| Set On Stun |

Crowbar? Yeah I've got an App for that!

Take at look at the picture above — you see the little apple on Gordon Freeman’s chest? You have to look real close — it’s obscured by the crowbar. Yeah. WTF? Not that anyone would scream bloody murder if Valve made the big switch to the Mac OS for future games but what does that mean for the PC folks? Up until now it’s been a fairly solid split of PC and console offerings. And does this have anything to do with the distribution service Steam gearing up for Mac support? The question here is what’s with all the subtlety?

So many questions but seriously what is going on Valve? Look it’s not that it’s would be a bad thing for Valve and Steam to get Apple-friendly but why go with this ambiguous strategy that more vague than messages from Half-Life’s G-man? Especially since in 2007 we heard this from Valve about why they didn’t want to work with Apple. This was around the time of the Orange Box release

..We have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go “wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming”. And then we’ll say, “OK, here are three things you could do to make that better”, and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. Those words from the mouth of Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell.

To anchor that quote was this from Newell — “They seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there’s never any follow through“.

So you can see, there really was no love for the Mac OS back in ‘07. What changed in three years? Well for now we have no idea. All we know is this Sam Fisher sneakfest coupled with some weird things going on on the Steam site means change is a-coming. It’s highly possible that Valve will spill the beans at next week’s GDC but until then we have to sit around and wonder.

could you be more obscure?

This sucks to report.  Earlier last year, Crispy Gamer bought the gaming social media site GamerDNA for a bunch of money, it had also raised over $8 million dollars as well last year.

As VentureBeat reports, once you raise that much money, the investors expect a strong return on that investment.  While details are unclear at the moment, what’s known is that all of the editorial staff at Crispy Gamer have been laid off and it’s CEO, Chris Heldman has resigned in protest.

Personally, I really enjoyed Crispy Gamer, it’s ethos didn’t allow any advertising money from game companies and it strove to give independent analysis on the game industry free from influence.

Once I started reading Crispy Gamer, I found its unique insight and the personality of the writers to be a refreshing change from most gaming editorials.  While I’m not one to say they were better than others, what was clear was that their passion, intelligence and independence really showed through.  They were able to become a clear voice for gamers in a short time with their excellent features, writers and analysis.

While it’s unclear as to what’s going to happen with GamerDNA, Crispy Gamer is still live, but it’s no longer being updated.

Hopefully, something good will come from these ashes, but that may come much later.

I’m sure some people will come along and question the wisdom of spending that much money to acquire GamerDNA at a time when money is tight across the industry, but from a consumer perspective, Crispy Gamer kept its integrity, kept its reviews worth reading and had the guts to call out influential players in the gaming industry.

Update: In my previous entry, I’d made the association that they’d raised the $8 million to buy GamerDNA, that was not the case.

MIT researchers have shown that people who play video games tend to have larger brains.

Technically, people who play video games have bigger striatum which affects motor skills, acquisition of new skills and react with strategies to deal with changing environments.

From the Fast Company article:

According to Kirk Erickson, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and lead author on the study, this is the first time–ever–that the size of a specific region of the brain has been linked to better performance and learning in a real-world task.

Without getting all nerdcore on everyone, I think this shows the evolutionary importance of gameplay has been in human development.  People who play games learn to think abstractly, they perceive situations and stimuli in multiple perspectives and they’re willing to experiment, while retaining what works and what doesn’t.

A study I’d love to see would be one that tracks the ability of gamers to visually multi-task.  From anecdotal evidence, I’d suspect that we are, but then I haven’t seen the data on that study yet.

So, next time someone says you’re rotting your brain away, you now know that you’re actually contributing to the evolution of our species with your superior striatum.

via: FastCompany

Check this out if you want.  It’s very slow, very boring and the exact same game as any Mafia War, FarmVille Facebook game you’ve ever played.

A friend of mine sent me an invite to play this game, and my first thought was, “you’ve gotta be shitting me, is this an app to promote the same Dante’s Inferno game from EA that got second place on my Worst Video Game Marketing Campaigns of 2009?”

Yes.  Yes it is.  Despite the slowness of the game, despite the fact that it’s a clone of other popular games on Facebook, the only thing that shocked me about this is that they actually made it.  I mean, if you’re gonna piss me off, do so in a way that doesn’t bore me to tears.  Even the UI, which seems to be created with the elegance of a crowbar is fitted to promote in the most visible way the upcoming game.  I guess subtlety is not in Visceral/ EA’s vocabulary.

Click to embiggefy

Before I sound like I’m picking on Dante’s Inferno, I want to say that they’re doing the right things, they’re creating a bit of controversy, they’re making marketing campaigns based upon the content of the game, they’re expertly using the language of the story and of the game to communicate to its potential customers.  All of those things, they’re spot on.

Unfortunately, the execution of these efforts are just wrong.  From the #EAFail grope a booth babe contest, to this Facebook application.  Yes, they should be on Facebook, yes they should be leveraging social media.  Unfortunately, this effort is so slipshod and devoid of any real thought that it almost pains me to say that I miss them pissing me off.

If you’re going to offend me, do so intelligently, not by copying what EVERY OTHER FACEBOOK GAME IS DOING.

Dante’s Inferno marketing, once controversial and offensive has entered into the bland and “meh” category.

For people who like games and booze…

How much more awesome can drinking and fragging be?

It’s real, and DO WANT!