Quite a short month and one for horror. Three films:

Jennifer’s Body is a fairly poor attempt at horror. It’s also a fairly poor attempt at comedy. Trying to mix the two is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and very few films have managed it successfully. The comedy kills the horror, and the horror kills the comedy. Beyond that, we’re treated to some pretty terrible acting, fairly affected dialogue, teen cliches and bad editing. Lack of consistency kills this film: it could’ve aimed for being cheesey and been better for it, rather than trying to be serious some of the time. Not worth seeing. (See my Jennifer’s Body Twitter review).

Paranormal Activity is another horror movie, in the style of The Blair Witch Project. The premise is fairly straight-forward: a couple believe they’re experiencing some odd, possibly occult, activity in their home so decide to film during the night. This starts to yield results. The scares themselves are pretty predictable if you’re a horror film fan, but the style of the movie brings out a little more believability. It’s a decent enough film, but probably won’t frighten those who’ve seen enough scary films. That said, the showing I was at was full of screaming teenagers so it’s certainly doing its job. (See my Twitter review of Paranormal Activity).

Finally, the Coen brothers yet again manage to create a world of ambiguity, disquiet and intrigue with their latest offering, A Serious Man. It follows a physics professor whose life is falling apart (the details of which I’ll leave to the film itself). In amongst this, he starts a struggle to become a better man, to understand the meaning of all the bad things in his life and try to become better. We see this through some typically brilliant cinematography, where so many stills from the film tell a story by themselves, and great uneasy characters moving through awkward situations; amusing, but never farcical. The point of it all? As with many other Coen plots, that’s for you to decide. Very good. (See my A Serious Man Twitter review).

While it didn’t have much competition, it would have done well in most months: the winner is A Serious Man.

For a long time now, various game developers have been complaining about the secondary market, arguing that it should either be abolished or that they should get a slice of secondary sales. I don’t think either of those ideas is particularly good. If the secondary market (for any type of good) is removed then you have the situation where, upon buying something, goods effectively become worthless beyond their immediate utility to you. This doesn’t reflect the real world where items often become less valuable to you but much more valuable to someone else. It’s also pretty damaging to free markets when items no longer have resale value.

Consider buying a car. Would you be as willing to spend as much on one if you couldn’t trade it in or sell it on? The industry only manages the pricing structure it has because there is segmentation. Those who both want and can afford a new car have access to that option, and those who want to spend less have a second-hand option available.

Whether developers deserve to get paid from secondary markets as well as primary markets is for you to decide. Personally, I see no reason to differ from other goods where this overhead doesn’t usually exist.

In recent years, though, a third trend has appeared that is somewhat more interesting: the game itself comes with a code to unlock additional content, over and above the core game. These codes are one-time use only. If you bought the game at retail, then you get the additional content. If you buy the game second-hand, then you get the original game but not the additional content. It’s an interesting take on market segmentation and, I think, relatively gentle at the moment.

The danger is that once we start to accept this kind of segmentation that developers and publishers start to become more aggressive and punitive. While all the codes we’ve seen so far unlock content that is very much in the extras category, it’s not too hard to imagine a situation where something is omitted from the main game for this purpose; an epilogue or prologue maybe, something that could be argued to be extraneous but is actually fairly core.

Perhaps a way of avoiding this situation is having the additional content available to buy as well. If you bought the game second-hand, then you can buy the extra stuff for a small fee. That way the developers get something out of it, and people in the lower segment of the market still have the option to access all of the content, without being required to use that option.

We should keep our eyes open going down this path. If this practice is seen as handing out rewards it’s fine, but as soon as publishers realise that it can also be a stick, someone will use it. That could hurt the industry as a whole.

The thing that impresses me most about the current generation of games, the thing that differentiates it from the previous generations, is the level of spectacle on offer. While I’m sure that in a few years time I’ll look back on this and cringe, I can’t help but think that there really has been a huge step-up in recent years in delivering some eye-opening experiences.

