成人快手

Confessions and discussions

• Darren Waters
• 9 Mar 07, 06:24 PM

Have you ever played that cultural confession game in which you admit to which classic books or films you haven't read or watched?

I'll begin - I've never read Ullyses (I started it....) and I have never watched The Hidden Fortress.

Have you ever played that game but referencing video games?

If the answer is yes, you are probably in a minority. If the answer is no, then you are probably not a gamer and safely in the majority.

So is there such a thing as genuine video game culture?

I'm not questioning the cultural value of games but asking if the consumption, playing, and creation of games generates a culture.

I ask because I just attended a session that was predicated entirely on a affirmative answer to that question.

The Meta Game session was a panel quiz in which gaming luminaries and games academics competed in two mixed teams in the Meta Game - establishing a series of assertions and counter assertions about two selected video games.

It worked like this - each team moved across a board made up of counters representing different video games. Each move between counters generates an assertion - such as "is more culturally sophisticated" or "has better than writing" - and the teams must try and produce a move which results in an assertion that favours their side.

But in order for the game to work it relied on having a panel and audience that has a high level of gaming cultural sophistication.

Does Everquest tell a better story than World of Warcraft? Is Asteroids more social than Lemmings?

In a room full of gaming developers and journalists, of course we had no problem debating these questions.

But the debate itself is the interesting thing - because, I believe, that increasing the sophistication of the discussion we have about video games, we increase the sophistication of gaming itself.

Video games have emerged as cultural form with little of the rules and tradition that art, books, music and even film, now take for granted.

The debate around cinema in the 1950s led to increasingly sophisticated cinema in the 1970s.

Developers need to understand where they are going wrong to understand where they are going right.

There are too few "thinkers" in the games industry but that is changing as the nature of the discussion around gaming grows more complex and satisfying.

So back to confession time... I have never played Final Fantasy VII or the Zork trilogy.

Your turn...

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60 second soap box

• Darren Waters
• 9 Mar 07, 01:25 AM

One of the reasons that San Francisco flourishes as a hub of technology is because there is a great network of like-minded people.

I attended the last night where tech firms pitched their ideas to an audience made up of tech lovers, possible investors, journalists and bloggers.

Questions were thrown at the presenters - and no mercy is shown. These companies have to know their stuff.

It was akin to a live Dragon's Den - the 成人快手 Two business ideas show. But this is something firms in San Francisco live day in and day out.

They are in the den every day of their working lives. For every great start-up idea there are 10 others just as good, and 100 others that are not too shabby.

I'll be writing about this aspect of SF tech life in a feature next week but I wanted to report on one element - the 60 Second Soap Box.

This was the chance of anyone in the audience to pitch an idea, ask a question, make a declaration.

And it was an eye-opener.

There were programmers looking for jobs, CEOs looking for programmers, companies looking for investment and even a philosopher who thought he could help firms grow.

"Think about want you need to make, not what you can make," he said.

Sound advice.

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