The Internets are on FIRE!

Man, there's a lot of stuff going on, and I don't have time to blog it all with the detail I'd like.



Here's a smattering of this week's interesting tidbits, and a quick thought or two on each. More when there's time... work's got me pretty busy right now.

• EA gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar, or rather in the Wikipedia, for makin' a little revisionist history. Jeez guys, I get why some clueless government lackey does this, but a tech company? Don't know know you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube? Also, I just don't get why people think their company's wikipedia entry is what gives tehm their rep. Your company gets it's rep from it's behavior, and thus ya just screwed the pooch a little more, didn't ya?


• Clint Hocking takes PC Gamer's Vederman opening salvo on Far Cry 2 ("will it be art? Will it have the power to affect you emotionally on anything other than a surface level? Probably not.") as a personal throwing down of the gauntlet. One thing about that Clint, he does love his wicked problems (see also here). Go Clint Go! We're rooting for ya!


• Bioshock is getting crazy good reviews. While I'm glad for the developer and for what it's doing for our platforms, I more depressed about it overall, and have a lengthier post I'd like to write about "local maxima and the game industry", but that's for another day.


• Not only is Facebook going to eat the social networking universe, it's also turning out to be a pretty compelling game platform as well - especially for play-by-mail type scenarios. No wonder people say it's a black hole.


• Related to the above, I think it's only a matter of time before Scrabulous (I've been playing the facebook app version) gets sued and shut down. Oh well, enjoy while you can!


• Parks Associates reports that gaming is the most popular activity on the web - more than blogging/reading/socialnetworking/youtubin', etc, etc. (And no, this doesn't contradit my previous post - the games will just move onto facebook - it's the platform, silly).


• EA says user created content is the next big thing in games. I agree. This is another subject I need to do a longer post on, but I have come around 100% on the UGC thing. I will say a couple quick things: (1) I don't think it's going to happen in the way EA anticipates - or likes, (2) there's going to be a TON of interesting discussion on user and creator IP rights, ownership, copyright protection, etc, in the coming years (like I said at the conclusion of my MIGS talk last year - Customer Ownership is going to come by granting customers ownership. Also relevant is this 2004(!) Clay Shirky quote: "So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast."

That's all for now. More once I catch my breath.