There are interesting articles in today’s New York Times – and two in particular that caught my attention. The first is an article by Alice Rawsthorn titled “But Is It Art?” (Link) which I think makes some worthwhile observations. In particular, these two comments registered with me:

The conception and process of producing art became as important as the work itself, which was increasingly made by someone else, not the artist.
…
Technology has also enabled designers to exercise greater control over the production of their work by using their computers to execute tasks once delegated to engineers or typesetters.

But then she gets into the kinds of distinctions that get me in trouble with fellow designers: Continue reading →

The Brands in Games blog is reporting (Link) that a NYC ad agency, Anomaly, beat the Leo Burnett prima donna’s into the Second Life virtual world. That’s icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned (you’ll recall my earlier admonition – reLink). Even better is that Anomaly didn’t broadband what they were doing, which suggests they have more humility than the clueless big boys (although from what I read on their website, the relatively new Anomaly is impressive in a number of ways).

This of course has me wondering if reBang is the first “Industrial Design” firm inside Second Life (for the record, here’s the Patagonia beachfront prior to breaking virtual ground – reLink)? I don’t know. It’s certainly possible someone tried, or is actively trying and I’m just unaware of their efforts. It’d be nice to hook up with them.

I’m also wondering how many people – if any – are working toward transreality products; truly tying virtual product to real product in ways that start to get us Things like kirkyans, stellayans, and triblyans (I had to come up with a word for a Thing that could replicate without limit on both sides of the tangibility barrier; this seemed like a natural fit. If this is already defined somewhere, I’m still looking for the word defining it so feel free to post a note; there must be a science fiction novel with this thing in it).

If you caught my exchange with Cory Doctorow recently (reLink) you’ll recall the disconnect I pointed out regarding the Creative Commons license he and his publisher, Tor, apparently use on his books. In summary, Creative Commons is a rights management system that depends heavily on what I call Inherent Rights Management (the inability to replicate a physical object) and on the threat of legal action should I attempt to use the content in a commerical endeavor. It’s a two-pronged approach that’s probably effective for book publishers right now.

In some ways this isn’t all that different from Digital Rights Management. Plain and simple, they’re both about control. However, because digital products aren’t inherently difficult to replicate, it opens the door to abuse. In order to prevent that abuse, content providers are effectively attempting to emulate some aspects of tangible products and thus control the content to which they have the legal rights.

In other words, they have mostly the same legal options available to them, but they don’t have the one thing in common that’s turned everything on it’s head from day one: the ability for anyone to make perfect replicas of a product at home.
Continue reading →

I caught this on Next Generation earlier (Link) and I see it’s also over on C|Net (Link): Nielsen has some statistics on videogames and you can bet people will be looking them over and trying to figure out where this market is headed. There’ll be plenty of debate, especially between the console crowd and the PC people, there’ll be some long blog posts covering this report (and I’ll read some of it), but I figure this one is easy: if the women are online, the guys (at 2-to-1) will be chasing them*. Case closed.

I’ve caught mention of former Shiny operative Dave Perry off doing something for Acclaim, but hadn’t really paid too much attention other than reading about it on Blue’s News. Turns out what he’s doing is kind of interesting. From the Wired article “In-Game Ads Burrow Deeper” (Link):

Acclaim is about to take product placement to another level with its free, ad-supported massively multiplayer online games next year. Game industry veteran Dave Perry, who’s directing 2Moons for Acclaim and creating several additional MMO games, wants to open up the door for corporate-sponsored micro transactions.

“When you buy a virtual item, we’re going to do a search to see if any advertiser in real-time is willing to pick up the cost of that item,” said Perry. “If you want this sword, it would put up a message and ask if you would like Coca-Cola to buy this item for you.”

Perry said this business model makes the customer happy because they get the item for free and the corporate sponsor is happy because they’ve had a positive exchange with the consumer.

Less than an advergame; more than an in-game ad. And better than mere sponsorship. Clever. Slimey, but clever.