Look Who’s Playing Video Games

Posted on September 15, 2008 at 3:00 pm

NintendoWii.preview.jpg The Washington Post has a great photo of my friend Ally Burguieres playing video games with her mother and sister. The article says:
Women and girls make up 40 percent of the gamer population, according to the Entertainment Software Association, the video game industry’s trade group. And with game software sales at $9.5 billion last year, companies are paying closer attention to the titles women seek out…
For years, the video game industry spent its marketing dollars on trying to get guys excited about the latest sports or shoot-’em-up title. It was generally assumed that women and girls weren’t interested.
But that started to change in 2004, says industry analyst Michael Pachter, when Nintendo launched its DS portable game system, named for its dual screens. Its features stretched the notion of what a video game is — and who might want to play.
Women gamers even have their own website. And this is a delightful Amazon list of games for “women with lives.” It wasn’t that long ago that it was assumed that women would not be interested in games. Sheri Graner Ray, who says she got into the game industry in the first place “Because it was the only industry where I could list 15 years of running “Dungeons and Dragons” games on my resume as valid job experience!” She wrote a book about “gender inclusive game design.” Microsoft’s xBox brochure tells its buyers “Here are some things you might want to tell your wife this thing does.” Maybe with the next upgrade they will remember that women like Ally Burguieres, currently studying for her PhD in linguistics, don’t need anyone to explain it to them. Women are not just playing, they are entering tournaments.
Late last year, Nancy Davies, an 84-year-old woman living in a retirement community, defeated a real-life bowling champion in a Wii Sports tournament. She had been playing for only one year.

Spore!

Posted on September 7, 2008 at 8:00 am

Spore is not just one of the most highly anticipated computer games of the year. It is one of the most highly anticipated works of art and entertainment in any category. Think I’m exaggerating? Sales last year were $9.5 billion. Sixty-five percent of American households play computer or video games. The average game player is 35 years old and has been playing games for 13 years. And forty percent of all game players are women and women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent). In 2008, 26 percent of Americans over the age of 50 played video games, an increase from nine percent in 1999. Super Mario Brothers has sold over 40 million units. Best-selling video games sell many times more copies than best-selling books and have as many viewers/users as top movies and music.

Games have gone way beyond blowing stuff up and killing bad guys and aliens. Spore comes from the people who did the wildly popular Sims series. It gives players the chance to create entire universes, starting with one-celled creatures who evolve into complex organisms. It allows for an unprecedented level of imagination and interactivity for the participants, even allowing players to exchange creatures and visit each other’s planets. Spore gives players (I think we need a new word here — maybe participants?) the change to be creative while absorbing lessons about logic, programming, and consequences. Executive producer Lucy Bradshaw said in an interview with the Washington Post

Every single planet you go to was going to bring this sense of surprise and awe to the game. That was central and why we made the creation tools the way we did. Not only that we’d made the building blocks and could tap into the creativity of a million players, but the fact that the content is so compressible. The model data for a creature is like 3 kilobytes, the thumbnail picture is about 18 to 20KB. So a grand total of 25KB, which means that we can actually share all of this content without bandwidth issues.

And then we did things like the YouTube partnership, the Planetwide Games deal involving a Comic Book Creator, and a make-your-own postcard system that we put in the Creature Creator that allows players to take things outside of just the elemental game play, share it with other players, and see where those players might take it. We even did a Facebook application that ties back to our servers. We really want to see what directions players take all this stuff. We’ve built a really strong tool that lets users share their experiences in different venues, and I can’t wait to see what unravels next.

I love the way that Spore creates a sort of universal Wiki game, with everyone who participates helping to direct it.

And this discussion of games gives me a chance to share one of the funniest video clips I have ever seen, from the wonderful Australian music group, Tripod:

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Explaining Economic Issues

Posted on August 31, 2008 at 12:52 pm

My selection of David Copperfield as the book to best help people understand the current economic situation is included in this Washington Post round-up of recommended books by people with a background in business, economics, or finance.
All of the suggestions are worthwhile, including classics like Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and up-to-the minute assessments like The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It.
If they had allowed me to recommend a movie, I would have suggested I.O.U.S.A., Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Corporation, “Maxed Out,” and “The Solid Gold Cadillac,” all of which should be shown to every high school and college student and every person eligible to vote before they are allowed to see the next big blockbuster.

Crying movies

Posted on November 6, 2007 at 11:03 am

Movies that make you cry (or sob or blubber uncontrollably)
Desson Thomson has a wonderful piece in the Washington Post about movies that make us cry, and a list of some examples sent in by readers. The usual suspects are there, from “Dumbo” to “Field of Dreams,” but some surprises, including Adam Sandler’s “Click” (“Never thought I would cry at an Adam Sandler movie — I usually don’t even admit to even going to one.”), “Star Trek: The Search for Spock,” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” I admit to tearing up at the end of that one, too. Some of the other movies that have made me cry: Waterloo Bridge, A Little Princess, Steel Magnolias, the one Thomson refers to as “that Michael Keaton movie” (My Life) and yes, An Affair to Remember.
Be sure to listen to Thomson’s graceful audio commentary on his own list, with such classic choices as “Old Yeller” and “Terms of Endearment.” I enjoyed the quotes from experts, especially Professor Mary Beth Oliver of Penn State, who said that these movies
cause us to contemplate what it is about human life that’s important and meaningful. . . . Those thoughts are associated with a mixture of emotions that can be joyful but also nostalgic and wistful, tender and poignant. Tears aren’t just tears of sadness, they’re tears of searching for the meaning of our fleeting existence.
Just reading those words made me a little damp-eyed. Sorry, I just need a minute here.

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