Separation of Church and Video Games

Sony's "Little Big Planet" video game, originally set for release in North America on October 27, has been recalled due to the inclusion of two passages from the Quran.

This kind of video game blunder first drew the public eye in Rockstar's "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" with the 'hot coffee' minigame scandal.

Sony responds:
"During the review process prior to the release of Little Big Planet, it has been brought to our attention that one of the background music tracks licensed from a record label for use in the game contains two expressions that can be found in the Quran. We have taken immediate action to rectify this and we sincerely apologise for any offence that this may have caused.

We'll confirm the new launch date shortly."

At Electronic Arts, we are always looking out for this kind of mistake, and even were at fault when a version of an episode of the South Park cartoon was found on the Playstation version of our "Tiger Woods 99 PGA Tour" golf game.

Even recently, while working on the Wii title, "Boom Blox", we refered to one of the items in our game as the 'Super Ball' and fortunately avoided copyright infringement with the Wham-O company by wisely changing the name to 'Bouncy Ball'.

Fun is a serious business.

I love real-time approval ratings!

During the 2008 presidential debates, CNN displayed real-time approval ratings from undecided Ohio voters at the bottom of the screen. The graph clearly showed the way that the voters were connecting to the responses from both presidential candidates McCain and Obama and the difference in responses between men and women.

It was obvious to me that in the second half of the debate when the responses turned to education that Obama captured both demographics when he stressed parental involvement in their children's education.

There's already a video of this segment on YouTube. Obama's comments on the topic of the world's highest per-capita national education spending combined with American children's amazingly low test scores in math and sciences begin around 5 minutes and build to a crescendo near the 7 minute mark where the graph shows 100% approval ratings from both men and women. The 3rd Presidential Debate - Part 8:

"...but there's one last ingredient that I just want to mention and that's parents. We can't do it just in the schools. Parents are going to have to show more responsibility, they've got to turn off the TV set, put away the video games and finally start instilling that thirst for knowledge that our students need."

(I can forgive his disparaging comment about video games in the context of more responsible parenting)

I want to put this idea out there for FREE to any company that wants the benefit of real-time approval data from viewers: coordinate a system similar to this real-time approval rating that uses the cable box remote as the input device, REWARD the active participant for every minute (a small fraction of one cent that would amount to a few dollars over a month of TV watching) that they respond to programming and advertisements.

The benefit to advertisers could be as readily apparent as the real-time approval ratings seen during tonight's debate! Companies and networks could see the data that corresponds to their product ads and shows.

Banner Blindness

In researching my new glasses product and information on eye-tracking, I came across some information regarding banner advertising with regards to eye-tracking.

This picture comes from a banner blindness article on Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox website. It displays a 'heat map' of a user's eye fixations while browsing for internet information; the redder colors show the areas with the highest fixation rates and the green boxes identified the advertisements placed on the web page (after the heatmaps had been generated).

What is interesting to note is that none of the boxed ads received any fixations at all.
The Persuaders video we saw in class said that one of the goals of advertisements is to "cut through the clutter". It seems that Internet surfers have become immune - 'blind' - to anything that resembles a banner or an ad on a webpage.

How will online advertisements evolve to cut through the clutter?