It's been over a month since the automatic federal spending cuts
known as "the sequester" kicked in and Reason TV's Kennedy reports
from the suddenly-mean streets of Washington, D.C.
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isn’t reserved to film buffs. His death is being noted by the
video game
press, thanks to some comments by the movie critic that
inspired defensiveness among gamers but also introspection within
the industry.
Ebert famously (among gamers anyway) declared “Video games can
never be art,” subsequently explaining and defending his position
in a
blog post at the Chicago Sun-Times in 2010. He
grappled with the always elusive definition of art and what has
become these days an elusive definition of what constitutes a
“game.” He concluded:
Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be
defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never
said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua
Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why
aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy
themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against
parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics,
do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain,
"I'm studying a great form of art?" Then let them say it, if it
makes them happy.
His attitude didn’t resolve the debate. That one blog post
garnered nearly 5,000 comments. A couple months later he
addressed the matter again, admitting that it was unfair of him
to judge a medium in part because he personally was not interested
in engaging in it. He preferred books and movies. He didn’t want to
play video games.
And yet, despite his lack of interest in the medium, the medium
was still very interested in his thoughts. Ebert’s comments
inspired a session at the annual Game Developers Conference in
2011. “Are video games art?” and “Can video games be art?”
are topics endlessly debated among gaming enthusiasts and
creators.
Ebert ultimately, accidentally, symbolized the engagement gap
between Baby Boomers and younger generations in the role of video
games in culture. It’s a fascinating rift because, really, Baby
Boomers invented video games. But very few early video
games ever aspired to anything as fancy as being “art.” Until the
development of the adventure game genre they hardly even had what
could be called a story.
Ebert could be excused for his ignorance of what has come since
then in much the same way as a young millennial could be oblivious
to the role of Motown on the development of the popular music we
still listen to today. The expansion of video games from a hobby to
a subculture to simply part of our culture — like every other
form of entertainment — happened through Generation X and is now
being passed along to subsequent generations. Baby Boomers just
weren’t culturally connected to it. Ebert couldn’t include video
games as art because video games didn’t include him and thus it
inspires no connection. It’s nobody’s fault. Definitions of art are
not timeless and rigid. Ebert himself acknowledged it and struggled
to come up with a definition that would explain why video games
should be omitted, but not other artistic endeavors, like
music.
What’s happening now is that the children who grew up on video
games are now the ones running the industry and have a cultural
interest in creating a lasting legacy. Ebert’s observations were a
challenge to them, whether he realized it or not. Generation X is
defined in part by video games. Games have as much meaning to many
of them as rock music and Motown did for Baby Boomers. The
defensiveness and insistence of gamers and the gaming industry
about elevating this culture into an art form may well be
subconsciously based on the knowledge that games are what Gen. X
will be primarily remembered for years down the line.
"Cops with Drones: Alameda, CA Weighs Technology vs. Privacy,"
is the latest offering from Reason TV. Watch above or click on the
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Last month, 14-year-old Artem Smao was selling newspaper subscriptions to fundraise a trip to Tahoe, a popular West Coast ski destination. In a twist of events, the California teen ended up donating all of his money to a complete stranger when he knocked on Robynn Fried's front door.
Fried, a Lodi resident, told CBS News in Sacramento that she was unemployed at the time and two weeks away from being homeless when Smao approached her for a donation. When she explained that she could not afford to, the teen did not hesitate to hand over his envelope full of cash.
"That's just something you don't expect out of kids these days," Fried told the Lodi News-Sentinal. "He was trying to win a trip to Tahoe, so when you're trying to earn something, it's really unbelievable to have that person turn around and offer what they're trying to earn."
RIO DE JANEIRO -- A passenger bus plunged from a 30-foot high (10 meter) viaduct in central Rio de Janeiro, killing at least seven people and closing the major thoroughfare where it landed.
At least six more people were injured in Tuesday's accident, said Sergio Simoes, who heads Rio state's Civil Defense department, adding that number of injured was likely to rise. Simoes said the dead were five men and two women.
During his segment on Egyptian TV host Bassem Youssef on Monday, Jon Stewart took a pointed swipe at NBC, defending Jay Leno in the process.
While the joke was an unrelated gag intended to lighten the tone of a fairly heavy segment, Stewart didn't throw it away either. He equated NBC with a failed, dictatorial empire and then noted, "A couple of bloggers just went nuts."
We assume he was referring to someone else. Watch the clip above.
Slinky, curious, and intelligent - ferrets have been
domesticated for centuries. But in D.C., New York City, Hawaii, and
California ferret owners face threats of jail time and fines up to
$10,000.
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clips.
The Hermit Kingdom has released new propaganda footage showing North Korean soldiers firing at targets fashioned after American soldiers, according to Sky News.
It is unclear when or exactly where the footage was shot, but Sky News reports the video first appeared on state TV. The video was uploaded Monday to Liveleak.
The footage comes mere days after North Korea said it had "entered a state of war" with South Korea. A senior U.S. official dismissed the provocation as just more bluster.
In the short clip, North Korean soldiers are seen shooting AK-47 rifles and pistols in a field, as a target with a cartoon-like representation of an American soldier is blasted away.
Anti-American sentiment runs high in the North, with state-run media often calling the U.S. "imperialist aggressors," and the South a "puppet regime."
The latest video is another in a long history of propaganda from the regime. On Mar. 24, the North released a four-minute clip showing paratroopers jumping in and overtaking the South's capital city of Seoul.
"The crack stormtroops will occupy Seoul and other cities and take 150,000 U.S. citizens as hostages," the narrator says in the video, as The Telegraph reported.
