You are currently browsing the archives for the New Yorker category.
Yikes. According to the New Yorker (story here at Ad Age), the photos of the “real women” in their underwear were doctored — made more model-like — by airbrush artist Pascal Dangin.
Not much good news for print newspapers, according to Eric Alterman’s piece in the New Yorker.
“Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago…. [T]rends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.”
The New Yorker ran a profile of Will Wright in the November 6 issue, in which he shares some interesting insights on the popularity of The Sims, and — by extension — online environments such as Second Life. First, the social-interaction elements have brought girls to gaming, not mention more than $1 billion in revenues to EA:
When he was a kid, Wright told me, “I never played with dolls, which is more of a social thing than playing with trains. It’s about the people in the house. [My daughter] Cassidy helped me see that. She and her friends got into the purely creative side of the game, rather than the goal-oriented side, which really influenced me a lot.”
And the powerful idea that these build-your-own-virtual-world applications are more like software platforms than games:
Second Life seems like a logical outcome of Wright’s simulation games — and it isn’t technically a game at all. When I asked Wright about Second Life, he said, “I think what you’re going to see now on Second Life is people who will start to develop games — someone will invite other people to kick a soccer ball around, and it will go from there.”