Author: Sida Li

From August 16th to 19th, I attended Gen Con, a hobby game convention held in the Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis. The four-day convention was attended by over 41,000 unique individuals this year, which marked its most successful year to date. Started in 1967, Gen Con is one of the world’s first gaming conventions. Unlike the NY and CA Comic Cons, or E3, Gen Con is mainly focused on tabletop games, like Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, and board games like Settlers of Catan. Attendance numbers for Gen Con peaked in the mid-90s at around 30,000 unique visitors,…

Ouya is a new video game console powered by the Android platform. Developers of Ouya are seeking an open gaming platform for developers and gamers alike. One of my friends linked me on Facebook to the Ouya Kickstarter campaign one day after it was launched, at which point it had already raised over $1 million. At this point, Ouya has been featured on many top blogs and news outlets. While their pitch hit all the right spots, I have some lingering doubts about Ouya’s ability to make a lasting impact on the gaming industry and I want to share my doubts from the perspective of a console gamer. Ouya’s…

Newsle is a news tracking platform that allows users to follow news about the people that they care about. Whether they are friends, colleagues, competitors or celebrities, as long as they have a name, Newsle can track them through their “disambiguation algorithm,” which is able to filter relevant news from people who may have the same name. I had not heard about Newsle until I received two tweets from their @NewsleAnnounce Twitter account (I did some research on the company first before I clicked the link because I thought it might have been a spam bot). Newsle first launched its beta in January,…

In the 1970s, Atari helped form the modern day arcade and video game industry with its release of the arcade game Pong and the video game system Atari 2600. In many ways, Pong was the first “social” video game; the two-player arcade game was placed in public places and encouraged friendly one-on-one competition. Social media buzz is the hip marketing term these days, but Pong’s popularity was spread mainly through good old-fashioned word of mouth. These days, the video game industry brings in nearly $17 billion in revenue each year. Atari, however, is no longer a big player in the market….

This generation’s filmmakers have not been able to accurately portray the ethos of the social media generation yet. When will the John Hughes of the social media generation emerge? The filmmaker John Hughes is considered by many to be the voice of the generation that grew up in the 80s. His movies, such as The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, were accurate portrayals of what it was like to grow up during that decade. Move into the 90s and we have movies like You’ve Got Mail, which involves two people who can’t stand each other in real life but connect through email using…