Credit: Business Week
I recently read Paul Ford’s special report on software—all 36,000 words and three hours of it. If you work in computers, you should read it. If you work in business, you should read it. If you’re an adult human, you will learn a lot about the way things are and where they’re headed by reading it.
Admittedly, the story could have benefitted from some additional editing. Ford, after all, veers a little off topic. But like Bill Bryson, Ford is a master at explaining why things matter—in this case, why coders matter, and how they will increasingly influence the future.
If that’s doesn’t convince you to read the article’s entirety, maybe my 10 favorite excerpts will: Continue reading…
As of September 2006, Nintendo had sold 275 million Mario games worldwide easily making the little Italian plumber the best selling game character of all time. To put that into perspective, imagine all other notable game characters, combine them, and you still won’t account for half of what Mario has sold. Not Halo, not Gran Turismo, not even Nintendo’s own Pokemon or Zelda come close.
And he’s still selling. “Mario is a gaming icon that has had and continues to have a huge impact on the gaming world,” admits once Nintendo rival Takashi Iizuka of Sega. But even though single game sales may never resurface to the level of 1980s gaming, Mario isn’t the only franchise character still thriving. The franchise formula continues to work to this day assuming the playable characters maintain their appeal.
Continue reading at Business Week…
Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year was “you.” Not because you’re special, but because of your collective ability to readily produce, publish, and share content with others. It’s called user-generated content, and it’s slowly starting to creep into console video games.
While user-generated game content is no stranger to PCs, it’s clearly in its infancy; especially on consoles.
Wikipedia fittingly describes user-generated content as “various kinds of media content that is produced or primarily influenced by end-users as opposed to traditional media producers, licensed broadcasters, and production companies.”
Continue reading on Bloomberg…
