If you read my column on the regular, you probably know that it’s a video game industry look at games. So with that being said, it was an interesting challenge to keep it game related during book week. So I decided to talk about a topic that, in this day and age of kindles and nooks and iPads, I think about a lot. And that topic is the idea that [whatever new hot technology] is killing [whatever established art]. When movies came out, everyone said theatre is dead. Now with video games making billions of dollars, people theorize that they will kill film or that they will merge to form a sort of interactive film. My opinion on that stuff is: no. In order to find some decent research on it, I polled a number of friends who work in relevant fields. I’ll use first names only to prevent them from being spammed, but they are: Pedro, guitarist Marta, actress John, Theatre director and educator Deborah, Theatre director and author What Can’t be faked? There’s this weird question I think about sometimes. It’s more of a hypothetical, as I don’t really believe it. But interesting, nonetheless. Why do people still play guitar? Since we have the ability to emulate the sounds, at least for studio work, why not just fake it. Even though we can’t copy the exact nuances of a musician, we will be able to within 5 years, right? I was quickly corrected by Pedro: “the premise of the sound being faked in five years is actually ridiculous. It’s like saying human emotion will be perfectly faked in five years.” I made the connection (since I have a theatre background I needed to find an analogy in my field), that faking a...

First of all, what is a First Person Shooter? It is a game in first person (as in, you are the camera, like in a movie where you see a shot of someone running through the forest from their POV), and it involves them shooting. So you have a camera POV and usually a gun is in that view somewhere. Oh and one more thing: Because the core audience of FPS games are young boys who grow up to make more games for their childhood selves, the top sellers are almost always about aliens and/or space marines. Some day we will look back nostalgically at the alien/space marine era of subject matter in the way film people look back at the day when you went to the theatre to see a train coming at the screen. But we’re not at that day yet. You may see a flying car first. That being said, at our current level of technology, FPS’s are a very fun, proven game type that we’ve gotten really good at making. That is tempting to a lot of game designers to want to join the fray. But I’m about to rant a little bit about why you may not want to do that, if you want to succeed. So here we go…Take my mostly unresearched stats with a grain of salt. Your 1.0 can’t compete with their 3.1 A lot of us game developers have worked at studios that had goals of competing with Halo and beating it. Here’s why this is a bad idea: 1.  Game schedules are notoriously unrealistic, even if you had a crap load of money. The only way you can compete with the polish, the fun, and the scope of a Call of Duty or Halo,...

Ernessa says: You know what gets me? The fact that if I totally hate a song, it’s just about guaranteed to come on the radio every time I stray away from my usual audio book. It’s like one of Murphy’s Laws and it drives me nuts! Accordingly, you’ll find a lot of radio hits in the list of our least favorite songs of the year below. Btw, I was going to say that my least favorite song of the year is TRICK by E-40 f/ Too Short, b/c this mixed-message thing that rappers do where they celebrate sexually-liberated women on one-track, only to slut-shame them on the next one drives me crazy — but then I saw Alex and Emmy’s below and I decided that they called it right. Let us know if you agree in the comments! Jedward – ICE ICE BABY [Ed. Note – I wasn’t planning to embed any of the “worst of” songs, but I had to embed this one video, b/c Alex & Emmy are absolutely right. This might be the most AWFUL thing I’ve seen in 2010, even above my sick baby projectile vomiting and my dog have a foaming-at-the mouth seizure. Seriously, it’s that bad.] Alex and Emmy from Dating Ell-A Now for the rest. Basically, our FaN bloggers were not loving the female pop stars this year — especially the ones whose names started with K … or Taylor. That idiot song about California girls, which is even more stupid when you find out how it’s spelled. [Ed. Note: CALIFORNIA GURLS by Katy Perry] Amy Brown from Book Simple CALIFORNIA GURLS or really anything by Katy Perry.  Her songs are so processed, produced and bland to me.  She’s got a nice rack, but I don’t get...