Sony's new reality TV program on the PlayStation Network continues to raise questions about audience/player (mis)perceptions of labor and production in the games industry.
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Archive for January, 2010
The Tester
What Are You Missing? January 24-30
Ten things worth checking out online from this past week; feel free to add more in the comments section.
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Egregious Product Placement: The Biggest Loser
Subway. 24 Hour Fitness. Extra sugar free gum. Ziploc. Muir Glen organic canned tomatoes. NBC's The Biggest Loser is the home of some of the biggest product placement deals on television.
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Look at Your Hands: Computing, Embodiment, and the iPad
While much of yesterday’s Internet conversation centered on whether the iPad is a game changer for TV, gaming, publishing, and future of ebooks, I want to address the potentially unnerving aspects of how Apple constructed the user yesterday and point out that while Apple may be a global company, its users are definitely not.
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What Do You Think? Most Useful Media Studies Twitter Streams
The list below features Twitter Accounts that I've personally found consistently useful and valuable. So what are yours?
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What Do You Think? Apple’s new iPad
Apple has a new product. Are the possibilities as endless as the apps in the app store or is it much ado about nothing?
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Lessons From Jay, Coco, and Zucker
In debriefing what went wrong with the Jay Leno Show, we shouldn’t just ask what Leno’s failure says – we should also ask what the combination of the failure and the momentary ratings spike says.
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5 Thoughts On: MacGruber
Five thoughts on the film adaptation of the Saturday Night Live sketch MacGruber.
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The Plight of the Rockstar Wife
In the past few weeks, a fresh controversy about the working conditions in the industry of game development has arisen, this time centered on Rockstar San Diego.
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Housewives in Crisis, Economic that Is
Though we can always expect a good relationship crisis from the gals, the “Housewife” series on Bravo in 2009 promised all sorts of insights into market crisis.
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What Do You Think? Most Important Films of the Decade
Continuing with our series, what films would you nominate as the most important of the decade?
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The Role of the Media in Times of Crisis
The US television coverage of Haiti has me thinking about the role of media in a humanitarian crisis.
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The “Down with Democrats” Mood and Our Presentist Media
Although the public is notoriously ahistorical about contemporary politics, the news media do little to remind them of how we got here. Political reporting looks more and more like entertainment/celebrity reporting, and Obama will need to return to campaign mode to capitalize on that.
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Important Games of the 00s
What makes a game important? Is it commercial sales, the ways a game showcases how skilled a designer or studio is at their craft, the visceral response a game gives you, the player communities spawned by a game, the ways designers construct character/story/space, or the ways that games open up new genres, new...
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5 Thoughts On: ABC’s Modern Family
One Show, Five Thoughts.
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