Entertaining Shifts

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BusinessWeek online has an informative article on the entertainment industry’s current DVD-sales woes. The reasons for the sales slump are obviously speculative, but some of the guesses are interesting to consider. At the core of this problem is: What are people doing with their leisure time (assuming they aren’t so tired from the long work weeks that they have the energy to do anything more than sit in front of the tube)?

One interesting bit from the article:

During its first quarter, ending May 28, Best Buy said it saw revenue declines for DVD sales that were “comparable” to the double-digit sales hikes it reported for video-game sales.

With the continued press about the growth in casual gaming, I’m wondering if the “fragmenting market” comment isn’t the most accurate. And perhaps some of those casual gamers who might be part of a new fragment are moving onto the harder stuff. I’m curious to know how many are female. And how many make their way to There or The Sims Online.

Sony Exchange Live

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Here we go. The floodgates to the virtual market have just opened as Terra Nova informs readers that Sony’s virtual goods exchange service has commenced operations. Read the news, view some screenshots, and keep track of the comments here.

Additionally, I have to admit that after having spent the better part of a year recently on an indy game project which fell apart primarily due to lack of a worthwhile marketing plan, I realized that content was increasingly becoming the real prize. Consequently I’m glad I went back to content creation (I do still enjoy coding, but would like to make time for porting and building upon my old aerospace analysis work… someday). I think the recent turn of events bodes well for those of us making real-world quality models.

Over the past three of four years of hanging out on indy game forums and seeing so many projects wither on the vine due to lack of compelling content (and the free stuff online just doesn’t cut it), it’s hard to not reach the conclusion that a virtual market has some potentially nice ripple effects. I’m looking for one ripple in particular. If it makes waves, I think alot of people will be pretty happy.

Hive-Minded Swarm On Exhibit

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Via Bruce Sterling’s Wired blog comes this interesting bit on a collaborative art effort called “The Minded Swarm“. From the press release:

The artists have met for some years in a science fiction reading group, absorbing SF’s mode of fantastic speculation into their own practice. Assuming the model of a Gestalt Organism (Theodore Sturgeon, More than Human, Vintage, 1998.) where individual capacities merge to create a single distributed intelligence, the artists have enacted a state-change, adopting a communal consciousness (Olaf Stapledon, Starmaker, Wesleyan University Press, 2004 (1937), p. 271.) as a means of artistic production.

If you’re in the LA area, the exhibition runs through Sunday, 4 September 2005.

This reminds me a little of the early efforts of a European collective called Workspace-Unlimited. A few years back when they popped up on the radar they were attempting to use the Quake 3 game engine to create a virtual artistic community (it appears they’ve morphed into something else now perhaps). They got off to a really nice start with the game engine, and the possibilities to do something like a virtual “hive mind” project seemed within reach. But as some of us pointed out, they probably ran into licensing issues and the like. It does look like they have something else “virtual” going on though. Something to check out when I have a minute…

Personalized Marketing aka CRM

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Adage (free registration) has a revealing article online that’s tied to virtual spaces (even though it may not seem like it is). It’s called “In Search of Marketing’s Future“. You can guess some of what that future is if I’m talking about it. From the article:

The event {Outlook 2005}, which came one year after McDonald’s CMO Larry Light declared the death of mass marketing, made clear that there is life after that death — namely in the form of hyper-targeted one-to-one marketing strategies that use a variety of technologies.

That sounds sufficiently innocent; almost friendly even. As do a couple other quotables. But here’s the a piece of the article that caught my attention:

“We built this huge umbrella. We looked strongly and deeply at the internet,” Mr. Weedfald said. “The internet has very little value unless you understand the back end of something called CRM. It’s about tracking, converting and retaining customers 24 hours a day, utilizing the power of wireless and the internet.”

Is now a good time to talk about the “tracking” and spying tools that are already employed in virtual worlds? These comments sure make it sound like Big Brother has siblings. Should that be “restraining”?

WorldChanging 3000

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In the event you’re visiting this site and not regularly stopping over on the WorldChanging.com site (a highly recommended visit), the good folks at WC asked me to contribute an entry. I did and you can read it here. Obviously, as soon as I set up the dropbox, I’ll be taking donations to send me to writing class. Hopefully the message gets out in spite of my limitations.

[Edit from the future: As the WorldChanging site is now long gone and I have no idea what I wrote for them, here’s a link to something I suspect is related: “Making the Virtual Real”]