Live, from the Hollywood Bowl - it's the SuperMario theme!

Gamers.com reports that the first-ever North American concert of video game music, featuring an orchestra and chorus, will be staged on the final day of this year's E3.

A neat thread about video game music can be found on Metafilter, with some links to video game music archives.

Can you list every game you've ever played?

Kevin Fox writes about a game design assignment: list every game you've ever played. every game, not only electronic; games like chess, checkers, blindman's bluff, spin the bottle, playing house, etc.

An interesting thread results.

And I am provoked also to consider why, when I say I study "games", I usually mean only electronic/video games. Are there applicable lessons to be learned from studying Hide-and-Seek?

I will have to think about this much longer before I can come up with my list.

(via Jason Kottke)

Commercial Ludic Convergeance

We should see increasing use of video games to sell products and brands:

Matthew Ringel is president of Games Media Properties, a joint venture of the William Morris Agency and Ya-Ya that is designed to help companies reach consumers around "the video game lifestyle." ... "There's a gold rush with games," Ringel said. "We're making the picks and shovels."

There has been much talk in the past about product placement in games (ie, SimDonalds). But BizReport: "Advertisers Use Online Games to Entice Customers" is less about putting a Tommy Jeans billboard in a snowboarding game, and more about Jeep games for women, Jimmy Neutron games from Nikelodeon using codes found in cereal boxes, Barbie blogs and America's Army. These are games made specifically to promote products, not products coming up in the course of regular place. But about all current convergeances of commercial and ludic are mentioned in the piece. (from LucJam).

AI can't love - but it can play Tetris!

An enterprising fellow describes in a fascinating article not only how he created an AI program to play Tetris, but also a history of Tetris, mathematical breakdown of how Tetris works, a list of other wonderful projects inspired by Tetris. A bit geeky at times but worth a read even for non-geeks! (thanks, chris!)

Smoking a Super Bowl

Super Bore

The last Super Bowl I watched was in 1985: the Niners and the Dolphins. I don’t remember who won. I do remember that I had never watched an entire football game before and it was rather exciting. I watched with my dad, whom I would not call a football fan, but I remember he was excited too, sometimes to the point of shouting at the screen. I have never watched since, until last Sunday. The Raiders were playing, I thought maybe I would watch some of it again, for old times’ sake. And because, obviously, as a media monitor it’s my duty to investigate these things.

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Your Game Collection

Gaming can lead to obsession. Nowhere is this more evident then in the hardware and software assembled by dedicated gamers. Each person's collection reflects their tastes. I solicited game collection photos; one person sent me this picture of some extensive machines and software:

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Sims Online: Be a PAYtester?

The Sims Online was supposed to draw millions into multiplayer online gaming. As people flocked to the non-violent, non-fantasy gameplay, seeking the familiarity of the suburbs in their virtual fun, this persuasive mix of chat and consumer American fun would be gaming's biggest experimental labratory to develop the future of electronic entertainment.

I should have known I'd read too many articles like that to believe it. On Amazon.com today, the product rating for The Sims Online was down around 2 stars because the post holiday season reviews have all been around 1 star. Players are griping and complaining about terrible bugs, shifting rules, a 20 player limit, the lack of any city feeling. These people feel they're paying to be beta-testers and they're not excited about the game as it stands now. And most of all, they went looking for the same chance to build up their careers and persue the same meaningful character development and identity experimentation they remember from the single-player Sims game, and they can't find it online. Instead, they found an expensive 2-gigabyte chat client with too many restrictions on the supposed game environment.

I have some great faith in Will Wright as a game developer, or as a toy developer. Does connecting his toys to the Internet remove the fun of play? Or did Electronic Arts somehow mangle his vision? These problems were mostly foreshadowed in a recent GameGirlAdvance thread on the game. Maybe "The Sims Online is A Big Flop" is the next popular news story; I hope they get their playbalancing worked out over the next few months. If their core concept isn't fatally flawed! Otherwise, multiplayer online gaming will have to find another savior, the next title supposed to popularize the medium for the unplaying masses.

Greg Costikyan's Weblog

Greg Costikyan has worked his way through game design, starting with wargames and pen and paper role-playing, through to mobile phone games and massively multiplayer. He is terrifically articulate, if you can keep up with his brisk diction - his essay, "I Have No Words And I Must Design" is a strong starting framework for modern game analysis.

So I was pleased to get some mail from him announcing that he's started a Games/Design/Art/Culture weblog; tending towards long essays, to be posted once a week or so. The introductory email is pasted here below:

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The Dark Age of Chat

I dreamt last night of three realms. Vast though the lands were, it was possible to communicate directly with other citizens of the realm across great distances, either by sending a private message or addressing a group. I had a list of friends, complete with their alternate identities on other servers, with icons after their names that showed me at a glance their profession, level, location, and whether they were in the realm with me or not. I marveled at this system, in my dream. I admired its beneficent efficiency, its robust architecture. I touched on a name in my list to send an instant communication…

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