Baby Shaker iPhone App Short-Lived

Considering how hard it was for iFart to be approved for sale in the iPhone app store, one really has to wonder how an app called “Baby Shaker” made it through all the red tape.

For a relatively brief time, “Baby Shaker” was available for purchase at the iTunes app store. Now, after a few major blog posts and tons of twitters, the app has been removed.

Still, how did this ever get listed in the first place?

Other apps recently pulled by Apple include Nazi Sympathizer, iKKK, Puppy Kicker Lite, Skin the Cat, PedoFinder2 and Sexting: The Game.

A Pirates Approach to Game Design

Over on ArsTech there is a great look at Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, and his approach to game design and distribution.

“The way to make money in the world of PC gaming, according to Wardell, is to make sure many systems can play your games, while continuing to make them attractive. Find a market where people want to buy and support the games, and don’t go by what the magazines and the blogs seem to think are the big name titles. Don’t let people who aren’t your audience control the titles you make, and ignore piracy. This is much like Trent Reznor’s strategy, although the execution is different. Instead of worrying about pirates, just leave the content out in the open. The market Reznor plays to will still buy the music; he’s simply stopped worrying about the pirates. He came to the same conclusion: they weren’t customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose.”

Although I don’t spend a lot of time in the gaming world it is clearly one of the big areas dealing with issues of copyright, copy-protection and pirates.  It’s cool to see that one man’s approach is taking it all into account and finding success with the open model.

Love this Idea

Cory Doctorow over on BoingBoing has a look at what sounds like a very cool step in the world of game development:

“Eskil Steenberg is a solo game-developer who’s bent on creating an entire massively multiplayer online world single-handedly, using procedural generation techniques that cause the game to build itself by starting with clever rules and exploring them outwards.”

In addition to using mathematics and rules to sort of organically build the game outward, Steenberg is hoping to tap into a collective resource of other gamers to help the game grow.

“he intends to build the world into a kind of communal adventure, where gamers work together to furnish a central village, defend it from enemy attack, and explore the surround world and its many dungeons. Players will be able to do things like deform elements of terrain, allowing them to build tunnel networks or walls to defend their property.”

Should the game end up working out to be as cool as it sounds, major game developers who spend literally millions of dollars and man-hours to make a game will be quaking (pun intended) in their boots.