EEG News

Actors, Game Companies Reach Agreement

No doubt that Variety readers caught this piece of important news last week: Hollywood Unions Reach Deal with Video Game Makers.

The threat of a possible strike had been the talk of the game world for the last month, although, it had many speculating that the quality of games wouldn't suffer if actors suddenly withheld their services.

I'm not sure if that is true (that quality wouldn't suffer), but I suspect that game companies would have survived quite nicely. I think the actors believed that as well, because they settled for higher initial pay, as opposed to backend royalties.

MS, Intel Push Digital Home

Microsoft and Intel announced a joint marketing and promotion campaign that would educate consumers on how emerging technologies will transform their home lives, according to thisCnet News.com article.

Both companies have been touting emerging home-entertainment technologies, hoping that consumers would be lured in by the ever-increasing networked devices that allow people to share and shift files between personal devices. However, there have been problems – particularly that more complex devices can sometimes be a bit maddening.

The campaign is meant to address one of the key complaints about consumer electronics devices that use digitized content, which is simply that they are harder to figure out how to use.

Digitized content, such as audio files and video clips, is more portable and transferable between devices and, in most cases, is of higher quality than analog content.

Miss Digital World -- An Avatar Beauty Contest

Wired News has a story about a beauty contest searching for the best looking female digital avatar.

The man behind the event is Franz Cerami, an Italian promoter who's trying to start the world's first CG talent agency. His dream is to manage a bevy of virtual beauties, posing and costuming them for pinup calendars, videogames, ads, and movies.

The benefits of digital models are obvious - they never age, never have bad hair days, and can be on location in Tokyo, Paris, and Hollywood simultaneously.

There are drawbacks, as anyone who watched Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within knows. The characters, while inspired creations, were a bit on the creepy side. The technology hasn't quite reached a point where we can generate truly believable CG characters. They still look a bit computery.

Digital Studio Confab Examines Tech & Entertainment

The iHollywood Forum and American Film Market will host the third annual Digital Studio summit on November 2, where people will gather to examine how the movie, music, and television businesses are being altered by new technologies.

The day-long summit will focus mainly on how development and production cycles are changing, but there will also be a brief discussion on storing and delivering digital goods.

Just as a side note here: I was having a discussion with an old friend from my Wired News days last night, and we were lamenting about how little attention is paid by executives these days to the engines that run digital technology – namely, storage and databases.

Database management is truly the ugly stepchild of the digital world, and there is often very little attention paid to the details of its development. However, creating a dynamic and robust database will – in a very real sense – determine how much money you can make from your products (since all your customer data and ecommerce will be run through that interface).

It's a little nerdy, I know, but for those who are just dipping their feet into the digital waters, it's important to start with the database.

Game Blog Tracks World of Gaming

The convergence of media through the Internet has made it nearly impossible to keep up with all the news of the day, but the folks over at Game Blogs do a super job.

The site combines musings from around the Web – everyone from gamers to academics – talking about what's happening in digital worlds. For a time after Dungeons and Dreamers came out, I kicked around the idea of starting up a business that ran newspapers within online worlds. The reason: even in digital worlds, people need to know what they missed. After all, most folks can't be online all of the time.

Message boards and community centers fill that gap (and some have actually launched their own in-game media organizations), but I think there is still a place to today's media in tomorrow's worlds.

Game Blogs – while primarily focused on the world around games – is a good example of what a New York Times for gaming may one day look like.

Technology's Innovation

Slashdot has an interesting discussion today about a two-piece Texas band called Tree Wave that creates music using obsolete gaming and computing systems.

The post got me thinking, so forgive me for straying a bit from the convergence of video games and Hollywood. But, if you hang with me, it will all make sense.

The technology world never ceases to amaze me, particularly when devices and applications end up in the hands of the people. I have a hard time not laughing when people tell me that they don't understand technology because it doesn't involve creative thinking. Clearly, the people that feel that was are insane.

Check out some of these projects:

• Star Wars ASCIImation: a scene-by-scene rendition of the original Star Wars movie

• Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME): an ad-hoc group of programmers around the world who make old arcade games run on the PC that I followed at Wired News

• Machinima: film directors using video game technology to shoot entire movies

• Survival Research Laboratories: organization that builds massive robots that do performance art, which usually ends in massive explosions

When technophiles argue that putting limits on technology will stop innovation, its projects like these (some of these), that they are concerned about. Not one of these groups is using technology the way it was intended.

Chinese Gov't Bans Game

The Chinese government has officially banned the Swedish game Hearts of Iron because it portrays "Manchuria, Tibet and Xinjiang as independent nations", according to this BBC Technology article.

The government has also set up a task for which will specifically monitor video game content for objectionable and anti-national content.

This isn't the first such ban. Australia, Greece, and Germany have made international headlines for outlawing games which have violent content. Germany went so far as to remove Nazis from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a game where Allied soldiers battle against, uh, Nazis.