No Love for the Love Guru

First Universal and now Paramount is showing just how to do a web campaign wrong.  From ReelPop:

“Come on, Paramount Pictures. Was it really worth it to skimp on paying Mike Myers’ just a little extra to participate in the new online promotion that started this week for the June 20 release of “The Love Guru?” For a series of comic insights delivered by the title character — they call them “sutras,” natch — Paramount didn’t get Myers to reprise the role. Instead, they pulled a Conan O’Brien and superimposed another actor’s mouth over an image of the Love Guru (whose name is Pitka). ”

Check it out for yourselves:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOyAjCXo1cg&hl=en]

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.