Turns out this feat of imagineering is old as sin (well, about a year old), but I think these Hello Kitty DS styluses and/or styli warrant a closer look.
The Hello Kitty styluseseses—key or butterfly -shaped, your choice!—are sold by Strapya, international purveyor of all things strappy. Check out the product description:
It’s tacky. It’s cumbersome. It is irresistible.
Besides, it will go perfectly with my brand new bling:
Patrick Stump, hat-wielding frontman of Fall Out Boy, gets behind the controls to show us what a guy’s video game collection says about him…“Boys and video games go together like milk and cookies—it’s an inevitable combination. I’m not an extreme gamer now, but I definitely had my day when I was younger. The Mega Man series, Kid Icarus, The Legend of Zelda—I didn’t date for at least a year while those titles were out.”
I’ve dutifully stolen—er, transcribed—the full text of the ‘article’, so hit the jump if you, uh, want to know more about your man’s personality.
Read the rest of this entry »In January, the IndieGames blog noted that the Writers Guild of America has nominated Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!, along with a handful of other, bigger-budget AAA titles, for excellence in game writing. IndieGames went on to describe Dangerous Girls as a “social board game.”
Interested, I downloaded the Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble! demo. Each morning for maybe a week, I sat down with a cup of coffee and played Dangerous Girls until my eyes began to burn. I complained that it was innovative, interesting, but not always fun to play; I also purchased the full game.
Spoilers follow.
Read the rest of this entry »Now that my readership has appropriately flatlined, I am permitted to publish the second in a three-part series of journal entries about my quest to create the perfect avatar. In part I, we talked about caricature, and I obnoxiously examined what makes my own face distinctive. Now, we examine what, exactly, makes cartooning effective. Here’s a hint: HAIR.
Let’s talk cartooning.
In his wonderful work of literary and visual criticism, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explains (emphases his):
...I’m going to examine cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification.When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.
How do cartooning, caricature, and avatars relate to videogames in a broader sense? The key, I think, is iconography. Take a look at Character Design for Mobile Devices, wherein realistic character design and artistry are pared down to their simplest and most fundamental pixels.
“How did you feel,” 1UP editor James Mielke asked Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano, “about seeing your elaborate illustrations transformed into such tiny sprites?”
Amano replied with an elegant description that could be applied to any type of icon. ”...Back then, ...my art couldn’t just go into the game without major adjustments,” he explained. “So I looked at the sprites as just a symbol of my art. Here’s an example: when you say ‘Mount Fuji’ and you make a motion like this”—here, Amano makes a peak sign with his fingers—“everybody knows what Mount Fuji looks like, so they get the mental image in their head. So I was in charge of making the master art piece that people would keep in their mind, and people would remember this art because of these symbols in the game.”
Read the rest of this entry »It’s no secret that racism, sexism, homophobia, and colorful swears are all hallmarks of online multiplayer gaming. It’s the sort of thing, in fact, that gamers laugh about, albeit uneasily. But the first time you hear a truly earnest slur, the blood runs cold: something about the experience feels distinctly like being trapped in a small-town Chainsaw Massacre kind of nightmare.
As I was channel-surfing tonight, I flipped past Current TV—that’s Al Gore’s young adult -oriented “citizen journalism” cable channel—and I was pleasantly startled to catch the end of “Gaymers.” It is a short video that, in the span of four minutes, concisely explains the homophobia and hostility that often occurs, whether on Internet forums or inside of in-game chat, within the very insular gaming culture. Of course the video is intended for a mainstream audience, but it approaches the issue in an intelligent way. It is, in short, the video to send to your non-gaming friends.
The video is also a very abbreviated profile of games journalist Flynn De Marco, and his site, the excellent GayGamer.net.
“Gaymers” is framed by credible explication from Dr. Benoit Monin, a professor of psychology at Stanford. Near the video’s beginning, Monin gives this fantastic, succinct explanation of the relationship between anonymity, information technologies, and hate speech:
The problem with anonymity on the web is that everyone’s anonymous. It’s not just the people engaging in the prejudicial action that are anonymous: they’re anonymous, the victim is anonymous, the bystanders are anonymous. And it’s like this perfect storm of social… disinhibition, if you will.
Although “Gaymers” focuses on the problem of hate speech in both online co-op and within the internet-centric gamer culture, the video concludes itself optimistically. After all, as Monin points out, the technologies that facilitate anonymous hate speech and actions are the very same technologies with which we create safe virtual spaces for other communities.
“Gaymers” was recently added to Current TV’s continuing rotation of viewer-created programming, so congratulations to everyone who participated in the video’s making. You can chance across it in syndication on satellite or cable, or you can watch it online here.
So we made this for our friend Adam, but we were so tickled by our own wit we just couldn’t keep it to ourselves. (Click for the whole nightmare.)
