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Tag Archives: BitMob
Nintendo’s Next Trick
The narrative surrounding Nintendo over the last half-decade has been one of innovation, as the company’s Blue Ocean strategy has led to pioneering new technologies. The concept of the “blue ocean” comes from a book by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, which argues that rather than fighting over the same piece of the marketplace (creating a “red ocean” of blood), companies should strike out into the “blue ocean” where no other companies set sail, and create new, uncontested markets for themselves.
Nintendo has tapped into this strategy with amazing success. PlayStation Move and the Xbox 360 Kinect are nothing if not Sony and Microsoft’s attempts to spill some blood into the waters of motion-control gaming. It’s been exciting to see Nintendo, one of the founders of modern video game culture, raising the bar and not resting on its laurels, but sometimes it’s beneficial to recognize trends and fall into line. Video games, and devices which play host to video games, are moving steadily further into the realm of online connectivity, and Nintendo is not keeping up.
Read more: Nintendo’s Next Trick
Another use for the Scott Pilgrim movie
I had no idea what the hell anyone was getting so up in arms about when this Scott Pilgrim movie hit the news at San Diego Comic-Con. I guess if you’re a harder-core comic book fan than I that you knew the scoop, and were looking forward to this film adaptation, but my comic book reading tends to be limited to The Walking Dead and pretty much anything by Warren Ellis nowadays.
The reviews of this movie, however, led to a very interesting piece on NPR which my wife point out for me, and which led to this response by yours truly on Bitmob.
Anonymity is for the birds
All joking aside, I wish Blizzard had had the guts to move forward with their plan to attach real names to forum accounts on the new Battle.net for Starcraft II. I can’t honestly believe that a rash of stalkings and murders would have broken out as a result, and if a publisher with the stature of Blizzard had gone through with this, other publishers would have followed suit, and a new paradigm might have been established, which I think would have led to further credence of our art form. Perhaps if video gamers weren’t all hiding behind forum names all of the time, it would be easier to convince the world that we respected our own medium.
Then again, I’m not about to start throwing my real name around Xbox Live. In the meantime, here’s the article I wrote about this on Bitmob.