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New newsgame: Xtreme Xmas Shopping

My friend Ian Bogost — and his insanely talented group of designers at Persuasive Games — have just released their latest newsgame: Xtreme Xmas Shopping. As they describe it:

Only in America can shopping be considered a contact sport. And Christmas is the Super Bowl for competitive consumers. You’ve got a list of must-buy toys for your little toddler, and you’ll be damned if someone else gets those gifts before you! Use whatever means necessary (physical harm?) to snatch this season’s hottest toys before the other greedy shoppers get their hands on them!

Oh — and merry Christmas!!

It’s actually quite fun! I confess that I’ve always enjoyed the spectacle of toy crazes that produce Australian-rules, smashmouth holiday shopping. Back when Tickle Me Elmo first came out and kids went nonlinear over it, there was an incident in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in which a Wal-Mart employee was sent to the hospital after being stampeded by rabid parents. (Up in Canada, newscasters started referring to the doll as “Trample Me Elmo”.) If there actually were a “War on Christmas”, which there isn’t, one could scarcely ask for a better culprit than America’s annual, Caligulan orgy of consumption.


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

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May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson