Video Games Past Tipping Point.

With The Sims Online coming out later this month, we should have been expecting a torrent of press about video gaming. Still, you know it's "not just for kids" anymore when you start seeing big stories in Time and USA Today and it's on the cover of Newsweek and now Entertainment Weekly. I just got the latest issue of EW today, and since the cover story isn't available online for free, here are some choice quotes:

"Some 60 percent of Americans (over 145 million people) play videogames. Average age: 28. More than $6.35 billion worth of computer and videogame software was sold last year; that's expected to increase this year....

'I've played videogames since I was in elementary school - from the Atari 2600 up the ladder,' says Tiger Woods, 26, a pro golfer who...oh, you know who Tiger is. Favorites: Madden and GoldenEye 007, the shooting game inspired by the 1995 James Bond flick. 'When I'm on tour and I'm staying at the house of a family I know, I'll bring the PlayStation with me. A lot of times, they'll have kids and we'll play. You'd be amazed. Every single kid knows how to play videogames....'

Aside from hip-hop and music videos, no other form of pop culture in the past 20 years has so pervasively cross-pollinated other popular media as videogames. 'When it comes to pacing, action, and capturing youth culture right now, it's all coming from videogames,' says Tom Calderone, MTV's exec VP of music and talent programming....

Or look at the NFL's running scoreboard, ref-mounted cameras, and even sound effects: They're all lifted from videogames. 'When we started Fox Sports in 1994, I went out and got...every videogame I could,' says Fox Sports Networks chairman David Hill. 'What fascinated me was how videogames were so rich and multi-layered, while television was two-dimensional....'

The next step forward will occur when the two movie sequels to The Matrix arrive in 2003, along with their videogame companion, Enter the Matrix. 'Companion,' because Matrix creators Larry and Andy Wachowski - hardcore gamers both - have been actively involved in the development of the game, conceived as a complement and continuation of the movies. This will finally bring The Matrix to the very medium that, had things gone differently, might have spawned it."

There's also an interesting chart that shows more video game consoles in U.S. households (44%) than DVD players (25%), which I find especially interesting since the Sony Playstation 2 and Microsoft X-Box consoles both play DVDs. The USA Today article, Video Game College is 'Boot Camp' for Designers, is also interesting, in part because it appears in the Money section. Some interesting stats from this article:

"DigiPen is the only accredited school offering a four-year degree in making video games, and it's fast becoming the Harvard among joystick-clenching students fresh out of high school....

No wonder: Even while the economy struggles, the video game industry has become one of the fastest-growing forms of media entertainment:

• Video game sales exceeded the movie industry's annual box office draw last year by $1 billion.
• The current video game hit, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, sold more than 1.4 million copies at an average $48 apiece in its first three days. That $70 million windfall easily puts it in the ranks of a blockbuster movie.
• The popularity of NFL video games has given longtime TV football announcer John Madden celebrity status among teens and young adults.
• Designers can make $50,000 a year right out of college and twice as much if they are part of a team that produces a hit video game....

Video games have morphed from being primitive toys for geeks and kids into a major form of entertainment. Sales of video game hardware, software and gear jumped 42.4% to a record $9.4 billion last year, says NPD Group. That's more than the $8.4 billion in movie tickets sold each year, says PricewaterhouseCoopers." (Emphasis is mine - take that, legislation-hungry Hollywood!)

Yes, the future is indeed video games, and what all of these articles fail to mention is how they will also drive demand for bigger-faster-newer-better cell phones, and PDAs, as well as broadband and 3G. Every kid knows how to play video games, and every kid is going to grow up and play them on mobile devices with always-on, very fast connectivity.

Every time I think this might be a limited phenomenon after all, I find Kailee playing Zoo Tycoon on the PC. She'd love to take the game with her and care for the animals throughout the day. She has already reminded us several times this month that Zoo Tycoon: Marine Mania, Zoo Tycoon: Dinosaur Digs, and Rollercoaster Tycoon are all available at Best Buy (I'm not sure how she knows this, but of course, she's right). I'm a little scared to think about how well she would take to The Sims Online.

[The Shifted Librarian]
7:57:49 PM  #  

Another "Next Level" Type of Step for RSS. An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers (.doc)

"Quote: "RSS is the first working example of an XML data network. As such, and in this world of learning objects and metadata files, RSS is the first working example of what such a network will look like for educational designers. Just as news resources are indexed and distributed in the RSS network, so also educational resources can be indexed and distributed in a similar learning object network."

Comment: Nice article on RSS (Rich Site Summary)...timely as well - currently at RRC, we are trying to create a culture of bloggers...and use aggregators as a means of accelerating the reading process. RSS is already popular in the blogosphere and news sites. Stephen Downes extends the role of RSS from that of news aggregation to learning object network (which he contrasts with current LCMS models)." [elearnspace blog]

[The Shifted Librarian]
7:48:15 PM  #  

Technorati RSS Watchlists

"Technorati now has RSS feeds that show you who is linking to your blog or web site.  Here's the RSS feed of the newest inbound links to this blog.  It's a great way to see the conversation that is inspired by your website.  I've gotten addicted to the Technorati Link Cosmos Watchlist I have for Sifry's Alerts - it lets me very quickly see people's reactions to posts here, and add comments on their blog." [Sifry's Alerts, thank Will Cox for the heads up]

Whoo-hoo! Doing the happy dance... planning to sign up....

[The Shifted Librarian]
7:46:12 PM  #  

This has been making the rounds already, but I wanted to make sure the folks back in ILL see Billy Joel's song We Didn't Start the Fire done in Flash. The great part is that in the morning, I'll know when they start watching it because I'll be able to hear the laughter all the way over in my office.  :-)

[The Shifted Librarian]
7:45:16 PM  #  

 

5:50:16 PM  #  

CityBlogs: Harnessing the Power of Everyone [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
5:45:13 PM  #  

Wearable Communities. Whenever Kortuem sits down with another participant in his ongoing experiments at the University of Oregon's Wearable Computing Lab, his iPAQ establishes a Wi-Fi link with his colleague's device. It checks the user's identity, and if the person is someone whose taste Kortuem has noted as trustworthy, it downloads an MP3 playlist ranked according to frequency of plays. Later, Kortuem culls through the lists he has harvested. "I rediscovered David Bowie and the Talking Heads," says the 38-year-old assistant professor, who recently moved to Lancaster University in England. "I knew I liked them, but I had forgotten all about them."

The iPAQ doesn't quite qualify as a wearable but it's a step toward Kortuem's vision. Wireless wearables, he says, can link like-minded strangers in a new kind of social organization he calls an "ad hoc community."

As he sees it, the crowds who surround us every day constitute a huge waste of social capital. If you live in a city for instance, there are many who pass within a few yards of you each day who could give you a ride home, buy an item you're trying to sell, or consider you as dating material. Dynamic networking makes it possible to tap those resources through a momentary alliance among transient interest groups, "like people working in a given neighborhood, staying overnight in a certain district, or taking the 10:15 flight to Chicago," Kortuem explains.

In a world of wireless wearables, computers embedded in clothing could form networks on the fly, prompting software agents to carry out mutually beneficial transactions. A group waiting to buy movie tickets might use an ad hoc network to auction off favorable places in line. Thousands of people in Times Square could pool computing power and sell it by the teraflop-second to nearby office buildings. [Smart Mobs]

5:44:28 PM  #