To be clear, I’m not talking about any sort of deeper engagement or interaction (better advances in that arena will surely come later), I mean a purely surface-level increase in wow-moments. Some highlights:

• Burnout Paradise brought us a massive streaming city, with over the top speed, insane collisions and the potential for a lot of carnage.
• Left 4 Dead took the zombie apocalypse movies that people love so much, and turned them into a game. The sheer amount of action and messiness, coupled with the great 4-player co-op, really makes a difference. The finales are great.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is exactly like playing through an action movie. While the general shooting mechanics are okay, the level of spectacle on offer is almost unparalleled. The cliff-climbing, the dodging helicopters falling out of the sky, the massive pitched-battles in a fast-food car park; every section brings another eye-popping moment.

There are many other examples, I’m sure. It seems like a great time for gaming, and finally one where we seem to be getting some pay-off for all the time developers have been putting into mimicking films, even if they are mostly dumb action-movie clones.

I signed up to Dopplr, a social networking site for travellers, a good long time ago. After the to-be-expected initial flurry of activity, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve logged into it. Most of those times were because a friend had noted that they were making a trip to Glasgow in the near future (it was the same friend on every occasion). To me, that’s not a particularly good amount of usage.

I think one of the biggest problems that Dopplr faced in its early (and critical) stage is that it is yet another social network at a time when people were starting to grow weary of signing up and amassing their friends again. Myspace and Bebo had already started to become less commonplace, and Facebook was taking over. Given that a lot of people viewed joining up to a general social network as a potential hassle, the chances of them joining up to a single-application social network was not going to happen.

That’s the lesson here: if you have only one particular domain of interest (whether travel, music, art, business etc), don’t try to build a social network around it. It takes a lot of people to get these things moving and by the very essence of operating in a niche, you are extremely unlikely to succeed in capturing much attention.

A better plan: let people use an existing social network to use your application. There’s much less friction that way. You only have to convince people that you’re worth their time, rather than having to do that _and_ convincing them to part with their time to help your application work.

Given the abundance of music in the modern age, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find ways of getting music out to interested parties using traditional means. Most musicians don’t have the money or backing for widespread advertising and almost certainly couldn’t capitalise on it even if they did. Just because you’ve got a lot of posters or other advertisments out in the world doesn’t mean anyone is actually going to go and listen to your record. There are simply too many people trying the same strategy for it to be effective.

Rather than trying to convince everyone to listen to you in the hope that some might (the mass-market, lots of media approach), it’s probably a lot more fruitful to try the targeted approach.

Start by figuring out which other artists that you’re like and whose fans might like you if they had a chance to listen. It’s important that at this stage that you’re honest about who you sound like (you can’t trick people) and that you aim for relatively small bands (I’ll explain why later).

Got a nice little list of small artists drawn up? Go to last.fm and make a list of people who really like them, probably a hundred or so fans at first. Last.fm is going to be a gold-mine for this because:

• It’s full of people who care enough about music to actually document who they listen to (albeit passively),
• You can separate the hardcore fans from the people who merely listen to them occasionally.

Remember when you’re picking names for your list that you’re not aiming to hit everyone who likes any of the people that you think you’re like. You want to be selective, picking people who REALLY like as many of those artists as possible.

Got a list of people? Now write a relatively personalised message to each one, explaining why you’re contacting them, who you’re like, and that you’re a small artist who would like a small amount of their time. Give away a bunch of your free tunes and thank them for your time. My bet is that if you’re ever going to grow your fan-base that doing it in this way, with people who are engaged with following similar music, will be your best bet.

Why aim for smaller bands? Sure, you might think you sound like Radiohead, but promoting yourself to that fanbase won’t work: they’re too big and have too many fans. Trying to reduce the signal to noise ratio (the number of engaged to passive fans) is going to be too hard to do and, honestly, most of them won’t care about your music.

Now, take this approach and generalise. Whatever it is you do, whether it’s making webcomics, movies, art, anything at all, connect with the most engaged parts of the community that are most likely to like what you do, and enter into as personal a conversation as you can manage. If you try this, you can probably grow a decent community over time. This is obviously not the full story of how things like this can work (you can’t do a one-time, one-way communication and expect to get a fan) but it’s a better starting point than most people have just now.