Heck of a job, "Pat"!

"I hope readers understand we're working very hard to establish credibility and integrity, and I would hope this does not undermine it," said John P. "Pat" Philbin, FEMA's director of external affairs.

"I think it was one of the dumbest and most inappropriate things I've seen since I've been in government," (*) Michael Chertoff said.

(*) Chertoff's first job after law school was as a clerk for Murray Gurfein, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. That was in 1978.

Philbin's last scheduled day at FEMA was Thursday. He has been named as the new head of public affairs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

I thought someone had lost their head last week ...

Buy It Now in time for Christmas!

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One of a kind "Tim Burton on bad acid" Dolls

Be advised, this is NOT a spoof. I repeat: this is not a spoof.

In Left Behind, video game players must try to convert others to Christianity. If nonbelievers won't convert, players must kill them.

Set in perfectly apocalyptic New York City, the Antichrist is personified by fictional Romanian Nicolae Carpathia, secretary-general of the United Nations and a People magazine "Sexiest Man Alive."

The CEO speaks out:

Situations resulting from the stories' post-apocalyptic time-frame are used to encourage gamers to think about matters of eternal significance, a topic largely ignored by modern games.

In the initial missions, there is little emphasis on physical warfare and gamers are introduced to powers of influence which result in a battle for the hearts and minds of people. As missions progress, there are no ‘objectives' to cause war physically. However, physical warfare results when the player is required to defend against the physical forces of evil; led by the Global Community Peacekeepers.

From IGN:

The units just aren't smart enough to take any initiative here so you'll spend the majority of your time micromanaging the particulars rather than planning out your overall strategy.

And this:

There are a lot of Christian rock acts featured in the clue screens between missions. While it's not everyone's cup of tea, the selections here are enjoyable and typical of the genre. The style of music, however, serve as an unintentionally amusing commentary on the game's decision to cast electric guitarists as the minions of evil on the Antichrist's side.

And finally:

The company's ultimate goal in offering the game: to bring parents and kids together to talk about the Bible.

'Convert or die' game divides Christians

Howard Stringer, you have a problem. Your company’s new video game system just isn’t that great.

Last year, Sony blithely insisted that the PS3 would leapfrog all competition to deliver an unsurpassed level of fun.

Put bluntly, Sony has failed to deliver on that promise.

Over the weekend a clear sense of disappointment with the PlayStation 3 emerged from many gamers.

It often feels as if the PlayStation 3 can’t walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.

Sony seems to have lost its way; their technologists seem to have won out over the people who study fun.

A Weekend Full of Quality Time With PlayStation 3

Some notes about Finite and Infinite Games:

There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite.

A finite game is a game that has fixed rules and boundaries, that is played for the purpose of winning and thereby ending the game.

An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game.

Finite players are serious; infinite games are playful.

Finite players try to control the game, predict everything that will happen, and set the outcome in advance. They are serious and determined about getting that outcome. They try to fix the future based on the past.

Infinite players enjoy being surprised. Continuously running into something one didn't know will ensure that the game will go on. The meaning of the past changes depending on what happens in the future.

Your daily dose of McLuhan (here excerpting Life magazine):

The traditional enemies of the Willigiman-Wallalua are the Wittaia, a people exactly like themselves in language, dress and custom ... Every week or two the Willigiman-Wallalua and their enemies arrange a formal battle at one of the traditional fighting grounds. In comparison with the catastrophic conflicts of "civilized" nations, these frays seem more like a dangerous field sport than true war. Each battle lasts but a single day, always stops before nightfall (because of the danger of ghosts) or if it begins to rain (no one wants to get his hair or ornaments wet). The men are very accurate with their weapons -- they have all played war games since they were small boys -- but they are equally adept at dodging, and hence are rarely hit by anything.

The truly lethal part of this primitive warfare is not the formal battle but the sneak raid or stealthy ambush in which not only men but women and children are mercilessly slaughtered ...

This perpetual bloodshed is carried on for none of the usual reasons for waging war. No territory is won or lost; no goods or prisoners seized ... They fight because they enthusiastically enjoy it, because it is to them a vital function of the complete man, and because they feel they must satisfy the ghosts of slain companions.

Back to the book:

You can do what you do seriously, because you must do it, because you must survive to the end, and you are afraid of dying and other consequences. Or, you can do everything you do playfully, always knowing you have a choice, having no need to survive the way you are, allowing every element of the play to transform you, taking pleasure in every surprise you meet. Those are the differences between finite and infinite players.

Exactly who are the ... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

"If popular culture has taught us anything," Daniel H. Wilson says, "it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace." Luckily, Dr. Wilson is just the guy to help us do it.

If Robots Ever Get Too Smart, He'll Know How to Stop Them

The bigger picture for investors is that game publishers in the US are still almost entirely in the same business they have been in for 20 years: selling new games at retail. As a result, the big publicly traded domestic publishers are not participating in any meaningful way in two of the hottest parts of the global video game industry: subscription-based online gaming and trade-ins of used games.

Those two sectors are very different; online gaming is growing quickly but remains risky, while the used game business is more mature but remains tremendously profitable. Yet each represents a major challenge to the publishers' traditional business model.

Over all, GameStop appears on track to generate about $3 billion in revenue this year. Of that, it looks like $800 million to $1 billion will come from the sale of used software, hardware and accessories. Just how profitable that segment is has only recently become clear to investors.

The quarter that ended in October was the most recent with GameStop results and was the first in which the company broke out results for its used segment. They were eye-popping. Used products made up almost 32 percent of the company's total retail sales and almost 44 percent of gross profit. Even more impressive, while GameStop's gross profit margin on new hardware sales in the quarter was less than 11 percent, and on new software less than 25 percent, the company generated a whopping 45 percent profit margin in its used segment.

A Bright Spot in the Dim Video Game Picture

Companies in China pay thousands of people, known as “farmers”, to play MMORPGs all day, and then profit from selling the in-game goods they generate to other players for real money.

One day soon, you'll see digital protestors gathered outside a WTO chat room in which a treaty on the trade balance in virtual goods is being debated.

In one case in South Korea, the police intervened when a hoard of in-game money was stolen and sold, netting the thieves $1.3m.

Worlds without end

On sale in September! I've seen reports as early as September 14, but the consensus seems to be on September 20.

The King of All Cosmos grew to stardom after taking all of the Prince's Katamaris and replacing the stars. His fans knew no bounds and wished to see more Katamaris fill the sky. The king of all Cosmos desired to appease all of their requests and recruited the Prince and his cousins to help. Now they are tasked with rolling up even more clumps, each larger and more different than the one before.

We love Katamari

Sudoku (数独) is the number placing game taking the world by storm.

The rules of Sudoku are simple. Enter digits from 1 to 9 into the blank spaces. Every row must contain one of each digit. So must every column, as must every 3x3 square.

Each Sudoku has a unique solution that can be reached logically without guessing.

One nice feature of this site is that it clocks you and provides feedback on your performance, plotting your time to completion within the distribution of all players.

Sudoku

Sudoku is a Japanese word that, roughly translated, means "unique number." In Britain, in little more than six months, it has gone from obscurity, to fad, to mania.

The innocuous-looking logic puzzles, first introduced in November by the Times of London and then taken up by almost every other major newspaper here, are causing commuters to miss their stops and students to skip their homework.

Do Brits Love This Puzzle? Let Them Count the Ways