Presidential Pong
Right after the NYT does editorial games, we see Presidential Pong on the front page of CNN.com. Whoo hoo! Ian Bogost comments here.
Game talk
This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.
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The boundaries of user created content
A lot of user-created content is porn.
Seems like a truism, doesn’t it? Then again, a lot of professionally-created Internet content is porn too. It’d be interesting to see whether the percentage of user-contributed smut in user-built spaces is different from the percentage of professionally-contributed smut in open spaces like the Internet.
Anyway, what prompts this musing? Well, the combination of stuff like the recent LiveJournal PR disaster and subsequent backpedaling (gotta love a company announcement entitled “Well we really screwed this one up…”), and the big controversy over in the fanfic community over this company called FanLib that is trying to build a business model out of fan fiction.
And of course, the inevitable virtual world tie-in: the announcement on Linden Lab’s site that they are encouraging the reporting of unpalatable content, which has led to a predictable outrage among many residents.
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Big or small valuations?
Virtual Worlds News reports that HiPiHi has raised $7-10m, with the little comment that it’s “from three overseas venture capital firms for a 10 percent stake in the company.” So, uh, that’s a valuation of $70-100m for a product in beta.
On the flip side, I just mentioned Multiverse’s round, which was for $4.175m. According to VentureBeat, that’s with a post-money valuation of $10.5m.
Quite a gap there. Is it all attributable to HiPiHi being in China? Is it because the monolithic server is seen as a better business play than the slightly-middlewarish Multiverse approach? Who knows!
I know, I know, all you gamer types are bored with this biz and legal stuff I keep blogging today. 🙂