Alpha Pups
2001-08-06 14:32:13+00 by TC 3 comments
More Confirmation of how the new viral marketing works. Get the Alpha Pups and you get the followers.
2001-08-06 14:32:13+00 by TC 3 comments
More Confirmation of how the new viral marketing works. Get the Alpha Pups and you get the followers.
[ related topics: Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising ]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:32:25+00 by: Larry Burton
There was so much more addressed in that article than viral marketing. Possibly the most impressive statement in the article was this:
But what about the boys who played Doom and then killed their classmates at Columbine High School? What about the Mortal Kombat player who shot his classmates in Kentucky? The makers of those games were blamed for the tragedies and sued by the parents of victims. But while this was happening, the news media all but ignored a larger trend that has been evident since those two graphically violent games were introduced -- Mortal Kombat in September 1993, Doom four months later. Up until that point, the national rate of youth violence, as measured by arrests of juveniles for homicide, had been rising for nearly a decade. Then the trend promptly reversed.
It kind of leads me to believe that I may be correct in wondering if all the extreme school violence that we are seeing might not be the result of all the little conflicts on the playground being repressed.
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:32:25+00 by: Dan Lyke
I've had quite a bit of exposure to teenagers and their computer games in the past year or so, and on the basis of that I'm strongly of the opinion that violent games provide a catharsis, that siblings beating the crap out of each other in virtual worlds provides for better coexistence in the real one.
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:32:26+00 by: dhartung
Hey, Larry, I came into this thread to make the same point! That's been said elsewhere more informally, but I've never seen it attrbuted to an academic source or published someplace like the Times.
Other interesting points in the article were the way the kids found unintended features ("stealing" body parts -- something like PKs on UO?) and got into the deep complexities of the game. It seems to combine elements of martial-arts videogames, Magic: the Gathering, and online gaming, all in a handheld package. It sounds brilliant.
I bet a few Pox players grow up to be l33t haXor d00dz, with sk1llz to boot, and a talent for finding backdoors ...
By contrast, I play video games "like a girl" ...