Wonderland

Sewn Atari cartridges and other things

So the worst thing about GDC is its size. It's the best game conference on the planet, without a doubt, but you'd need to be able to shard yourself in order to actually get the most out of it. Take my Summits pass: it gets me into something like 7 summits over the Monday and Tuesday, 3 of which I really really want to go to: Serious Games, MMOs and Indie Games. And they're all on at the same time!

So Moxie's just distracted me from my head scratching by sending in word of these giant sewn vinyl classic Atari game box plushes. You following? Sewn Atari plushes. Giant ones. See: Skiing.

Up close:

Just beautiful!

The maker has made a pile of them, too. They seem to be for Giant Robot here in SF.

(Thanks Moxie, as ever!)

Diva Girls games

Okay: maybe these games have some good points (no reviews yet on amazon, 2 unhappy reviews on Game), but I'll never know because if the entire stable of games for girls from this lot is Princesses on Ice, Diva Dancers and Diva Girls: Making the Music, well, bleh. BLEH.

Diva Girls: Super Scientists! would be nice. Diva Girls: Media Magnates. Or Diva Girls: Arty Architects, Diva Girls Go To The Olympics. No? Maybe? Ever?

Pac-Man head band

Sweet perlerbead creation stuck to a headband!

Put your order in at Kuyshi's shop.

X48 kicks off tomorrow

Our sponsored Game Camp kicks off today (holy crap I'm jetlagged) tomorrow! 2 mad days of game designing to the theme of Evolution. Don't snore, that includes cloning, sex and the Singularity, so plenty of good meaty stuff to play with... can't wait to see the results.

Flickr pool.
Last.fm playlist.
Daytum feed.
Twitterstream.

Very sad to miss it, but I'm at GBL and then on a flight tomorrow for the marathon of awesomeness that is GDC.

Game-related Twitterers

From this month's Develop mag comes the (not-quite) news that game people are using Twitter.

From there, I googled Dave Perry, and got dperry, whereupon I found, via his follows, Frag Dolls, VideogameMakers, Gamasutra's Simon Carless, Kotaku's Brian Crecente, Three Rings' Daniel James, Brenda Braithwaite, God of War's David Jaffe, researcher Nicole Lazzaro, Persuasive Games' Ian Bogost, N'gai Croal, Chris Hecker, and Amy Jo Kim. There's Raph Koster, and Wired's Clive Thompson too, and over there's Offworld's Brandon Boyer, Kotaku's resident meat bun Mike, Escapist Susan Arendt and Save the Robot's Chris Dahlen. There's Major Nelson.

Via 2 mins more digging, I've found Kieron Gillen, Leigh Alexander, Jim Rossignol, Aleks Krotoski (had her already, natch :-)), someone who claims to be Mark Rein and three Cliff Bleszinskis. There's undoubtedly a ton more (game people, not cliff bleszinskys)... if you find folks, feel free to stick 'em in the comments.

UPDATE: John Romero. XBox's TriXie. Henry Jenkins.

In other news, I just got a kiss from Nolan Bushnell. Yes, I am at Games Based Learning 2009.

UPDATE 2: here's Game Industry Tweet, with a lot of twitternames! (Thanks Chris!)

Super Mario super bed

Check out Punzie's entire Mario bed! She made the lot herself, as a commission for someone with clearly perfect taste.

Buy her stuff here.

Lenovo wallet-PC

No words needed.

UPDATE: It's not real. Question is, WHY NOT.

Things I have learned at SXSW

1. Mobile devices are finally IT. It's all about the mobiles.
It's possible to manage on just wifi, depending on your city, but an all-you-can-eat data package is still pretty much essential. I'm managing without while roaming, though, but Austin is very wired (KEEP AUSTIN WIRED). Most people here have iPhones, and the rest have googlephones or blackberries. Top apps: Twitter (obviously), FourSquare, google maps.

2. Werewolf in all its forms is just plain evil. And completely addictive.

3. Location and privacy are going to be our biggest struggles for the next few years. Trying to manage privacy while broadcasting a fantastic amount of location-based data is going to be entertaining.

3. Twitter works best in smallish groups, and it really needs private, user-created channels. Non-SXSWers are annoyed by the level of sxsw-related mundane blather from people here ("we're in the Hilton playing werewolf! Where are you?" = folks elsewhere: "oh shut UP ALREADY"), but that same blather is exactly the location-rich data that's making Twitter useful here. Shame we can't take it into some sort of backchannel. There's probably an app out there that does this, but I haven't found it.

4. Games are oddly represented at SXSW. It's very non-AAA (excellent), but also still a bit small for my liking. The how-to-be-indie panel was excellent, although the panel was all the Big Successes and actually people would probably learn most from stories of failures. If someone asks, how do you get successful (and it's happened in both the indie-games panel and the indie-tv panel), the answer is: "have a really great idea, work really really hard on it, and raise money by mortgaging your house or begging from friends and family." The million-dollar question is then, how do you know if your idea is really great before you embark on this long and financially-terrifying venture, how do you know you're doing the right thing? And of course no-one can answer that for you.

In other non-news, the games most people are talking about are sociable ones. Werewolf, FourSquare and the like.

5. Be nice. There's a huge emphasis on this now. Post greed-based economic crash? Or just tech hippy tendencies? Either way, it's sweet, and everyone's at it. "Don't be a douchebag producer", says Felicia Day. "Be nice, be kind to people", says the Waxy-led panel yesterday..

Link dolly

Yeeeek!

His booties are kind of cute, but the eyes I think will haunt me for weeks.

Blizzard puts up huge orc statue

Blizz have moved into new(ish?) offices, and have plonked a walloping great orc on the front lawn. BECAUSE THEY CAN.

Made by WETA. I like the fact that they chose Horde, I must say.

(via)