Games in the Media


Some trivia: Greg Costikyan in The Economist; the NHL in Slate

Better late then never, I guess ... one game-related item and one item that maybe is just a metaphor:

The January 29th issue of The Economist had an article on the lackluster sales of digital games in Germany ("Reasons to be Playful"), and then made the, ah, questionable leap to the conclusion that Germans were not big fans of games in general. Greg Costikyan had a follow-up letter in the February 19th issue, p. 16, talking about "how enthusiasts everywhere look with envy on the highly competitive excellence of German boardgames". A nice little plug for the hobby.

The second article was in Slate, "The Puck Stops Here". The link to boardgaming in this case was much more tenuous, but somehow I couldn't help but think of German games while reading it. So many of them, especially auction and deal-making games, involve scooping up undervalued or underutilized assets and getting mileage out of them, or combining them in interesting ways, or separating the value from the chaff. It seemed to me that there had to be a good game somewhere in there. Of course one might also see some similarities between some NHL owners and some owners of US game companies (and I'm not talking about Curt Schilling).

Posted: Thursday - March 10, 2005 at 07:38 PM            

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