BRA gets into the videogame business
By adamg - 3/13/09 - 3:48 pm
And you thought they only dealt with zoning and buildings. Take a gander at PoweringUpBoston, the city's new portal for information about the video-game industry, whose growth in Boston the city is trying to promote. Among its features: A directory of game-related companies in the Boston area.
Via the Boston Business Journal.
Ed. Web-design note: Sadly, it seems the city blew through so much money on photos from a two-year-old conference at Northeastern that they apparently had nothing left to hire a competent Web designer - who would have told them it's kind of dumb to build the entire site in frames (frames? How 1998!), which makes it almost impossible to bookmark any individual pages and which will hurt the site with search engines.
Comments
Plus they make it nearly
Plus they make it nearly impossible to navigate through the listed video game companies. I wanted to check a particular area and could not do it...
Site crit
The use of HTML frames looks like just a hosting issue, not part of the site design.
The list of video game companies should be flat in one page.
The "news" page seems bogus, and definitely shouldn't be the default. Game industry people will go to real game industry news sites.
The graphic design is good, IMHO.
The information design seems a little schitzoid, as if designed by multiple people or over-constrained by spec.
Uncensored news feeds are dangerous
Why would a site promoting the video game industry have a news feed that just seems to rip stuff right off RSS? As of right now, not only do they have two versions of the exact same story as #2 and #3 (number of Nintendo DS consoles sold) but the lead story is a negative one about violence and Resident Evil. Seems smarter to have some veto control over what stories are pushed to the News page, especially if this is the de facto front page for the site.
On the other hand, though, Jenn,
Too much censoring is equally dangerous, if not more so. It helped get this country into the mess that it's in right now, it led to the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany in t he 1930's, and it also led to the witchhunts in the early to mid 1950's.
Not exposing people to the truth is also quite dangerous, imo.
We're talking about video games here
Not some greater Truth.
I understand that, adamg, but
on the other hand, how will people know what to avoid, and what's Okay for their kids?
There is a rating system for
There is a rating system for video games, much like for movies.
If you don't mind the MPAA values (i.e., fighting and killing is OK, but a bare breast is the instrument of Satan), you're all set.
Godwin's Law FTW!
I didn't mean censoring so much as filtering. The goal of that site certainly isn't to provide us with a rounded view of the video game industry, it's promotion. If I want game news, there are plenty of other sites to get my fix.
um
OK, I get it, snark, ha, but as the guy who shot that event, on staff at Northeastern, I have to put on the record that the BRA got the images for free ...