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Straight Trippin'
I was reading an article on CNN about how TV might be losing out to video games and it got me thinking... Currently television has sweeps week, during which they all compete to have the craziest shows and attract the most viewers. Imagine if online games were handled in the same way, imagine if games not only replaced television, but adopted it's structure. A subscription based service that allowed you access to a large number of games, some of them might be fantasy games, some of them science fiction, some drama. Now at any time you could change games to any one of the ones you currently subscribed to. Maybe they are bundled like cable channels are, for example. Assuming that video games ran on a combination of advertising and a share of the subscription fees based on ratings then they would have sweeps weeks as well. Video games would compete to have features or events rolled out to attract players during specific time periods.
Oddly enough this model doesn't actually offend me as much as I had thought it would, in fact it has a lot going for it. First of all you would have a lot more choice as to which games you wanted to play, you could switch out to a different game at any point, as long as it was within your game bundle. Not only that, but the game bundles would be constantly evolving, with new games being introduced all the time, and lower rated games vanishing. In fact, that's probably the biggest drawback. I know that more than once I have fallen in love with a show, only to have it canceled because it lacked mass appeal. Futurama, Family Guy, and the Tick live action all spring to mind.
In other news, I think that someone needs to buy me two round trip tickets to New York. The American Museum of the Moving Image has a new exhibit called "Blip! Arcade Classics from the Museum Collection". It's a display of classic arcade machines from 1978 to 1982 and the price of admission comes with three free tokens. Oh, and while you are buying those tickets for me, see if you can book me a nice hotel, too, and maybe some broadway show tickets! Hey, if you're going to send me to New York, you want me to really experience it, don't you?
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