Some Interesting Morning Links

If you all don't remember from a few months ago, Electronic Arts was embroiled in a labor dispute in which a class of employees argued that they had improperly been denied overtime pay. Traditionally in California certain classes of workers, mainly in the entertainment industry, had been exempted from overtime pay with the reasoning that often those workers were expected to work very long hours during a "crunch period" which was followed by a more slack period of work. The EA employees were saying that in practice their jobs had no "slack" and was all "crunch". It seems EA got a little scared because the case has been settled out of court.

Next, in World of Warcraft, an online massively multiplayer role playing game (MMORPG), recently there was a bug which created an disease outbreak in the game. Evidently there was some boss-type creature who would attack players with some kind of plague attack. This was supposed to kill the players pretty quickly and then be over. I'm not exactly sure on the specifics, but either it didn't kill players quickly enough, or it stayed with the player after they had been resurected in the game. This has led to a massive outbreak of the plague in the game world, going so far as to spread to some of the major cities in the game and infecting non-player characters which in turn pass it on to many more players. Now there's a group of scientists, who's main area of focus is the asian bird flu, who are studying the reaction of the populace in WoW to the plague as a potential tool for predicting the reaction of people in the real world to a real plague.

The fanboys are going crazy. Peter Jackson to executive produce the Halo feature film. Also, the script was written by Alex Garland, who wrote 28 Days Later. Rage serum aside, I rather liked that movie, so that looks like a good thing to me.

Game Informer has an interesting interview with Peter Moore and J. Allard, the two big Microsoft Xbox bigwigs, taken at the recent X05 event in Amsterdam. The cover everything from why we don't know the launch lineup yet, to why we don't know which games will be backwards compatible yet, to what stuff will be on the Xbox 360 hard drive on day 1 when you open the thing up. Best quote in my opinion: [When asked about what will be on the hard drive out of the box] J. Allard: "I don’t know if I’m actually allowed to talk about this… I can talk about this. I’m the boss." If you're interested in the 360 I think you should read this, good stuff in there.

Another good quote from the article about the ability to plug in your mp3 player or Sony PSP to the 360 (yes, you can do this to play music or video files):

"I’m pro-consumer to the end on this one and anyone in my company that thought it was a bad idea for us to plug in Sony devices or Apple devices into this thing, I ended that conversation pretty quickly. This is the right thing to do for consumers. Once they’ve invested $500 into their digital media library you can’t ask them to go buy a 360 music player and a 360 digital camera. No! They’ve got their stuff. They’re going to want to plug it in. We want to be open here."

Good stuff

"Are you a lucky lady in the City of Light / Or just another lost angel...City of Night"