• ICED, serious game about immigration

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 10 Comments

    Here’s an interesting serious game: you play an immigrant teen whose objective is to become a U.S. citizen. The opponents in the game? The system.

    Breakthrough.tv | ICED

    ICED puts you in the shoes of an immigrant to illustrate how unfair immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights. These laws affect all immigrants: legal residents, those fleeing persecution, students and undocumented people.

    This aspect of the serious games movement — specifically, what I generically term games-as-propaganda, but Ian Bogost prefers to call persuasive games — seems to have started to boom a little bit.

  • How many hot startups are VW-based?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    The SIA 25 Live (a snapshot from CNet)

    The SAI 25 Live is this new index that is trying to track the hottest startups based on an estimated valuation figure. As you look at the chart, realize these figures are in thousands, so the top of the chart is valued in the billions.

    Several of the top 25 are familiar names to readers of this blog and folks who hang around the virtual worlds space:

    • Webkinz
    • Habbo (why it’s not listed as Sulake, I don’t know)
    • Linden Lab
    • Stardoll

    Of course, if you are on the Metaverse Roadmap bandwagon, then the stuff like Twitter also fits into the eventual metaverse picture, via the “lifelogging” quadrant. And Meebo, which many think of as just a chat app, has had great success with Meebo Rooms, which is basically am embeddable chat room that you can put on any website — another step towards web-wide synchronous interaction.

    The table is intended only to show privately held companies, so many of the big players are absent. And many of these valuations are purely hypothetical — there isn’t necessarily a buyer at that price, and the markets aren’t exactly hot for IPOs right now either. But it does serve to demonstrate the attraction of virtual worlds as a category.

    It’s also interesting to me how many of the others are ones I have never heard of. Tudou is a video-sharing site in China. Ozon and Yandex are Russian. There’s a bunch of job-seeking sites, and a bunch of ad networks.

  • GTA’s latest shots in the culture wars

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 188 Comments

    YouTube – GTAIV HOOKERS

    Totally not safe for work.

    Not sure what the distinction is between an M and an AO game these days, but one thing seems clear — Rockstar is not hiding stuff on the disc anymore. Presumably if you don’t try to hide it, you can’t be accused of hypocrisy. 🙂

    On the one hand, this is clearly puerile and likely counterproductive in that it undermines what by all accounts is a stellar game with a great script and great gameplay. (I say by all accounts because I don’t have it. And I don’t have it because, well, of scenes like this, and my kids).

    On the other hand, the industry does need to be able to tackle mature content, and games with this sort of content should be allowed to exist.

    I just kind of wish it weren’t so gratuitous.