As is often the case with North Korean propaganda, the videos are mainly for domestic consumption, with Kim Jong-un demonstrating readiness for battle, inciting nationalism, and presenting himself as a forceful leader of his people.
Estimates of North Korean army personnel range from 700,000 to more than one million. The South has similar numbers, along with nearly 30,000 U.S. troops backing them up.
SEE ALSO: US: North Korean Warmongering Just More Bluster >
SEE ALSO: Kim Jong-un Has Already Hit His Biggest Target >
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Actress Francisca Gavilán grew up listening to the music of folksinger Violeta Parra in her home, quietly. Parra’s music wasn’t exactly forbidden during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, but the authorities frowned upon it.
“We sang it silently,” Gavilán says.
Now, as the star of the biopic “Violeta Went to Heaven,” Gavilán sings Parra’s music professionally. The film opened Friday in New York, bringing the story of one of Latin America’s most famous musicians and iconic figures to the big screen in the United States. The movie will also play in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities.
about to hit the stores, and it’s not produced by Sony, Microsoft
or Nintendo, the current gorillas dominating the market.
Ouya, a much more modest $99
console, running off Android’s operating system, will be hitting
the market in June and will be available in stores like Target and
Best Buy.
The launch of Ouya will mark the culmination of an interesting
experiment. The completion of the console’s development and release
was paid for via a Kickstarter campaign that drew in $8.5 million
in donations. Kickstarter campaigns have been successful in helping
fund products and artistic ventures. But as gamers know, the days
of a console being just a product are long over. Game consoles also
now provide persistent services. Games can be purchased and
downloaded via console these days, as can rentals of movies and
television shows.
Ouya’s challenge will be not just getting the console into
gamers’ hands, but in being able to continue to operate an online
market given its economically modest origins. I
wrote about Ouya back in August and the skepticism over whether
such a business model could possibly succeed.
Chris Kohler at Wired got his
hands on the console in San Francisco just recently. It
obviously is not going to be competing with the Xbox or the
Playstation for the high-end games, but that’s absolutely not the
point of the system. Rather, it intends to be an avenue for
smaller-game developers to more easily find an audience. Because of
the huge boom of indie game development, the success of the system
will depend on the ability for creators to use their marketplace
and the ease of consumers in connecting to the types of games
they’d like. Kohler notes the system Ouya will be using for its
marketplace incorporates both an algorithm and human curation:
It’s common knowledge in the world of iOS apps that you get
noticed in one of two ways: Get featured in the store via Apple’s
secretive process of internal curation, or (by hook or by crook)
get onto the top-grossing or most-downloaded charts.“We don’t think downloads or revenue are good indicators of what
a good game is,” [Ouya CEO Julie] Uhrman says. To that end, Ouya is
crafting its own automatic algorithm that will determine whether or
not a game is any good, based on other players’ behaviors. How many
times have they played it? For how long are they playing it? When a
player turns on their Ouya, is it the first game they immediately
boot up? All of these factors will influence how prominently games
are positioned in the Ouya marketplace when a player clicks on
“Discover.”There will also be an element of hand-picked curation on Ouya.
That process, Uhrman says, will be led by Kellee Santiago,
co-founder Journey creator thatgamecompany and now Ouya’s
head of developer relations. All new games will go into an area
called the “Sandbox,” and will be pulled up into the “Recommended”
feed after they hit the jackpot on the automated fun algorithm, or
are selected by Santiago’s team.
There’s still plenty of skepticism among gamers that Ouya’s
business model can actually work (just read the comments under
Kohler’s story). Portability and simplicity has contributed to the
success of mobile phone gaming apps. Do people really want to play
such games on their televisions? We will find out beginning in
June. For the curious, PC Magazine has a
slide show of some games that will be available at launch via
Ouya.
Even if Ouya fails, console developers will likely learn a lot
about building economic systems that accommodate the ever-changing
nature of the gaming marketplace.
Jerry Buss wrote his much-younger girlfriend, Delia Cortez, into his will, Captain Wag reports in the video above. Cortez, in her late twenties, scored a $5.5 million condo in Hawaii and his 2009 Bently, estimated to be worth about $200,000.
Cortez told TMZ that she started dating Buss years ago when she was living in Marina del Rey, Calif. and that, when the relationship got hot and heavy, he moved her to Honolulu to keep things discreet. She said he told her to "keep quiet" about the relationship.
Buss, who purchased the Lakers in 1979, left almost everything else to his family trust, overseen by his daughter and trustee Jeanie Buss, Captain Wag reports.
Prankster Jack Vale knows how to get under people's skin... let's just hope the guy with the photo of a gun on his t-shirt has a sense of humor. Watch Vale make everyone around him paranoid simply by talking on the phone.
Two very young startups called Mailbox and Summly recently sold for millions of dollars. Storage company Dropbox acquired Orchestra, the company behind Mailbox, earlier this month for a rumored $100 million in cash and stock — merely&a few weeks after the email app launched.& Just yesterday, Yahoo acquired two-year-old mobile news startup Summly for a little under $30 million, according to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, even though the app had generated no revenue. & But what did these early stage startups have in common that made them so attractive to the big players in the industry? Neither had very many users. Mailbox had maybe 1.5 million. Sumly had less than a million. Neither made any money. What&both had was an awesome video with high-production values to show off their products. If you're a startup and you don't make a video like these, you are dumb. Check that box! Here are the videos: Meet Mailbox from Mailbox on Vimeo. Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.SEE ALSO:&This Is How It Feels When Your Startup Fails Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »
