Blizzard + Twitter

Social Media is taking a completely new toll on gamers and their views of certain games based off of the opinions of other people. Blizzard has a Warcraft Twitter account and they recently just announced that their customer service support team will be accessible via Twitter. This is very important to Blizzard as a whole because based off of positive or negative feedback from users contacting the Blizzard CS team will largely affect the purchasing power of other users. The more of a positive experience that people have with the Blizzard CS team, the more likely the people will respond by tweeting about their experience. This in turn might have an impact on the opinions and views of others since some gamers rely on reviews and shared experiences of other people. I read an article on the importance of the video game industry word of mouth and the effect that social media including Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc. are having on the gaming industry today.

Since consumers care so much about shared experiences, when new platforms are issued like the PS3, people will most likely tweet about how good or bad they like it. The creation of platforms that work with faster, sharper, and more high tech games appeal to many of the gaming population so hearing what other people have to say about the consoles, games, or even the publisher of the game is a very important factor that links into the purchasing decision of the consumer.

Article: http://www.beaffinitive.com/solutions/video-games/

I found an article from WoW very amusing. As in and out World of Warcraft player, I do notice the amount of spammers in the game. From in game messages to the actions describe in the article, I have partially seen everything that spammers try to sell gold or take your personal information. With this article, I found way to stop them in one instance where they float in formation to spell their "brand" I guess with a in game item. The item makes everyone automatically dance which causes those spammers to break formation. Whenever I get back, I will take sweet joy in doing this action.

Article

-Vircell Dayap

Magnavox Odyssey: the first home video game console

From reading Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost's article, Racing the Beam, I have been amazed by the rapid speed of technological improvement. Therefore, I decided to do some research on Magnavox Odyssey, which was the first home video game console in the world.

From looking at Odyssey's inside, it looks far more sophisticated than Atari 2600, although they were both invented in the 1970's. (for pictures, please visit http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magnavox-Odyssey-100-Teardown/3531/1) However, the graphics were still very simple compare to the graphics in the video game today. In order to give you a hint on what kind of games people played on the Odyssey and to show its graphic quality, I want to show you all an advertisement that I found online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2EIsnr_cv4

Hopefully, it will let you guys learn more about the video games or even video game advertisements at the time.

Atari 2600, Magnavox Odyssey 100, and RCA Studio II from Kotaku

While searching on various game sites, I also found an article regarding Atari 2600, the first "home" videogame console, on Kotaku. Here is the link to the article. This article is similar to the article that Benjamin posted before. It is amazing to see how people used to be thrilled to play Atari 2600 just like people now enjoy Playstation 3, Xbox, and Wii. As the article describes, there aren't many things in Atari 2600. Just a board, a black cord, and a chipset. However, at the time of release in 1970s, Atari 2600 was the highest technological development. This article also put links to old game consoles such as Magnavox Odyssey 100 and RCA Studio II (You can click the name of the console to get redirected to the article).
From today's view, all these old game consoles look like a simple technology and would only provide limited experiences to a gamer, but without these inventions, the game industry would not have built at all.

Modern game character creators, not very creative indeed.

this very article I found from The Border House describes how a lot of different games share almost same characters in their game: white male, and many of them are bald. Albeit the fact that not all of them are main characters, it still strikes me as shocking pattern;


Is there racism within game exists? I would like to cover that topic sooner or later, because whether they want or not, in their heart people usually  draw or like to recognize what they are familiar with. Hopefully I can find more articles on this.

Connection between google instant and video games

I found a post from Kotaku about very close relationships between game titles and Google instant. If you type in "Hal" in Google search, it will show Halo as the first result and half, hallmark and so on. Moreover, if you type in "Ze" it will show Zelda as the first result. Resi" will get you Resident Evil. "Space I" will result in Space Invaders. I found this very interesting because this shows the importance and popularity of video games in today's society.

A visual to show just how far gaming systems have come

All the components of the Atari VCS ( courtesy of ifixit.com)

I found a post on Joystiq that has to do with what we have just discussed in class. It links to a site that shows classic consoles like the Atari 2600 VCS looked like when you took them apart and a little about each component and what it did. It really gives you an idea of how simple the technology was back in the 1970's compared to todays modern gaming machines and gives a great visual to all of the technical parts of the article by Montfort and Bogost.


You can find the link to the post Here