Sarcastic Gamer Site

One of my Artificial Intelligence students presented a paper on gestural recognition at the end of the last term and included a parody video about microsoft's table computer. It was hilarious so I'm posting it here. It also lead me to a great website called Sarcastic Gamer. (www.sarcasticgamer.com)

Sarcastic Gamer is a decent video game blog with funny postings from the gamer front. Full of in jokes and commentary, it's refreshing to see a productive outlet from the primarily consumptive gaming audience. They also have a great selection of audio podcasts from gamers about games. Great listening fun.

Here's that parody video...


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farmville tops the charts

So I have been interested in facebook app games for some time now and when looking for recent news I came across a post in Bruce Sterling's blog for wired, "Beyond the Beyond" where he describes farmville as the biggest game in america.

His post links back to this great article (http://www.reddyeno5.com/afeeld/notebook/cultivated-play-farmville/) that gets at the under belly of games like this. I love the label sociopathic corporation... it really works to characterize the relationship between the players and the played.

I also found this article from LA Times that covers more of the economics of farmville. (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/02/how-social-games-make-money-lessons-from-farmville.html).