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Originally uploaded by NathanF.

Thanksgiving gave me my first real chance to try out my new camera. Obviously I didn’t take this picture.

It’s been a while since my last post, so here’s the update:

1. I am now involved in a truly epic game of Diplomacy, played by email from all over the world. Check out the Epic Diplomacy blog.

2. I spent the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in Miami with my girlfriend, which was awesome. Unfortunately, due to the summery weather, it didn’t really put me in the holiday spirit.

3. Civ4 multiplayer is pretty amazing.

The Long Tail. Read that if you haven’t. It’s about one of the most important effects the Internet is having on culture. Mosly it deals with books, music, and DVD rentals; but the long tail exists in other markets as well.

Games have a unique relationship with the long tail. Certain types of games: roleplaying games, war games, collectible card games exist almost exclusively in the long tail. They are under the radar of the average consumer and appeal only to a niche market. Other types of games, notably video games, exist almost exclusively in that mainstream above the long tail space. There are few remaining independent game studios producing top quality games because it’s just getting too expensive. This guy is hoping to change that by creating an effective distribution and promotion mechanism for lower-budget independently created games targeting the hardcore gamer market. I hope it works out; it will be a boon to consumers and developers.

I spent some time at work today playing with the Yahoo! maps API. It seems like you should be able to create a pretty cool strategy game using an API like this for the map. I think a zombie game would be cool. You would play the role of the military trying to contain a zombie outbreak. The API doesn’t update all that quickly and you get a limited number of hits to the API each day, (50,000 for Yahoo!) so I think an action game wouldn’t work very well. Turn-based strategy would be perfect though.

It’s a slow day at work so I took the time to patch up a nasty security hole in my site that I discovered a while ago. I also installed Python on my work machine so I could work on learning the language while I’m at work.

I started playing with Python and Pygame a little tonight. I am still getting acquainted with the language and the library, but my initial impression is that you can do some very rapid development with these tools. I might see if I can whip up a little game this weekend, as a pedagogic tool. Something very simple, obviously. I haven’t forgotten about Diplomacy; I just need a mental hiatus from PHP spaghetti code for a while. I deal with enough of that at work every day.