Ouya

Link Roundup 9/19/2013 – Video Game Edition

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Lots of gaming Links!

The power of failure in creating The Last Of Us. An interesting and inspirational look at the game, its themes, and how it came about over a long period.  Worth reading for gaming and media pros.

Speaking of failure, here’s an insightful look at sexist problems in video games beyond the use of sleazy sex appeal.  There’s actually some rather interesting issues of infantilization I hadn’t thought of.  Also shame and wonder that more and more we here at MuseHack to to Cracked for insight.  Food for thought for game developers and culture commentators.

The Tokyo Gameshow is in decline, and there’s a huge chasm in titles and representation that is part of a larger game industry change.  Maybe Cracked has some thoughts.

Amazon is working on it’s game console and his going to go full ecosystem – they’re courting developers and moving forward.  What intrigues me (beyond the level of awareness) is that they’re really more competing with the X-Box.  Might need to watch out for them, developers . .

Speaking of alternate consoles, Ouya is changing it’s rules on free games and development.  I’ll say . . . they didn’t do as well as I expected.  And I had low expectations.

Small, obscure title Grand Theft Auto V manages to net $800 million dollars.  Remember, game, not movie, and people will spend more time with this game.  Of course games-as-causing-violence is back in the news at about the same time – and the fact that torture is part of the game is not going over well.

– Steven Savage

Link Roundup 9/11/2013

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Career:

Job seekers recruited via Social Media more likely to be hired. Not surprising really, but worth thinking about.

Culture:

Steve found this about Meritocracy – this blog post notes it came from a satire, before going on to eviscerate sexism/classism/racism in text.  Remember that next time someone says they’re in a Meritocracy.

Publishing:

Lulu is adding new features – They include new templates and, according to their press release, “four new solutions for publishing e-books, each allowing authors to make their books available quickly and easily on tablets and e-readers through the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Bookstore and the Lulu Marketplace.” Notice that Amazon is conspicuous by its absence.

Try and follow this.  Tumblr’s book club picks a novel about a fangirl as it’s first book club pick.  First, congrats to the author on promoting such a subject and I’ve heard some good things on it, secondly Tumblr has a book club.  Wow.

Technology:

Tivo moves to the cloud.  Sure it’s experimental, but they’ve got some foundation, lead, and alliances – and a need to save themselves from market changes.  Probably worth watching and there might be some good opportunities – though since everyone else is doing the streaming/TV/cloud thing who knows . . .

Video Games:

Ouya’s “Free The Games” is a bit of a debacle.  More here.  I’ll say again I treated the Ouya as more a milestone or experiment.  But this is kind of sad.

– Steven Savage

Gaming, Opportunity, Convergence

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So last week it was announced that the Ouya is going to have OnLive on it.  Frankly I expected to see a lot more on that, but it didn’t seem to make much of an impression.  Just another case of technology converging.

Of course the way I see this potential alliance is different.  It means a service that streams games (that don’t run on Android) is going to be playable on an open Android device.  Or in short, your $99 Ouya is going to let you play stuff that you’d normally need a far more powerful machine for.  Sure you have to pay for the service, but we’re talking quite a benefit here.

Yet, I saw a lot less speculation on it, so let me speculate more – and extend this.

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