Matteo and I went to a book reading for the new book Smartbomb : The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution.

Steven Johnson describes the book like this:

It could have been the most interesting game-2-movie adaptation, but Andrzej Bartkowiak's Doom is, simply put, a missed opportunity.

This kind of captured my imagination. Amazon has launched Mechanical Turk that lets you make money by doing jobs that humans do better than computers.

The pay is not exactly handsome in fact some would call paying 30 cents for an approved image selection and 75 for writing a product description on little on the cheap side. Then add the fact that you get credit in their store and not cash and Amazon will have found themselves a very inexpensive work force if this Mechanical Turk succeeds.

Welcome to the home of the How They Got Game Project, a project of the Stanford Humanities Lab, here at Stanford University. The aim of this project is to explore the history and cultural impact of a crucial segment of New Media: interactive simulations and video games.