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How Rovio CEO's grandparents saved the space program... wait...
Before Apollo 11 made history by successfully shuttling the first humans to the moon in 1969, the space program was in desperate financial condition and President John F. Kennedy had his grandparents mortgage their apartment for the money to keep NASA running. Er, no -- we're getting our stories mixed up here.The bit about the grandparents mortgaging their home to keep a company running is actually the story behind Rovio, the creators of Angry Birds. Rovio was mainly backed by CEO Mikael Hed's dad and it hadn't produced a hit in years before Angry Birds; it was Hed's dad who proposed the family-mortgage plan."He told me that he wanted to mortgage my grandparents' flat so he could put some more money in the company to keep it afloat," Hed told All Things D. "That was pretty tough. I certainly did not want to be the person responsible for putting my grandparents on the street."Hed doesn't have to worry about that now, as Angry Birds is a smash (HA!) hit and Rovio is valued at more than $6 billion. The next game from Rovio is Angry Birds Space, due out for iOS, Android, PC and Mac on March 22, and whose out-of-this-world adorable trailer you can view above.
MMO Family: Long-distance gaming with Grandma and Grandpa
MMO Family is your resource for leveling a gaming-specced family, from tips on balancing gaming with family life to finding age-appropriate online games for everyone in the family. Back in my day (eons before even that prehistoric era when we trudged five miles uphill through the lava to kill Lord Nagafen, after sitting in the server's text chat room so our buff timers wouldn't tick down while the rest of the group was getting prepped), kids wrote letters to keep in touch with long-distance grandparents. We struggled almost as hard to read our elders' spidery, old-fashioned cursive as we did to figure out something relevant to say to these relative strangers. Then once a month, we'd be herded into the kitchen or hall (where most people's phones were back then) for the Dreaded Phone Call of Doom, during which we'd self-consciously mumble responses to people who couldn't remember which grade we were in or which of us kids was the swimmer and which was the ballet dancer. Talk about awkward... Today, cell phones and email make it much easier to keep a family in touch when its members are separated by miles. Still, it's hard for kids to develop a relationship of any depth with people they meet infrequently at best and with whom they share nothing in common beyond a few genetic jots and tittles. Until gaming came along.
UC Irvine studies differences between Chinese and US players
Our good friends at the OC (don't call it that) Register have an article up about how the University of California at Irvine has received a grant to study the differences between US and Chinese players of World of Warcraft. And the differences are fairly interesting: apparently US players use many more UI mods and addons than Chinese players do. Additionally, more Chinese players play the "more challenging version of the game" (seems like they mean PvP servers to us, though that may change with yesterday's big news), and Chinese players, say the researcher, tend to talk more about color schemes and architecture than American players. Finally, the demographics are fairly different -- here in the states, women make up 20 percent of the playing audience, and in China that number is almost halved. And while people here may play with parents or even grandparents, in China, the older generation isn't interested in the game at all.These observations seem more to be based on anecdotal evidence of Chinese players in cafes more than anything else, but the study is just getting started, so maybe with some more research they can come up with some more solid numbers (or even more reasons) showing why this is the case. But it's interesting that inspecting how people play this game in two different countries can reveal something about the cultural differences between each.
On a slow news day, CNN discovers that retirees enjoy the Wii
As if the news of older individuals enjoying the Wii was anything new to us, CNN found themselves late to the party in reporting it. They focus their story on 82 year old Ruth Ebert, self-explained apathetic towards all things gaming, that is until she got her hands on a Wii. "It was funny, because normally I would not be someone who would do that," Ebert explains after giving a match of Wii Sports: Tennis a go. She ended up losing the match, explaining that such a loss was alright by her as "I didn't mind losing to a video game. It couldn't rub it in." Yeah Ruth, well you try losing to a Mii of Hitler, that hurts.The rest of the article talks about others in the Virginian retirement community and their experience with the system.
Old Grandma Hardcore is Nintendo's Grandparent of the Year
Who could have anticipated that they'd be sending a 70 year-old ringer into Nintendo's Coolest Grandparent of the Year competition, huh? Barbara St. Hilaire, better known to the gaming community as Old Grandma Hardcore, took the top honors in the contest, held on Grandparents' Day at the Nintendo World Store in New York. Contestants battled in Brain Age, and OGH took home two DS Lites and ten new games after vanquishing the competition. Since she already owns both a Phat and a DS Lite, we wonder if she'll pass the booty on to one or two of her 13 grandchildren. From her blog, OGH certainly seems like the coolest grandparent around, so we approve. In fact, we'd like to steal her to be the official DS Fanboy Grandma, but we're afraid she'd kill every time we break out Mario Kart.
