Cranky T-Rex's Blog

“Stay a while and listen.” Coming up on March 25 th , the first expansion pack for Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 3 will be released.  Reaper of Souls , as it’s called, has gotten many gamers, including myself, to take a second look at a game that didn’t quite live up to its predecessor.  While ruminating on the successes and failures of Diablo 3 , it occurred to me there are some striking parallels with, of all things, Obamacare. Back in Diablo 2 , Blizzard had a multiplayer component that allowed users to trade in-game items, and naturally a market formed between the players. It wasn’t long before people started paying real money for these digital goods, and of course some people got ripped off.  You may even remember news reports from around that time of people paying exorbitant sums of real money for items in Diablo 2 or perhaps later in World of Warcraft . When Blizzard created Diablo 3 , they decided to take control of this market by adding the Au...

"Get over here!" It’s no secret conservatives lag way behind liberals when it comes to almost all aspects of the entertainment industry. Fortunately they’re starting to come around to the idea that engaging that part of the culture is absolutely necessary to change the tide of politics, but when people think of entertainment as a battleground, usually they stick to movies and television while ignoring a very large elephant in the room: video games. Video games are a huge part of the lives of the American youth and over the last couple decades have become a juggernaut industry.  Just a few months ago, Rockstar Games’ magnum opus Grand Theft Auto V grossed $1 billion in three days. If that’s not reason enough for us to take the uncontested battleground of the gaming industry seriously, Microsoft gave us a new one at CPAC. As Brian Fung writes over at the Washington Post :  Microsoft is trying to [ersuade[ sic ] politicians to take out targeted ads on Xbox L...