Two Productivity Killing Games: Flight of the Hamsters and The Fancy Pants Adventure

July 5th, 2007, No Comments »

Surely you’ve already put in enough work this week for four days, haven’t you? Take a break, and play these two popular Flashy-flash games until your fingernails bleed:

And speaking of games, check out this creative new form of in-game World of Warcraft spam. Apparently it’s come to be called corpse graffiti.

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My Idea for a Stupid Hat

May 27th, 2007, 2 Comments »

Today I was looking at some of Rog’s MMPORG screenshots on Flickr. I noticed one from the beta for Dungeon Runners (here’s some of Rog’s comments on the game). Here it is:

As you can see, they’ve borrowed the ‘yellow exclamation mark equals quest giver’ convention from World of Warcraft (there’s also the ‘yellow question mark equals finish off your quest, stupid’ convention). The practice may predate WoW–I’m not sure. I wondered if big yellow punctuation marks have now become a standard in online roleplaying games.

Given the ubiquity of WoW, I thought it’d be funny to design a hat (kind of a variation on the cheesehead, I suppose) that was a foam yellow exclamation or question mark supported above your head by a halo of wire or something. These dudes have made a nice-looking ballcap, but I was thinking of actual foot-long 3-D punctuation marks. They’d be ideal gag gifts for gamers.

If nothing else, they’d make for great field marketing costumes for a game-related marketing campaign. Imagining positioning a few of those at street corners in cities. Gamers would be drawn to them like a schnauzer to spilled ice-cream.

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