Incomplete Gamer

Archive for June, 2009

I’m always open to an idea that can potentially make me money, and while I won’t be sending any more money to Nigeria any time soon (I only ever make the same mistake three times), I did get excited when I read a report on CNBC about making money from my favourite past time. CNBC, is of course the cable channel dedicated to all things business, finance and money related. These guys live and breathe money and know what they’re talking about. So when I see an article on the CNBC site titled How to Make Money Playing Videogames I sit up and take notice.

Turns out this isn’t about the elite players wearing garish t-shirts and bandannas, playing in big professional leagues for big money; the guys with unpronounceable gamer tags with more ‘z’s than vowels. In fact you don’t need to be the best of the best or even the best of the worst to be in with a chance to make money doing what you love. The article charts the emergence of companies that allow you to play family, friends or strangers online, matching you up with players as good or as hopeless as you and letting you win as little as $1 or thousands of dollars in the process.

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The future of videogaming is driven almost solely by technological innovation and not by creative endeavour. The reason is simple. For all the recent talk of the importance of the story, there are only seven basic plots anyway, and chances are, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are across all seven. In all likelihood you have probably already played all seven too! So in ten years time will videogaming resemble the videogaming of today? Will videogaming evolve in response to the wants and wishes of gamers? Will we get the videogame experience we demand or will the videogaming landscape be formed by the emerging technologies of the day? Sorry to burst your bubble, but your videogaming future won’t be the one you wish for and nor will it be the one the masses clamour for either. We’ll get what ‘they’ give us and it’s already happening.

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How environmentally friendly are your videogaming habits? Unless you’ve got your own wind farm in the back garden or a bank of solar cells on the roof providing all your energy needs and spitting the excess electricity back into the national grid, then probably not at all. Even if you have managed to build your own eco-friendly power station in the burbs, the eco warriors still won’t be happy knowing you’re squandering that energy on mindless fun when you could just as easily be providing the energy needs of a modest sanctuary for giraffes with cataracts.

Don’t think you’ll earn brownie points simply by choosing the most energy efficient current generation console on the market. That’s the Wii for those keeping score. Nintendo’s Wii uses only slightly more power than a jack-in-the-box.  So little power in fact that you might mistakenly imagine it must come with a crank handle…until you see the graphics it puts out, at which point you’ll be absolutely convinced. Just kidding. Seriously. Come back. I repeat, there is absolutely no correlation between a console’s power consumption and the power of a console.

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This week’s edition of The Wrap over at PALGN, asks the question: Is there ever a wrong time to game?  The question was prompted by the news that over in the  US, in the wake of Hurricane Ike, a number of children were admitted to hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning whilst playing video games.  The story puts Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs on its head.  You can also find out how I fared with my PSP Go! predictions from a few weeks back.  You’ll find the complete article right here: The Wrap #33 – Generating Headlines: Is there ever a wrong time to game?

Enjoy.

The Incomplete Gamer