Laurent Courtines Free Online

MeowSplash Games
Oh and it's live on meowsplash.com (My crappy flash game site)

Cuteness matters. Just ask buzzfeed or icanhazcheezburger. I think we may have another "When Harry Met Sally" on our hands.

Alexander Armero (Big Al, or Big Red) was an intern at AOL Games while I worked there and he's one of the finest young dudes I know. (By the way,  hire him,  he's about to graduate from Fordham)   Full of quirky insights and funny anecdotes, I am not surprised that he has made such a delightful little film. Everything about it reflects Alex's personality. Connecticut, A love food, an eye for film and a joy for romance. Good stuff Al!  Really proud of you.

Shout out to his pal Logan,  whom I have never met,  but appeared to be Alex's foil in nearly all of his adventure stories... they usually began "So my buddy Logan and I went...."

Take this idea a bit further and apply it to the games industry. This would mean that the developers go direct. That anyone, with any game can be posted to your site. If you are the owner of a portal, you simply direct the people who come to your site to the games you think are the best?
What if there were simply a site that had everything about games in it. I mean EVERYTHING. A river of games, games news and game stuff.

Someone for the love of God, explain to me why this wouldn't work?

Whether games are art (the way movies are) is an actual debate.  There are arguments on both sides.  Most notably Roger Ebert who definitively says games are not art and can't be art because the players CHOOSE what happens.  (Or something to that effect) Even the most classic games have never been considered art. How could anyone think chess or checkers being considered art?

It's an interesting debate.   Me,  I think they are art.  Not art in the classic sense, (Cave paintings, canvas, Rembrant and all)  but the sense that someone (or a group of people) create something out of nothing and GIVE of themselves to the world.  Art is about bestowing gifts.  Every time someone gives of themselves into the ether and says "Look what I thought of this, want the world to have it and don't you think its fucking AWESOME"  So yes,  games are art - especially,  the original flash indie games.  Those guys? They are the artists of the games world.

Does that mean,  every Mochi powered, WordPress hosted flash portal is an art gallery?  Maybe.

I just read an article on GigaOm about a small photo sharing app called Pixable.  What they do is pull images from your relevant social feeds and present them algorithmically to you. 

They apparantly are very sticky with engagement metrics that are.off the charts.

How this could be applied to games: (I'm sure between Raptr, Heyzap or someone they are doing this)
Scan folks twitter feeds or public feeds and note any game play.  Present in a compelling or visual way,  what is being played. 
Where is the value?  Ths value is in discovery of new games or finding out what friends play and to find that connection through games.

I wrote about the games industry a month or so ago but didn't post it because it felt too angry and grumpy.  Reading it over, its a little heavy handed, but I thought I would leave it up to the committee to decide.

The gaming communities biggest problem:

It is boring and conservative.

For all the high tech engineers, discussion about being artists and trying to be the next great media, the game industry is fundamentally conservative. 

Every innovation in the business comes in the form of new distribution that is outside of the industry. Every new editorial site comes out with same angle of being made "by gamers for gamers" . There is a pervasive ethos of protecting the good ol' days, of saying this is a game or this isn't a game.  Its insular, exclusionary, a boys club, a nerd haven.  Ths industry lacks vision and each and everytime a new paradigm changes the game, it digs its collective heads in the sand.
There is so little variation in the self-identified gamer thought, that I could probably write a profile of one and be 85% accurate. 

Push yourself people!  Get better,  embrace difference and find the Bill Simmons of video game writing.

So we have itunes.  It manages all media (that we allow Apple to control in our lives)  It is the accepted UI/UX for how you manage content in large quantities.

Its a serious question... Zynga aside (they are nominally Flash), are there any stand alone web sites, that are public, who's sole business is making money in online flash games?
I really can't think of any.  All the big online game portals are owned by other companies.
Pogo, Addictinggames, or Kongregate are corporate owned.  What is it about flash games that makes them hard to monetize?  Is it that we're asking too much? Do we expect them to make too much money? Is it that the market is fragmented?  What is it?  Its not like there isn't demand.  Online games drive tons of traffic and people (especially kids) play all day.
Hmm.

The person or company that unlocks Flash/web games will do well for themselves.

Every vertical on the web has a go to source - a search engine, a social network that encompasses that network.  For information it's Google,  for social it's Facebook, for shopping it's Amazon and on and on. Each one of these has worked to aggregate it's vertical and present it in a way that makes it the go to source for those items. 

Games, does not have that.  There is no single source where ALL the game information is stored.  There is no where I can go to find out the rules to Canasta,  buy an expansion to the table top game Carcasonne, find out where I can play an arcade cabinet of Ms. Pac-Man and play an online game from Pogo.com.  The game information aggregator does not exist.  This is an opportunity lost.
Until someone tries to build the mega games data base,  I will continue to advocate for it.  There has to be someone who can combine, gamespot.com, paget.com, boardgamegeek.com and Kongregate into something usable, playable and a must visit.

Am I wrong?  Why hasn't this been done?