The Sunday Poem: Puzzle Poetry

 Posted by (Visited 5903 times)  The Sunday Poem
Dec 022007
 

This one is for Amaranthar. 🙂

Puzzle Poetry

A poem where the lines cannot add up.
Where verbs and nouns are hidden; you must find.
Where rhymes are slanted indiscriminate,
And rhythms pop and prattle out of tune.

It’s not like it’s all done on purpose – no!
We try to make the words convey the most
We can, and sometimes they convey too much.
They overflow, and simple matters mud.

In part, the puzzle lies with us, who craft
The lines and lessons into sonnets. We
Are piecing syllables and skeletons.
We try to make the lines add up to truth.

We fail, and sense is lost cacophonous and ground.
We reach mellifluous success, and then it’s lost in color, and in sound.

Jon Blow’s Design Reboot

 Posted by (Visited 7048 times)  Game talk
Dec 022007
 

Jonathan Blow has posted the slides and audio to his talk “Design Reboot” from the Montreal conference.I spotted this over on Quarter to Three, where people in the comment thread are to my mind surprisingly resistant to what Jon is saying. Among other things, the comments are made that “videogames do not have the power to affect humanity.”

If that were the case, nobody would play them. 😛

I suspect that some of the reason for the resistance is that people don’t like being told that things they love can be bad for them…

Vivendi buys Activision to create Activision Blizzard

 Posted by (Visited 9566 times)  Game talk
Dec 022007
 

It’s the big news of the game industry today.

The upshot:

  • The Blizzard name gets hurt. This is a shame. Blizz itself is going to retain its name, “Blizzard Entertainment,” but there’s sure to be some degree of market confusion and tarnishing of Blizzard’s brand, which is unquestionably the best in the industry, by having associated with absolutely everything coming out of Vivendi and Activision. Not a good branding choice — we’ll probably all call the new entity just “Activision” anyway. Or “A/B” which I will do because it is shorter to type. 🙂
  • EA will probably have to respond, since this makes them the #2 publisher (!). There’s that Ubisoft purchase that’s been dangling out there for ages… In fact, it may stimulate more M&A activity across the whole industry, and more consolidation.
  • It’ll be interesting to see whether EA and A/B diverge in their approaches; EA has been talking more and more about being “an entertainment company” whereas A/B seems like doubling down on traditional gaming.

The impact to employees will probably be minimal for quite some time to come. Both publishers are enormous, so everyone there is used to that sort of environment.

One states reason for the merger, btw, is for ATVI to get more online expertise. It will be interesting to see whether Blizzard’s online expertise can actually be translated outwards. After all, EA and others failed at that sort of approach.

It’s also amusing to remember that Blizzard was actually on the block not that many years ago. 🙂