June 10, 2006
Game AI in The Economist
Recently there’s been some high-profile, mainstream business press on games: a few weeks ago, Will Wright and Spore were featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, and a Second Life avatar made it to the cover of the May issue of Business Week.
The trend continues in the June 10 issue of The Economist, with a one-pager on game AI, repeatedly quoting Dr. Mateas of GTxA, and including two screenshots of our project Façade! Here’s a link to the article on their subscription-only site; here’s a scan I made of the article. [Update: the article is now properly online here.]
The article, on page 7 of their Technology Quarterly, page 60 of the magazine as a whole, takes on the subject from the angle of academia getting into research in game technology. (In fact, the article suggests I’m an academic too, describing me as a researcher at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, which I was as of a month ago, but only part-time — my main gig for quite a while now has been as a commercial developer with InteractiveStory.net / Procedural Arts. ICT had nothing to do with the making of Façade. Anyway.)
Our download traffic hasn’t increased at all since the issue came out, just as it didn’t when we got in the business section of Newsweek; but it’s good PR that should further help us with potential investors.