One of my best friends in the world is madly in love with Los Angeles and all of the various cultural events that go on in this fair city.
So, thanks to the wonders of casual internet research of blogs about the city she found a great event in Hollywood. Today we went to Thai Town and enjoyed a super hot day of Thai beauty queens, dancing, drinking Singha beer, and Muay Thai boxing at the 2008 Thai New Year Festival.
This is further evidence that blogs are awesome and make our lives more fun and interesting.
Now onto other topics:
A conversation with Travis Boatman frm EA Games in Dmitri's class got me thinking about development for the mobile platform. I am sort of writing about this topic for my module paper, so hopefully I will have something really juicy for the "tell me something I don't know" part of class. That being said, Travis was explaining that some of the major barriers to innovation and independent non-major studio mobile games is the interface for mobile purchases and people's insistence on buying things that are familiar on those menus.
He pointed out that consumers see a text based menu where games are categorized by type. It can take up to 10 clicks to get to a game. Travis went on to say that consumers tend to buy games with which they are already familiar. This is why titles like Tetris and Monopoly are leaders in the space.
This got me thinking about my personal experiences with buying content on my shitacular Razr phone. I am more of a consumer of ringtones than of games, but the experience of buying on the mobile phone is slightly better than awful. The number of menus you have to go through to find one ringtone is ridiculous. I recently was trying to find a Motion City Soundtrack song to have as my ringtone and I had to go through at least 7 menus before I started the download process. I was close to giving up because it wasn't a smooth, easy process. I absolutely would not stand for that kind of user experience on the web. The limits of the technology make us tolerable of some pretty subpar user experiences.
With new mobile platforms like the iPhone, the Blackberry and the coming Google Android, I wonder if the shopping experience for things like games and ringtones will change and open up the possibility for new and innovative games to reach the consumer easier.
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2 comments:
wish I could have been at the festival drinking beers - I guess when my kids are grown. Would it be unsightly to have a 60 yr old dancing and drinking there/
you are never too old to experience LA.
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