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All The Mistakes That Are Fit to Print

"Those who have spent the day trading carbon credits have another opportunity to save the planet, this time from aliens in Halo 3, the third edition of the Xbox 360 game. The PlayStation 3 game Gran Turismo 5, a hyper-realistic, high-speed journey, is one of the best sellers for that Sony console, which starts at $299. Microsoft’s Xbox starts at $280. Both are built around the multicore Cell processor, which allows numerous tasks to be done simultaneously." (Peter Wayner, The New York Times)

Impressive! It was hard to fit so many mistakes in just one paragraph, but the New York Times journalist did it: The PS3 does not cost $299 but $399, The Xbox 360 does not feature the Cell processor, Gran Turismo 5 is not even on the market, so it cannot possibly be "one of the best sellers". This tops Il Corriere della Sera innumerable snafus...

Read more (via Joystiq)

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

"The bulk of paperback advertising came from tobacco companies, which were looking for new places to push their products after a federal ban on cigarette advertising on television and radio passed in 1969. Beginning in 1971, the Lorillard Tobacco Company began buying into print runs of tens and even hundreds of thousands of copies apiece at the astounding rate of 125 titles a month, often in pulpy volumes like “Purr, Baby, Purr” and “The Executioner #8: Chicago Wipeout” — not to mention the poetically if unintentionally matched “I Come to Kill You” and “Unless They Kill Me First.” True to the era, Lorillard placed advertisements in 150,000 copies of “Group Sex,” as well as in “Heloise’s Kitchen Hints.” By 1975, the company had spent $3 million for advertisements in a staggering 540 million paperbacks" (Paul Collins, The New York Times)

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Who needs game reviews, anyway? (updated)

...All you need is Meta critic (for the raw stats) and Zero Puntuaction (for the smart comments).

Kevin Gifford wrote an outstanding piece on GameSetWatch on this topic. The gist: game publishers only care for scores. Most gamers only care for scores. My question is: would we/they care more for reviews if their content were even remotely interesting? The truth is: most game reviews are just painful to read (nothing new here - I bet there are at least 30 posts on this blog relating to game criticism - or lack of thereof). Also, the numerical obsession - the urge to quantify the ephemeral quality of the game - was institutionalized by game journalists back in the '80s so if there is one to blame for this poor state of affair is the journalists themselves, not Metacritic which did not invent anything new: like most interactive databases, it simply provides an easy, crystal-clear access to information.

random incoherent thought: I am currently playing F.E.A.R. Files for the Xbox 360 - I did not bother to read any reviews, because a) really, who cares? b) being a fan of the series, I would play the game even if the scores were relatively low (as in the case), c) I agree with every single comment made by Zero Puntuaction - still, I am enjoying the game (it's not great, but it does not matter to me - I would play endless variations for the same reasons why I would watch yet another season of "24" or another zombie movie - it's the mix of familiarity-cum-innovation that keeps me going back to the same things over and over again). I don't use reviews for making purchasing decisions: I know how the business works from personal experience. Sometimes I read reviews after the fact, i.e. after buying and eventually finishing the game. Ditto for movies. The big problem is: excellent film criticism is abundant, e.g. Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Filmmaker et al. But when it comes to "good" game criticism, aside from EDGE magazine there is a depressing, empty wasteland. Nothing much has changed in the last 10 years in terms of writing about games. Meanwhile, this thing called the internet ("the one with email") has dramatically changed the rules of the game - in fact, the most interesting criticism about games comes from game developers themselves, fans, academics and game journalists who write on their blogs.

Other recent games that I bought and played just because/even though they look flawed-but-interesting: Kane & Lynch, Blacksite: Area 51, Timeshift. They are all indeed flawed, but at the same time they are also very interesting for reasons that most reviewers failed to notice - especially in the case of Blacksite: Area 51 (BTW, Harvey Smith has all of my support).

Anyway, "gamers [that] endlessly argue about scores, about Jeff's 8.8 for Zelda and about Fran from IGN's 7.9 for Mario Kart: Double Dash" are not very smart, but at the same time, they are the inevitable outcome of an idiotic system for rating games (again, established by the game journalists).

"Game publishers [that] care about the score, the Metacritic average" are not too smart either, but hey, they have to deal with the above mentioned idiotic system for rating games and with scores of gamers that would not buy the game because of that - a vicious circle. And I am sorry, but there is no way out. The few magazines that dared to get rid of the score system were lambasted from the gamers - and, I bet, by the game industry as well - and they quickly re-established it (one recent example is Computer Gaming World/Gaming for Windows). Onc e you pop, you can't stop.

