Another day, another study. Today it’s “Addiction and the Structural Characteristics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games” over on Gamasutra (the full study is available here (PDF). [Edit: link fixed.] It looks to use Nick Yee’s work as a starting point. Key findings:
No, not the ordinary sort, I mean with hardware.
The August 18th issue of Entertainment Weekly has a fun little gimmick: six covers, one for each of the James Bond actors, going back in time. It provides an interesting window into the changing pop cultural preoccupations.
In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” To which today’s response is “what’s laserdisc?” We see a pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow insisting that “I’m more than a head in a box.” And the cover article asks, “Do we still need 007 in a post-Cold-War world?” The Brosnan Bond movies of course answered that question; the 1995-era sense that history had ended was turned on its ear in not too many more years.
I’m fond of pointing out that these days, Penny Arcade has more reach (and much more street cred!) than many of the print mags. Now comes an article on Gamesindustry.biz giving some hard numbers on just how dire the situation is for print games outlets:
Once upon a time I wrote a guitar instrumental called “After the Flood.” It became the title track on my CD. It sounds like this:
Then I mistakenly wrote lyrics to go on top of it. It’s not that the lyrics were bad; they just didn’t need to exist.
They’re in the liner notes on the CD now, but I figured, why not post ’em as the Sunday Poem? So here they are.
