Video game advertising company Massive recently signed a deal with Vivendi to integrate ‘live’ advertisements within their titles. The first title was the strategy-shooter SWAT4. As one might expect, gamers took about two seconds to find a way to block the origin of the ads. Details here. Nothing a dedicated anti-marketing gamer wouldn’t have already done to block ads on his favorite gaming sites – disallowing ads.* in your hots.etc file is an old trick to block web ads – but it’s probably not going to be long before a patch is going around to enable this with a simple Doubleclick of the mouse (pardon that ad-related pun, please) to allow the less-technical gamers to avoid these in the future.
Gamers love to hack these titles (see ‘Hot Coffee’); if in-game ad technology is going to take off, it’s going to need to be smarter about how these features are implemented. And I have to guess that there may not be too many sponsors who would be happy to see that hostage’s blood spattered on their ad if the player is too slow and the terrorists get to her first. Or maybe that’s just me.
Kitten War is a site with a simple idea: people send in scans of their kitties, and then two kittens enter, with only the cute kitten leaving. Fair enough, but the golden nugget of this site is not the cute stuff, it’s the hall of losers. These are not happy animals. Looks like the kitten equivalent of a media indecency watch group.
You go Wolf! On the debut of Wolf Blitzer’s new show yesterday, our favorite blog reporters Jacki Schechner and Abbi Tatton held a webcam interview with Joichi Ito, who then wrote about the interview on his blog. Joichi explains that Abbi had found him via a mention on another weblog (BuzzMachine) where Jeff Jarvis discussed Ito’s op-ed piece on the anniversary of the use of nuclear weapons over Japan. Macworld UK also talks about the use of the technology.
Because the only thing cuter than a baby, is an iPodified baby.
What that really means is unknown to yours truly, but it sure is an interesting concept. $15.95 from iPodMyBaby.com. Does anyone expect Apple’s lawyers to take this one lying down? Expect a domain name change pronto. I do think, however, that Sam would look darn spiffy in one of these.
(Via Engadget, via iLounge).