Here's an excerpt from Kevin's piece:

"Game publishers, nearly all of whom these days are multi-million-dollar corporations with shareholders and Wall Street analysts breathing down their necks harder than their gamer audience, don't care what Jeff Gerstmann or any reviewer has to say about their games. They care about the score, the Meta critic average, and it's been that way ever since the Internet became the primary vehicle for game media. [...] And now that the Internet's largely shattered the notion that a professional game-media writer is somehow more qualified to bring judgment upon a new release than V3GETA80051 down at GameFAQs, the obsession with scores has become game media's undoing. Text, videos, podcasts, whatever -- nobody cares about any of it except that decimal number at the end of the review. And game writers' realization of this has made them lazy." (Kevin Gifford, GameSetWatch)

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Henry Jenkins on Moral Kombat

"Let me start with a simple and straight forward statement: Spencer Halprin's Moral Kombat is perhaps the most important film ever made about video games and you should see it if you get a chance. The film will force people on all sides of the debate about games and violence to re-examine their own positions and ask harder questions" (Henry Jenkins)

Trailer

Part One

Part Two

No, but we saw the movie

"Who’s Javier? Javier Bardem. The serial killer. I thought it was Benicio Del Toro. Well it wasnt. The guy outside the men’s room said there’s a scene in the book that’s not in the movie. He said Javier goes to see a total stranger in some office, who’s never been mentioned earlier. He gives him the satchel of money and he says, Here’s your money back, now maybe you’ll hire me to do things like this in the future. Why did they leave that out? How do I know? Write a letter to the Coen brothers." (Nora Ephron, The New Yorker)

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The Italian Digital Divide

"The Italian situation is very clear: the European average is 18% of penetration rate, Italy stands at 17% so it is under the European average and 20% less than the best player. I think that rally Italy could do better, but there is something more worrying in this, that is the access and the coverage. You see people living in cities: they have access to broadband. But as soon as you go out the city people do not have access anymore. This is what I call “white spots” on the map. We got too many white spots on the map and we have to change that because I believe that all people hate to have access to broadband in a society which wants to develop in a equilibrate way. The fourth best in the world in penetration rate are Europeans, I’m speaking about Denmark, Nederland, Finland and Sweden. Well done. But then we have a tail which is horrible, very low penetration rate and this brings, of course, our average down to 18% whereas our best players at 20% more and our worst players are 30% different from the best players.
(Viviane Reding is a Member of the European Commission, responsible for Information Society and Media, via BeppeGrillo)

No worries! Italy can always count on such luminaries as Franco Frattini, Clemente Mastella and Paolo Gentiloni! :-)

Read more (there's a video, too)

Milan has never looked so great

Images from Codemasters' upcoming Race Driver: GRID, the new game from the creators of Colin McRae: DiRT and Race Driver series. The virtual always surpasses the real.

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Gianni Canova - intervista IULM

"Gianni Canova: Sceneggiature, soggetti, film… ricevo di tutto: fra studenti dell’università e conoscenze acquisite in questi anni di conferenze e festival in giro per l’Italia ricevo almeno duecento email al giorno. Se rispondessi a tutti, dovrei fare solo quello. Mi faccio carico dei lavori dei ragazzi della laurea specialistica, ovviamente, perchè fa parte dei miei doveri didattici. Quando arriva un dvd lo metto in fondo alla pila che si è accumulata sulla mia scrivania: ogni tanto, la domenica pomeriggio posso dedicare qualche ora alla visione dei lavori che mi sono stati mandati, ma ci vorrebbe molto più tempo. Il consiglio che vorrei dare a  tutti coloro che desiderano iniziare una carriera nel cinema (e non solo) è di convincere qualcuno a dar loro del tempo. La vera merce rara, il capitale prezioso, oggi, è il tempo. Bisogna capire come riuscire a convincere un professionista a dedicarti mezz’ora della sua vita, della sua unica vita, per guardare o leggere il lavoro che hai prodotto." (Gianni Canova)

Leggi

Archivio interviste IULM

Google Earth in a World Without Us

"Due to the massive interest in the animations and timeline we created for the book's publication, we have created a new toy, a Virtual Map which provides insight into many of the locations discussed in the book. Next week we will launch a GoogleEarth Tour where you will be able to fly to and explore on your own the locations mentioned in the book. If you want to be notified when the GoogleEarth tour is ready to be taken, you can sign up for the mailing list on the books' website. In the meantime, we hope you will enjoy our Virtual Map! " (St Martin's Press)

Few books have been able to maximize the potential of the web to expand their appeal beyond the written page. Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is one of them. Suggestion: I would not mind a videogame based on Weisman's depictions. No. really...

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On fanzines...

"And I'm afraid that true game criticism will not come from game enthusiast press, which are essentially the modern equivalent of fanzines." (Jane Pinckard, Game Girl Advance)

So true. I was recently lambasted by my PC Gamer editor for daring to discuss the political messages in Blacksite: Area 51 in my monthly column. I should really translate and post some of the epistolary exchanges that we had. They are almost surreal. Most of the gaming press is so... disconnected :-( It is not just disappointing. It is scary.

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