released late in 2008 and so didn't make the list. However, Mr Harding-Rolls thought that Warhammer would be one of the top three when next years list comes out. There has been much speculation on how the video games industry would fare during the recession, with many experts - such as the British veteran game designer, Peter Molyneux - expecting a lot of price pressure on games. Mr Harding-Rolls said that, for now, it was a case of wait and see when it came to MMOGs. "Under the current conditions, it will probably be harder for publishers to pick up new customers and gamers who have multiple accounts on different games may well scale back which game they play. "That said, playing a video game - especially a MMOG - is a low value proposition to a user and once you're a subscriber you're likely to stay a subscriber for at least a few months." |
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