Labor rights for professional gamers is a tough concept to wrap one’s head around. At least in the states it is, but in South Korea it’s a different story.

“The standard in pro gaming groups is for people to live together 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with no traveling to or from work, and for those ranked Group 2 or lower, their entire daily routine consists of eating, cleaning, laundry and games,” said Kim Jeong-geun. “Because of this structure of bringing in young people, developing them and then replacing them when their lifespan is spent and they have been squeezed dry, it has earned the name of ‘the chicken coop.’”

(Eating, cleaning, laundry and games sounds to me like a life many young gamers dream of… minus the cleaning and laundry maybe.)

“Everyone knows about these problems, but if you start talking about players’ rights, everyone wants to keep quiet about it, scared they might be branded as an impediment to the growth of e-Sports,” said Kim Dong-su. “They need to introduce things like a minimum age system for players and limitations on the number of games.” Citing the example of fixed StarCraft matches uncovered on May 16 through an investigation by prosecutors, Kim said, “Because players have short lifespans and uncertain futures, you inevitably have a widespread sense of ‘Let’s pull something off while things are going well.’”

Since I got my hands on the StarCraft 2 Beta, I have become a bit of a follower of the StarCraft programing and commentating scene. I wonder how many of these problems extend out to the west’s tiny place in it?

Steven Johnson on the Tumblr of the enlightenment era:

In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book.

My favorite characteristic of Johnson’s writing and speaking is his ability to reach back into history for some much needed perspective. Great post. Read it with Instapaper.

Blizzard has more money than God. Some of this money they have spent on things like fully staffed museums and 24-hour gyms. A bit out of reach, but nice still inspiration for P’unk Avenue as our little shop will soon be growing into some new space.

The debate over whether or not video games should be considered art won’t be won with words. It will be won when somebody finally crafts a gaming experience whose artistic merit can’t be denied. Roger Ebert and Kellee Santiago would appear to believe differently.

Ebert is a fine writer and skilled at making an argument, but when it comes to the subject of gaming, he is largely ignorant. Here, he makes his point by examining the descriptions of a few games. Apparently, he also watched some footage on YouTube to help him reinforce his opinion. I am curious as to which games he has actually played, if any. By the sound of things, his current argument should hold about as much weight as if I were to take a stab at summarizing modern dance in 500 words:

Her next example is a game named “Braid.” This is a game “that explores our own relationship with our past…you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there’s one key difference…you can’t die.” You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game.

While I don’t disagree that Braid’s presentation takes itself a bit too seriously, if you have actually experienced its gameplay you will recognize how absurd this criticism is.

I may still be unsure where my own opinion lies on the subject of game as art. What I am sure of is that my opinion won’t be influenced by Roger Ebert.

(via slashdot)

Whatever you think about 37signals — and I’m not a fan, particularly, but so what — you can’t deny that they’ve built a highly successful enterprise by epitomizing “small, fast, ruthless…all Edge.” This is a shop that does very well by surfing (and in a few cases forging) the zeitgeist, so if they have meaningful wisdom to impart, I’m all ears.

I just finished reading Rework myself. As a partner in a shop that has for some years been finding useful nuggets in the gospel of 37signals, I found their latest book to be contradictory, gratuitously inflammatory and (surprise) quite insightful.

So many people are so polarized when it comes to Jason and David and their styles of business and preaching. All the more reason to enjoy Greenfield’s unique perspective:

I’m less interested in their advice on building successful businesses than in what their own structural decisions might imply as a bellwether. Between certain traits of their core audience and the brash self-assurance with which they issue advice, the way 37signals does it now is likely to influence the way any number of startups choose to do it next year, so I paid particularly close attention to those passages in the book that described the company’s spatial and temporal organization.