Brave New Media: Evolution of Games

I was asked by a few here to give a "tour" of Second Life. I pulled out an insert from Wired magazine and we went to some of the better known 2L ventures. The recurring comment was "where are the people"? All these corporate constructs, but no people. Our visit to a sex dungeon revealed the people on a Monday afternoon and points to where all the real action is on the burgeoning 2L...Today.

The experience reminded me of 1994 when I went to the internet and looked up some random sites to visit. I had an insert from Wired magazine then, too, to guide me to the better sites. And I wandered into some chat rooms and sex dungeons to check out where the real action was on the burgeoning world wide web. Most of the sites I visited then were lame and not much use at all. However, users created eBays and Amazons and Netscapes and Googles and YouTubes to channel all that potential into profitable ventures beyond banal twittering.

If you impose Second Life onto this familiar framing of the 'evolution of games', the possibilities become clear. Or rather, the usefulness of Second Life is still not so clear, but the potential for users to eventually create previously unfathomable, yet fiercely ubiquitous uses becomes very clear.

Second Life, for the moment, is analogous to the internet circa 1995, or gaming circa 1974. Now: a banal waste of time, crude and choppy...tomorrow: perhaps a daily standard for us all.

Brave New Media: Geico Caveman TV Show?

The Wall Street Journal informs that Walt Disney Co.'s ABC will pay for the production of a pilot for a show about a trio of prehistoric characters--based on Geico's cavemen characters--who battle prejudice in modern-day Atlanta. There's no script or cast yet, but plans call for the comedy to be titled "Cavemen."

The characters have achieved celebrity status, thanks, in part, to Geico's enormous ad budget. More recently, the caveman has been showing up outside ads. Eight days ago, an actor dressed as a caveman appeared at the Ocars. Last month, a caveman played golf with football analyst Phil Simms during his Super Bowl pregame show on CBS.

A spokeswoman for ABC Television Studio cautioned that there is no guarantee "Cavemen" will result in a prime-time show. If the series does make it to air, it will leave the Geico's famed Green Gecko behind, which is more popular than the cavemen, but has no spinoff in the works. "Evidently the Gecko doesn't have the right agent," says Ted Ward, Geico's vice president of marketing.



via MediaPost's Marketing Daily and WSJ

Brave New Media: Red Bull Crashed Ice

In addition to sponsoring sports, athletes and teams like the Red Bulls of Major League Soccer, the Red Bull company has created new sports, ostensibly to sell more energy drinks. One of them--Crashed Ice--is a cross between hockey and snowboard, in which three racers at a time, dressed in hockey equipment, whip down what looks like a large bobsled run.

Crashed Ice was conceived almost 10 years ago when executives at Red Bull's Austrian headquarters heard a pitch for a new sport based on downhill in-line skating. "The next generation of sports fans are participatory in nature," says David Carter, executive director of the University of Southern California's Carter of the Sports Business Institute.

Three weeks ago, 50 workers began constructing a 1,500-foot course past Old Quebec's historic architecture for a Crashed Ice event held Saturday that was expected to draw 50,000 people. One excited participant from Madison, N.J., 21-year-old Jamie McGrath, knew nothing about the sport before a friend saw it on television. "Our goal for the entire thing was to get a Red Bull jersey," McGrath says.



via MediaPost's Marketing Daily andNYT