Ludogistics & The Irrational Thought Patterns Of A Great Many Things

We've heard of MAG , of course, long before any game play was shown. Discussions have flared up and subsided, as anything does on this Internet of ours. The flavor of the month and whatnot, you know? Well, Zipper Interactive and SONY have brought it back to the forefront this week, and have made damn sure that we remember about the 256 players engaged in modern warfare simultaneously. An impressive number, as far as multiplayer shooter numbers go. Two hundred and fifty-six feels well rounded, especially in the savvy tech world of computing. A number we have, in days of old, associated with the number of kilobytes or megabytes found in gaming machines, such as the Tandy 1000, with its 256 KB of RAM; or the 256 color modes able to display with VGA hardware. Now, this number comes back to bite us in the ass (a pun, if such a thing is permitted, was absolutely intended here). But outside the technical marvel of such a value lie questions, and mysteries that may only find answers...

So it was decided that we would do a radio show on advertisement and publicity within the world of video games. We were aware that using such a limited media to talk about a very visual subject was a bit of a problem, and so it was decided to create a sort of "Companion Sheet" with what we thought were some of the more interesting ads for games. Interesting for us because they are either funny, stupid, make no sense, or are total failures. Of course, we are not the first to explore the relationship between publicity and games. A few years ago, 1UP.com started doing a series on the Best Worst Ads that ever came out in print back in the days of the Electronic Gaming Monthly. You'll find a link to those very articles (written by Scott Sharkey) somewhere below, amongst the cornucopia of videos embedded. The radio show itself will not be exclusively centered on commercials and print ads, but it will also feature a discussion about the current and future presence of publici...

T he folks from the 1UP Show (now part of a group called Area5) are back for keeps now, thanks to Revision3 Internet Television and various other sponsors. The weekly program, COOP , features the same brand of humor and the same level of relevance as the old one , and the conversations remain fresh and eye-opening. A couple of friends and I have a radio show called Multi-Joueurs , which kind of feels very symmetric to what COOP is : a show by friends who have everyday conversations about games and the industry in general. I do not believe we own the same degree of insightfullness as the guys from Area5, but this would be normal since we do not have the same level of entry within the game industry. We work FOR this industry, while they work at REPORTING about it. Hence, their field of vision is much wider, and their minds opened to the woes and wows of all developpers, all game genres and news. I try to keep in touch with this technology-savvy world, but I find it harder each day to...