Advertising is coming to videogames. This is something gamers will come to accept.

However, I have reservations with some arguments supporting in-game advertising.  First of all, very few people want their game spoiled by blatant, obvious, advertising.  Posting billboards for pepsi inside a Counter-strike third world city map is bad.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, most people are happy when games that mimic reality.  We might not want billboards in strange places, we’re fine with the fake-company parody advertising in Grand Theft Auto.  Any ad that is as realistic as possible, even though it mentions no real company, makes Grand Theft Auto feel more real.

However, my reservations are on people who argue “I’m fine with in game advertising, you can put pepsi in a pepsi machine because it promotes realism.”  My argument is that it isn’t real.  Unlike the manufactured advertisements in real life ™, the advertisements in games promote only the brand of the advertiser.  I’m only fine with pepsi machines in my sandbox GTA-esque game, as long as across the street I might find a coke machine.

Advertising doesn’t promotes realism in games, because there is only one advertiser.  It is void of product differentiation; advertising tries to convince you that there are no other products.  Yet those who want advertising in games want it because it makes the game feel more like reality.

Without competing advertisements, there is no realism.  It is eerie, and gives the user a feeling of being cheap.

Therefore, I argue in-game advertisements are fine, but in-game advertising is not immersive.  It can never be immersive by definition.

“This ultrakill brought to you by MOUNTAIN DEW.. YEAH“

What inspires a David to fight a Goliath?  Cuil is a search engine created by those who know how to make search engines.  These same people contributed to the being they’re now trying to surpass with merely brute force.  It seems Cuil’s strategy is trying to beat Google at the thing it does best.  You would think that it would make them experts at knowing the Achilles heel of the great search engine.  Even if they were able to find a potential weakness, would it be something google could not find in itself; in doing so, fixing itself?

This leads me to wonder: what markets are left from the pre-web 1.0 world?  Is web 2.0 a spawning of new interactive web applications, or is it merely a new version number on companies who have long stood the test of time?  Any web application that stands the test of time on their idea alone will soon be replaced by an iGoogle version, whether it be calendars or otherwise.

… “We’re gonna revolutionize the calendar industry.” …. Uh?

So I’m sick of the mbta website.  It’s unwieldy.  The problem with google’s T schedule service is that I want to find the fastest point in a radial location to another radial location, but it only allows searches for point to point traversal.  With too-exact searches I produce inaccurate results because unlike google maps, I’m not trying to figure out how to get from Cambridge to a specific building at a university, I just want the fastest path to an area around the university.  There are a lot of areas that cannot be pathed because they are not technically roads.

I had a few MBTA results which were different based on whether I wrote Harvard Station, or selected Havard Station from a dropdown.  This was because it was comparing the Harvard Bus Entrance versus the subway entrance.  To you or I, the distance was only 1 minute, but the pathing engine had a difficult time moving out of the bus station and into the subway station part.

I propose that these sorts of websites should be work done by open source and research communities.  What better use of budding computer scientist graduates than to have them improve the pathing engine for the public transportation website.  The great thing about this idea is that other cities could benefit from such open source material.  Once we solve the “transportation scheduling” problem, we no longer need to resolve it.  I am certain there are other areas where open source could merge with the government.

Unrelated Link: Class Math (Posting all my comics from last issue of the northeastern Times New Roman, this is 3 of 6)

.ME was just added as a toplevel domain name, direct from Montenegro for the price of $20 dollars a year.  This, not without some problems.  Thunderdo.me, Threeso.me, and even Peanutbutterjellyti.me are all taken!  Almost every obscure word that ends in ME.  I wanted Morphe.me for irony’s sake.

I wonder what web 2.0 companies will rise out of this.  Web 2.0 companies seem to naturally follow chic domain names.  It’s hard to imagine visiting delicious.com versus del.icio.us for bookmark sharing. (although del.icio.us now seems to own delicio.us and delicious.com)

Unrelated Link: “Lemon Aid” (Comic 2 of 6 from my comics for Northeastern Times New Roman Magazine)

I’ve noticed that every company has attached to it a MEME that describes it, regardless of its employees.  The greatness of those ideas in their corporate culture decides the success of the company.

For example, Google - “Be Good”, Google prides itself on being good.  Part of Google’s corporate culture is to be an idealistic young person.  This resulted in a reverse brain drain, Google is a company of some of the smartest computer scientists.  Facebook made a huge mistake not selling to Google for the inordinate sum offered.  In response, Google has directed its Awesome Sauron’s Eye of software engineering on social networking.  iGoogle will be transitioning into a social networking site that is essentially a Facebook clone.

What I think is troubling about this corporate meme is that it shackles the freedom of artistic companies.  Traditional software companies put out a new version of their product every couple of years.  Microsoft’s continuous upgrades of Office serves as an example.

However, when this happens to successful game design company with several development houses,  each team within the company comes to represent a single meme.  Not only does the same company have to put out the same game with a new version number year after year, but the same Code Monkeys have to work on the same game meme for their entire careers.

For example, Nintendo has a “Pikmin Team“, Bungie doesn’t want a “Halo 3 team” (I have a feeling their new game is a marathon game, centered on storyline and singleplayer.) and the old Diablo 2 team is disintegrating.

To play devil’s advocate, I would have a hard time letting any franchise I were to develop go.  The corporate meme makes each company an expert in a genre.  Albeit artistically limiting, it does have some perks.

P.S.

It’s been a while since I posted consistantly, I’ve decided to try to post a new thing every ~2 days until I get sick of it.

P.P.S.

This week I’m posting my NEU Comics, one comic at a time.  Today’s comic is called “Seedlings“