Bird’s Eye: One of the great surprises in Bali was how the ubiquity of free wifi let me remain in touch with the world. Just how universal it has become to be online is shown by a fascinating set of statistics. Then we look at the online business of gaming, and the new wave of handheld games. We end with Cory Doctorow, in a TED Talk on how to protect your kids on the Internet. It’s quite wonderful.
* What happens on the Internet every 60 seconds (via Reddit)
Search engine Google serves more that 694,445 queries
- 6,600+ pictures are uploaded to Flickr
- 600 videos are uploaded to YouTube, amounting to 25+ hours of content
- 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments are published on Facebook
- 70 new domains are registered
- 168,000,000+ emails are sent
Lady Gaga, pop supremo, wearer of meat dresses, the star who has sold more than 15m albums worldwide, announced on Wednesday that she is partnering with games company Zynga to release exclusive songs through their Facebook game, FarmVille. The singer’s fans will be able to visit GagaVille, a specially designed farm inside the virtual farming simulation game, which will contains unicorns and crystals.
Lady Gaga’s choice of FarmVille makes sense: it’s an enormous market. The game has around 60 million players worldwide – that’s roughly the same size as the population of the UK. And FarmVille’s demographic appeal is broad. The game is inoffensive to the point of being anodyne, and unchallenging to the point that some commentators say it barely deserves the title “game” at all. But the lack of challenge is part of what’s made it successful: it can be played on any internet-connected computer, doesn’t need special equipment or particular skill, or an expensive phone or data-download plan.
In FarmVille, players plant virtual crops – strawberries, bell peppers and leeks are just some of the many choices – wait a few hours, and then harvest them to receive coins that allow them to buy more farming supplies. Of course, the best farming goods can’t be bought with in-game coins, but need real money, with items ranging from a few pence to a few pounds. As the New York Times pointed out in a profile of FarmVille’s founder Mark Pincus last year, “the sums are small, but add up quickly when multiplied by millions of users”.
* IPad gaming, Angry Birds, & Grand Theft Auto Tom Bissell
It is becoming ever easier to share the crepuscular outlook of my developer friends — if, that is, the kinds of games you most often play are console games. For gamers whose chosen platform is, say, the iPad, the future of the medium seems quite a bit sunnier. I have never been much for handheld games, cell-phone games, or smaller games in general, but after spending several weeks playing games on my iPad, I can say that the best of them provide as much, if not more, consistent engagement than their console brethren. In fact, a really fine iPad game offers an experience in which many of the impurities of console gaming are boiled away.
Many of these pure games — less grandly known as “gamey games” — have little of the narrative ambition (or, to put it less kindly, bloat) typical to console games and, as a consequence, don’t bother trying to push the same emo-cognitive buttons. They get in your head, to be sure, but through different passageways. Another way of saying this is that console games do everything in their power to form a relationship with you, which can be great and rewarding and, just as often, aggravating and tedious. iPad games, on the other hand, are like someone you meet in a bar and find yourself screwing in the bathroom 10 minutes later. This is not a criticism.
* Cory Doctorow re facebook and privacy TED Talks Youtube 11 minutes
