Daily News Spin — August 6, 2001 (Monday)

Alpha-pups, Pox, gender differences, and games

Yahoo has a story from the NY Times about how Hasbro has recruited "cool" kids to help market its new handheld electronic game, Pox. It's about alien virii. Our only hope is to find the best handheld game players and use them to battle the aliens. And so on.

Hasbro went to schoolyards in Chicago and asked kids to name the coolest kid they knew until they found the kids they determined were the "alpha-pups", the playground opinion leaders, and paid them to play their game. Here's a look at how one of the pups had some difficulties with his mother as he tried to keep up with his friends who were advancing more rapidly in the game:

''I just have to get to the next level,'' he said. He tried to argue that his electronic quest was just as important as homework. ''The game gets you smart. You have to, like, find treasures and figure out a way to open doors to get to the next level. You really do learn something on your own.'' These seemed to him essential skills for his intended occupation of explorer (''I'll climb mountains and find stuff''), but he realized that the argument didn't go far with his mother. He knew, as researchers say, that video games are a ''gendered'' phenomenon. ''Girls don't like these games,'' he said, putting down the Pox unit. ''They like to play with little babies -- yuck!'' He grabbed a doll from the floor and absent-mindedly flattened its plastic head between his hands as he talked. ''My sisters like to pretend they have babies and live in a house. They use Monopoly money to go shopping. Boys like to play with cool stuff. Boys like aliens. Boys are like, more, I don't know how to say -- more mature.''

The article also casts out an interesting theory about gender differences and gaming.

Angel's conflict with his mother is a familiar situation to Henry Jenkins, the co-editor of a book of scholarly essays on computer games, ''From Barbie to Mortal Kombat.'' Jenkins, the director of the media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has analyzed the Mom problem. He argues that video games, far from being a corruption of traditional childhood, actually embody the classic boyhood themes celebrated by previous generations and writers like Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. Video games offer boys a chance to explore, fight, master manly skills, make scatological jokes and act out fantasies that would appall their mothers. But whereas boys used to hop the fence and play away from home, today Mom can always look over and see what they're doing on the computer. ''Mothers come face to face with the messy process by which Western culture turns boys into men,'' Jenkins writes. ''The games and their content become the focus of open antagonism and the subject of tremendous guilt and anxiety.''

We also found this observation about the possible connection between video games and child violence interesting.

''Just as violent video games were pouring into American homes on the crest of the personal computer wave, juvenile violence began to plummet,'' said Lawrence Sherman, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania. ''Juvenile murder charges dropped by about two-thirds from 1993 to the end of the decade and show no signs of going back up. The rate of violence in schools hasn't increased, either -- it just gets more media coverage. If video games are so deadly, why has their widespread use been followed by reductions in murder?''

The game is Pox. The article is well worth reading.

As theglobe turns

It's not over until the fat lawyers serve. A law firm has filed a class action suit against theglobe.com on behalf of shareholders.

This is no big surprise. It will throw an irritating monkey wrench into theglobe's plans to sell off its assets as potential buyers may want all legal issues settled before entering into an agreement. Our guess is that the lawsuit essentially is blackmailing the company to pay it off in order to be able to complete the sale but otherwise isn't significant.

There are also a number of stories out on the news sites about theglobe if you care to do a search. They were something of a poster-child for Internet success and hubris, and now there's no shortage of finger wagging going on.

Games as art

Seems to be a theme lately. The BBC has a look at the issue over the Institute of Contemporary Art's (ICA), Peeking at Gaming exhibit.

Andrew Chetty, head of new media at the ICA, has argued that games have become so massive they warrant debate around their impact on popular culture.

Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Chetty said computer games had spawned a massive industry.

"A huge section of modern society is playing these games and there is a larger cultural impact both in film and music and the world-wide web which you can't ignore."

But Sunday Times critic Brian Appleyard does not believe that computer games can really be considered as art.

He told Today: "They are a hypnotic dull procedure. It is not like engaging with a work of art."

He added: "This is an attempt to tell people that what they are doing anyway is art so its OK. It's a condescending view.

Sounds like the kind of guy who drinks tea with his pinky waving around in the air.

Why MMOGs have shoddy customer service

Jessica Mulligan takes a look at the MMOGs and has some ideas why the customer service is so bad, among other things, in her latest Biting the Hand column.

So OK, why would a service treat the customers in such a manner? I think quite a bit of what is wrong with customer relations in MMOGs today can be traced to two issues:

1. From the start, games are designed and implemented by people with experience in a free MUD environment.

It is a huge mistake to go into a design and development project on a for-pay massively multiplayer game with a non-commercial MUD mindset. The environments are antithetic, nay, virtually antagonistic. Many features and concepts that work in a non-commercial game just plain won�t work in a for-pay game. Developing an MMOG with this mindset is just guaranteeing that, after launch, your customers will be hitting the complaint button like a speed freak playing Whack-a-Mole. And, gee, won�t your customer service representatives love you for that?

2. After launch, the team continues to treat the game in the spirit of a non-commercial MUD player environment. In other words, the game and its mechanics are treated as more important than the players.

Interesting read. You'll have to navigate the Skotos site to find it. You should find a link on the front page or else look in the articles section.

CPU price wars raging

The PC processor price wars are just getting started, according to this CNET story.

In a research note, Lehman Brothers analyst Dan Niles said Intel is hatching a plan to regain market share from Advanced Micro Devices, sparking a price war that will hurt earnings. Intel will make its move Aug. 26, he said.

According to Niles, Intel plans to cut prices by 50 percent on its high-end Pentium 4 chip. The chip giant will cut the price on its 1.8GHz Pentium 4 from $562 to $260. And if that cut doesn't work, Niles said there is "an additional 10 percent to 25 percent price cut on Oct. 28."

AMD is expected to engage in a round of price-cutting also. If you've been thinking about upgrading, you may want to wait a few months.

3am

Gamespot has a look at the history of space empire games.

Konami has purchased a casino management system company, Paradigm Gaming Systems. Konami already makes gaming equipment for casinos in Las Vegas.

The PS2 has arrived as a sales force. Three of the top five selling video games for July were PS2 titles. Gran Turismo 3 and NBA Street were numbers 1 and 2 and Twisted Metal Black grabbed the number 5 slot. There's life in that Dreamcast yet as Sonic Adventure 2 was the fourth best-selling game last month.

Bigger than Pikachu? Apparently so. Seattle Mariners outfielder Ichiro Suzuki is extremely popular and many of the card shops that sell both Pokemon crap and baseball cards are cashing in, according to this NCM story.

Resale cost of Suzuki's cards range from $30 to $850, and are driving up overall prices for the glossy baseball cards, which are usually sold in packs of 10 for $2 or $3. Because the cards are included in random packs, many fans hoping to hit the jackpot buy huge boxes of unopened packs.

Summer camp Nazis! The LA Times has an article about how summer camps are clamping down on video games.

"They can play with electronic toys and video games all the rest of the year," said Jan Milligan, director of Camp Sealth on Vashon Island in tech-savvy Washington's Puget Sound. "We ask them to take a break from their e-mail and electronic stuff for just five to 11 days. It is a little bit of a culture shock for some of them."

Warbirds III for free? Yes, during August, according to Avault. Go here to sign up.

Wild Tangent's technology is being used for good as well as evil. The good is the games stuff, we suppose. The evil is that it's being used by the band that opens for N'Sync, according to this story.

"The ability to translate my music into a visual display gives me the power to actually play the graphics, lights and video for the audience," Mobius 8 said in a statement. "The combination of sight and sound is incredible."

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