PUBLIC MARKS with tags 2006 & "raph koster"

I realize this list may seem like a cutesy joke. But it isn’t. Go back, and re-read it. It’s actually a lament.

I want to talk with you today about how teenagers are using a website called MySpace.com. I will briefly describe the site and then discuss how youth use it for identity production and socialization in contemporary American society. I have been following MySpace since its launch in 2003. Initially, it was the home to 20-somethings interested in indie music in Los Angeles. Today, you will be hard pressed to find an American teenager who does not know about the site, regardless of whether or not they participate. Over 50 million accounts have been created and the majority of participants are what would be labeled youth - ages 14-24. MySpace has more pageviews per day than any site on the web except Yahoo! (yes, more than Google or MSN).

You can stream it from GameSpot and see whether in fact it deserved to set the Internet on fire the way it apparently has. :)

The entire video game industry’s history thus far has been an aberration. It has been a mutant monster only made possible by unconnected computers. People always play games together. All of you learned to play games with each other. When you were kids, you played tag, tea parties, cops and robbers, what have you. The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal.

Dan Arey gave a talk at GDC 2005 on developing AAA games, and interviewed several designers for it. The actual interview was quite long, and I skipped many of the questions... but here's the answers to the ones that I did respond to. You can comment here on the blog if you like.

Raph Koster gave a talk this afternoon at PARC titled "The Medium That is Eating the World." Raph is a well-known online game designer (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) and a warm, funny, engaging speaker. His talk today was pretty loosely structured; he wandered around through a bunch of disjoint thoughts about the origin of games, different kinds of media, the definition of play, a bit of kitchen cog sci, and the impact of games on gamers and on the world. Overall it was quite interesting, but I felt like he was trying a bit too hard to be academic and researchy, since the audience was that kind of crowd.

Bruno in Brazil is in fact really far away from everyone else.

the Japanese edition of A Theory of Fun for Game Design is out now. Masaya Matsuura was kind enough to write a foreword for this edition