How do Amazon charts work anyway?

 Posted by (Visited 6358 times)  Game talk, Writing
Jul 062005
 

I’ll never understand the vagaries of Amazon sales. esterday and for the last few weeks, ATOF had been slowly slipping down the charts–the doldrums of summer, I thought, with no orders from universities for their classes, no press attention, and so on.

Today, it’s in the 3500’s on the charts, and the #12 bestseller in the computer and video games section.

I am told that Tim O’Reilly has a mystical formula that he can use to determine sales figures with exactitude based on Amazon sales rank data. From where I sit, it’s gotta be a heck of a formula, and probably involves eye of newt.

E3 is over

 Posted by (Visited 5700 times)  Game talk, Writing
May 242005
 

Hurray, E3 is over!

Latest press spottings of the book:

  • George “The Fat Man” Sanger calls it one of his “very favorite books of all time,” but he rags on the cartoons.
  • The Daily Pundit, of all places,
    discusses the LA Times article with the comment, “One practical payoff here is that Koster may have set the table for the first PC-acceptable justification for Booth Babes: luring males into teach/learn situations. If that angle ever gets traction it’s likely to find lots of creative applications.” Yikes.

Press round-up, including Dutch

 Posted by (Visited 5933 times)  Game talk, Writing
May 242005
 

And more May 24th…

Anyone read Dutch? ‘Cause there’s this review… Freetranslation.com renders the conclusion as “…as an introduction for the practical side of the ludologie an absolute must-property.” I think that’s good. 🙂

(Also, is tic-tac-toe really called “Butter, Cheese, and Eggs” in Dutch?)

I have gotten my second Wikipedia link, and this time it’s as the only cited book reference in the “Game Programming” article on the French Wikipedia. Very cool.

Over on Machinima.com a bit from the book is serving as the starting point for a discussion of whether machinima can be art. The answer had better be “yes,” duh, especially coming from that crowd! I don’t see why anyone would think that machinima couldn’t be art given that it’s essentially an animation technique, and we know that animation can be art…

Lastly today (I hope), the Detroit News seems to have reprinted the editorial from the LA Times. At least, they reprinted around half of it. It almost reads like they ran it through MS Word’s auto-summarizer–which is not a knock, that tool is surprisingly good.

 Comments Off on Press round-up, including Dutch

LA Times editorial

 Posted by (Visited 4997 times)  Game talk, Writing
May 152005
 

I’ve got the front page of the Opinion section of the LA Times today! It’s mostly a brief summary of the content in the book, put in the context of E3, which is about to start in LA. I imagine the link will soon vanish behind their pay-for-archived-articles policy, so read it while you can…

For the curious, see if you can spot which paragraphs are mostly the editor’s words and not mine. 🙂 (The title’s not mine either).

It’s unfortunate that the editors chose to attach a sidebar with the old “MMOs are addicting” theme on the
side of the article. It’s not entirely apropos, given the subject of the editorial itself.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries