July 02, 2005
Is the Game Industry Really Bigger than the Film Industry?
Once a niche market and considered by some as a curiosity in the mid-1970s, the video game industry now takes in USD$10 billion per year worldwide. Contrary to the popular belief, the video game industry is not bigger than Hollywood. The film industry as a whole makes $180 billion per year, while book publishing makes $23 billion per year. (From Wikipedia)
The claim that the video game industry has surpassed the film industry has been made a lot in recent years. I'm not sure I buy it. I have heard reports that the game industry bloats their numbers by including console sales, while the film industry only counts the box office. If the two industries went head-to-head comparing everything specifically related to them (including motion picture cameras, projectors, DVD players, etc. on the one hand vs. consoles, high-end graphic cards, etc. on the other), I wonder which would truly come out on top. Anyone got hard numbers they want to show me?
July 01, 2005
April 27, 2005
nokia converges a little further
Nokia N91
- 4 GB HD: multimedia playback
- 2 Megapixel camera
- FM radio
- Record: Line In, Radio, Voice
March 18, 2005
Blur+Sharpen Tuesday 3/22 @ 7:00PM
BLUR + SHARPEN presents TIME MACHINES
Tuesday, March 22, 7:00 PM
Ron Howard Screening Room
Robert Zemeckis Center for the Digital Arts
Blur + Sharpen returns this Tuesday night with a program devoted to experiments with time in a series of short films, music videos and commercials. Time has become an obsession for many filmmakers – why? In part, artists are responding to our culture’s accelerated pace and the ensuing emphasis on instantaneity and disposability. But they’re also visualizing a new temporal consciousness, with attempts to show the instant or frozen moment seen in bullet time effects, or the contradictory stasis and movement in the use of open flash, or the tension between forward and backwards time, extreme fast and slow motion, and spatio-temporal fragmentation.
The pieces collected for the “Time Machines” show express some of the transformations in the cultural conception of time. Works include the pinhole camera bullet time videos of Finnish artist Liisa Lounila, the Timetrack project of Chris Cunningham, and the temporal distortions of Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. Also screening, Daniel Askill’s award-winning short We Have Decided Not to Die and Michiel van Bekel’s amazing 360 degree Muybridge update Equestrian.
September 24, 2004
PSX failure: Do consumers want convergance?
The dream, as far as anyone outside the company can gather, is a household where a server-like system based on the PlayStation 3 architecture sits in the living room, feeding content and connectivity wirelessly out to smaller, dumber PS3 units and portable PSP units spread around the rooms of the house and the pockets of its inhabitants. This is what the battle for the living room is all about.
However, the reality seems to be diverging from the vision, and PSX is the biggest blow it has suffered to date. Although the system has its problems - it was hit with some extremely bad PR when it launched without a number of promised features, for example - it's still a pretty good product, with a very competitive price, but the Japanese consumer doesn't seem to be interested.
March 04, 2004
OZ - story, toys, book, movie deal, then game?
Disney [and Jerry Bruckheimer are] making three films based on the iconoclastic designer American McGee's unreleased game "Oz."
I'm posting this article in relation to our last lecture by Tracy Fullerton in Seminar in Digital Game Studies (CTCS 564), where we talked about Games relation to other media such as cinema and television.
AM: "Truth is that game publishers aren't buying original game ideas these days. They want either a sequel to an existing successful game or a piece of Hollywood IP with someone else's marketing dollars behind it"
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/americanmcgeesoz/news_6087040.html
February 11, 2004
EXPLORING THE NEW FRONTIER OF DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT
"The virtual web is the new frontier of digital entertainment," says Montone. "The next Holy Grail is the living room. Someday our home theatres will be filled with lean-back, lean-in immersive VR experiences designed to take us anywhere we want to go-past, future, here or there-no matter where we are in the real world. Vir-Con is just the beginning."
Producers Guild of America New Media Council
http://www.virtual-conventions.com/
About Vir-Con 2002
February 04, 2004
Eastern Standard Tribe
Cory Doctorow has published his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Like his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory's made his book freely available for download under a Creative Commons License.
Cory has a write up of what he's trying to do:
The future is my business, more or less. I'm a science fiction writer. One way to know the future is to look good and hard at the present. Here's a thing I've noticed about the present: more people are reading more words off of more screens than ever before. Here's another thing I've noticed about the present: fewer people are reading fewer words off of fewer pages than ever before. That doesn't mean that the book is dying -- no more than the advent of the printing press and the de-emphasis of Bible-copying monks meant that the book was dying -- but it does mean that the book is changing. I think that literature is alive and well: we're reading our brains out! I just think that the complex social practice of "book" -- of which a bunch of paper pages between two covers is the mere expression -- is transforming and will transform further.
(The comments are also quite worth reading.)
October 27, 2003
Datamining TV audience activities
AOL news release blogged by Henry Jenkins/MIT:
... I received notice about a new project involving the intersection of television, Tivo and the internet. AOL has announced a plan to offer twenty-second clips of the five most talked about moments from television the previous night. The selection will be based on their monitoring of chatrooms and message boards and based on data from Tivo usage. It's scary how much the media industry now knows about audience response and how quickly it can act on that information!
May 29, 2003
Poetry and Programming
"Writing code, he (Stuart Feldman) explains, is like writing poetry: every
word, each placement counts. Except that software is harder, because
digital poems can have millions of lines which are all somehow
interconnected. Try fixing programming errors, known as bugs, and you
often introduce new ones. So far, he laments, nobody has found a silver
bullet to kill the beast of complexity."
Survey: The Beast of Complexity; The Economist (London, UK); Apr 14,2001.
The syntactic link between poets and programmers, perhaps the strongest bond between artists and scientists, educes the relevance of an ancient tradition to our technologically rich but semantically impoverished culture.
Claiming that writing software is "harder" is rash and problematic but the comparison is a substantial one.
KMAC
May 28, 2003
Sony to offer PS2-based home server dubbed PSX
TOKYO — Sony is rolling our a home server called PSX that employs the PlayStation 2 processing engine. The server will be the first in a line of products that Sony intends to promote as a new digital consumer electronics device that integrate game and electronics technology. "We'll show how digital consumer electronics will make a drastic metamorphosis by using the PS2 engine for PSX," said Ken Kutaragi, executive vice president of Sony. The pearl white PSX server measures about one foot square. It integrates a DVD+/-RW drive, an R drive, 120-Gbyte hard drive, TV tuner and PlayStation2 game console into one box. The engine is called "EE+GS@90nm," for a one-chip solution for the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer fabricated on a 90 nm process. Sony said it plans to introduce PSX by the end of 2003 in Japan and next year in the United States and Europe with an appropriate TV tuner for each region. To avoid copyright-protection issues and direct digital content recording, PSX will initially come with an analog TV tuner, Sony said.
By Yoshiko Hara
EE Times
May 24, 2003
"Cinema Stale, Passive, Needs Reinventing" - Greenaway
"Most cinema today is an illustration of 19th century novels. A lot of it is disastrous, formulaic and predictable. The sense of pluralism has been curtailed,'' Greenaway said."
Advances in multimedia, the Internet and audience interaction means traditional cinema -- sitting quietly in a dark theater -- was dead, he told a news conference.
``We are discovering the multifariousness of telling stories. The subjectivity of narration should be high on the agenda. Any self-respecting filmmaker should acknowledge the audience.''
from the NY TIMES
April 04, 2003
the matrix has you...
The third animatrix short (not counting The Flight of the Osiris running before Dreamcatcher) is out.
You may thank Shinichiro Watanabe of Cowboy Bebop fame.
KMAC
