musings of a social architect

Pop Idol meet Citizen Karaoke

I admit it -- I'm hooked on American Idol. I love the enthusiasm and bravery of the singers, the all-over-the-map excitement of the performances, the audience participation angle, and even the sometimes prickly interplay between the judges and the contestants. For me (and millions of others, judging from the ratings) it's much more entertaining and engaging than watching slick, scripted pre-fab TV shows.

I also love Karaoke, for many of the same reasons -- and now there's a show in Finland that combines the two! Via Communities Dominate Brands, I learned that the people who  produced Finnish Idol has recently created a parallel, truly amateur contest called "Jokamiehen Idols" (literally "the common man's Idols"). Would-be contestants call a special number, and sing their song into the recording. Audience members  listen to the songs and vote. This contest is open to everyone - and the filtering process is done by the audience from the get-go.

Now,, things get really interesting when you look at the participation stats. Finland has a population of 5 million people. 1,862 Finns sang songs for the contest.  150,000 separate individuals called in to listen and vote. And the whole activity generated 1.95 MILLION separate listening/voting sessions in Finland. More than the total traffic generated by the voting activities of the "real" Finnish Idols show on TV.

We truly are living in the age of user-generated content. I wonder how long it'll be before similar contests show up here in the States?

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Cooking Mama for the DS

Lately, I've been playing a lot of games on the Nintendo DS.  I LOVE this device, and  the creative and wacky games that are being developed for it, like Brain Training, Nintendogs, Electroplankton, and now Cooking Mama - a game that's all about... learning to cook. It's cute, colorful, and might actually teach you something. If you wanna see what it's all about, here's some Cooking Mama video fun!

Putting the Fun in Functional

I'm back from Etech,  where I gave a talk about applying game mechanics to functional software. It went incredibly well -- the room was packed, and I got a lot of appreciative comments afterwards. Here's a link to a writeup of my talk on the Etech blog. I'll post the slides on my site later tonight, and provide a link here.

UPDATE: Here are my Etech slides. Enjoy!

UPDATE II: More notes from around the Web - here's some excellent, detailed notes about my talk from 'we make money not art' . And some perspective from Alice in Wonderland, one of my favorite game-oriented bloggers. And also some comments from Raph Koster, my friend and colleague from Ultime Online days.  I'm thrilled that people whom I admire are responding to my work, and finding it useful. W00t!

WOW as a text adventure

This is the funniest thing I've read in a long time - a text adventure parody of WOW. Brilliant!   Link

Death offline is acknowledged online

Here's an interesting (although sad) article about the real-world suicide of a young man who spent most of his time in online games - complete with a quote from your truly. What's interesting about this particular case is that the outpouring of emotion and tributes was much greater online, than in his physical-world life. It just goes to show... when someone invests most of their time in online worlds, that where their relationships happen.

Now THAT'S what I call immersive entertainment

Wired News has a story today about a new 3D IMAX movie called Deep Sea. It's a documentary about underwater life, complete with interspecies grooming, chase scenes and near-death escapes. I can't wait to see it! Here's an excerpt from the article that tickled my SMS-loving fancy:

We witness what might be described as an undersea smartmob: off the coast of Mexico, eight nights after the August full moon, every coral organism on an entire reef spawns, at precisely the same time -- exactly one hour after sunset. How do such simple life forms coordinate such a complex act? Nobody knows, but text-messaging has nothing to do with it.

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