Year: 2007

  • Barbie Girls (maybe) registers 3m

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 19 Comments

    According to a blogger over at Scientific American,  the 3m is in the span of 60 days.

     Last night at the Digital Life preview a Mattel rep–who, just to make the conversation extra surreal, actually looked sort of like Barbie–told me that in the first 60 days of its existence, the new online virtual world Barbie Girls has signed up three million members, and they’re adding new ones at the rate of 50,000 a day.

    “Could Barbie Girls Become The Largest Virtual World?” has some good discussion over at TechCrunch, including some controversy over the stats. Among the other comments that caught my eye:

    • It has to be fun for me to be there: “I think Niche games like this will end up being more popular that games like second life. I have no interest in second life, but if there was something that was a little more specific that was interesting to me I might be motivated to try it.”
    • Probably less than you think: “out of the 3M users, lol – how many of those accounts are pedophiles?”
    • Yeah, good idea: “These virtual worlds should allow users to travel to other virtual worlds through special “gates”.”

  • The Sunday Poem: Why It Is Hard

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 2 Comments

    We always write our verses on the green.
    Extolling nature, one dull paean, then
    Another, the savannah evo psych
    So loves a bellwether to our brains.

    We hammer home our thoughts of death, with odes
    And eulogies, our writing full of black,
    Of wistfulness, of melancholy. Sad,
    As if mere “sad” was “deep” and “deep” was “good.”

    We speak of love, the thrust, surrender, catch
    Of breath, exchange of fluids, the coy glance
    And longing. Each of us forgets that all
    Of us know all of this. Forever. Now.

    So much of writing tells us what we know.
    So much of culture trades old comforts, myths
    We tell ourselves to keep the strange away.
    Just three great subjects, and our story’s done.

    This makes it hard to write each Sunday poem.

  • GH3 and strippers?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 28 Comments

    From the Joystiq article:

    They fully updated the graphics, including doing motion capture for the avatars, and the NPCs in the background, like the go-go girls in the stage that’s set in a strip club. Neversoft has a full-sized motion capture studio at their facility in California, so why not make good use of it? Especially if you have to mocap some strippers. Tough work, this rock stuff. Based on what we saw, the dancers will be giving Soul Calibur a run for the money. Jiggle factor five, Mr. Sulu.

    Dammit. Wasn’t it obvious already that this was a crossover game of broad appeal? One played widely by families? Sure, it’s rock ‘n’ roll. Well, guess what, ten year old daughters like rock ‘n’ roll too.

    *grumble*

  • Star Wars Galaxies – The Galactic Senate

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 29 Comments

    So SWG is taking a small step towards player government. This is nice to see, though I note that even though players can nominate, they can’t vote on the Senators. Instead, Senators are picked by the community team.

    One of the powers of a Senator is to vote on legislation. There’s nothing in there about what exactly Senate legislation is or what it can accomplish, though. 🙂 But they do get some forum mod powers, the ability to sticky posts, and stuff like that. It isn’t a hollow title, basically, though it’s also not true power.

    Long ago, I floated the idea of actually let.ting players vote in Correspondents. Kinda neat to see the meme still around (though who knows to what degree this was inspired by that…)

  • Facebook

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 23 Comments

    Facebook seems to be Silicon’s Valley’s darling du jour. I was, shall we say, highly reluctant to engage with yet another social networking system. But I figure, I need to see what all the fuss is about. I must say that the ease of adding applications to your profile is really neat.

    However, I am not so eager as to start actually filling the page (or my network) in with stuff (or people). I have already turned down two requests to join a zombie army…

    By the way, there’s a MySpace profile page too, over here. As you can see, I haven’t bothered making that one particularly compelling either. 🙂