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Daily Round-up

• The Cardinals beat the Padres to win their NLDS match-up in four games. Here are the ESPN experts' play-off predictions. One of the 19 predicted a Cardinals win. One might be tempted to question the collective expertise of this group, but I'll abstain for now.

• North Korea test fired a nuclear weapon late last night. Odd that we invaded Iraq because we thought they might be getting close to having nuclear weapons, but preferred to (not) hold six-party talks with N. Korea about their nuclear ambitions. If Iraq really was about the WMDs, we've made a gross miscalculation.

• Seniors in Levy County, Florida are rebelling against mandatory drug testing for library volunteers. The library system's pool of 55 volunteers worked 330 hours in September 2005. This past September two volunteers logged 11 hours of time. Now the libraries "are struggling to get books checked out or reshelved" without the volunteers.
  (via obscurestore)

• In New York magazine, Kurt Andersen has a great piece on the NY Times handling of the Duke lacrosse case. The Times does not come out of it looking good.
  (via Romenesko)

• Google/YouTube Rumors: If google really does want YouTube, I guess we can call google video a bust. Also, Forrester's Charlene Li has a good analysis of the whole thing: Why google wants YouTube, Why YouTube wants to be bought by google, and is YouTube worth $1.6b.

• The NY Times Magazine had a very thoughtful piece on Will Wright's (of SimCity and The Sims fame) new videogame, Spore. The entire article is worth a read, but I was especially taken with the part that points out that

  Spore breaks decisively from the fastest-growing genre in gaming today: the so-called massively multiplayer networked games -- like World of Warcraft -- where thousands of players share a single persistent virtual world, interacting with other players via their onscreen characters. (Interestingly, Wright’s only foray into massively multiplayer design -- the online version of the Sims that launched in 2002 -- was a flop.) When you visit a bustling town center in a multiplayer game and see hundreds of characters sharing the space, you are intensely aware that each of these onscreen characters is being controlled from moment to moment by a live, sentient human somewhere in the real world. The social element is very much in the foreground of the experience. Spore flips that model on its head. Instead of a single shared world with millions of active participants, Spore promises a million alternate worlds, each occupied by a single player. You will meet creatures invented by others, but ultimately you are alone in your own private universe. Wright calls Spore "massively single player."

  I'll probably post a follow-up to this, but it comes back to the idea that gaming needs to be opened up to the masses. And not having a whole community of active, highly-skilled competitors is one way of lowering the barriers to entry.
  

Posted by on 9 October 2006 at 12:48 PM